Soundstream

~ the obit ~

This is ten years of American studio history that was over before my second birthday, in an industry I have only ever met from the listening end. The records are reachable. The company is not, and the people who used its machines mostly described them in trade journals that were not translated.

Thomas Stockham was a professor at the University of Utah and already had an unusual line on his resume: during the Watergate hearings he was one of six technical experts convened to examine the White House tapes, reporting to Chief Judge John Sirica. In 1975 he founded Soundstream in Salt Lake City to do something nobody in the United States was doing commercially, which was record music as numbers. The first live American digital recording was made on a Soundstream prototype in 1976, at a Santa Fe Opera performance of Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All.

That first attempt was a partial failure in a useful way. The record released afterward was pressed from the analog tape running alongside rather than the digital master, and the criticism that followed from Telarc's Jack Renner and Robert Woods pushed Stockham straight into building the machine that actually worked. Soundstream built eighteen digital recorders in total. Seven were sold and the rest were leased, often by the hour, which meant the company's business model was closer to a studio service than to a manufacturer.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ fifty kilohertz on instrumentation tape ~

The recorder was four channels of 16-bit audio sampled at 50 kilohertz, written to a modified Honeywell instrumentation transport on one inch tape. Each audio channel went to two separate tracks, laterally separated by about eleven millimeters, so that a single dropout could not take out both copies of the same sample. The analog front end used no transformers, which gave it response down to DC, and that is where a 1978 Telarc session with Frederick Fennell's Cleveland Symphonic Winds got its reputation as the bass drum heard round the world.

~ the paper that saw the cd coming ~

In October 1977 Stockham published a paper in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society describing a future in which records would be pocket-sized digital discs holding about 490 megabytes, good for sixty minutes of music sampled at 42.5 kilohertz. Five years later Sony and Philips shipped the compact disc: pocket-sized, 540 megabytes, sixty-odd minutes, 44.1 kilohertz.

Specifying a format correctly half a decade before anyone builds it is an odd thing to leave behind, because it earns no money and settles no argument. It did earn Stockham most of the awards his field has. An AES gold medal, SMPTE's Poniatoff medal, a Technical Grammy, an Emmy, and the presidency of the AES in 1982 and 1983.

~ what the labels took ~

The first Soundstream recording to reach shops was in January 1978, a Diahann Carroll tribute to Ethel Waters with Mercer Ellington conducting the Duke Ellington orchestra. In the three years that followed, the machines handled something close to half of all classical music recorded digitally anywhere, more than two hundred sessions, for Telarc and Delos and RCA and Philips and Decca and others. Most of it was classical, but country and rock went through as well, including the first Canadian digital recording, cut live to two tracks in Toronto by the band True Myth.

Almost none of this was released digitally at the time, because there was nothing to release it on. The tapes went to vinyl, and audiophiles bought the records specifically for what had happened upstream of the pressing. So the first few years of digital audio reached listeners entirely through an analog format, with the sleeve notes doing the explaining.

~ who owns the word ~

Digital Recording Corporation bought Soundstream in 1980. DRC had its own idea about the home format and it was not a pressed disc: it wanted a photographically reproducible optical card, cheap to mass-produce because you could print it. The compact disc arrived in 1982 and the question stopped being open. DRC went down in 1985 and took the Soundstream operation with it, five years after buying the first American company to have done any of it commercially. A car audio brand holds the name today, unrelated at every level, which is how soundstream.com ends up selling marine speakers.

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