Soundstream - The Company

The Company

Soundstream was founded in 1975 in Salt Lake City, Utah by Dr. Thomas G. Stockham, Jr. The company provided worldwide on-location recording services to Telarc, Delos, RCA, Philips, Vanguard, Varèse Sarabande, Angel, Warner Brothers, CBS, Decca, Chalfont, and other labels. It also leased or sold some recorders (a total of 18 were manufactured). Although most recordings were of classical music, the range included country, rock, jazz, pop, and avant-garde.

The first digital recording of a symphony orchestra was made in 1976 by Soundstream's prototype 37 kHz, 16-bit, two channel recorder. New World Records, which recorded the Santa Fe Opera's performance of Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All, provided Soundstream with a stereo feed from their multitrack console. Soundstream demonstrated its recording of the opera at the Fall 1976 AES Convention. Critiques of the recording, most notably from Telarc's Jack Renner and Robert Woods, led directly to the improved 4-channel, 50 kHz sample rate recorder that was used for all of Soundstream's future commercial releases. (The New World Records issue of Mother of Us All was not from the digital recording made by Soundstream, but rather from the analog tape that New World recorded themselves.)

Also in 1976, Soundstream restored acoustic (pre-electronic) recordings of Enrico Caruso, by digitizing the recordings on a computer, and processing them using a technique called 'blind deconvolution'. These were released by RCA Records as "Caruso - A Legendary Performer". In subsequent years Soundstream restored most of the RCA Caruso catalog, as well as some RCA recordings by Irish tenor John McCormack.

Soundstream’s first commercially released recording (popular music on the Orinda label) in 1978 was a month shy of the world’s first digitally recorded commercial release, Ry Cooder's "Bop till You Drop". For the ensuing three years, 50% of all classical music recorded digitally used Soundstream equipment. In 1980 the album E=MC² produced and composed by Giorgio Moroder and Harold Faltermeyer describes itself as the first electronic live-to-digital album, recorded by Soundstream.

Unlike its competitors, Soundstream's analog circuitry was transformerless, permitting a frequency response to 0Hz (DC). This accounted for the ‘bass drum heard round the world’ review of the 1978 Telarc recording of Frederick Fennell: The Cleveland Symphonic Winds. Soundstream collaborated with Telarc for several years, producing legendary symphonic recordings; the earliest ones are chronicled in Renner. The care with which Telarc selected and used its microphones and audio console, combined with the Soundstream recorder, created a gold standard for audiophile recording. Telarc has re-released many of its original Soundstream recordings in SACD format, with a DSD-equivalent sampling rate of 50 kHz.

Soundstream recordings made before the advent of the CD were released as high-quality vinyl LP albums. Despite analog playback, many of these releases were sufficiently impressive to gain an early acceptance for digital audio. The recording industry’s transition to digital was further facilitated by the many demonstrations given by Dr. Stockham, whose articulate explanations of digital audio theory and practice were renowned.

In 1980, Digital Recording Corporation (DRC) acquired Soundstream. DRC attempted to develop a home digital player that would use a photographically reproducible ‘optical card’ as opposed to the mechanically pressed CD. This effort was eclipsed by the rise of the CD, leading to the company’s demise in 1985.