Concept
Soundstream Inc. was the first United States audiophile digital audio recording company, providing commercial services for recording and computer-based editing. 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. They manufactured a total of 18 digital recorders, of which seven were sold and the rest leased out. Although most recordings were of classical music, the range included country, rock, jazz, pop, and avant-garde. The first US live digital recording was made in 1976 by Soundstream's prototype 37 kHz, 16-bit, two channel recorder. New World Records recorded the Santa Fe Opera's performance of Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All, and provided Soundstream with a stereo feed from their multitrack console. Soundstream demonstrated this recording at the Fall 1976 AES Convention; however the resulting record was pressed not from the digital master but from the analog tape that New World recorded themselves concurrently. Critiques of the recording, most notably from Telarc's Jack Renner and Robert Woods, led directly to the improved four-channel, 50 kHz sample rate recorder that was used for all of Soundstream's future commercial releases. 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, Diahann Carroll With the Duke Ellington Orchestra Under The Direction Of Mercer Ellington – A Tribute To Ethel Waters (on the Orinda label) appeared in January 1978.