Telarc and the Development of Audio Technology

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Everything You Hear Is True: The Telarc Legacy (index)

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Telarc was formed at the start of the digital recording era and demonstrated the sonic potential of this new technology. Their alliance with Soundstream in this effort was the first of numerous partnerships with equipment makers and tinkerers. These early days set the tone for Telarc’s leadership in the technical side of recording. This part of the Telarc story is recorded primarily in two places: the pages of audio magazines (discussed below) and the inside back cover of their CD booklets (click here for an example of a detailed listing).

Telarc’s close relationship with Soundstream pushed that company to improve its signature digital recorder, and their alliance with Soundstream’s founder Thomas Stockham, Jr. and his team was pivotal to the successful adoption of digital audio industry-wide. Journalist Greg Milner describes Stockham as “the earliest pioneer who truly understood the technology’s potential.”1

The technical details of Telarc’s sessions often made news in the trade magazines, in articles written by Telarc’s engineers or by audio journalists.2 Engineers Jack Renner and Michael Bishop were the subjects of numerous profiles in audio industry publications.3 Equipment designers and distributors were often invited to Telarc sessions to see their equipment in action.4 

When the current technology was not up to their standards, Telarc worked to build something new. They were eager to increase the dynamic range of the digital recording process by adding to the CD’s 16-bit bit depth. Since no commercially available analog-to-digital converters could do that, Telarc set out to build their own. Their collaboration with Thomas Stockham and Cleveland-based engineer Ken Hamman is extensively documented.5 The resulting 20-bit ADC was built from scratch and extensively tested. It was first deployed in May 1990 on a recording session with Robert Shaw and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus (CD-80254), and was used for many years after.

As the technology advanced, Telarc continually updated their equipment and tried out new technologies. Direct Stream Digital (DSD) was introduced in 1999, and the Super Audio CD followed a few years later as a means for playing back this new format at home. The first session recorded on DSD was The Big Picture, with Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops. Recorded in September 1998, this session initially had to be transferred to PCM for editing, but it was eventually re-edited in native DSD and reissued on SACD (see below). 

Telarc engineer Michael Bishop was experimenting with surround sound several years before there was a practical way to deliver the format to consumers. In recording classical music, surround sound is typically deployed to give the listener a greater sense of the space where the ensemble is performing. To this end, Bishop placed microphones on stage facing away from the players and microphones out in the hall to capture the sound from the audience position. He also used microphones shaped liked a human head, that were specifically engineered to pick up directional sound the way our ears do.6 At first Bishop incorporated these additional microphones into the stereo mixes created at the session. He utilized several devices that applied the science of directional hearing to simulate surround sound in a two-channel system. The sampler album Surround Sounds, released in 1996, contained tracks created or reprocessed with all four such systems in use at the time.7 As soon as a surround sound delivery medium was available, Telarc began releasing discs in discrete surround for the public.

The first CD ever released was a classical recording (pianist Claudio Arrau performing Chopin waltzes, released on August 17, 1982). Telarc established an early dominance when the new format hit the market.8 The February 1984 issue of Audio magazine features a column of Compact Disc reviews. Five of the ten discs covered are from Telarc, with no other label having more than two.9 The April 1984 issue of Audio magazine is billed on its cover as a “Special CD Issue.” A CD player review features Telarc CDs as optimal test material. And in another CD player article, Leonard Feldman reassures his readers: 

As for sound quality, I now have some excellent Telarc discs which confirm what I’ve been saying: There’s nothing wrong with the standardized CD system itself; we’ve simply got to learn how to make discs that take best advantage of the system. Telarc seems to have mastered the technique well ahead of others.10 

Telarc offered some releases on cassette and DVD-Audio, but the former format was not a major factor in the classical market, and the latter never really caught on with consumers.

The SACD format was released in 2001, just three years after the first Direct Stream Digital recordings were made. The superior sonic resolution and the ability to encode discrete audio channels was a big selling point, and Telarc reissued all of its DSD material in this format and kept recording new projects. Engineer Paul Blakemore also remastered their early Soundstream recordings into this format to capture some of the details that did not come through on the initial transfer to CD a few decades earlier. SACDs sold better than other post-CD formats and are still available today, but they failed to initiate the massive wave of sales that Telarc and other labels were hoping for.11

An article in audio industry publication Mix Magazine summed it up this way: “Clearly, Telarc has no fear when it comes to new formats.”12 In one of the odd technological twists that seem unique to the music business, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in vinyl LPs. While Telarc and Concord have not re-released any LPs, they have licensed Telarc recordings to other companies who did. With audio, old technology never entirely goes out of style.

A remarkably effective method of recording and reproducing piano music was developed in the late-nineteenth century. The player piano, initially patented in 1897 as the Pianola, was a pneumatic device that played a specially-designed piano using a system of holes punched into a roll of paper. Companies such as Welte-Mignon and Ampico greatly refined this system and developed the Reproducing Piano. These pianos created a faithful recreation of the pianist’s interpretation, and did so well enough that famous virtuosos of the day were willing to make recordings on them. In 1999, Telarc released an album of short works originally played by virtuoso composer Sergei Rachmaninoff between 1919 and 1929 and rendered for this recording on a custom Bösendorfer piano. The New York Times wrote about these recordings, comparing them to recently restored 78s also recorded by Rachmaninoff, and discussed matters of tempo, dynamics, and interpretation. Modern technology has revived this type of recording with such systems as Yamaha’s Disklavier and Steinway’s Spirio. While this method of recording and reproduction works on mechanical instruments such as piano and organ, attempts at expanding this concept to other instruments never succeeded beyond the level of parlor novelty. It also still required the listener to have the means to own or travel to an expensive instrument. The Pianola Institute website is an excellent resource for more information about this family of instruments.

Last updated on April 16th, 2024 at 03:24 pm

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  1. Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever : An Aural History of Recorded Music, (New York: Faber and Faber, 2010), p 309 ↩︎
  2. See “A Day at the Opera,” Studio Sound, October 1991 and “Recording Liza Minnelli: The Challenge,” db Magazine, June 6, 1988. ↩︎
  3. These profiles appeared in magazines such as Stereophile (Jack Renner with Jonathan Scull), Studio Sound (Jack Renner with Janet Angus), TapeOp (Michael Bishop with David Goggin), and the Inner Circle podcast (Michael Bishop with Bobby Owsinski). ↩︎
  4. Session guests included John LaGrou (Millennia Media), Ed Meitner (EMM Labs), Mark Levinson, John Ötvös (Waveform), and others. ↩︎
  5. The Woods/Martone private collection and the Thomas Stockham papers at the University of Utah contain this documentation. ↩︎
  6. Bishop discusses some of these experiments in this interview. ↩︎
  7. These systems were Pro-Spatiailzer, Dolby Surround, Shure HTS, and Circle Surround. They each in their own way mimicked how sound changes as it reaches the ear from different directions. ↩︎
  8. Joe Saltzmann, “Compact Disc: Too True To Be Good?” Los Angeles Times, November 27, 1983 ↩︎
  9. Bert Whyte, et. al., “Brandenburgs Rare,” Audio, February 1984, 90 ↩︎
  10. Leonard Feldman, “Technics SL-P8 review”, Audio , April 1984, 55 ↩︎
  11. Jack Schofield, “No Taste for High-Quality Audio,” The Guardian, August 2, 2007. ↩︎
  12. “Telarc: Still on Digital’s Leading Edge,” Mix Magazine, December 1998, p. 169 ↩︎