Would they have been able to mix the whole thing down to 2 tracks, then
edit, rather than editing across all 8?

-----Original Message-----
From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tom Fine
Sent: Friday, November 09, 2012 12:02 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Early digital recording history -- RCA's first
(according to Billboard)

Ye olde Billboard via Google Books yields another tidbit ...

Levine/CSO - Mahler #7 was RCA's first digital recording. Medinah Temple,
July 1980. The Soundstream 
system was used, and according to Billboard interviews with both producer
Thomas Z. Shepard and 
Soundstream head Thomas Stockham, it was a more elaborate setup than
previous Soundstream projects. 
Stockham said that his tape machine (a Honeywell instrumentation recorder)
was capable of up to 8 
tracks, although the typical Soundstream setup was 4 tracks and usually (in
the case of Telarc at 
least), it was duplicate stereo sends. For the Levine/CSO recording,
Soundstream was sent 8 channels 
from RCA's recording setup. So two Soundstream electronics units were sync'd
together and the 8 
separate digital signals were fed to the tape recorder. One can imagine how
slow the editing was 
with 8 tracks loaded into the DEC computer. This was all probably pushing
the capabilities of the 
Soundstream system. According to several different interwebs sources, the
record wasn't released 
until 1982. I wonder if there had to be some R&D at Soundstream to get the
project edited and 
mastered?

-- Tom Fine