Hi Jon:
Closing this loop, you are absolutely correct! Billboard April 26, 1979 details RCA's first digital
recording session, with Soundstream, in Philadelphia, on April 16th. It was indeed the Bartok
"Concerto for Orchestra," with Ormandy/Philadelphia. RCA's first-issue LP was red vinyl and the
sleeve was branded Red Seal Digital, with "The Dawning Of A New Era In Recorded Sound" above the
title.
This also shows that, assuming Billboard's dates of recording sessions are correct, RCA was a few
weeks ahead of Columbia with digital recording, and was the first "major" classical label (with
Sound80 and then Telarc being the first U.S. classical labels, period) to make digital recordings.
Of course Denon had been making digital classical recordings since the early 1970's.
To summarize:
RCA made its first digital recording using Soundstream on April 16, 1979 in Philadelphia with
Ormandy - Bartok: Concerto for Orchestra.
Columbia made its first digital recording using 3M on May 5, 1979 in New York with Mehta -
Stravinsky: Petrouchka.
RCA made its first multi-track digital using two 4-track Soundstream units sync'd for 8-track in
Chicago with Levine the week of July 19, 1980 - Mahler Symphony No. 7.
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jon Samuels" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, November 09, 2012 2:12 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Early digital recording history -- RCA's first (according to Billboard)
Tom,
I'm still trying to determine with certainty which RCA digital recording was their first, but it was
not the Mahler 7th. Eugene Ormandy conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in Bartok Concerto for
Orchestra, recorded digitally April 16, 1979, recorded via Soundstream.
Jon Samuels
--- On Fri, 11/9/12, Tom Fine <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: Tom Fine <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Early digital recording history -- RCA's first (according to Billboard)
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Friday, November 9, 2012, 12:01 PM
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
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