Soundstream, Inc.

See also: Soundstream, Inc. Founded at the University of Utah in March 1975 by Thomas Stockham. The chief electrical engineer in the beginning was Richard Warnock. Bruce Rothaar was hired as a junior electrical engineer. He became chief electrical engineer, when Richard Warnock left in 1976. Jules Bloomenthal joined in Sept. 1975 as a technician. Bob Ingebretsen was hired for the software engineering. The company developed a 16-bit digital audio recording system using a 16-track Honeywell instrumentation tape recorder as a transport, connected to digital audio recording and playback hardware of Stockham's design. It ran at a sampling rate of 50 kHz, as opposed to the audio CD sampling rate of 44.1 kHz. 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 [m443262]. 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 Records label) in 1978 was a month shy of the world’s first digitally recorded commercial release, [m65222]. For the ensuing three years, 50% of all classical music recorded digitally used Soundstream equipment. In 1979 the album [m25585] produced and composed by Giorgio Moroder and Harold Faltermeyer describes itself as the first electronic live-to-digital album, recorded by Soundstream.