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March 4, 1987
BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY: ADVANCES IN RECORDING
BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY: ADVANCES IN
RECORDING; HARMONY OF ART AND SCIENCE
LIFTS A MUSIC INDUSTRY BARRIER
By PETER H. LEWIS
STEVIE WONDER and Nile Rodgers are planning to get together this afternoon to make a record,
even though they are 3,000 miles apart. Their studio will stretch from Queens to Staten Island, across
45,000 miles of space and back down to Los Angeles, but it could just as easily span New York and
Tokyo, Maui or anywhere else that busy, or perhaps reclusive, recording stars are found.
When the first wail of Mr. Wonder's harmonica is laid down on the soundtrack to the ''Moonlighting''
television theme, the music industry will pass another milestone: the merging of digital audio
recording technology with satellite telecommunications. The technology will allow recording artists to
work together despite great distances, with greater freedom in scheduling, and with substantial
savings over the cost of flying an entourage of family and followers across country.
But in a broader sense it is a clear signal of the increasingly important role of computers, fiber optics
and other digital technology in the recording industry. Remote recording sessions have been done in
the past, but never with the absolute clarity of the digital system that will be used today.
In a test of the system last week at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, the faint sound of Mr.
Rodgers's fingers sliding along a guitar string, the whisper of Mr. Wonder's harmonica as he breathed
into it, and the mutterings of disbelief from Quincy Jones, the producer of the Los Angeles segment, all
came through as clearly as if they were all standing in the same room.
''This is wild,'' Mr. Jones said. ''Are you sure you guys are in New York?''
''Are you sure you're in Los Angeles?'' Mr. Rodgers answered, watching Mr. Jones on a video monitor
overhead.
''Amazing,'' said Mr. Wonder, who was standing next to Mr. Jones in Los Angeles.
Ben Rizzi, chief engineer and co-owner of Master Sound Astoria, the New York terminus of the
experiment, agreed. ''The sound quality is as if he's in this room,'' Mr. Rizzi said. ''Our signals are going
down the hall on laser light. There's no interference, no hum, no distortion - it's perfect. And with

2. these Sony recorders, what you put into the recording is exactly what you get back. The copy is every
bit as good as the original. In fact we don't call them copies, we call them clones.''
In the digital recording system, explained Gus Skinas, a spokesman for Sony Professional Audio,
sounds made by the performers are sampled by a device called an analog-to-digital converter, which
senses the voltage of the audio wave form every 44-thousandths of a second and gives it a number
value between 0 and 65,535. These numbers are stored in binary form on magnetic tape. Later, when
the tape is played back through a digital-to-analog converter, each number produces a voltage that
exactly matches the original. Digital processing corrects for data losses on the tape or in transmission.
And in the copying process, only pure digital data, identical to the original, is transferred, thus
eliminating static, tape hiss and any degradation of the sound, Mr. Skinas said.
In the process that was tested successfully last week and that will be repeated today, studio musicians
lay down the background music on a digital multitrack master recorder. As the tape is played back, it is
mixed to stereo - the way recording engineers and musicians will hear it over their headphones - and
once again converted to digital through another Sony device, the 1630 processor.
After passing through the 1630, which is the device used to make master copies of virtually all the
compact disks on the market today, the digital signal is transmitted as if it were video.
The signal is carried to a satellite dish on Staten Island from Kaufman Astoria Studios via a fiber-optic
network belonging to Teleport Communications. There, the video signal is beamed to a GTE Spacenet
communications satellite and relayed to a dish mounted on a truck. In this case the truck is parked
outside Mr. Wonder's studio, but it could just as easily be anywhere in the world.
The digital signal is decoded and converted back to audio, and as Mr. Wonder hears the music he
simultaneously adds his own contributions. His sounds, in turn, are encoded digitally, beamed to
Staten Island and relayed by fiber-optic cable to Kaufman Astoria Studios.
The digital signal returning from Los Angeles arrives in Queens roughly 520 milliseconds after the
original master recording is played in New York, and is recorded onto a ''slave'' multitrack recorder.
In the meantime, the version of the original that is to be heard through the New York studio monitors
is delayed 520 milliseconds, so that the producers hear both the original and the returning signals at
the same time.
Later, Mr. Skinas said, the slave tape is synchronized to compensate for the satellite delay time and the
information is transferred digitally to the master machine. The result is one master tape that sounds
like everything was recorded at the same time. ''It's as simple as that,'' Mr. Rizzi said. The first satellite
digital recording, in addition to the overdubbing of Mr. Wonder's harmonica to the ''Moonlighting''
theme, will be the addition of Mr. Rodgers's guitar to an anti-drug song that Mr. Wonder has written
called ''Stop, Don't Pass Go.''
While the process is useful for overdubbing tracks, it is not yet feasible for recording entire albums,

3. said Harry Mendell, the inventor of several digital music instruments and the man who arranged
today's session. Nevertheless, he said: ''I see a worldwide network of these studios being established.
This kind of collaboration will become routine.''
Photo of Stevie Wonder in his Los Angeles studio; photo of Nile Rodgers accompaning Mr. Wonder on
guitar (NYT); diagram illustrates digital recording technology that allows musicians working in
separate places to collaborate on recording
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