Channel Classics’ founder Jared Sacks on super audio, running an independent label and the secret to making a great recording…

In 1983 French horn player Jared Sacks began holding rehearsals in his house on Amsterdam’s Kanaalstraat. He bought some basic equipment – a tape player, some headphones, a microphone – and recorded the intimate concerts performed in his loft by fellow members of the Amsterdam Conservatory of Music.

Three decades later Jared’s hobby has become a lifetime’s commitment. Since packing away his horn and setting up the Channel Classics label in 1990 (named after the Kanaalstraat venue), he has produced some of the world’s most critically acclaimed classical recordings. He has released more than 330 titles and, while he has traded his basic equipment for state of the art studios, he remains just as passionate about recording as he was in those early days.

“What I loved about recording – and still do”, he explains, “is the meeting of technology and emotion. Setting up equipment, pushing the right buttons and having music come through your speakers is incredible. It’s a real high. Other people might have religion or drugs - I have my recordings.”

While he’s had to recruit extra staff (including his wife, Lydi) Jared continues to oversee the entire recording process and everything from post-production to distribution takes place in his home – no longer in Amsterdam but on the banks of Holland’s River Waal.

“The reason I still make my own recordings”, he says, “is because I want to be a part of the process. Some labels just get the finished product and meet the artists and that’s great for them but to me, as a musician, it’s about being involved from beginning to end. That’s what so much fun. Unfortunately, I have to sell the damn things too! 

According to Jared the secret to making a great recording is a mix of setting, subtlety and super audio technology.

“80% of a good recording is the ambience of the hall. If you don’t have a good hall, you can screw around as much as you like and you can make it good but it will never be great. It’s also about distance – someone who’s only interested in sound will put a microphone above the hammers of a piano or the strings of a violin, but if you want to really hear the music, you need distance. You need to capture the overtones, not just the direct sound.”

It takes Jared around two weeks to produce a single CD: for every day’s recording there is a day’s listening and making broad edits, followed by careful but gentle refinement. “I try to limit the post-production process”, he says. “If something is really out of tone you have to address it. Sometimes a note doesn’t speak well and you just can’t leave it in but if you do too much, you’ll kill the music. Musicians know you can do a lot in post-production and they’ll listen with headphones as if holding a magnifying glass up to each and every note. After all they know that this CD could be around for the next 20, 50, 100 years.”

Aside from acoustics and editing Jared attributes the quality of his recordings to the super audio format he has been using and promoting since 2001.

Developed jointly by Philips and Sony in the late 1990s, super audio CDs (SACDs) use a higher sampling frequency than traditional CDs (2.8224 MHz compared to 44.1 KHz), hold six times as much data and have a dynamic range of 120 dB (CDs have 96db). Instead of PCM (the standard processing technique), SACDs use direct stream digital (DSD), a format developed for the digital archiving of analogue master footage and, as a result, offer greater clarity, depth and a higher resolution sound. While the lack of mainstream demand led to Philips and other major labels dropping the format, Channel Classics is one of a handful of independent labels that continues to record in super audio.

“Nowadays nobody wants to invest in recording in super audio, but they’ll make multi-channel discs and tell people it’s done using DSD. But people know the difference, and you only have to download an audio programme from the web, check the frequency graph and see that it’s not true.”

So what, in Jared’s opinion, is the difference between listening to a multi-channel and a stereo recording?

“If you’ve never heard something, then you don’t miss it. Most people listen to stereo and they think it sounds fine. But when they listen to SACDs for the first time, they hear something else. They can’t describe it, but they feel something, and that something is the emotion, the range and the depth of music.”

“It’s like scanning a photo, really”, he explains. “On a screen you look at a picture and it’s 72 dpi (pixels per inch). It looks fine but if you want to print it out, it has to be 300 dpi and if you want an art-book standard photographic print, you’ll need 1200. Music is exactly the same, but it’s about clarity and the air around the music. With DSD and super audio the sound comes loose from the speakers. It’s not a gimmick - multichannel really does take you a step further - and with it, we try to reproduce the reflections of the hall that is used for the initial recording.” It’s important to know that you do not need expensive equipment to get the emotional impact that multichannel can create.

While super audio remains a niche market, the number of independent labels using SACDs is steadily increasing. Channel has recently introduced downloads of their DSD files and these have attracted have strong support in countries from Holland to China, Japan, the US and Australia. For Jared, this select following is reward enough.

“I’m always striving for the best possible in sound”, he says. “It’s something I want to do, something that is important to me and if there are people out there who also appreciate it, then it’s all worth while. The people interested in super audio and DSD are a small group, but a dedicated one and for those consumers what’s amazing is that they can enjoy the same quality as a producer – the quality of a master recording.”

Despite the lack of mainstream players offering multi-channel playback and the absence of big-label support, Jared is confident that DSD will be the sound of the future. “When I was promoting DSD and super audio, I told the major labels, ‘sure, you might not use it now, but you don’t know what will happen in the future’. dCS made it possible to send DSD over USB to a DAC with the Debussy and I think that now more and more people will jump on the band wagon and work to create playback for DSD.”

Regardless of what the future holds for DSD, Jared remains as committed as he was 22 years ago to producing the finest possible classical recordings and it’s a process he continues to enjoy.

“Being able to work with some fine musicians is what really keeps me going. You don’t expect to make money on an artist’s first or second disc, but when you get to the third release, and you get positive feedback from distributors and great reviews from magazines, then you know it’s going someplace. Recording has always been fun for me and all these years later, it still is – even if there is an awful lot of equipment to set up!”

For more information on Channel Classics visit www.channelclassics.com.