Keith O. Johnson
Keith O. Johnson | |
|---|---|
| Other names | "Prof" Keith O. Johnson, "The Professor" |
| Occupations | Recording engineer, audio designer |
| Known for | Reference Recordings; co-development of HDCD |
| Awards | Grammy Award for Best Surround Sound Album (2011) |
Keith O. Johnson, known in the audio press as "Professor" Johnson,[1] is an American recording engineer and audio equipment designer.[2] A founding partner of the classical label Reference Recordings, he built much of the equipment used for its sessions and engineered its releases.[2][3] With Michael "Pflash" Pflaumer he developed High Definition Compatible Digital (HDCD), a coding system for the compact disc commercialized by Pacific Microsonics and acquired by Microsoft in 2000.[2][4] He has won one Grammy Award from thirteen nominations.[5]
Early life and education
[edit]Johnson began recording in the early 1950s on Pentron machines, and at fourteen assembled a vacuum-tube tape recorder from parts of a Sears Roebuck Silvertone machine fitted with heads of his own manufacture.[6][3] He studied at Stanford University, concentrating on instrumentation and transistor circuitry, and during the 1960s built a solid-state three-channel tape recorder later used on more than a hundred recordings.[3][2] As a summer student at Ampex he investigated photolithography as a means of producing thin magnetic heads able to operate at high frequencies.[3]
Career
[edit]Equipment and tape technology
[edit]Johnson helped form Gauss Electrophysics, which built high-speed tape duplicators using heads of his design.[3][2] He contributed to MCA DiscoVision and holds a patent covering the embossing of plastic discs and their readback by a servo-guided pickup.[3][2] He engineered orchestral programs for Armed Forces Radio and, in the 1970s, worked with the band Ambrosia and producer Alan Parsons.[2]
Reference Recordings
[edit]Reference Recordings was founded in 1976 by Johnson with Tam Henderson and Marcia Martin.[2] Johnson met Henderson while recording a small classical ensemble at a party.[3] The label's early releases included Professor Johnson's Astounding Sound Show, recordings of Tafelmusik and Respighi's Church Windows.[6] He designed and built the label's recording chain himself. His microphones used Schoeps capsules with lighter diaphragms and modified interface circuitry, his mixer was a passive device with no active circuitry, and his tape machine was built from the ground up, including its heads and transport.[6] He has engineered the label's releases since its founding.[6][2]
HDCD and Pacific Microsonics
[edit]In the mid-1980s Michael Ritter introduced Johnson to the engineer Michael "Pflash" Pflaumer, and the three set out to improve the sound of the compact disc.[3][4] The resulting system, HDCD, was designed as a conjugate process in which an encoding stage and a complementary decoding stage each contribute to the improvement; Johnson and Pflaumer developed it by combining measurement with extensive listening tests.[4] Two patents covering the encode and decode system were assigned to Pacific Microsonics, the Berkeley, California company that Johnson co-founded with Pflaumer to develop and market HDCD.[7][8][2] By 1999 the technology had been licensed to more than ninety hardware manufacturers, over two thousand HDCD titles had been issued and about 125 million such discs had been sold.[4] Microsoft acquired the company and its intellectual property in 2000 and continued to use HDCD in its personal computer products.[2]
He also conceived the Colortek optical CCD scanner, which removes noise from damaged motion picture soundtracks, and with Parsons developed the Projectron, an early polyphonic sampling instrument.[2]
Awards
[edit]Johnson received the Audio Engineering Society's Fellowship award in 1967.[9][10]
He won the Grammy Award for Best Surround Sound Album at the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards in 2011, shared with producer David Frost, for Britten's Orchestra, a multichannel SACD recorded with the Kansas City Symphony under Michael Stern. It was his first win after seven nominations.[1][5]
| Year | Ceremony | Category | Work | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1993 | 35th | Best Engineered Recording, Classical | Arnold: A Sussex Overture; Beckus the Dandipratt; The Smoke; The Fair Field | Nominated |
| 1997 | 39th | Best Classical Engineered Recording | Stravinsky: The Song of the Nightingale; The Firebird Suite | Nominated |
| 1999 | 41st | Best Engineered Album, Classical | Bruckner: Symphony No. 9 | Nominated |
| 2001 | 43rd | Best Engineered Album, Classical | Bolero! | Nominated |
| 2002 | 44th | Best Engineered Album, Classical | Respighi: Belkis, Queen of Sheba – Suite; Dance of the Gnomes; The Pines of Rome | Nominated |
| 2003 | 45th | Best Engineered Album, Classical | Rachmaninoff: Symphonic Dances; Vocalise | Nominated |
| 2008 | 50th | Best Engineered Album, Classical | Garden of Dreams | Nominated |
| 2011 | 53rd | Best Surround Sound Album | Britten's Orchestra | Won |
| 2016 | 58th | Best Engineered Album, Classical | Saint-Saëns: Symphony No. 3, "Organ" | Nominated |
| 2018 | 60th | Best Engineered Album, Classical | Schoenberg, Adam: American Symphony; Finding Rothko; Picture Studies | Nominated |
| 2019 | 61st | Best Engineered Album, Classical | John Williams at the Movies | Nominated |
| 2020 | 62nd | Best Engineered Album, Classical | Rachmaninoff | Nominated |
| Best Immersive Audio Album | The Orchestral Organ | Nominated |
References
[edit]- 1 2 Serinus, Jason Victor (February 21, 2011). ""Professor" Johnson Scores His First Grammy". Stereophile. Retrieved September 24, 2026.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Johnson, Heather (May 1, 2005). "Keith O. Johnson". Mix. Retrieved September 24, 2026.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Harley, Robert (May 1, 1995). "HDCD: Keith Johnson, Pflash Pflaumer, Michael Ritter". Stereophile. Retrieved September 24, 2026.
- 1 2 3 4 De Lancie, Philip (June 1, 1999). "Pacific Microsonics' HDCD: Looking Beyond the Compact Disc". Mix. Retrieved September 24, 2026.
- 1 2 "Keith O. Johnson". GRAMMY.com. Recording Academy. Retrieved September 24, 2026.
- 1 2 3 4 Holt, J. Gordon (August 1, 1984). "Keith O. Johnson: Reference Recordings". Stereophile. Retrieved September 24, 2026.
- ↑ US 5479168, "Compatible signal encode/decode system", published December 26, 1995, assigned to Pacific Microsonics
- ↑ US 5872531, "Signal encode/decode system", published February 16, 1999, assigned to Pacific Microsonics
- ↑ "Audio Engineering Society Awards Recipients" (PDF). Audio Engineering Society. Retrieved September 24, 2026.
- ↑ "AES Awards". Audio Engineering Society. Retrieved September 24, 2026.
External links
[edit]- Keith O. Johnson at Reference Recordings
- Keith O. Johnson at GRAMMY.com