The Grammy® Award-winning Britten’s Orchestra SACD, was not something that came together from only one or two people. There were many integral parts to the puzzle. One of those integral parts was Graemme Brown, the chief engineer at Zen Mastering in Vancouver. Part of the journey for getting an SACD into your hands is a conversion process. At Reference Recordings, we record in the PCM format, therefore, in order to get our music onto an SACD, it must first be converted to Direct Stream Digital (DSD). That is where Graemme Brown and Zen Mastering come into the picture.

Direct-Stream Digital is a system of recreating audible signals using pulse-density modulation encoding, a technology to store audio signals on digital storage media used for the SACD. It is a very intense process of conversion when the original recording is in PCM, and to get Grammy-winning quality, it takes very talented people.

Graemme Brown and Zen Mastering are specialists when it comes to mastering surround sound, DSD/SACD projects. In 2003, Brown mastered 32 multi-channel SACDs for Concord Jazz as part of their 30th anniversary series of remixed classic albums; including the world’s first Hybrid SACD/Enhanced CD (Poncho Sanchez Out of Sight). In 2004, Brown did the DSD transferring for Chick Corea’s Grammy winning SACD Rendezvous in New York. And of course, he was in charge of the DSD transfer and SACD authoring on the Grammy-winning SACD, Britten’s Orchestra. Besides being the owner of Zen Mastering, Brown also currently holds the Assistant Faculty position at The Haven Institute and is a Visiting Faculty member at The Banff Centre.