Musician, entrepreneur finds commercial success
BY MARY LANCASTER INDEPENDENT WRITER

Howarth: “There is nothing else out there that can do what this does.” ROB BENCHLEY/The Independent

Jamie Howarth’s future is looking very bright. In less than two years after he publicly presented his unparalled audio restoration invention, he is celebrating his first commercial success and is well on his way to many more.

On Nov. 15, Fox Home Entertainment released the 50th anniversary edition of “Oklahoma!” after Howarth’s technology corrected the 1955 soundtrack to a state surpassing the quality of the original master recording.

“It is a celebration,” said Howarth, an accomplished pianist who performs at the Summer House in the season and will play during Christmas Stroll at The Club Car.

Howarth’s company, called Plangent Processes, is now partnered with the 21year-old Burbank, Calif.-based Chace Audio. Chace is widely recognized as a leader in sound preservation and restoration and the licensee of Howarth’s patented product known as Clarity technology.

“It’s a hot rod tape player and a computer program that analyzes what the player plays back,” said Howarth, describing the complex equipment in the most simplistic language possible. “There is nothing else out there that can do what this does.”

Howarth and Chace Audio president Bob Heiber met in October 2003 when Howarth introduced his first prototype at the Audio Engineering Society Convention in New York City. It took about a decade from concept to a successful model to bring the Clarity technology to the entertainment industry.

“Chace is a well-known film restoration company. When we came across Jamie’s technology it was obvious to us that it had an application for film sound restoration,” said Heiber. “Jamie had used it for the music industry, but the audio is pretty much the same. It was a no-brainer, slam-dunk decision that this would be the methodology to apply. Technology could be fixed that could never be fixed before. That’s what makes it so brilliant, in our opinion.”

Though “Oklahoma!” is the partners’ first large commercial project, Plangent Processes was previously involved with the 2004 release of the Fats Waller Centennial Collection on RCA Bluebird records, which includes rare music spanning the 1920s to 1940s. Howarth has also been working with Sony Music and the Warner Music Group.

Since “Oklahoma!” was completed, Howarth’s and Heiber’s companies have restored the original 1958 soundtrack of “South Pacific” starring Mitzi Gaynor and Rossano Brazzi that will be released next year. They have additionally been correcting stereo films from the 1950s that will be released in the near future by 20th Century Fox. Those films, as with most of the recordings restored using Clarity, suffered from “wow” and “flutter” problems, which Heiber explained in layman’s terms.

Wow and flutter are wobbly effects that occur when the machinery playing or recording the sound has an element that varies the speed. Wow happens when the speed is too slow and flutter results from an accelerated speed.

“That’s what it’s called,” said Heiber. “Maybe the first guy who heard it just said, ‘Wow, that’s awful.’ It’s pretty subtle, but where Jamie’s technology fixes this stuff is it lets you analyze these microscopic flutters that are almost imperceptible to human hearing. It’s like magic. It allows us to deliver a quality that was never available before. It’s a lot of fun and he’s a very interesting guy.” One of several intreresting things about Howarth is that he has perfect pitch, an ability that drove him mad until he finally developed a method to clean out the distracting and detracting variations of sound that others did not detect.

“I was surprised to find that even minor amounts of wow and flutter are very audible,” said Howarth. “It’s a lot more damaging to the quality than anyone thought. Even if the tape or film isn’t obviously damaged or suffering, the results are substantial. Things that didn’t obviously have problems turned out to benefit quite a bit.”

Howarth moved permanently to Nantucket in 2002. A native of Philadelphia, he spent 1980 through the late 1990s in New York City where his first important professional job was working at the Hit Factory with David Bowie, Blondie and Bob Seager, among others.

He went on to design the original sound for ABC’s broadcast of the 1985 World Series, then performed post-production mixing for various ABC programs and received his first Emmy award for sound editing.

During the 10 years he was music director for the daytime drama “One Life to Live” he earned two more Emmys and an award for exceptional directorial achievement from the Directors Guild of America.

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