NEWS RELEASE
mediaHyperium Producer Herbert Waltl Wins
Top Grammy Honors for“Best Album of the Year”
Ray Charles: Genius Loves Company
NEWS RELEASE
mediaHyperium Producer Herbert Waltl Wins
Top Grammy Honors for“Best Album of the Year”
Ray Charles: Genius Loves Company
Super Audio CD Version of Genius Loves Company Wins
First Ever Best Surround Sound Album Grammy
16 February 2005 , Los Angeles – mediaHyperium studios’ founder and Senior Producer Herbert Waltl, took away two Grammys at the 47 th Annual Grammy Awards for his work on the eight Grammy award-winning RayCharles: Genius Loves Company. The two awards received by Waltl included the coveted Best Album of the Year, and first-ever award for the newly created category of Best Surround Sound Album.
NARAS (National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences) awarded a total of eight Grammys to Ray Charles: Genius Loves Company, paying tribute to Charles’ creative genius on this, his 250 th and last album (Charles died in June of 2004). This inspirational album, which was released on Super Audio CD and CD by Concord Records, won a total of eight Grammy awards, including Best Album and Best Record of the Year. This was the first time Charles has received these top awards in his long and prestigious musical career. Its eight Grammys make this album amongst the most awarded albums in Grammy history.
Alongside the “Big Two” Grammy categories, this year was the first time NARAS recognized the increasing influence of multi-channel audio recording by creating a dedicated category - Best Surround Sound Album. Establishing another first, Ray Charles: Genius LovesCompany is the inaugural winner in this new category.
Waltl , whose mediaHyperium studios is known as the reference studio for PhilipsElectronics in North America , and is quite active in developing cutting edge audio/video content for new technologies such as the new Blu-ray format, explains the background to the decision to release the album on Super Audio CD.
“When I first discussed making a duet album with Ray it was very important to him that he be recording ‘on the cutting edge’. Ray was an innovator in many ways, creating many new musical forms and breaking cross-genre boundaries. This paved the way for many younger singers and musicians who followed him. It only makes sense that Ray should receive this first Surround Sound Grammy,” explains Waltl.
“I felt that during our initial discussions he was very excited about the production and the creative possibilities Surround Sound has to offer. Technical details were not of much interest to him, but the sound quality of DSD was. His key question was always ‘How does it sound?’ I’m glad that Concord Records, an advocate of the SA-CD format, agreed to release this historical album on SA-CD. Ray’s genius deserves the best.”
Ray Charles: Genius Loves Company features the late Ray Charles in classic duets with many of today’s leading recording artists, including Norah Jones, B.B. King, Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, Van Morrison, Diana Krall and Elton John. The album has sold over 4 million copies in less than 6 months since its release, making it Charles’s most commercially successful album ever.
Herbert Waltl and mediaHyperium studios have produced more than 75 SA-CD titles in the past two years, including 8 time Grammy award winning Ray Charles: Genius Loves Company, and 2004’s Grammy winning album Chick Corea’sRendezvous in New York . mediaHyperium studios also did the DSD recording for 2005’s Grammy nominated Ultimate Mancini. Many productions have become reference discs for the SA-CD community. In 2003 mediaHyperium studios won the DVD Entertainment Award:Best DVD-Video Music (Miles Davis) and the VSDA DVD Technical Awards.
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For more information, please contact:
Tripp Mikich / mediaHyperium studios
Ph:310-891-0006 or 310-378-1078
email: tripp.mikich@mediahyperium.com
*Album of the Year
*Record of the Year
*Best Pop Collaboration w/ Vocals: Here We Go Again (Ray Charles & Norah Jones)
*Best Pop Vocal Album
*Best Gospel Performance: Heaven Help Us All (Ray Charles & Gladys Knight) ; *Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist: Over The Rainbow (Ray Charles & Johnny Mathis)
*Best Engineered Album, Non Classical
*Best Surround Sound Album