Urlicht Audiovisual

“Are you crazy?”

That was the reaction of friends in the music business when I told them in 2011 that I planned to start a record label.

“Sales are tanking… the business model is in meltdown… and did I mention the economy is a train wreck?”

Yes, yes, and yes — which is why I felt the time was right to launch Urlicht AudioVisual, initially as a "physical" record label.

It was already apparent that indie classical labels and small distributors were the real incubator for interesting music and innovative artists, and the growing audience of serious listeners were getting as much if not far more more satisfaction from recordings made by passionate teams of artists and producers than from floundering dogs, horns, and yellow labels that had painted themselves into a mass market corner.

Urlicht AudioVisual's initial focus was on daring artists with a strong interpretive point of view, including pianists Pascal Rogé and Elisha Abas, violinists Elmira Darvarova and Miranda Cuckson, legendary double-bassist Gary Karr, and one of the most versatile conductors in the world - José Serebrier.

The best selling release, however, was "The Music of Gustav Mahler - Issued 78s, 1903-1940", an anthology of all commercially released pre-WWII shellac recordings of Mahler's music in state-of-the-art transfers, with extensive scholarly liner notes by Sybille Werner.

It was with the release of this set that two things happened.

I partnered with Alto Distribution and Entertainment One - now MNRK Music - to make all of my label's recordings available to a select number of streaming and download outlets.

I also began to take on an increasing number of CD mastering and audio restoration clients, commercial and private. I had been doing tape-or-vinyl-to-digital transfers for SPJ Music (now owned by Naxos). Transfers remastered by my studio appear on Sony, Vox, Parnassus, Music & Arts, the revived Musical Heritage Society, and several other labels.

Our studio uses Avid and Mac hardware, and our studio software includes Mac Logic Pro X, Final Cut Pro, Capstan (I was one of the first users of this speed stabilization software in the US), Izotope, Har-Bal, Sonoris DDP, and many other off-the-shelf and custom software and hardware tools in the mastering and restoration process. Our studio is 384k 32-bit and multichannel ready.