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Jean Holtzmann
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A musician at heart with a passion for recording, Jean Holtzmann has been a session musician, and has toured the world as a guitar player with famous artists before starting up Super Sonic Productions in Paris. He has also played just about every synthesizer ever produced, and owned just about every recording and editing system known to man… he tells us about his formative years, his company, and his favourite equipment.
 There was a peculiar feeling to my trip to Paris to meet Jean Holtzmann and his associates at Super Sonic Productions. As a French expatriate living in London, UK, I had lost touch with the French way of doing things. But the ambience soon became familiar again, the comings and goings between the studio and café, the relaxed atmosphere… Super Sonic feels more like a small family than a big company. However, Super Sonic certainly means business, and this easy approach is also a part of their success. I was sitting next to Elisabeth Lochen while eating a tasty ham and cheese baguette at the aforementioned café. Also a French expatriate, the multi-talented Elisabeth is a Los Angeles resident. She was keen to talk about her ongoing relationship with Super Sonic, explaining how the high standard of their work ensured that they would always remain in charge of her sound. No small compliment considering that Elisabeth is well-known not only as a documentary and short film maker, but also as the co-inventor (with Pascal Chedeville) of the DTS audio format!
The next stop after the café was one of the Super Sonic post rooms, and this is where I could finally sit down with Jean Holtzmann for an interview. Jean has a lot to talk about, his many years in the music and sound businesses feed an infectious enthusiasm and his passion is obvious at all times. We talked about his beginnings, his career, and some technical aspects of the sound-to-picture business and how it is handled at Super Sonic.
Jean’s musical interest started early. “I was very small”, he recalls. “It was when listening to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, on the first record-player I touched as a six year old, my dad’s Grundig record-player, while I was alone in the house on a saturday. I listen to Tchaikowsky and it’s… incredible”. Then he learns to play, starting with piano. “During the same week probably, on the family’s old Gaveau. One of my brothers already plays the piano, the other one plays the guitar”. Eventually Jean receives formal musical training. “I learned piano from my grandmother, then I had violin lessons and guitar lessons. But I was also in a Jesuit school far from home… horrible period in my life… so I learned music partly at the local conservatoire, and partly from the Jesuits, with Bach, chorals and so on, traditional things like that”. One of his teachers is Alberto Ponce, who is now aknowledged as one of the world’s most prominent classical guitarists. “At about fourteen, I heard Alberto Ponce play. I decided to go for that kind of “flesh and nail” sound as opposed to the “nail only” sound. I was still very interested in classical music, and specifically classical guitar, and I became fascinated by that man, his open-mindedness, so I had lessons from him. But while classical music is still alive in me with composers like Bach, Sor, or Scarlatti whose music I transcribed for guitar, I very quickly had to move on. I had to look after myself at an early age, so I started to teach at the Cultural Centre in Yerres, the Paris suburb I come from. I was teaching rock, at the time it was CSN&Y, the early Yes, Genesis… I learned to play all this on the guitar and then taught others. You know, just to make a living”.
His interest for sound itself and, in particular, sound to picture also comes from way back. “I always loved sound as well as music. I was very lucky in that my father had a passion for recording, hi-fi equipment, so when I was a kid we had Grundig tape recorders, some of the early AEGs, we recorded the family occasions. And also the local Cultural Centre was very sophisticated, with some fantastic people including Alain Bergala, of “Les Cahiers du Cinéma”, who is today a very well known director, and when I was fourteen he showed me sound editing, I did my first sound edits on Uher Reporters… it was really interesting… I was just very lucky!”.
Another important element in Jean’s personal development was synthesis. He has used just about every synthesizer model ever released. “At the Yerres Cultural Centre, I quickly had access to some EMS, early modular synths, ARP 2600s… I was really passionate about that, from when I was about fifteen, and I started to work on the first Korg synths, before the modulars. Later on I teamed up with Karlheinz Schäfer. We developed an obsession with synthesis, IT… it was the time of the first Macs, of polysequencing. We became betatesters for Performer, Vision, we used the first score editors, all that in the late 70s. That led us to work in major studios like Ferber, Davout, the Studio des Dames, as specialists of that kind of approach”.
 In the 80s Jean and Karlheinz move on to hard disk recording, experimenting with a number of systems and often investing heavily, while working for high-profile clients. “Between 1978 and 1989 we worked for people like Zamfir, George Martin, French singer Christophe, directors Samuel Fuller and Robert Enrico and many others, while closing the gap between traditional twenty-four track recording and our machines. We looked into synchronization, automation. We purchased two PPG HDU, and eventually a Fairlight. We started to use convolution and Fourier series. We’d be launching a calculation on Friday and coming back for the result on Saturday evening, for 1 second of sound, on a 1.3 million machine like the Fairlight! That’s the origin of my involvement with Soundscape, because I gradually moved from Mac to PC. I used Alchemy on the Mac, but I was very disappointed with System 7 which promised multitasking but was unable to deliver. I found that Pro Tools was a very bad recorder, when we already had excellent recorders, and a very bad editor, only offering facilities we’d already had for years. Then I settled on the Korg Soundlink. It had mixing, processing, sync, snapshots, EQ, precise work with picture, EDL, everything I needed, with eight tracks. I used it for a few years while always watching how things evolved. Then I saw SoundForge. I loved it because it was a creation tool, not just a reproduction tool. It was reminiscent of the possibilities they had at IRCAM. So this got me interested in PCs”.
 At this stage Jean keeps an eye on Soundscape. Eventually he gets a demo from Gilles Prigent, who used to work for Korg and look after the Soundlink system. Jean is suitably impressed by the facilities on offer. “I thought ok, I’ll get one”. He goes for a fully loaded SSHDR1-Plus, and all the plug-ins already available (TC Dynamizer, Synchro Arts VocAlign…). At a time when getting good picture from a PC is difficult if it is also required to produce sound, Soundscape is ideal. “I can work the way I want with picture, exchange files between Soundscape and native programs like SoundForge, Samplitude and so on, while working on a hardware platform that does not tax the CPU. I still had the top Pro Tools system of the time, a Mix 24 with two DSP Farm cards, 888 interface and I still had Macs as well as PCs. This is when I decided to sell them. From that point on, the way Soundscape interacts with the PC simply seemed to make sense, and after a while there was no point looking for anything else. Then Mixpander came, and that was a revolution”.
Before delving further into the technical aspects of using Soundscape, I asked Jean to talk about Super Sonic, the people and the business. “Super Sonic was formed by a group of sound engineers who all worked at the Jacques Son studio. We all had a lot of equipment and wanted to stop moving from studio to studio. So we decided to set up Super Sonic. Eventually Mathieu Gossard and myself ended up in charge. We were both passionate about Soundscape. We worked for two years, got big deals, video games and so on, doing 100% of the work on Soundscape. We worked for young directors like Antoine Charreyron, who brought us contracts for small games cinematics. He moved on to do Dead to Rights, Terminator III, USS Antarctica and we’d be doing sound and mixes for him. Eventually he got us in touch with clients, we recorded actor Jean Reno for Onemusha, this kind of thing. They were not huge budgets, they just allowed us to carry on, but it gave the whole thing a rather international flavour, which is nice when operating from France. In parallel we’d do documentaries, short films that would get prizes like the one in Clermont-Ferrand, big films presented in Cannes, Venezia… we started to build up a reputation, and organized our whole structure around Soundscape, because we think it is the most flexible tool for this type of activity”.
Super Sonic comprises of four studios. One in the basement, with a link to the foley room on the same level, and three on the ground floor, one of which is equipped with a Dolby CP65 surround processor. All the studios are linked to the machine room on the ground floor which hosts the Soundscape units (three Soundscape 32, two R.Ed and one SSHDR1-Plus) and computers, and all the computers are networked so that any file can be accessed from any of the studios. This way, the same project can be loaded simultaneously, for example, in the basement studio for foley recording and in a ground floor studio for music recording. A Mac is also present for compatibility reasons.
 Jean was happy to elaborate on the qualities of Soundscape. “The first advantage that I realised very quickly is that Soundscape frees up the PC, allowing me to work in parallel with other applications that have very specific abilities, like Samplitude for FFT, special effects, sound creation. Very quickly, with the launch of the R.Ed 32, the Mixpander becomes a major factor because we can now mix native audio with Soundscape audio without cables, so Mixpander becomes our only soundcard. This also makes IRQ management easier, and allows us to integrate other cards like the Creamware Pulsar”. Super Sonic also uses Soundscape for mixing, as part of a very individual approach. “We get two types of job. Either recording, sound creation and editing, or complete projects including mixing. We’re a bit different from other studios because right from the beginning we have been very careful regarding the “auditorium” aspects. We have installed Dolby decoders, DTS decoders, everything needed for real post-encoding monitoring including very specific loudspeakers that can emulate the JBLs found in many cinemas. So we placed Soundscape in the best possible real-life context, rather than working in the dream context of the recording studio”. We then talk about the Soundscape Editor. “Soundscape is stunning. Everything you should ask from a manufacturer is there, but it’s hardly talked about! Anytime we need something particular, we check the Global or Tape menu and we go… “it’s there!”… absolutely everything is covered. So we have pushed our knowledge of the Soundscape Editor very far. Another thing is that we all do freelance work besides Super Sonic, so we all work on other systems like Pyramix, Pro Tools, the Akai DD1500, the Fairlight. That means we can really compare the strong and weak points of all the systems. We always notice that Soundscape is a platform of extraordinary intelligence and freedom”.
 Super Sonic have streamlined their operation at every stage of a sound-to-picture project. They are used to dealing with all the main formats. “We receive AVID projects as OMF files. Depending if they use an old or recent OMF format we open them directly in Soundscape, or open them first in Pro Tools - we have a Digi 001 system just for that - and export to Soundscape in Pro Tools format. We digitize the images using DV via firewire or via a Matrox RT2000 if the source is an analogue tape such as a beta or U-Matic. All our studios have a Matrox Parhelia for playback”. Super Sonic have just acquired the Soundscape Synchronization Board and also use it to synchronize to analogue tape. “We use the sync card for very quick jobs, when there is no time to digitize. Someone will come in at 2.00pm, at 2.02pm we are recording. In that case it works very well. We have just received it and tested it, and we find it as precise and as smooth as a Sony BVE-900. However, we will always tend to digitize, because we may have any number of studios working on the same project, so they must be able to share the files”. When it comes to music, Jean has a lot of contacts in contemporary music, in particular with Eric Daubresse of IRCAM (Super Sonic are linked to IRCAM via an ftp link allowing file tranfers in either direction). There is also an ongoing collaboration with Benoit Jarlan, Jean de Vesa and Xavier Despace who often come to Super Sonic. “They have always been very involved with Super Sonic. They visit on a regular basis and use Studio 3 to finalize their sound in Soundscape. We have even set up a system that allows them to bring in their sequences, prepared on a Mac, and to control the PC system, including Soundscape, from our own Mac G4 via MMC. They can arm and disarm tracks, control the picture frame by frame from the Mac and so on. It was a bit complicated to set up but it works very well”. Soundscape comes as standard with Pro Tools Import and Export, but difficulties sometimes arise when transferring files from PC to Mac or from Mac to PC. Super Sonic have worked out a radical solution. “One of our collaborators, Nydal Essyad, has created an automated routine to take care of the format problems with the Mac binary files. When a Pro Tools project is created in Soundscape it is saved directly on the Mac via the network. Files can be converted to and from Mac binary format automatically”.
During my visit at Super Sonic I met Michel Muller, a French actor I had first seen playing the part of Jean Reno’s hilarious accomplice in “Wasabi”, a Gérard Krawczyk film written by Luc Besson. He was working on the sound of his new film, “Suicide Mediatique” in Studio 1, an ambitious project featuring some of the most famous French actors (like Gérard Depardieu). A director came in for a quick chat with Jean, a pianist was recording beautiful parts for a movie… I asked Jean about current projects. “Working with Michel is wonderful... we also work on a film by Damien Odoul, “Après nous le déluge”, featuring Pierre Richard who is coming tomorrow for some vocal takes, and we are dubbing an old Japanese series called “Princesse Saphir”. We have just finished replacing the lost original soundtracks of an old Japanese series from the seventies where we had to recreate all the music and soundtracks. In all we have seven or eight projects going on at the moment”. Super Sonic is, quite clearly, a success story.
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