New York, NY (September 29, 2026)—Key to the Amplified Art and Sound audio recording and mixing team’s day-to-day work at Jazz at Lincoln Center is its selection of tools.
Amplified Art and Sound LLC has been at the center of the institution’s archival recording, studio recording, broadcast, and streaming operations since 2021. Owner and chief engineer Todd Whitelock, a 13-time Grammy-winning engineer with a background at Power Station, Sony Classical Productions and Sony Music Studios, has long collaborated with the center’s founder and managing and artistic director Wynton Marsalis.
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“The greatest performers in the world play on our stages and as such, we take our responsibility to livestream and capture those performances very seriously,” Whitelock explains. “When our team first started with JALC, the goal was to bring a more ambient approach to recording that I’d done with Sony Classical so that we could purposefully capture these performances in a way that elevated them sonically while still being true to the players and their sounds they get on stage. Close miking alone doesn’t adequately capture the power of the orchestra in full swing.” He says that Marsalis had always envisioned that sound for the livestreams and records released by JALC’s label Blue Engine Records.
Whitelock often opts to use Schoeps mics, a choice influenced by his time at Sony Classical, where tonmeisters favored them for their pickup and minimal stage profile, an essential element required for orchestral recording. They have since become workhorse microphones for him both in the studio and live at JALC.
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“Schoeps were the very first thing I asked for to hang as our main array,” he says. “We use seven Colette Series with MK 2 capsules hanging from the stage catwalks for all of our live performance recording sessions both in Rose Theater and The Appel Room.”
He comments, “The mark of a great microphone is their sonic honesty, in my opinion. The ability to capture the true characteristics of an instrument is always a challenge, and you want the microphone to do that without imparting too much unnecessary coloration on the results. I equate that to a photographer choosing the right lens for a closeup versus a landscape.”
