Ward Marston, a successful jazz pianist and orchestra leader, is considered a legend among sound engineers for his painstaking and innovative work in restoring old recordings. The performances he has saved for current and future listeners and scholars include the entire recorded works of singer Enrico Caruso and conductor Arturo Toscanini and all of conductor Leopold Stokowski’s broadcasts with the Philadelphia Orchestra. At the time he transferred them, most of the original recordings were spread over many short-duration disks that approximated but rarely hit 78 RPMs around holes that were often off-center. Marston, blind since shortly after birth, applies his musical ability and historical knowledge to use progressively more sophisticated technology to remove stray sounds, adjust speeds, correct for disk wobble, and string the music from multiple disks into a seamless, digital format. After high school, he had been admitted to a conservatory but chose instead to attend Williams, where he majored in history and worked at the college radio station.
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