Bio : Anderson Audio New York

With more than 30 Grammy nominated recordings and a host of international awards and honors between their storied resumes, Jim Anderson and Ulrike Schwarz stand as two of the most revered and cutting edge figures in the world of acoustic audio engineering and production. Ask them about their work, though, and the critically acclaimed couple will tell you that they prefer to be invisible.

“If we can make the technology disappear, if our presence can be totally transparent, then we’ve done our job,” Anderson reflects. “Sure, we’re always trying to push the envelope, but ultimately our goal is to make timeless recordings with nothing standing between the listener and the musical experience.”

For Anderson and Schwarz, it was that reverence for the musical experience that led them to audio engineering in the first place. Born and raised in western Pennsylvania, Anderson got his start in the fourth grade, when a teacher recommended he take up the French horn in the elementary school band. His proficiency on the instrument eventually led to a performance scholarship at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and it was there that Anderson’s passion for sound and technology would collide in the music school’s on-campus recording studio. After graduation, he took work at the local public radio station, WDUQ-FM, and one year later, he made the leap to NPR in Washington, DC, where he engineered broadcasts of everything from news and documentaries to performances by jazz icons, classical orchestras, folk singers, and contemporary composers. In 1980, Anderson moved to New York to launch his career as a freelance engineer and producer, and in the decades to come, his recordings would go on to garner a dozen Grammy and Latin Grammy Awards, two Peabodys, and a pair of Emmy nominations alongside countless other accolades. In 2003, he became a professor at the prestigious Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music in the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. In 2008, he was elected President of the Audio Engineering Society.

Though Schwarz grew up 4,000 miles away in Germany, her experiences mirrored those of her future husband and production partner in many ways. Like Anderson, Schwarz got her start as an instrumentalist before falling in love with the idea of studio work as a teenager. One of only three students to be accepted to the exclusive Tonmeister program at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin, Schwarz stood out as a rising talent from the start and soon began splitting her time between Germany and the US, where she assisted some of the recording industry’s premiere figures while pursuing her degree. After graduation, she worked with German public radio and spent more than a decade serving as the senior sound engineer for large orchestral and jazz productions at the famed Bayerischer Rundfunk in Munich, where she broke the mold as a woman in a male-dominated field and garnered numerous honors and awards for her recordings and broadcasts, including the Echo Klassik, Diamant D’Opera, Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenindustrie, and Diapason d’Or. 

In 2015, Schwarz moved to New York full time to team up with Anderson (the two were married that same year), and the pair’s pristine, high definition stereo and surround sound recordings have been fixtures at the Grammy Awards and on critics’ Best Of lists ever since. While Schwarz often acts as producer and Anderson as engineer, the pair regularly reverse roles depending on the project at hand, and their versatility across genres and settings has proven unparalleled. In just the last few years alone, the two have garnered Grammy nominations with their recordings of contemporary Norwegian composer Gisle Kverndokk, American jazz stalwart Patricia Barber, and most recently, soprano saxophonist and composer Jane Ira Bloom; captured the score for Shaka King’s critically acclaimed film Judas and the Black Messiah; collaborated with artists as diverse as Chinese vocalist Min Xiao-Fen and Pomplamoose singer/songwriter Nataly Dawn; and recorded Afro-Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba’s Grammy-winning collection Skyline, which took home the award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album in 2022. 

“We’ve always believed that there’s genius behind simplicity,” says Schwarz, who designed and built her own one-of-a-kind portable recording setup. “No matter what genre you’re dealing with, it all starts with having the right microphones in the right places, and when Jim and I work together, we always know that everything is precisely where it needs to be to yield the highest quality results.”

Today, the couple continues to build upon their legacy of excellence at Anderson Audio New York, delivering not only world-class recordings, but also helping artists navigate the intricacies of licensing their work for high resolution streaming and download in an ever-changing industry. Their latest Grammy-nominated recording Picturing the Invisible: Focus 1 by Jane Ira Bloom was recorded by Ulrike Schwarz in Ultra High Resolution (384kHz/32bit) using the internet for communication and is nominated for Best Immersive Audio Album at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards®.