Stephan was born in Wuppertal in 1974, the son of a German violist and a French cellist, both orchestra musicians. Music was omnipresent in his parents' home, and he spent his childhood between rehearsals and the orchestra pit. Stephan has been playing the violin since the age of five, later adding the piano. He actually wanted to become a conductor and practised tirelessly in front of the record player during his lunchtime break instead of sleeping. When he was seven, the family moved to Bochum in the culturally vibrant Ruhr area.

At the age of 13, a school friend introduced him to the fascinating world of recording technology. Together, they began recording school concerts, chamber music evenings and local festivals using scavenged equipment (two AKG C1000 microphones and a Revox tape machine, later a borrowed PCM F-1 digital recorder) in order to boost their pocket money by selling copies on cassette. At the age of 16, they produced a vinyl record with the school orchestra and the school's own jazz band. For the cutting of the disc, they attended a session with vinyl mastering legend John Cremer at EMI Studios Cologne, where Stephan breathed in the captivating scent of a recording studio for the first time. Sound demos of local bands are made, and the collaboration with orchestras in the Ruhr area lead to a variety of live sound projects in the coming years, which Stephan supervised at the mixing desk, including concerts with the Bochum Symphony Orchestra and guests such as Ian Anderson/Jethro Tull, Herbert Grönemeyer, John Corigliano and Mauricio Kagel. He has also been responsible for the live sound at the popular open-air concerts at the end of the season, which attract thousands of listeners, for many years.

After graduating from school, Stephan first studied musicology at Ruhr University Bochum and later Sound and Video Engineering at the Robert Schumann Conservatory of Music in Düsseldorf. During his studies, he assisted renowned music producers and received awards for his first recordings from the Association of German Recording Producers (VDT) and the Audio Engineering Society (AES). He also starts working as a technician at the TV broadcaster ZDF's Düsseldorf studio during live broadcasts and in the control room. At the same time, he made his first professional music recordings as a freelance producer, which were released in 1998 on the Telos Records label.

In 1999, he met his fellow student Jin Choi during a study project. The two quickly realised that they had the same mindset and, while still students, founded sempre la musica (slm), a music production company based in both Germany and South Korea. Their client list soon included well-known musicians and ensembles, and the premises of Christian Zimmerli's Düsseldorf-based Studio Zimmerli provided them with a professional facility where the recordings are post-produced. Even in the early years of their collaboration, the two founders can look back on an impressive number of productions, including a Beethoven symphony cycle with the Gangnam Symphony Orchestra and initial projects with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, which are released by Deutsche Grammophon. To this day, Seoul Phil remains one of slm Korea's longest-standing clients.

But Stephan is also fascinated by the world of television, and he begins working part-time as a sound engineer in the post-production mix/synchro dubbing department at WDR television, where he is responsible for voice recordings and mixing content from short news clips to full-length art feature films. He later takes on this position at the ZDF headquarters in Mainz, gaining in total over 13 years of experience as a freelancer at these TV broadcasters.

In 2006, Stephan collaborated with composer Kai Rosenkranz to produce the soundtrack for the blockbuster PC game Gothic 3 for the German game label Piranha Bytes. The recordings, featuring a large symphony orchestra, choir, Japanese percussion ensemble and other international artists, are still considered groundbreaking for this genre and have received numerous international awards. Further game music projects followed, including Drammatica – the very best of Yoko Shimomura for the Japanese game label Square Enix and Symphonic Fantasies Tokyo for Merregnon Studios, which was produced live on site in Japan and mixed in Germany.

In 2008, Stephan fulfilled a childhood dream and founded his own label, myrios classics, which he promoted at MIDEM in Cannes. Worldwide distributors were immediately found and the first two albums were produced, including Tabea Zimmermann's SOLO, which became a huge international success. Other artists soon joined, including pianist Kirill Gerstein, the Hagen Quartett and composer-clarinetist Jörg Widmann. Stephan gained a wealth of experience not only in his work as a recording producer and sound engineer. He is also involved in financial and strategic planning, PR and positioning artists in terms of their media presence on the music market. As a boutique label, myrios classics has enjoyed the highest recognition for over 15 years. In 2021, the second label, Avenir Records, follows.

As a recording producer, Stephan soon became responsible for projects for other labels such as Deutsche Grammophon, DECCA, Sony/RCA, naïve, Alpha, Wergo, as well as radio stations such as Deutschlandfunk and WDR. In 2013, he produced recordings with the London Symphony Orchestra for DECCA and with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of then principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski and violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja for the French label naïve. Almost every production he has worked on, whether for his own label or other clients, has received the highest international awards, including numerous ECHO and OPUS Klassik awards, the BBC Music Magazine and Gramophone Magazine Awards, the Diapason d'Or de l'année, the Choc de Classica, the ICMA, the dutch Opus Klassiek, the Limelight Magazine and Presto Music Award, plus countless editorial recommendations from radio stations and music magazines.

In 2015, Stephan accepted a permanent position as recording producer and deputy head of the music production department at WDR, Europe's second biggest broadcaster. For more than 3,5 years, he was responsible for a large number of projects with symphonic and chamber music, crossover and cross-media projects, until he decided to concentrate on his freelance activities again and to focus on working for myrios and other labels, still holding a position as a freelancing recording producer at WDR and Deutschlandfunk. These projects included productions with the Deutsches Sinfonieorchester Berlin, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Daniel Harding, composer Thomas Adès and legendary actor Bruno Ganz, whose last recording (Strauss' melodrama Enoch Arden) Stephan produced shortly before his death. In the same year he took over the productions with the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne and chief conductor François-Xavier Roth. Besides of a multitude of concert streams, a Schumann and Bruckner symphonies cycle for release on SACD, CD and digital formats are the result of this collaboration which has lasted over 6 years so far. 

The Covid pandemic required a strong focus on video streaming formats to bring performances to the many listeners who are stranded at home. By the end of the pandemic, Stephan has been responsible for well over 100 streams of various orchestras, ensembles and individual artists and numerous album productions, including the highly acclaimed recording of the St. John Passion performed by Masaaki Suzuki and the Bach Collegium Japan (as recording and balance engineer), Brahms string sextets with the Belcea Quartet, Tabea Zimmermann and Jean-Guihen Queyras as well as Schumann's piano quartet and quintet with Isabelle Faust, Anne Katharina Schreiber, Antoine Tamestit, Jean-Guihen Queyras and Alexander Melnikow (as recording producer). Recent collaborations include projects with mezzo-soprano Anna Lucia Richter, Spanish pianist Javier Perianes (for both, album release and on TV) the completion of the long-awaited Beethoven String Quartets cycle of the Quatuor Mosaïques for naïve, as well as recordings/streamings with Andrés Orozco-Estrada as the newly appointed chief conductor of the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne.

Stephan has always been a welcome guest at conferences and roundtables, in radio programs and video formats as an expert in the music industry and recording studio technology. His enthusiasm for multi-channel surround formats and experience with immersive recording techniques such as Dolby Atmos also make him a popular lecturer. Stephan was a training partner of the ard.zdf Medienakademie Nuremberg for several years and as such has trained many colleagues in these areas.

He has been living with his family near Cologne since 2013.