At an age when many successful professionals would be contemplating retirement, Amelia Haygood, who died March 19 at 87, quit her job counseling juvenile delinquents and founded Delos International, an independent classical record label known as an innovator in American repertoire and digital sound.

Among the company’s big hits were two neo-Romantic symphonies by Howard Hanson, an American composer from Wahoo, Neb., who was hardly a household name when the recordings were made, in 1989.

Others included “Heigh-Ho! Mozart,” a collection of the composer’s themes from Disney movies that scored in the crossover charts in 1995, and the “Baby Needs” series of classical music such as Bach and lullabies for infants.

But the label’s greatest strengths were in top-drawer artists including Gerard Schwarz, Jean-Pierre Rampal, and Dmitri Hvorostovsky performing the music they felt passionate about.

“The first thing she would ask an artist is, ‘What would you like to start with?'” Constantine Orbelian, who recorded nearly 50 albums for Delos as conductor of the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, said. “When Arleen Auger recorded the ‘Love Songs’ for her, she didn’t like the way it sounded. So Amelia let her re-record it. That’s unheard of.”

In a collaboration with the inventor Thomas Stockham that began in 1979, Haygood produced recordings with digital technology, then in its infancy.

“I’ve spilled blood trying to get high-quality recordings and have tried all the noise reduction methods,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1979. Delos subsequently became the first independent American label to issue digital CDs, the company said.

Among the first artists to record in digital with Delos were pianist Carol Rosenberger, now the company’s vice president for artists and repertoire, and Mr. Schwarz, then a trumpet player and now music director of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra.

“They were my trumpet swan song. Her attitude was to document it,” Mr. Schwarz said of the recordings, made at Manhattan’s Masonic Hall. “She ran the company by emotion. Business came second to art.”

Haygood continued to run Delos, attending recording sessions until the wee hours, into her late 80s. When she finally retired after falling ill last fall, the Delos catalog stood at more than 500 recordings.

Running a record label was at least her third profession.

Haywood was born July 15, 1919, in Gainesville, Fla. Her mother was a descendant of Florida’s Spanish settlers, and her father was on the law faculty at the University of Florida. Optimistically internationalist in her political leanings, she studied at the Sorbonne and went to work as an editor of cultural and scientific publications at the State Department.

After being married in 1945 to J. Douglas Haygood, a clinical psychologist, she decided to get her own degree in psychology, and studied at the University of California at Los Angeles with Bruno Klopfer, known for having introduced America to the Rorschach test. The Haywoods eventually established a joint practice in Beverly Hills, Calif.

After her husband died, in 1956, Haywood worked as a consultant to the Los Angeles County Probation Department, where she designed programs for juvenile offenders and their families.

In the early 1970s, Haygood told the Los Angeles Times, she was fed up with psychology. A crisis occasioned by the death of a close friend led her to focus on music. She closed her bank accounts, sold her stocks, and began consulting with producers, artists, and reviewers on how to get started in the recording business.

Drawing on her long-standing love of music — she had a gigantic music collection — and her own studies of psychoacoustics and the physics of music, she formulated a business plan. On the day Delos Records officially opened for business, she said, she broke out in hives.

At first it was a shoestring operation, and Haygood stored boxes of records in her garage. She began making sales calls at record chains and big regional stores, badgering them to sell Delos recordings, which were distinctive for featuring American artists.

“She said later, ‘I shamed them into it,'” Mrs. Rosenberger, the pianist and A&R executive, said.

The list of artists who have worked for Delos would grace any music hall — Janos Starker, Andrew Litton, Zdenek Macal, and Eugene Ormandy, who made some of his final recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra for Delos.

In a kind of mission statement for her company, Haygood wrote, “Greek mythology tells us that Apollo set out from the island of Delos every morning with his lyre in hand, bringing light, music and healing to the world. We at Delos International share the awareness that our world needs the balm of music.”

She leaves no survivors.