When I arrived in Australia in 1982 the music industry was going through an major shakeup. The last Vinyl factory was on the way out and CD replicators were struggling to get it right. No-one knew where the wind blew.
After a few years the situation was still not settled. I arrived at Richmond Recorders there were plans afoot to create Australia’s only Pressing Factory.
The chosen Venue was an expensively refurbished ex garage that became a variable geometry acoustic room. We used it just for reverb, a hugely costly waste of space in Adolph Street, Richmond.
Not that the reverb wasn’t nice – it was, but we were at the start of the AMS revolution. AMS made companded processors sound really quite amazing. As a fall back we still had our old faithful AKG spring reverb and gold plate foil unit.
Building the Pressing Plant
One day I was taken (ironically) to a cement factory and introduced to an elderly Egyptian gentleman. After a ceremonial cup of tea where we discussed the Great Pyramid and the Middle Kingdom, with reference to their chemistry and physics, he took me to his dusty office and uncovered – a Neumann SX68 Cutting Lathe, in more or less working order. He had bought it from the original record plant in Melbourne when it closed.
I was appointed cutting engineer – with no experience – and given a short time to learn the dark art. They threw in the chemistry – metalwork, silver spraying, and then later the management of steam at 180psi, hydraulics, pneumatics, 100 ton presses, metalwork, boiler management and the rest.
Now, with over 30 years experience in cutting records, I have an intimate knowledge as to what does and doesn’t work when it comes to vinyl mastering.
vinyl mastering with Neumann
I have owned and loved several wonderful Neumann Lathes over the years, rescuing my first one from a cement factory as I mentioned above. Each one has had to be taken apart and rebuilt with utmost care to bring it back to to life.
Fortunately, Neumann Lathes are built with extreme attention to detail, with the finest materials and smart design. It is ease to repair or replace bearings and other moving parts, which are still available if you know where to look. Other bits we made from scratch.
Additionally I learned to read circuit diagrams in my primitive pidgin German – the rather daunting manuals have several hundred pages like this to wade through, and understand. Its a deep subject. I’m still not fluent but I mange to get by. Fortunately the symbols and uber-logical and nearly all international so its not as difficult as I though it was going to be at the start.
No Fuss Mastering
Today I offer a no fuss, straightforward vinyl mastering service for people wanting to prepare masters for cutting. This ensures the project has a far better chance of achieving a faithful reproduction. This is just one of the audio services I offer.
Mastering has changed dramatically in the last few years, and as technology and habits change, it will continue to evolve.
In the early days, digital files were more than -12 db below 0db measured as RMS. 0db is the absolute ceiling for digital media. This allows for 12db peaks which reflect the typical peaks in music once recorded to tape.
Tape compresses extreme transients during recording, which is an effect many engineers enjoy, because the distortion added is even harmonic..and thus musical.
Too LOUD!
Then as spectral compression and look-ahead peak limiting became more available, levels started to rise and rise. Now its common to achieve -4db maximum RMS – and a true RMS of around -6 to -8. But, is it still music? Would you enjoy listening to it?
Why did we go down this route?
Some would say, because it wasn’t good if your mix sounded quiet on the radio or in the club compared to everyone else’s mix. This resulted in loudness wars, and fighting has badly damaged a lot of music.
Next we demanded the technology to listen to anything anywhere all the time. To help store all these options in available memory, we threw away 90% of the information and just kept the outlines of the music, scraping away the detail. I’m talking about mp3, as you probably guessed.
As Peter Gabriel succinctly put it – ‘We spend years with the best equipment in the world trying to make great sounding recordings and then people listen to it on terrible converters having ditched most of the content’.
Its a pity, and its a worry as well. I am glad people listening in the street have started using headphones rather than ear – buds. Its a move in the right direction. Anyway, to get back to the point…
Too much compression?
The louder a song is, the less dynamic range it has.
In the extreme case, compression artefacts – (sounds created by the compression process) – interfere with the music.
I usually back well off a bit from that position unless specifically asked not to.
What I do in vinyl mastering
- First listen carefully to the artist and producer to find out what they want to achieve.
- top and tail the tracks, put them in order, work out the fades, and gaps.
- listen to all the music with that in mind and develop a strategy for achieving their desired effect.
- Then we start to process, whatever is necessary to achieve the desired effect.
Cutting vinyl is expensive, and creating the metalwork – stampers, and mothers, is a time consuming and delicate process. It is so important to get the vinyl mastering right, so the cutting engineer can concentrate on transferring the music to the disc.
Sometimes I finish a session and send the producer away to listen to a ‘first master’. We have a second go a few days later after all the interested parties have had a chance to contribute their ideas.
On the other extreme, I re-jigged a lo-fi CD the other day and it only took 2 hours. The company was well pleased!
Still Too loud ? but getting better
Oh yes, you can have it really loud if you want – but there are trade-offs.
I did a 50 or so song compilation for Shock which got a good review in Rolling Stone.
I had to get some garage recordings up to the standard of the Hoodoo Gurus at their peak. That was a challenge, it was all hovering around the – 4 mark. LOUD! Yes, loud it was. Sold well though. I would not do that again.
If you want to master something, get your vinyl mastering right, and still eat, drop me a line.