SH Spotlight I'm asked stuff: Favorite mastering engineer, best BOSTON CD, best TRAVELING WILBURYS CD, etc..

I've seen worse.

 

Long been a fan of that 1st Leon Russell solo album.
I buy pretty much every version including the 1993 DCC CD version with those added five tracks and the return of "Old Masters".

I was always curious about the lineup and who played on each song. I came across this in an old Rolling Stone that I'd saved that gave some information.

Can you give any insight into the musician lineup?
You can spot Clapton pretty easily.

Any insight into your remastering of it?
How did you get them to OK the return of "Old Masters"?
I noticed the most recent Audio Fidelity vinyl reissue doesn't have it.
Lastly, I imagine Audio Fidelity is gone forever and never coming back ...

(YIKES! It's huge, sorry!)

 

This doesn't answer all of your questions, but it touches on a few:

SH Spotlight - I'm asked stuff: Favorite mastering engineer, best BOSTON CD, best TRAVELING WILBURYS CD, etc..

 

It does.
I do have the original LP with “Old Masters” as well as the original “silver” DCC, the later gold DCC, the “silver” DCC “Leon Russell and the Shelter People” and the DCC “Best of ...”

Now what about that DCC Willis Alan Ramsey ...

 

Steve, I wish I had known what DCC was all about back when I was a one-stop buyer. I think it was Schwartz Brothers, here in the Baltimore -Washington area that distributed the label. At the time, I recall looking at the fancy gold discs and the prices....and was thinking, "no way!"

Do you know why Audio Fidelity didn't get a chance to do the Holiday album by America? (I didn't expect them to license Hat Trick - nice album, but not a big seller. But Holiday seemed like a natural.)
Same question on James Taylor and In The Pocket - especially after doing all the other titles. (And I really would have liked you to do your magic on JT's Greatest Hits - and have them let you use the 45 version of "Country Road"! I remember you said you tried to get that for SBJ, but they wouldn't go for it...)

How are you doing in all this insanity? (I do miss the days of the "Adventures In Mastering" threads - when you announced new AF releases!)

 

Only slightly related to this thread, but here is my story:

I was a member of the DCC Forum back in the late '90's/early 00's. I joined because I found the discussions interesting and had NO IDEA who were the moderators or hosts. A discussion came up concerning the MCA CD of Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy by The Who. I made a comment that the CD sounded great, except for the song 'Substitute' which sounded shrill and crappy. Steve responded that he had trouble securing a decent master for that one song, and they went with what they had.

I had NO IDEA that I was communicating with the guy that actually mastered that CD. I ran to look at the CD credits and just kept repeating to myself "holy s4it, holy s4it"!

Ahhhh.. those days when the internet was new.

Just in case you read this Steve, I have many, many of your mastering titles on various formats and love them all.

But Substitute is still 'ehhh'.

 

Well, on this note, if somehow Parlaphone, Sony and/or the Bowie estate would reach out to you to finish their box set reissue series since it's mostly past the Visconti period, would you accept the gig?!? Not that I have any pull to make that happen but a fan can dream....

 

You're probably right, but at least know if it did myself and probably several readers here would highly approve of it happening! Thanks again for taking time to respond to all of our inquiries!

 

Steve, that's so funny. I have the same car dream and the same dead air dream, even though the last night I DJ'd in a club was 1996!!! All of a sudden, the record ends and I'm scrambling to grab a record to put on the other turntable, while 200 people on the dance floor stare at me. Lol

 

Steve, I've been playing the SACD you did of Nat Cole's "Welcome To The Club" and it sounds magnificent, with dynamics left intact, no added processing, etc. I also have the mono LP where the dedicated setup included more spot mics, giving a "fuller" representation of the orchestra and rhythm section. The original vinyl sounds a bit compressed, even pinched in places. To your knowledge, do the mono session tapes have the same compression as the LP, or are they more dynamic? I would love to hear what you could do with those mono tapes (assuming they still survive).

 

Happy wife, happy life!

 

Is it true that some artists record things in MP3? I have heard this about at least one Beck album. But listening to some other albums that were horrendously mastered like RHCP - Californication, I often wonder if this is more widespread. That's a good album, it's just too bad there has never been a release of it that sounds good and dynamic.

 

MP3 has nothing to do with reduced dynamics.

 

Ahh, I see. So you agreed with your wife — interesting approach! I’m sure my ex-wife is nodding her head in agreement somewhere...

 

No. Some samples in a song may be in MP3 format, or a mix in progress exported in MP3 by mistake (and later used as the best mix, I have seen this happen), but virtually nobody, outside of newbies with no technical knowledge, would "record" in MP3.

 

The only exception I could *possibly* think of would be recording demos/rehearsals with a portable digital recorder and using MP3 for some reason, either by mistake or to get a longer record time. But even that's an extreme edge case.

 

Mike Scott of the Waterboys has used his iPhone to do sound effects and field recordings on a number of songs, so certain bits of album tracks are lossy-sourced. He's also released demos recorded the same way, but that's a bit more understandable. Now, iPhone has an option to record voice memos in lossless quality - I don't know if it sounds any better than the MP3, the built-in mic ain't exactly a Shure, but theoretically it could be better.

 

About two years back I spent a week in Moro Bay, California, a laid back beach town. Late one quiet night I recorded the sound of the waves crashing and sea lions calling, using my iPad. Was hoping to use it as an introduction to an original song. When I got home and uploaded it to Logic Pro I was surprised at just how awful a recording it was. Took a lot of EQ and mucking about to get it clean enough to use as ambiance. To your point, the microphones on Apple devices are nothing special.

 

Having used them for close to a decade, I would agree with the last statement of your post even if you dropped "the microphones on" from it.

Back when I worked in a factory, we had an oil machine that made this really wild noise when it started up. I got a lousy, lossy phone recording of it. Many months later (over a year, I think) I bought a portable Zoom handheld recorder which does 24/96 audio and sounds great. I've done field recordings, acoustic demos, all sorts of stuff and it's awesome. Well, in that time, they came in and serviced the machine, so it doesn't make that noise anymore. I got a hi-res recording of what the machine is supposed to do (yawn) and a crummy recording of what it did before they fixed it (which sounded like an alien spaceship taking off). I'm gonna have to sync those up and blend them together as best I can. Lossy audio sucks.