Music star power surrounds state-of-art Boulder studio

Music star power surrounds state-of-art Boulder studio

By Mark Brown, Rocky Mountain News
December 18, 2004

It's 1975 at Caribou Studios outside of Boulder; Elton John and his band are recording their masterpiece Captain Fantastic & the Brown Dirt Cowboy.

Davey Johnstone's acoustic guitar is right there. Nigel Olsson's drums thump all around. Elton's voice is booming at you front and center. The sound is crisp and clean, live and perfect.

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Then engineer Gus Skinas' cellphone rings; he checks it quickly. "I gotta get this," he says. "It's John Mayer."

OK, so it's not 1975. It's 2004. And this studio is in Boulder proper, several miles away from the legendary studio that burned down years ago. And those musicians aren't here - it just feels like they are.

In an odd bit of synchronicity, those multitrack Elton John masters recorded at Caribou nearly 30 years ago are being heard here now, getting mixed and mastered in 5.1 surround-sound using state-of-the-art technology barely imaginable when the original analog tapes rolled.

Hidden in a nondescript business park near the University of Colorado campus, the Super Audio Center and the adjoining Immersive Studios are ground zero for new recording technologies.

The studio has become the center of the next step in high-quality sound, Direct Stream Digital (DSD). The new technology and recording procedures have excited the artists who have used it.

"It's the next step beyond digital audio as we know it," Skinas says.

Which is why John Mayer's people are calling Skinas, director of the Boulder center, from the Los Angeles studio where they're remixing Heavier Things into 5.1 Super Audio CD surround sound.

John Hiatt told the News earlier this year that he'd gotten his hands on this new recording device that was going to allow him to make an album that sounded better than anything he'd ever done.

"What we're trying to do here is to convince artists and producers by getting them involved in projects . . . showing them what you can do with the technology," Skinas says. "When someone's properly exposed to it, they love it."

Skinas' work is two-pronged. Sony developed the SACD technology to bring high-quality audio to a larger market. Remarkably, more than 20 years after the introduction of the CD, many releases still use inferior technology and tapes that are far from the masters to put out music. The primary job of the Boulder studio is to assist in new surround-sound mixes of classic albums.

It is also Skinas' mission to take DSD technology into the mainstream. That's what led him recently to Memphis, where he helped record John Hiatt's new album, with legendary keyboard player/producer Jim Dickenson playing a part as well. The DSD technology has been harnessed in a 24-track recording/editing workstation, dubbed Sonoma, that Sony introduced to mainstream recording in October.

"We're dealing mostly with the surround stuff here," Skinas says in his mastering studio, the size of a small auditorium. "All the Elton John stuff, we had quite a bit of hands-on. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, most of that was done at (producer) James Guthrie's house, but we did some work here. Eric Clapton's stuff, the two records were (in Boulder). The Allman Brothers was edited here and authored, but not mixed."

In the recent remastering of much of Elton John's classic catalog, producer Greg Penny used the Sonoma technology to do new surround-sound and stereo mixes of albums such as Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Honky Chateau.

"We took each album, one song at a time, and played them right into the Sonoma system. That's the best transfer you can do, really," Penny says.

The technology can be applied to recordings new and old. Singer-songwriter David Elias recorded his new album, The Window, in Immersive Studios, with the band doing live takes while being recorded with DSD and little separation between the instruments.

Voices and instruments spilled over into all the tracks - something most engineers fight against. But the leakage here makes for a seamless surround-sound experience, making it seem like the band is right there.

The technology also can bring back long-ago recordings. While the Dark Side of the Moon SACD project was under way last year, guitarist Dave Gilmour enthused to the News about finally going back and getting to mix it right.

"The original backing tracks of Dark Side of the Moon were done on one set of 16-track masters, then copied to another set," he says. "So all the backing tracks are second-generation. We can now go back one stage and do a remix from the very original masters."

Getting the feel of music

Music is the 50-year-old Skinas' passion, but getting to work on the Elton John project is a dream come true. Skinas' first concert ever was at Philadelphia's legendary Electric Factory, catching John's first U.S. tour in 1970.

"That was when I decided that I wanted a career in the music business. I remember it like it was yesterday," Skinas says. "After the show Elton stayed and shook the hands of people in the audience. He shook a lot of hands. I was in awe. It's funny, Greg (producer Greg Penny) met Elton when he was very young. He was in France when Elton recorded at the Chateau, and was inspired in much the same way as me."

After high school Skinas went to the Institute of Audio Research in New York before landing a $90-a-week job at Secret Sound Studios, then owned by Todd Rundgren. He eventually became a partner in the studio. Later, Skinas joined Sony and became one of the leads during the introduction of digital sound and recording in the early '80s, helping to launch the CD era.

After that he came to Boulder with his wife and three children to work for Waveframe, an early company making digital workstations for recording. When Sony approached him about spearheading its latest technologies, he didn't want to leave. So Sony decided to come to him, building a studio in Boulder. "I was here and Sony allowed me to set up here."

As of Nov. 1, Sony no longer runs the studio. It is now independently owned by Skinas and other partners, but they still work closely with Sony. The group also owns similar studios in L.A. and New York.

Even if it's for just smaller jobs, projects also have passed through Boulder from Nine Inch Nails (the surround-sound mix of The Downward Spiral was authored here) and newer bands such as Snow Patrol and Keane (the latter of which stopped into Skinas' studio after a local gig a few weeks back to approve the final mix of their album).

But visits from bands aren't the norm when Skinas remixes old albums with the new technology. "Generally speaking with the surround mixes, the artist isn't getting too involved in it," he says.

But there are exceptions, including Elton John and Pink Floyd. Producer Greg Penny took the original mixes of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road to Elton to get his approval.

"He heard it, he loved it. Greg told me he played it several times from start to finish," Skinas says. "He then gave Greg carte blanche to do the rest of the records."

"In the case of Dark Side of the Moon, we flew (producer James Guthrie), myself and his assistant to the Bahamas to play it for Roger Waters. We actually took speakers . . . into the main studio there in Nassau, set them up, measured them, spent a day getting things all tweaked out," Skinas says.

"Roger came in, (sat on a) stool in the center of the room with pad and paper and listened to the whole thing. James took it back to Tahoe, made those changes, and that was it."

When doing a 5.1 surround-sound mix, producers know they're potentially tampering with history.

"When they did Dark Side of the Moon, James really tried to get the feel of the record. There are other examples where you go off the wall and make it completely different," Skinas says. Derek and the Dominos' Layla was done twice, for example.

"One (mix) was a little too risky. They went back and made it more like the original."

The benefits of good sound

Besides Skinas' passion for the music, it has its moments of fun, such as getting to take daughter Melissa, 15, with him to the session when Aerosmith approved the Toys in the Attic remix.

And it's not just old-school producers and bands who love the technology. Michael Beinhorn, who works with nu-metal acts such as Korn, is a big proponent, as is legendary producer Rick Rubin.

Skinas hastens to add that fans don't have to have studio-quality equipment to get the benefits of clean recording. MP3s are all the rage among music fans these days but feature some of the lowest-quality reproduction of music.

"But if you start with a higher quality, the MP3 actually (sounds) better," he notes.

But the full technology is best used on SACD systems, with players starting around $100 these days.

"When you sit back and listen and close your eyes, you get absorbed in the music. It's not something that has happened for me with a CD for a long time. It happens a lot with SACD."

In digital audio, speed thrills

In a nutshell, most digital recording for CD-quality sound samples the music in the PCM format in 16-bit chunks at 44.1 kilohertz.

DVD-quality audio can take sampling up to 24-bit samples at 96Khz.

DSD stands for Direct Stream Digital. Instead of doing straight sampling, DSD is a one-bit continuous stream going very fast – 2.8 megahertz. Instead of taking digital snapshots of each moment of music, it's a continuous flow, much like the best audiotape. Instead of sampling the musical spectrum, it can take in the entire musical spectrum.

"It's much more analog-like in nature, so it's a completely different technology," says Gus Skinas.

"When you can take a project from start to finish and stay in that domain, it's actually quite stunning. There's nothing that can touch it, quality-wise."

A life's work

Projects Gus Skinas has handled:

• Elton John: SACD reissues of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Honky Chateau, etc.

• Allman Brothers: Live at Fillmore East, Eat A Peach

• Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon

• The Animals: Retrospective

• George Harrison: Live in Japan

Copyright 2004, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.Music star power surrounds state-of-art Boulder studio

 

Great article.

 

oops, I just posted that article in another thread.