an interview with Bob Ludwig

from Expo98

Listening to Bob Ludwig talk about his processes, thoughts, tools, and clients is a pleasure for anyone who works with recorded sound. He is one of the world's leading mastering engineers, winner of many awards. Each year, his projects include dozens of gold and platinum, and Grammy-winning and -nominated recordings.

This was a live interview of Bob at Expo98. Mark Parsons was the interviewer, with audience contributions. We have transcribed most of it, to give maximum feel (as far as text is able) for the person and the event. Towards the end of the transcription, as you will see, we have simply transcribed excerpts instead of every word spoken.

Mark Parsons: I think that most people here are familiar with Bob Ludwig, but let me deliver a little bit of context you may or may not be aware of. Bob was a leading, if not the leading, mastering engineer for many years, based in New York at Sterling and later at Masterdisk. He called me up in 1992, I guess it was, and announced his intention to move to New England, which he did. He opened up in Portland, Maine, establishing Gateway Mastering Studios. He expected that he'd be moving somewhat out of the fast lane, into a somewhat slower lane up there; built a spectacular facility, and moved up there expecting some of his clients to fall away. Anyone who works in Manhattan, I think, especially in media, has a sense that once you move outside you've moved into outer darkness, and that you might suffer a loss of business. (laughter)

That isn't what happened to Bob. He has been very busy since then. I visited the Gateway Web site recently and came up with a brief curriculum vitae, which I'll run you through, just to give a sense of the work he does. I think it's probably fair to say - gosh, being in the sales business I tend to look for fairly extreme statements - but it might actually be true to say that no mastering engineer has mastered more music that has been enjoyed by more people ever than Bob. I can't think of anyone else that might be true of. So there's a start. Simple fact.

[Goes on to review that in the past five years Bob and Gateway have won every available TEC Award for Best Mastering Engineer and Best Mastering Facility.]

Last year there were 16 Grammy-nominated records that Gateway mastered...including three of the five records nominated for Record of the Year. Also on the Web site there's a list of clients since 1993, since the move from New York, and it's gigantic. It's hundreds and hundreds of names. I thought I'd go through and circle just the really famous ones. It took me a long time, and I ended up with more than a hundred names. [Goes on to read off some of them.]

There's a reason for all these notable artists turning to Bob. Perhaps some of those reasons will become evident tonight. At NAB last spring I was talking to Bob Clearmountain, the engineer. There had just recently been a story in the Sunday New York Times about a mastering engineer, of all things, who of course was Bob. There was also a profile in USA Today at about the same time. In those stories a number of artists said that, well, there are the good mastering engineers of the world; then, standing above them all, there's Bob.

There's a context. Let's get into what that's about. I was up at Bob's a few weeks ago, to hatch some questions for him to address. I also asked a few friends to help out. David Moulton came up with a really interesting question, and Tom Bates came up with several. ...

First, I know Bob would like to talk a little bit about his experience with DSD. (to Bob:) You've been doing something with it.

Bob Ludwig: I think it was yesterday that Bruce Springsteen released a four CD set of, I think it was, 65 songs that have been in the can, never released before. Bruce has been with Sony, or CBS, for 25 years now; just got nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame yesterday. So Sony is going to reissue all of his CD's again, so I'm getting to do that again. (Bob mastered all of Bruce's past CD's.) Being that he's on Sony, they were interested in having some material on the Super Audio CD, which is as you probably know a dual-layer CD which has DVD audio on one layer and Red Book audio on the other.

Tom Bates was talking (at an Expo session earlier today) about having 27 flight cases for the 8-channel unit. Well, this is only a stereo unit, and it was about seven cases for that. It's quite something seeing a 2-track take up that much space on the wall.

To keep you up to date about what is happening with DSD, Sony's idea is to have a Rosetta Stone of Audio, to have something that is so spectacularly perfect sounding that would be what you would use for archiving or for any other master library purposes. Then they have something called a Super Down Converter that super bitmaps that super high quality audio down to anything you want. Could go down to 88.2 or to Red Book 16-bit 44.1.

How many of you were here during the day? Tom (Bates) was saying that the DSD recording they (Tom and Tom Jung) just did on the multitrack had to be all done in one take, because there was no editing involved. That's certainly true. Right now there's a DSD console for two tracks, one that will work for 6 or 8, is going to have EQ and compression on it and level changes, but since it's a one bit system, when you do any processing at all on it, be it the slightest level change, the slightest EQ, whatever, it takes the one bit signal and spreads it out into either 28 or 56 bit long words, does the processing, then comes back into one bit again.

It's been interesting. We've had three A-to-D converters in my room, and a couple of D-to-A's. The three A-to-D's we had were one made by Sony, one by dcs in England, which I use for D-to-A as well, and then the third one that Tom Meitner has been building on Sony's behalf. It was very interesting because, just to show you where the state of the art is right now, the Sony unit that Sony had built by themselves did not sound nearly as good as my Pacific Microsonics A-to-D and D-to-A at 88.2. Pacific Microsonics works only at 88.2; doesn't work at 96, but the next month or so it will.

The dcs was very comparable sounding. Tom Meitner's box was perhaps even better. There was tons of CD offset in Tom's box. I couldn't use it because of that.

So we had two tasks. One was to do archivial tapes of Bruce's recordings, and the other was to make an EQ'd fully mastered version that Sony can put out on the market. The converter we ended up using for the archival work was the dcs, because that one sounded the next best, I thought. This is all my opinion, by the way; it's just what I thought. But there's one problem with it. That is that if you have any digital overs, which if you're doing a pop recording you're bound to have the occasional over. Especially with no piece of digital gear to do any digital limiting. The thing goes into full band white noise. I called dcs and they knew about it. They were proud, because it had improved from a state where once it hit an over it stayed there, full bandwidth white noise. [laughter] So this is where the technology is today, November 11, 1998.

For the archival tapes that we ran, we used the dcs, making sure that it never got anywhere near the 0 clipping level. For the pop CD's I'm gonna have to use the Sony converter, which still sounds very good, mind you. It sounds better than any 44.1 system. I just wanted to share with you some of the real world aspects of how it's going.

It's interesting because in my opinion Tom's box, which has -- here's this giant Sony corporation throwing lots of resources into the converters and the whole project, then having someone like Tom, who is this real super expert, refining it further and further. It sounds really good. But the point of it is that that's all it is, it's pretty darn good. It's not that the Pacific Microsonics at 88.2 isn't really good also. It brings up a lot of questions. The DSD is going to involve all new consoles. We're just now starting to get a few 96k/24-bit devices, PCM, into the marketplace, and we're still screaming for more of those. For instance, there's still not a good 96k de-esser yet, a very essential piece of gear, even in the world of the CD. You may be thinking, gee, CD's have no problem with overload, but just to be in the room hearing some of the sibilance, pss! psss!, it's like an assault from the speakers. You really do need to control them. So anyway, we hardly have enough 96k gear yet, and here's the dcs that, there's nothing out there except these two consoles on the planet right now. It's going to be very interesting to see how it goes.

In its favor, I haven't finished doing tests yet, so I can't say for sure, but it seems to me that the down-conversion of DSD down to Red Book seems to be the best Red Book CD I've heard so far. That means that to get the most perfect Red Book CD that you can, that seems to be the best system so far for doing it, to go DSD and then down-converting it.

[Audience question about the sonic quality of down-conversions.]

BL: In my experience, a lot of the great qualities seem to stay there. At least on the Bruce stuff I was listening to in my studio. And I've also heard some of the things that Tom Jung has done, heard down-conversions of that, and it sounded really really good. We compared it to original 44.1 versions of it, and there's no question that the down-conversion produced a better final CD.

MP: Another question. Quoting one of Dave Moulton's recent columns, he cited Clarke's Law, which anyone who works in audio, especially cutting edge audio, might appreciate. It states that any sufficiently advanced technology will be perceived as magic. Is that true? I have a sense, observing you and your work, that you have a great affection for technology, almost in twain with a love for music and what audio can communicate to people; and that that's sort of the key to what you have accomplished. So I wonder if you have a sense of constant questing to keep up with technology. I know that part of that is your own drive, but also because of your success you have an influence with manufacturers and relationships with manufacturers as you do with Sony and dozens of others, and that's very interesting. You must have this sense of being a sort of technological frontiersman.

BL: With a lot of arrows in the back. [laughter]

MP: To bring that right down to the mundane, you've talked a little about DSD and your involvement with that. Is there anyting else going on right now in terms of things that you're curious about, that you're looking at in the studio.

BL: There's no question that when I found out that DVD was on the horizon and would support 96k/24-bit, well, some of our 96k gear has got serial number 1 on it. We were the first mastering studio to buy a complete authoring system. This is one of the pioneer aspects, where you get the arrows in the back. I was so enamored with the idea that you'd be able to take a 96k recording, 24-bit, and make a DVD out of it, - you understand that even with DVD-Video, that's part of that spec and you've been able to do it for two years now - that clients would be running to my door saying, "OK, I want to make my 96k DVD."

It turns out that that didn't happen. The record companies as a whole have been slow getting into the DVD thing in general. Of all the artists who have been into our studio the past two years, when they see all the DVD-Video and the authoring stuff, and talk about the 96k - and indeed some of them have brought in 96k projects: the last Eric Clapton project came in on a 96k Nagra; Loreena McKennit's last two albums were recorded 96k on the Nagra; the Gypsy Kings, 96k. We just did Jewel, which was recorded 88.2. It's definitely starting, but all the artists without question, when they hear the 5.1, that's it! That's what they're really really into. Their eyes really light up. To me it's a big difference between a DAT and a 96k/24-bit sound - it's important and wonderful. But the artists are much more interested in the whole spatial aspect of it.

MP: So you're introducing artists to this sound; you're proselytizing.

BL: Yeah! When Eric Clapton was here last year doing his Pilgrim record, we showed him his DVD. It was the first time he had seen it. [laughter] In fact they have a menu where you can show the guys in the band. We went to one of the menus where he said, "Oh, they made a mistake, that's supposed to be Terry and that's...." Which of course shouldn't be. The artist should sign off on everything that has his name on it. So the 96k is one thing.

Also we just bought some new loudspeakers, which have a new... It's an older theory that's been expanded. You know how the M&K subwoofers have the main subwoofer and then there's another woofer behind it, so that the air pressure behind the speaker is the same as the air pressurer in front. We got some new speakers made by Eggleston Works, not the Will Eggelston who kindly provided the Genelec speakers (for the Expo playback system). This is a full-blown speaker system in which each speaker has two drivers behind it, on this theory that there should be an infinite amount of drivers behind the speaker. So there's 23 drivers in each speaker cabinet; it weighs 800 pounds.

MP: And the ones you had before weren't any lightweights.

BL: No, we had the Duntech Sovereigns.

MP: So what did you hear that led you to your decision? I was up a few weeks ago and you had the Duntechs in the hall, which I had listened to before, which had left me weak in the knees because they were so gorgeous. What led you from the one into the other?

BL: I'm always trying to get what I think is the best sound. From a mastering engineer's point of view it's easier to do your job if you have a high resolution monitoring system in a high resolution environment, because the speaker and the environment it's in have a marriage that never has a divorce - they're always together. We built what we tried at the time to make the acoustically most perfect room possible, with the best speakers, and the best amps, the best cabling, and everything like that. I've found that by having a high resolution speaker it makes your artistic choices a lot easier because you're hearing it about as high definition as anybody in the planet is gonna hear it. Thus the choices that you make tend to sound good on all other systems. That might come as a surprise. You might think that, well, maybe it would only sound good on that. I think it's true that as you listen to more and more of the high end speakers, the closer and more neutral they all start sounding.

MP: You don't think in terms of how your work translates (is the common word) to other speakers and other environments around the world?

BL: Well, I do. I do. If something comes in that's going to be for a disco club, and it's got tons of subwoofer and tons of bottom in it, I'll tend to leave that bottom in there, because it's going to be for that kind of venue. If it's going to be intended as a Top 40 radio single, obviously I'll get rid of that low bottom, because it's just going to modulate the radio station's limiters with something that you can't even hear over the speakers in a car.

MP: A brief anecdote. Bob just raised the notion of taking arrows in the back, which he very much does because he's dealing with the so-called cutting edge, a viable adjective for technology. When I was up a few weeks ago, you were trying to get a 96k converter going.

BL: Before I read the manual! [laughter]

MP: Then you played some material you had and I thought, and thought again when you were playing some of your work here earlier this afternoon, that it's a shame that the world can't go to your room to listen to music, because it's really spectacular to listen to. Those of us who don't listen in such environments, we can only respond in terms of the magic. You of course are familiar with that quality; maybe even pay a certain price for being overly familiar with it. It's a wonderful experience.

Audience: Did you buy five of those?

BL: We have serial numbers 1 and 2 of the (larger Eggelston Works speakers, in the main mastering studio), which retail for about $14,000 a pair. I like (the smaller model of) those speakers so much that I have five of them in our surround screening room. When I do surround work in my (mastering) room, when you have five of them and the M&K subwoofer, they move plenty of sound pressure level, and sound great in there. But when you just have two of them, it doesn't work well, because they're not quite big enough for my room. So I told the guy at Eggelston Works that if he'd build a bigger speaker I'd listen to them and see what I thought. He decided to build a no-holds-barred speaker, and did a good job.

Audience: How many cubic feet in the room?

BL: The shell of the room is about 30 feet long, and it's about 23 feet wide, and 16 feet wide. It's based on the acoustician Loudon, on his First Ratio. They're at the proper dimensions for a rectangular enclosure.

MP: I have a question that was suggested to me by Dave Moulton a few weeks ago, concerning loudness, which is a whole topic unto itself. To unravel it properly might run into a couple of hours. In fact I should add parenthetically that there are probably enough questions here (in my hands) that we could continue this conversation next year.

You were at Masterdisk not long ago weren't you, Dave, and you spoke to Andy Vandette, who got to remaster some of your work, Bob, working from your notes. He told Dave that yours is the best level management of anyone on the planet. With similar praise, Scott Hull (of MasterDisk) told Dave that "It took me two years to begin to hear compression as you (Bob) do."

So how do you hear, and think about, loudness? I would pose the question both in the general sense, about loudness, and also in terms of compression. A run-on question to that is what do you think of the current rise in levels of CD's? Are they over-hyped, and how do you deal with that if they are?

BL: Well, to answer the last part first. (I can't believe those guys said that!) I think it's just a travesty what has happened with the level of CD's, where people are trying to get it louder, louder, and louder than the next guy. I just thank my lucky stars that when the Beatles were around we didn't have digital compressors back then. In my opinion, there's a bunch of reasons why this thing is happening. It started when Apogee came out with a mastering versoin of the UV-22. It is a wonderful piece of gear, but there's a button in it for mastering engineers called Nova. When you push this button it lowers everything by, what is it, an LSB or something like that, enough that you just never went into the red. The plants -- Sony and Warner Brothers -- were saying that they wouldn't accept any CD masters with any overs in them, because they didn't want to be responsible for any sounds they might make. So that was the rule. Then Apogee comes with this box that simply turns off the Over light. (laughter)

I love the people at Apogee, by the way. Don't get me wrong. This isn't Apogee bashing. And then Apogee came out with a soft limit on their A-to-D converter. What that does, it not only doesn't go over, it lets you do 2 or 3 or maybe even 4 dB over what any sane person would have done before. While it might sound a little grungy, it sure was hot, but it never went over. In fact it would usually read minus 1/2 or minus 1. That really got the ball rolling. Then you would have situations like, in Nashville, for instance, only the first, I think, 500 country stations in America are actually serviced with CD's by the artist, when it comes to singles. Past #500 there's one CD that comes out of Nashville every week with a compilation of all the singles. Naturally the producers would listen to this compiled CD, and whoever's was the loudest on that one sounded the best to them. So everybody else had to make theirs as loud as that one. Every week in Nashville the levels would come up and up.

Then we would get people like John Zorin, who's the composer in New York. Does some very wild and wonderful music. John is into having things very loud. He would have us master things.... He wasn't happy unless the red light was on all the time! Then he would have us make a copy of it lowering the levels two tenths of a dB through the 3000 editor so the plant wouldn't reject it. (laughter)

Now it's gotten to the point where the DJ at the radio station is going through his stack of 30 or 40 CD's that people want him to play that week. It is true that if you're playing songs one after another the one that might be a little less musical than another if it was twice as loud might sound more impressive at first, and might grab his attention, and might get on the air. If it gets on the air, well, payola is illegal in this country, but in other countries it's not.

So you can see how the whole thing has really gotten out of hand. The price we pay for all of this is we can't listen to the records. Some of the records you can't listen to from beginning to end without getting tired. It's just this constant asssault on your body, with everything always to the max. That's why I say thank God the Beatles music wasn't ruined by that stuff. Obviously they had _nice_ compression. Compression is a good thing. Compression is the key to rock and roll. How do you take something that is designed for a venue where it's played at the threshold of pain and make it sound like anything at all through a little boom box? Well, you just fill that thing up as much as you can.

I think it has definitely gone the other way. The only hope I have is that lately I've actually had some producers, almost for the first time, come in and say to me, first off, "I don't want to have this be the loudest record in the world. I want it to have dynamics." I go, "Yes!" Then it's a lot of fun. But I'll tell you, there are some records I'll do, that I'll do it the way I want it, and I'll think that this is very good, very musical. Then I'll make another version that is a dB or a dB and a half hotter, and then I'll send it to the producer to make the comparison. Almost without exception they choose the hotter one, much to my dismay.

Audience (Brad Meyer): In the interest of better sound are you willing to spearhead the AES Subcommittee to bring back payola? (laughter)

Audience: Have you noticed a similar thing with EQ?

BL: ...brighter and with more low end and things like that. Not really. There's no question that a few years ago when Nirvana broke, and grunge became the thing, I started doing recordings where I thought my speakers were broken. I'd put the thing on and think, "Oh my gosh what happened to it; it just turned out that it was the tape." (laughter) That led to bands being recorded on ADATs in garages and selling in huge numbers. They spent $10,000 producing the record. They spent more on mastering it than they did recording it. So that whole trash sound that was very much in vogue a while back certainly led to sometimes very brittle top end, which was not fun. There was a period in time when I was thinking, "Hmm, this is not as much fun as it used to be." But fortunately we're pulling out of that now.

Audience: I've even noticed that trend with Rush. At first Presto and Roll the Bones was very bright. Now their latest one and Counterparts sound darker.

BL: One of their records, I don't know which... When I'm working on a record sometimes they don't know what the title is yet. I know one of them, they finished the record up early. They're such a great group. They recorded the thing in record time. They were supposed to mix it at this famous studio. But they finished recording and had nothing to do except to mix it in this lesser studio. They brought in the tape and it had absolutely no bass on it, and it wasn't intentional. They just had no bass. You can add only so much in mastering before it just starts woofing everything up.

Audience: Does the producer, Peter Collins, come in with you and say, "I'm going for this, or this" or do they just send you the thing.

BL: They usually just send to me...oh, Geddy usually comes in. He's great. He refers to my mastering studio as like going to church. (laughter) "Now I can find out the truth!" (laughter) "...find out what I really got on the tape."

Audience: Do you ever turn down (i.e., reject) artists because you hate them? (laughter)

BL: There's uh... No. (laughter) I wish I could sometimes, but most of our clients are the major companies. We love them dearly, and we're very grateful to make a living from them. Sometimes an A&R guy will call up and say, "Oh, I'm so happy you're doing this record. This is so great. The best thing I've signed in five years." And you put the tape on and I go, "Whoa!" First of all we certainly don't have the time to audition things before they come in the door. The first time I hear it is when I put it up on the machine and we're going. There'd be no way that I could reject something. And I wouldn't want to if a record company thought enough of it that they want me to do it. Fortunately, the vast majority of the things that I do, there are some good redeeming qualities about everything. Sometimes it's spectacular. You put a Jewel tape up or some of Bruce Springsteen's stuff and sometimes you find yourself almost crying because it's such beautiful music. That's neat to have a job like that.

Audience: If you could choose a format as a mastering engineer, for what you'd like to receive as the mix master, what would it be?

BL: I would think it would be either a Nagra or a Genex 88.2 done on a Pacific Microsonics.

Audience: Last year at this point you mentioned that you really wouldn't mind seeing a half-inch analog master.

BL: Oh, that's like the air that I breathe. It doesn't even show up for me (when you asked). Always.

Audience: What format allows you to do the most?

BL: The thing that's best is to have that 88.2, 24-bit tape and a well-recorded analog tape on a really good analog machine like an ATR. Very often I'll go back and forth between the two of them. The thing between analog and digital from my point of view is if you're doing a mix on a console and you're a great engineer like Bob Clearmountain, and it's perfect. Sometimes his mixes are just incredibly well balanced. Digital is usually the only thing that will exactly give you that back as far as frequency goes. Going to an analog machine, sometimes that slight tape saturation and the head bump will be a very bad thing. Bob was one of the first people to start mixing digitally, to DAT. When we had grey market DAT machines from Japan, which ran at 100 volts, he was doing DATs then. Whenever we'd do a shootout between the analog and his DAT, his DAT would always win, because of the way he mixes. He's a minority. Almost anybody else you can mention, the analog tape does wonderful things to the music. That compression tends to glue together a mix that may not have been that glued together before. Compared to a DAT, 1/2-inch analog has all of the advantages that we know about analog. It's got better resolution than a 16-bit DAT. It's naturally a more musical sounding device. Our ears respond to it really well. The playback electronics on a Class A Ampex ATR are usually way better electronics than you'll find on a $1900 DAT machine. So I usually like to have both the analog and a high-resolution digital and compare.

Audience (Andy Munitz, Sony): How many pop projects have you done that have been recorded through digital consoles. I wonder what diffrerence it makes to have a complete 24-bit project all the way through.

BL: Lots, lots, lots. This is a great question. Again, when you're an engineer, every engineer should have a big toolbox at his disposal, and do whatever is appropriate for the project. If you're mixing a grunge project, or a lot of projects I can think of, a digital console may not be the best thing. But, talking to people like Mariah Carey, Michael Bolton, Celine Dion, lots of artists where the music has a lot of spatial aspect to it and is very natural sounding, the digital consoles are awesome, just awesome! The analog consoles can't come close. You can hear it. Not just 'cause you're from Sony, but the Oxford console sounds really amazing. There's something very magical sounding about that console. But the AT&T console and the Capricorn console are no slouches by any means.

What really excites me is that now there's going to be the 24-bit multitrack. I can't wait until it's 96k 24-bit. That's when it's really gonna make a big difference to me. Producers are varispeeding things all the time. When you're recording at 44.1 and you varispeed down a couple of percent, things begin to get a little hashy. That's why God invented 48k, huh? (laughter) That's why 96k is even better. I think when we have 96k 24-bit multitracks going through the Oxofrd and the Capricorn, it's really amazing.

I don't know how many of you have had the chance to A-B a digital console with an analog console. Nick Gazauski, who is buying an Oxford console, presently uses the AT&T console. This a digital console that sits on top of an SSL; uses all the SSL topology but records digitally. You can just flip between the digital and the analog. The crosstalk that's in an analog console just goes away when you switch to digital. The thing that people complain about with bad digital -- lack of reverb, and everything like that. It's the opposite in the console world where you're using professional specifications -- consoles going out to 48 bits internally. The reverb is way better, in my opinion, in a digital console.

MP: If I could ask a followup question relating to that. Have you received projects that have been produced on some of the less expensive digital consoles, like the Yamaha 02R, Panasonic DA7, the Mackie or Tascam...?

BL: Yes!

MP: How would you characterize...?

BL: Good. Good. When you get to some of the lesser, cheaper consoles, you have to start watching out more carefully about what's going on, because the signal processing may not be as much as like an Oxford or something like that. But a good engineer running one of those things can get spectacular results with them, I must say. Frank Filipetti doing that James Taylor record on an 02R, wasn't intending really for it to be what it came out to be (i.e., a final recording). Joe Bananno out in Chicago usually uses two 02R's grouped together; has made some amazing recordings. Al Dimeola's last recording was done on 20-bit ADATs and a Mackie or 02R; came out amazing. It can be done.

MP: A question that Tom Bates had was interesting: Has the advent of home studios and engineers, without either much technical training or benefit of apprenticeship, and/or the advent of synthesizer tracks instead of acoustic instrument tracks, and engineers without the benefit of much acoustic experience, resulted in any trends in the types of problems mastering houses are seeing? For example, improperly set EQ, compressors, etc. Are there any bad habits that you encounter on a regular basis that we engineers should work to avoid?

BL: Well, the only universal bad habit is using DATs for mastering. Almost everybody's got at least 20-bit converters now. They're very easy to find, let alone the 22- or 24-bit converters. The whole concept of having something with that dynamic range and dithering it down to 16 bits in order to give it to me so that my consoles will bring it back out to 24 just seems idiotic. The proof is in the pudding. When a tape comes in 24-bit, if you A-B it with a DAT the resolution always sounds better, the echoes sound better; it sounds more analog, if you will.

There are two edges to this question. One thing that's great is the fact that artists can for the first time really divorce themselves from professional recording studios, in the recording part of it. Natalie Merchant's last record was done in her house by her boyfriend who was not that big an engineer. But they ended up making a spectacular record because they got a porofessional guy, Jim Scott, to mix the thing out in California. She was able not to worry about the time in the studio, the clock on the wall, and she could do her vocals a billion times if she wanted to. That's the advantage of doing things with home gear -- time. That's a huge, huge benefit.

The thing that some of the better mastering engineeers -- the thing that separates them from the pack is not just that they're good but they're fast as well. When clients come in for sessions with me, very often they'll be sitting down and getting themselves prepared, and I'll be playing the tape, and I'll have got the thing 95% EQ'd within a matter of thirty seconds, sometimes. They're listening along and they think, "Wow, my tape's really sounding a lot better than I thought." (laughter) And I'll say, "Well no, I've already been doing a few things." And they'll go, "Oh-h-h-h!" (laughter)

Then it usually takes quite a bit more time to get that last 10%. There are mixers like -- I keep bringing his name up tonight -- Bob Clearmountain. He's that way too. He can get a mix 90% in about 40 minutes, then spend maybe half a day finishing it up, or a whole day if it's a difficult mix. That's part of the reason good mastering engineers are a lot more expensive than, you know, Joe Digidesign down the block. They can do it faster, and hopefully have a whole raft of gear to get the right result.

MP: The bulk of your business is popular music. But I know that at other times other stuff comes in too. You must have different goals for different genres of music. I wonder if you could...

BL: My background is classical music. I used to be the first trumpet player for the Utica Symphony in Utica, NY, when I was going to the Eastman School of Music. My favorite music... People ask what I listen to when I go home. I listen to everything. But I tend to listen to pretty avant-garde classical music, because I don't hear too much of it during the day. (laughter)

There was one time when I was at Masterdisk, I worked with Elliot Carter one morning, who was a very famous classical composer, doing a piece recorded direct to 2-track. The first fiddle player, his E-string was sort of hard and brittle sounding, and every time he was playing the upper tessitura there we'd soften it up a little bit. It was extremely difficult to do, actually. We were reading the score, but if you've seen one of Carter's scores... (laughter) It was a thrill. There he was sitting next to me. And I had that experience with John Cage once. They're thrills of a lifetime. But that session with Carter -- after he left at 11:30 in the morning, my session that afternoon was AC/DC! (laughter) For those about to rock!

But as far as the goals of--. We do more than our fair share of classical music for a mastering facility that does a lot of pop music, because the classical people know that I know how to read scores. You'd be surprised. There was a time that a lot of my classical clients didn't know that I did pop. It was that divorced, the two camps. Right now we're working with Steve Reich. We're doing a 10 CD box set for John Adams, who is a great composer.

The goals are very different for that. They're totally the opposite of rock. We want to maintain the dynamics. And yet, there's a story I like to tell, which is that years ago, back in the days of vinyl, I not only mastered but made a recording for Bill Bolcom of a piece called Black Host for Nonesuch Records. We were out in Ann Arbor, Michigan doing some very wide dynamic range recordings of organ and percussion. Some of it was almost inaudible. I cut two reference disks for Bill. One was a flat transfer of what we'd done. It was as close a duplicate of the master tape as I could make. Then there was a copy with a lot of judiciaous gain riding in it, where it wasn't quite as inaudible. Bill, the composer, reported back to me that listening to the music in his home, over his KLH turntable, the one with the gain riding on it more closely met his vision of the piece than an oral photograph, so to speak, of the recording.

You have to treat that judiciously. Does that mean that every piece of classical music that comes in you start riding the levels of it? Absolutely not. That's the kind of thing you would only want to do with the composer's supervision. And if he wasn't there, you shouldn't do anything like that to it.

Certainly back in the days of cutting vinyl, and we still do vinyl.... There's a company called Classic Records, and we just cut Born to Run. It has been a Springsteen month for us on vinyl. This is an aside, but it's an interesting look at realworld life. Born to Run is an analog tape. Classic Records always insists that its vinyl be cut from analog tape, which is a good virtue. But in this case the tape is old, and there are many ticks and pops that were in the original master which in the vinyl days you didn't notice. Now that's to be reissued as a CD again, you've got to go with a Sonic Solutions or Cedar or something like that and get rid of these noises. There was some distortion that was on the tape that wasn't intended to be there, that can now be cleaned up with Sonic Solutions. Part of the tape is so flat sounding that mastering is very difficult. Sometimes the EQ is changing almost every eight bars, sometimes every bar. To get the best result, you can't do it from an anaolog tape. We ended up doing a 96kHz 24-bit EQ copy of it. All the Sonic de-noise works at 96k. So we cut the vinyl disk from the 96k 24-bit Sonic. It turned out out very well. I'm anxious for people to hear it.

MP: A further question about artist vision, which you just referred to. On your Web site you have a statement, "Mastering is the art of capturing the most of musical performance, and allowing compact discs, and DVDs, cassettes, and records to faithfully reproduce the artist's vision." To what extent do you find yourself intervening on behalf of the artist's vision, or being called upon to do that? To what extent do artists bring projects in which their vision is far from being achieved so that there's a need to fix it in the mastering, the tracking and mixing having left something to be desired?

BL: A lot of times we're the mediator between the record company A&R department and the artist. That can be difficult. Most times the A&R department wants more vocal level in a mix than the artist. It's a never-ending battle. For radio air play (A&R) wants to hear all the diction, while the artist feels that if their voice is buried a little bit then more of the impact of the song comes through.

When you l isten to a raw tape from a studio -- again, you have to realize that we're so blessed to work with tapes made by some of the best engineers on the planet. They come to us. To me it's a sacred responsibility. Does this in fact sound as good as it can, in which case I'm anxious to get out of the way and leave it alone. The last two Elvis Costello records, the one with Burt Bachrach that Kevin Killen did and the one before that, was it Geoff Emerick did that, the tapes sounded so brilliant, so well done, that it was like, well... We have a very minimalistic approach from the console anyway. We always have the least amount of gear possible in the path. If something is needed we're not afraid to put it in, but if something sounds amazing the way it is a lot of times we just get out of the way of it.

We have at least five different ways of playing analog tapes back in our studio. We have a Studer A820, which has its sound. Cello Class A tape electronics, audiophile tape electronics, which have their sound. We have a stock Ampex ATR. We have a hotrodded Ampex ATR with no transformers in it. We have tube electronics for the ATR. We also take signals out of the lower electronics unbalanced sometimes. Sometimes you're going out of the tape machine unbalanced right into an A-to-D converter. Like having the fewest little things in that path, because the tape is so good sounding. That's when we're kind of in Nirvana. I always tell people that my whole goal of speaking to people here and in colleges is to put myself out of a job, to have engineers do such a great job that there's no need to do anything further to it. We're so far from that, it's not going to happen in my lifetime. My job security is good right now.

MP: Is it somewhat a negative experience when a project needs a lot, or do you develop with certain artists or producers or labels over time a relationship so that they need a certain level of completion, and you and they have a basis to go on from there? So you become a different kind of creative partner?

BL: Certainly part of that is, if I see on the schedule that a tape is coming in from Tom Lord-Alge, or Hugh Padgham, or Bob Clearmountain, or Ed Cherney, I know these guys so well, I know that it's going to be an easy day for me. It will need certain kinds of touchups, depending on who the guy is. Some will need more than others. But I know how my day will go.

But when I get a tape in from an unknown engineer, or, worse, when it's from five different engineers, and you have to try to make the record sound like one continuous project that was done by one person. That gets very difficult.
The thing that's great to me about mastering, when the artist is at the session -- here's the two-edged sword again -- things go faster, and easier, and I do more experimenting when the artist doesn't show up. Yet I love it when the artist does show up, because it's their record, it makes it wonderful because they can be there, they can participate, and they can share with me how they hear the record. A lot of times in mastering we've got tricks up our sleeves, and we can do things to a tape that the artist never even envisioned. You'll do something and they'll go, "Wow! That's cool!"

MP: What kind of stuff? (laughter)

BL: Well, it's... (pause; audience laughter; the master is about to divulge secrets?) It's mostly compression, or doing comprression a certain way. We've got some very specialized gear like the Daniel Weiss 96k 24-bit EQ. You don't find that in recording studios. It has a very unique sound. Things like that, they'll suddenly hear something EQ'd that they've never heard EQ'd that way before.

Just playing it back on the right machine, out of those choices. Sometimes you'll play the tape back with tube electronics, and they'll hear their tape in a whole new way. They'll think "Wow, this is so warm and beautiful and great." They'll love it. Even though they recorded it and heard it played back right in the mix room, we might play it back on a machine that is more appropriate than the one it was recorded on.

I remember years ago I was doing...there was this group called The Call, from San Francisco. The lead singer, Michael Beans, was the bass player. Being the bass player he just loved bass on the records. I was doing this record, and he called me up and said to be sure not to cut any of the bass. In fact, he said, "You should boost it, because no one ever puts enough bass on my records." OK. I'm thinking about radio play and stuff like that, so I put as much bass as I thought would sound proper on the radio and be commercially competitive with other records. He calls me back and says, "You're not even close." So I'm doing one with quite a bit more bass and he says, "No." (laughter) He says, "I took your last reference and took it over to a hi-fi store where they've got an equalizer and here are the numbers I came up with." I look at these numbers and I think, "What's this!" All this super subwoofer, all these lows, +6 at 30, stuff like that. So I kind of blindly dial in these numbers and play the tape, and it sounds like rock and roll reggae, which is just what he wanted! Suddenly I heard the record in a whole new way. I wouldn't have dreamt of going that far if it was left to my own devices. Obviously the guy mixing it for him didn't go nearly far enough for him. So he was happy. He had his vision. The problem was it wasn't very competitive on the radio, and it didn't sell at all. (laughter)
Another great example of that is the last two Lou Reed records we've done. The most recent one is live, done over in England. PBS just did this Great American Masters series, and they highlighted Lou. He just changed labels to Reprise and they wanted to have "product on the shelves" of Lou. So he dug up these tapes of live performances that he was pretty happy with.

Before I get to the punch line of that one, the previous record, Set the Twilight Reeling, which is the last home record he made.... Lou is an equipment junky. He has enough contacts; he'll get every piece of gear imaginable. He has Manley tube vocal mics that he had Manley customize for him; things like that. He had every mic preamp in the world; was A/B'ing everything. He spent all of his budget on gear. He made the record in his house. His vision was to have the final record sound like it did when he was recording it. Well, I don't know how many of you are recording engineers or pop engineers, but you probably know that one of the things that translates the worst in the world is you'll go out in the studio and mic a rock and roll guitar amp, and come into the studio and turn on the monitor and it doesn't sound anything like what you heard out in that room. Lou's vision was to make it sound the same.

He did it. I was at his house when the record was over. I knew the record very intimately. We'd spent a long time on it. We tried to make it so that we didn't have to do anything in mastering. I've known Lou a long time, so while they were mixing it they would send me mixes, and we'd critique the mixes, say that if you'd do this or that it'll be perfect. So that was a goal -- to bring me something I wouldn't need to do anything with. He achieved it. There's no compression to speak of on that record. This is a rock and roll record with almost no compression on it.

I went to Lou's house. I know the record. We played the record. He picks up his guitar and amp; he hit the guitar; it was that exact sound! Chills went down my spine; I'd never heard anything like that. But, Lou being Lou, I said, "Look, Lou. You're gonna want to sell some of these records. It's not going to be very competitive." So we did a compressed version that we sent to the radio stations, so that it would be more competitive with the other CD's in the stack. But the one the consumer buys is as classical a rock record as you'll find.

So the punch line to this is that when we come to do the live thing it was a direct-to-DAT recording that the sound guy had done on the board. This is all Lou had to work with. There was no remix possibility or anything like that. So that record ended up having LOTS of compression just in order top bring it together, to make it sound like it had been mixed properly. We'd spent tons of time mastering that record --

Audience: How much is lots (of compression)?

BL: There's tons of gain riding; at least ten dB of gain manipulation, plus probably four or five dB of compression. It's way underrecorded, then when Tony hits the drums it goes into the red. That kind of nightmare.

Audience (Bob Dixon, NBC): Do you still claim that radio program directors trying to achieve their sound ruin work that you've done? Does that drive you crazy a lot?

BL: Absolutely. It drives me completely crazy. Years ago in New York WABC used to add echo to their records and speed them up. (laughter) It was like, do you make extra dry masters that you slow down so that when they--? (laughter) I know that Fagan could not stand to hear his stuff over the air. Becker and Fagan, they're the kind of guys where they'd do it and if they decided it ought to be one metronome marking faster they'd go and recut the whole track. They wouldn't varispeed it, that kind of thing.

I remember when I did the Police, Every Breath You Take -- a very mellow song. WPLJ on the air they have three-band compression; they compress the bass, mids, and the highs independently. (vocalizes what the compression did to the high-hat sound)

MP: To what extent is it feasible to do what you did with Lou Reed? Either to persuade the artist or the record company or whoever to do two versions-- i.e., you, given your long, sometimes gruesome experience listening to your projects end up on the radio, do a radio version, then another version for all the listeners at home who don't need that kind of chemistry?

BL: It happens sometimes, but not as often as I'd like.

MP: It's too expensive; too time-consuming?

BL: Both. There's usually time constraints. Like a lot of times, with a new record coming out, (the label) will have bought space next to the cashier at Tower Records for the week, so there's a little display by the cashier. If the record's not in the stores they've got this buy that they can't do anything with; all their advertising goes to heck. That's just the reality of it.

Audience: The bass player from The Call, did he not listen to you or did you not tell him? At what point does the artist say, "I'm not going to listen to this guy. He may know what works, but he doesn't know what I want."

BL: At any point he could have said that. That's really on a case-by-case basis. I can't tell you the number of records I have done where I'll do a reference the way I hear it... One advantage of your going to a mastering studio is that by the time you've worked on (recording and mixing) a project for several months, you're really burnt out on it in a lot of ways. You don't have as much overview of it any more. I remember when I did Fagan's Night Fly record, two things funny happened. Fagan by then was into the 3M 32-track digital machine. He completely abandoned analog and was a total digital man now. He walks into the studio and walks past my Studer tape machine and says, "How's your $8,000 compressor today, Bob?" (laughter)

Later on Gary Katz comes into the room, who had produced it, and they'd been sweating this thing out, and I said, "Is it a good record?" This was before I put it on. And he says, "I don't know. All I know is that every note is in tune." (laughter)

So bringing it to a mastering house is a can't-see-the-forest-for-the-trees situation. We hear lots of records, the first time we're hearing it, like this Rush record, and there's no bass. So we say, "There's no bass!" And they go, "Oh, yeah!"

I can't tell you the number of times that we've done a reference with our first instincts and given it to the artist and they say, "Oh no no no, we're very concerned about the highs. We need more highs." We'll go several rounds, maybe, doing revisions. Then they're happy; they sign off on it; the record comes out. Then a year later they'll come up -- this just happened with Elvis Costello, by the way -- he says, "I just listened to that thing that I rejected that you send to me initially. I don't know why I rejected it. It was really much better." Because they finally got a little perspective on it. But there's no going back, of course. Unless you're Bruce Springsteen.

Audience (David Griesinger, Lexicon): I just heard about a particular abomination called a Stereomax. Have you ever seen such devices? Do you ever try to manipulate the...stereo width?

BL: As more and more plug-in manufacturers are looking for more and more devices to put on Pro Tools, and other standalone devices, it's frightening what people can get their hands on nowadays.

Talking about how a lot of record companies like things louder, there's this one record called the Tea Party, a Canadian group. I sent it to the record company and they said, "Gee, we usually like your stuff, but this doesn't really sound very good." I asked, "What are you comparing it to?" The artist had put his tape through a Finalizer, on one of the stock settings, at max. It was just blazingly loud, just stupid loud, it was so unmusical. But somehow they had fallen in love with it. So I ended up buying a Finalizer just so we could duplicate what he had done, then back off certain things in the most musical way possible. It was a horrible way to approach a project. And his original mixes really sounded pretty good. I can't believe that the artist's vision was to have it the other way.

It still ended up crazy loud, because that's what they had gotten used to. He's from Montreal, and he has a friend at a radio station, and he got it on the air at 3 o'clock in the morning. The level made the limiters go crazy, and the record sounded so bad over the radio, that he ended up having me bring the level down. But did he have me go back to the original masters that I had done? No, he simply lowered the level of this grossly distorted thing, so it goes to minus-6 and sticks at minus-6 for the whole record.

Audience (David Griesinger): (explains that a Stereomax gives stations increased stereo width) Anything we can do about that?

BL: Just complain. You know, chief engineers try to please their program directors. I think the only thing to do is to call the station, have your friends call the station, and say, "What happened? Your station doesn't sound as good any more." Because those guys are paranoid. It's like walking in to anybody doing a mix and saying, "You sure about that snare sound?" (laughter) No one is ever confident about their snare sound, or about the level of the vocal. So I'm sure that chief engineers have that same paranoia.

I remember when the BBE came out. Now, I have nothing against any tool that is used properly. All these tools have their place. Believe me, sometimes these tools save your bottom when you're in trouble. I remember one year I was working with Spyro Gyra, and the BBE had come out. This is a device kind of like the Aphex that adds upper harmonics to a signal. The guys came into my studio, before they did their final mixes. These are guys that always did a pretty good rough, maybe even one they thought might be a master. They'd come into the studio and have it critiqued before they did the rest of the mixes, so they were sure that they were on track, which I think is a wonderful thing to do.

They hadn't told me a word yet. And I put the mix up. I had been working with Spyro Gyra for years at that point. And I know Jay Beckenstein's sound very well. I put the tape on and there was this buzz on Jay's sax. And I said, "What is that on the saxophone?" They didn't realize that I didn't like it, and they said, "Oh, that's this new BBE thing that just got invented. It's the greatest thing! You put this thing on the saxophone and you can duck it so low in the mix and you can still hear every note. It gives so much power to the rest of the sound." And I said, "But you just wrecked Jay's sound!" They listened, and said, "Well yeah, I guess so." They were just so enthralled with this new tool. They ended up not using one on that. Again, if there's anyone here from BBE, I'm not saying it's a bad unit. It's just that wasn't a great application for it, to put it on the star's main sound.

***

[From here on we'll quote excerpts, all spoken by Bob.]

One thing I always say is, "Never turn your back on digital." (laughter) The fact that it worked a hundred times in a row is no guarantee that it will work the hundred-and-first. That's why computer verification is very necessary, or listening to it.

...

You have to use your ears. Get the highest resolution you can, which for a lot of people means great headphones. Very carefully listen to the originals, listen to the copies, make sure that nothing's getting lost.

...

I'm to the point where I almost never listen on small speakers, because I know my high resolution speakers really well. Most of the times I need to use small speakers are just to please the clients. ...There are times when the bass is recorded in a strange way, and I'm not sure how it will speak on a smaller speaker, and I will listen on the smaller speakers.

A lot of times, there's a certain well known small speaker that a lot of people use. We have a pair of those, and I'll put it up so I can hear what the artist thought it sounded like. That speaker seems to put more reverb there than is actually there, because it's enhanced around 4k. And it has a certain thump that certain people like.

...

The dB Technology converter is the only one that measures 22.5 bits of true dynamic range. ... My opinion has been that the change from 16 to 20 bits was a dramatic improvement on the sound. ... The difference in humidity in a recording room is going to make more diffrerence than anything you're going to hear between 22.5 bits and 24. .. When we compare equalizers that have long coefficients, when it gets dithered down to 24, they do seem to sound better for some reason than ones that are just 24. There's mysteries still left to be discovered about what's going on.

...

What do I like to send to the pressing plants? The real answer to that is we don't get a choice. We send out whatever the record company orders. But we're glad to see when they ask us to send out a good old PCM-1630. The reason for that is that it has a computrer analyzer that can verify that it has no errors, that it has no concealments of the data. More than that, it can't be double-speed glass mastered, because it's off a video deck. ... The DDP is good as well. The thing I don't care for is sending CD-R's to the plant.

...

We keep a sound pressure level meter in the room, and we follow OSHA specs for sound pressure level exposure, which means 85 dB; 90 dB, you're only allowed 8 hours maximum exposure to that. I love what I do. I intend to keep my hearing as much as I can. I don't listen loud. Period. I just don't do it. If you like to go to rock concerts, it's not a good idea to be a mastering engineer. ... One thing I say to clients that really scares them off, and it's a true statement, is that if I listen even a little bit louder than my reference for a short period of time, my ears will become acclimated to it immediately, and then when I go back to my reference, it won't sound right to me any more. And they'll go, "Oh no, don't do that!" So I usually give them a pair of headphones and the volume control for that. ... In my opinion it's just pointless to listen too loud. .. If you start listening too loud, you won't have enough bass and you won't have enough high end.

...

...that guy from the record company who says that you want to archive as many bits as possible, and give the consumer as few bits as possible.

...

I advocate reading the manual. I routinely take manuals home over the weekend, like a doctor, to read what all this expensive gear does.

...

(Most musically satisfying projects:) Music From Big Pink (CD reissue), Sly and the Family Stone (There's a Riot Going On), second Led Zeppelin record (w/Whole Lotta Love), recent Bachrach/Costello record, new Jewel record, Lorena McKennitt, George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children.

...

I use Grado Signature headphones, Stax Lambda, and a lot of Sennheiser 580's (you can wear them all day long). Using a Grado headphone amp or other high end headphone amp makes a tremendous difference; can even make a Sony Walkman headphone sound like something that costs $300.

...

When clients listen too loud on headphones, maybe even to the point where the bleed of the headphones is so loud that it's annoying -- maybe they're listening at 100 or 105 dB -- I'll say, "Do you want to be in this business for a while, or just for today?" (laughter)

...

END

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