On your website, you specify your title as "audiophile music restoration specialist" instead of, say, "mastering engineer." Can you tell me what you think the difference is, and what you feel your job is?
I always like to use the word "audiophile" in there because nowadays a "mastering engineer" is someone who mangles the sound to the lowest common denominator. In other words, so that their CD is just as loud as everybody else's out there. Sort of the old "my radio station is louder than your radio station" thing. My personal opinion is that there has to be a bastion of good sound out there and many of my jobs entail much more than mastering. There are all different kinds of restoration, from old records to old tapes to this and that. I didn't want to be lumped in with the mass of guys out there who just follow orders now and compress the hell out of everything.
What do you mean by "just follow orders"?
I'm lucky because somebody who hires me is interested in getting the best sound they possibly can. Usually that is a record company that has an audiophile leaning. In other words, they are not worried about competing with the loudest CD out there. It's more of, "What sounds the best on a $50,000 stereo?" You'd be surprised at how bad most modern compact discs sound on really good equipment. It'll make your ears fall off after half an hour. When they hire me, they know that I'll keep the dynamic range intact, and try to add my trademark "breath of life" to everything.
Can you define the "breath of life"?
It's a sound that the ear, so easily fooled, would accept as something that sounds pleasing and real. Like if you were standing there singing rather than a recording of you. The magic is in the midrange. I don't add top end to the vocals, and I don't flatten them out because that's not real life. So when I get to work on an album by Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra or even Bob Dylan, I always make sure that in the magic midrange there's a lifelike sound to the vocals and main instruments. Sometimes at the expense of everything else in the track. I always center it around the vocals. If you hear any of my 2000 CDs, no matter what it is, there's something on there that sounds lifelike. Even on something that's been so heavily processed like the last Metallica album I did [Ride The Lightning]. This is a processed album! By my generous use of older vacuum tube technology, I managed to bring something to the performance that is certainly not on the mainstream version of it — at least I can't hear it. So I did that much without altering the rest of the sound or changing the intent of the original engineer or producer. I never do that.
So how did you get into all this?
I started out in radio broadcasting. Then I made the leap over to working at a record company, compiling greatest-hits albums. Bing Crosby, or The Andrew Sisters, or Buddy Holly... people like that. I was the catalog administrator. I basically dealt with, you know, what the Rhino guys do so well: making interesting packages. Never heard the finished product until it was actually in the stores. I was always appalled at this crappy sound quality on so many of these reissues. I made it my business to become a real pain in the butt amongst the engineering staff, and went out there and learned all I could about tape. There's only one master tape, and everything is made from that. There could be like 25 copies of the same song in the vault, and the guys in the vault have no idea which one is the right one so they just go "eeny meeny miney moe." I discovered that half the battle was right there: find the right tape and you're almost home free. I eventually just wormed my way into that, having had a lot of broadcast engineering experience, working with limiters and compressors and EQ. I wasn't alienated by any of it, so gradually I just demanded that I was the one in charge of remastering as well as compiling. I made a lot of enemies doing that.
What was the first release that you mastered yourself?
Well, the first compact disc I did was an album by Buddy Holly called From the Original Master Tapes. It's an album where the mastering part took about three hours, but actual research, finding the right tapes, took maybe half a year. Spread out all over the place, I found everything, brought them all together. That was 90 percent of the battle. When I mastered that album, I was sitting right there with the mastering engineer, who was a really nice guy, and I said, "Look, all these things sound great just the way they are. Do we have to master them? Can't we just transfer them straight?" And the guy said, "Transfer them straight? Well, I hear a cloud on the bass a little bit here. And I hear this and I hear that..." I said, "Well, if you take the cloud out, his voice just doesn't sound right. Leave the bass cloud in, worry about the voice, and my name's going on it, so if there's a problem I will take the heat." And he said, "Okay, we won't do anything." So I just did it straight, trusted my instincts, and it's the album that I'm most noted for because... [sighs] I had nothing to with the sonics of that album. It was all Norman Petty's engineering back in New Mexico in the '50s. He did it right, and I saw no reason to tamper with it.
Are there any requirements that you need from a label?
Over the years, especially working with Marshall Blonstein and the DCC Compact Classics guys, and now with Audio Fidelity and Analog Productions, we always just want the same thing. Is there a master tape? Is it playable? If so, let us worry about it and we'll take it from there. Record companies understand now what we need. We can't use a production copy, we can't use fake stereo; if that song came out in mono, it's going to stay mono. And they've let us do what we want. Usually.
You see "From the Original Master Tapes" on every reissue CD now, and you pretty much coined that term with your Buddy Holly compilation.
The thing is, it matters not a hill of beans if something is from the original master tapes if it's been destroyed in mastering. That's my soapbox for this year: Why bother to use the original master tapes if the final product sounds nothing like the original master tapes?
I read an interview where you described the long, hard struggle of getting master tapes for Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited. What were the most difficult master tapes for you to locate?
I'd have to say Jethro Tull's Aqualung. I believe we waited seven years. That was an album that was recorded in one place, then a tape copy was made for America and a tape copy was made for England, and these tape copies are the ones that are marked "master". They've been EQ'ed, and they've been compressed... slightly, in a good way. But, nonetheless, they were not the original masters. They kept sending us all these tapes marked "master". I kept saying to them, very kindly, "No no no, not this, not this, not this..." Finally, we got a hold of Ian Anderson, who said, "Oh yeah, I have those in my garage." That was about five years into the project. At about seven years into it, he finally got around to sending us Aqualung. It was a long struggle, but the project came out nicely. It's not that [the tapes were] lost, it was just that no one there realized that was what we wanted. They couldn't understand. "Well, here's a perfectly good tape that we used to make the LP. Why don't you just use that?" Well we don't want this $30 CD to sound like the LP because, personally, I didn't think the LP sounded that hot!
What was the hardest one to master?
The Eagles' Hotel California. In fact, when we finally got those master tapes from Criteria Studios in Miami, it was like I wanted to cancel the project. We had already paid Elektra/Asylum all the advance money and everything. But I didn't understand how something could sound so muffled and bass-heavy, and be the actual master. So I thought, 'Maybe it's been destroyed.' So I got the safeties, and they were 1:1 copies. They sounded exactly the same way. So I thought, "It must be the way they were mixed." I went in search of [engineer] Bill Szymczyk's JBL monitors (not the exact same pair he used, but a similar pair). I stuck them out in the middle of the room without any bass re-enforcement [like at Criteria in 1976]. "Oh, okay, that sounds more like it!" All that boomy bass was gone, and it started to take shape. I had one or two choices at that point. Either sell a pair of JBL studio monitors with every gold CD, or master the thing the way it should be sounding on everyone's stereo, like it sounds on those JBLs. So that's what I ended up doing. But let me tell you, I scratched my head a long time trying to figure out how to make that sound good. I used a lot of EQ on those. I didn't add any EQ, I just subtracted. Sometimes -14 db at 100 cycles. That's a lot! And even then, it was still pretty boomy.
I know that you don't like to divulge your techniques too much. You have your "secrets". But is there some specific gear that you like to use?
