Brilliant Corners

For years now, I've wanted to learn more about what I was hearing and just what was encoded on those great-sounding early records—and about why that sound seems to elude engineers today. When you write about things, sometimes having preferences and opinions isn't enough, so I reached out to four mastering engineers. This turned out to be a mistake. For starters, engineers love master tape, which sounds better than records and digital but is largely off limits to those of us who listen at home. How many audiophiles have even heard a master tape? Second, three of the engineers are, or have been, involved in the making of vinyl reissues and could hardly be expected to speak critically about their own product. Then, of course, engineers and audiophiles listen in different ways and for different reasons: the former to create a commercial product that works in a plurality of systems, the latter as a (hopefully) pleasurable pastime with few other demands. Finally, it turns out that mastering engineers agree with each other about as seldom as audiophiles do, a discovery I find weirdly comforting.

Still, our conversations proved fascinating and useful, in the sense that there's utility in having the dust periodically blown off one's assumptions. First, I followed a tangent about the condition of the source materials used in today's reissues. Has some of the glorious sound of the early pressings simply vanished from the master tapes as they deteriorated over the past 60 or 70 years? I asked Richard L. Hess, one of the foremost experts in the restoration of magnetic tape. Hess told me that the answer to my question is impossible to generalize about, varies from tape to tape, and depends on factors that include storage conditions, how much the tape has been played and handled, and the physical and chemical composition of the tape itself. He directed me to several of his extremely thorough published papers on the subject, the gist of which is captured by the following quotes: "It is extremely difficult to predict the lifetime of any given tape. Archivists must assume that all tapes, and the machines to play them, are degrading. ... Unlike wine, tape does not improve with age." Clearly the simple answers I'd hoped for weren't forthcoming.

My ill-advised PVC pilgrimage continued with a fascinating conversation with mastering engineer and Stereophile contributor Tom Fine, whose parents happen to be Wilma Cozart Fine and the aforementioned C. Robert Fine, the producer and engineer, respectively, of the beloved Mercury Living Presence series of classical recordings. In the first five minutes, Fine told me that he preferred listening to his parents' records, which he's involved in reissuing, on high-rez digital, a format that to him sounds more like the master tape than vinyl does. When I asked what went into the sound of the best vintage records, he suggested, very nicely, that perhaps I simply enjoyed the murkiness and distortion artifacts of the mastering chains of the 1950s and 60s.

But after a while, Fine did cotton to knowing what I was going on about. "I love rhythm and blues," he said, "and sometimes when you listen to those old records, the music just comes out of the speakers into the room and punches you in the face and sounds so incredibly human. I think of it as a kind of force." After we turned this phenomenon around and cracked each other up for a while longer, he said, "What I think you're responding to is the sound of the old tape machines, the Scully/Westrex lathes, and the tube electronics that a lot of the original LPs were mastered on. These days, most engineers use modern mastering equipment, which opens up the sound of recordings and reveals more detail, but in the process some of that force probably gets dissipated. I don't think it's possible to make records that sound like the old ones today."

I thought about this for a while, wondering what it would be like if some enterprising dreamer had painstakingly recreated a completely vintage mastering chain and then used it to press new records. So I called someone who's done exactly that: Pete Hutchison, the wizardly proprietor of London's Electric Recording Company, which makes probably the most labor-intensive and sought-after reissues on the market. Hutchison agreed with Fine that the secret of the early pressings lay in the equipment used to make them. To capture their sound, he has spent untold riches procuring, restoring, and modifying 1950s and '60s reel-to-reel recorders, lathes, and cutting heads from Lyrec, EMI, and Ortofon and rewiring their tube electronics with "mined silver." "It started as wanting to recreate the original but not make it a sort of pastiche," he told a New York Times interviewer. "And in order not to create a pastiche, we had to do everything as they had done it." As Hutchison and I spoke, my ears lit up. Here was someone as captivated as I was by that golden age sound who had gone to fanatical lengths to reproduce it today.

I don't own any Electric Recording Company releases, so I borrowed a few from my friend Beau and sat down to listen. The lovely packaging of Coltrane's Giant Steps (The Electric Recording Co. ERC059/Atlantic 1311) informed me that it was cut using original analog tape in true mono using a Lyrec SV-8 valve lathe and an Ortofon DS522 cutting head. It sounded wonderful, with gorgeous tone and subtle tube glow; compared to the Kevin Gray remastering on my Rhino stereo reissue, it was more intricate and transparent if not quite as punchy. And I'd never heard Scott LaFaro's bass sound so incisive and full-bodied as on the ERC reissue of the Bill Evans Trio's Sunday at the Village Vanguard (the stereo version: ERC ERC040S/Riverside RLP 9376). My 1974 Japanese reissue came across a bit cold and polite in comparison.

Yet as much as I admired and enjoyed my time with these British reissues, I had to admit that they didn't sound like my favorite vintage records, either. Despite the British records' delicacy and ravishing sound, they lacked the drive and tonal saturation of those sides, as well as their uncanny sense of presence. Now I was even more confused and becoming a little irate about it.

To calm my nerves, I reached out to Joe Harley (above), the producer of the Blue Notes reissued by Music Matters Jazz and the man behind the very popular Tone Poet releases from Blue Note itself. One of the most gracious, kind, and open people in the record business, he is also a longtime collector of original Blue Note LPs. Harley listened to my predicament with fatherly sympathy. He reminded me that during mastering, Rudy Van Gelder used compression and goosed the upper midrange to make the records sound lively—which may explain some but certainly not all of their uncanny vividness and realism. He also told me that while he preferred the sound of the Tone Poet reissues to the originals, he had listened to "vintage or single-ended-type systems" through which the early pressing sounded better.

"I think those systems are more suited to the older records, in the sense that they are almost reverse engineered to play them," he told me. "But when I produce reissues, I need to make sure that they sound good on as many systems and in as many rooms as possible." Harley then described some of the more out-there listening situations he's encountered among jazz fans. Cackling ensued.

Since my apartment contains a "vintage or single-ended-type system" of the kind Harley was talking about, he suggested I compare some early Blue Notes with the Tone Poet reissues on a more conventional hi-fi, like his own: Harley's home system uses Vandersteen speakers and solid state amplifiers. He told me that if he had a larger home, he'd get a second system with horn speakers and tube amps. "I need my system because it tells me the truth about what's on the records," he said. "But sometimes you want a system that's just for fun!"

For what it's worth, I performed Harley's experiment at a friend's home on his Pro-Ject turntable, Yamaha integrated amp, and KEF bookshelf speakers—a system not too different from the one I owned when I first listened to that battered Sonny Rollins record—and came away preferring the early Blue Note pressings made from Van Gelder's lacquers. Go figure.

What have I learned? Instead of finding answers, I was reminded yet again that the world is complex, disordered, and frequently contradicts itself—and that it's prudent to make peace with the uncertainty of not knowing and try to enjoy ourselves.

I remember hearing, as a kid growing up in Moscow, neighbors my grandparents' age talking about the past. According to them, nearly everything—ice cream, strawberries, bread, books, music, even women—was better in their youth, during Stalin's Great Terror. They treated these opinions as immutable facts of life. The same tendency crops up in writing, particularly criticism: There's nothing more tiresome and predictable than middle-aged men railing about the alleged deficits of contemporary culture and going on about some golden age when things were done right. And when it comes to reproduced music, make no mistake—we're living in the best of times, able to avail ourselves of the celestial jukebox of streaming services, great-sounding new vinyl, and a rich marketplace for old records that can be accessed online with a few keystrokes. And this is probably as good a place as any to suggest that if your hi-fi plays only your best sounding records well, you should sell it and buy something else.

After speaking to Harley, I made tea, spun up the turntable, and listened to "Sayonora Blues" from a 1962 copy of The Tokyo Blues (Blue Note BST 84110) by the Horace Silver Quintet, with Van Gelder's initials and the Plastylite P stamped in the dead wax. I could almost see the brass glow of Junior Cook's tenor sax and Blue Mitchell's trumpet; under Silver's fingers, the Steinway Model B grand piano sounded heavy and rich. The music in my room pulsed with the force Tom Fine had spoken about. Then I put on a Tone Poet pressing of Sonny Red's Out of the Blue that the FedEx guy had delivered that morning, which I'd bought mostly to revel in Wynton Kelly's floral piano lines. Though it didn't offer the Cinemascope pleasures of the Horace Silver record, I loved the superb playing and the detailed, pristine sound. (After I learned that the sole available copy of the original 1960 pressing of Out of the Blue was in France and selling for €600, I liked the Tone Poet even more.) I sat back and closed my eyes happily. Both records sounded just great.