Stan Ricker: Live and Unplugged
True Confessions of a Musical & Mastering Maven
Article By Dave Glackin

Dave:    I've heard that you took the nitrocellulose shavings that came off the lacquers in MoFi and took them out in the parking lot.

Stan:            Occasionally so!  You can light 'em off and make a good boomer out of 'em.  That's one reason, by the way, indirectly speaking, one reason why this lathe is almost in the middle of the room because in every mastering facility I've ever worked in, the lathe is smack-dab up against the wall.  You couldn't get around to service it from the other side [to empty the chip-jar or replace belts].  Also, near the walls is where the most bass is.  So you have the most possibility of contaminating the sound on the disk through airborne low-frequency vibrations from the loudspeakers.  But the most important reason is that you can just walk back here and work on this thing, you know.  We can look right here and see the pickle jar with the thread in it, the shavings, what we call the “chip”, or what the English call the “swarf”.  That's a great old German pickle jar, bunch of explosive stuff in it.  Cellulose.  To go boom, you wad it up in a ball, put it out in the driveway, and light it up.  Thhhumppp!   Sounds just like you lit off a little toy rocket or something.  And then it leaves about a million little tiny black goobers hanging in mid-air!

VTA Test Record

Dave:            Something that Michael Fremer mentioned in one of his recent articles was that you once had a concept for a VTA test record.

Stan:    Yeah, yeah.  We can take musical signal, which I really think is the best, or you can take pink noise, and sum it to mono, reverse the polarity in one channel, and cut it vertically.  A whole lot of people don't have stereo/mono switches on their preamps, or whatever, which is a travesty because if you're listening to a mono record, you really must have a mono combining switch for two very specific reasons.  Number one is that there's a lot of vertical nonsense [like “orange-peel(mold-grain), vertical rumble from ball bearings in mono lathes, and long-wavelength displacements due to warpage] happening on the surface of the record that has nothing to do with the recorded signal.  You’d like to get rid of those vertical disturbances which are using excessive power and polluting the music.  But even more important is that there are arm resonances excited.  The resonances on different axes are of different frequencies, because most arms are not purely symmetrical.  This one isn't.  It's a Grace 16” model 707, by the way.  So it has a curve near the cartridge-end, and slightly curved at the pivot end, too.  So it's gonna exhibit more stiffness in one plane than it does in another plane, and therefore a differing set of resonances in each.  So when you play a mono record, and some guy's in there pluckin' the bass, and you play it back in stereo mode and look at the oscilloscope, you see all kinds of ovals and everything else happening in the bass, whereas the bass was recorded mono, but the arm vibrations, the vibration modes are causing spurious vibrations in different planes.  So sometimes one note will come out loud on one channel and another note will come out loud on the other channel, depending on the particular notes being played, when you're in stereo.  When you're in mono, you combine these differences and the arm resonances are not eliminated, but they're made common-mode.  That which had appeared as pure vertical resonance, is eliminated.  [Tympani that “move around” back-stage when playing different notes can be traced to this different-resonances-in-different-planes phenomenon.]

Now, if you did this with a test record where you had mono pink noise or mono music, hell, that'd be great.  You make sure first of all, that obviously the cartridge-guts are oriented horizontally, azimuth-wise [level].  Many times you’ll find the output of the two halves of the cartridge aren't equal, almost never are.  You gotta get the cartridge lateral first, then get the levels equal, then combine to mono, then reverse the polarity of one channel only.  You gotta do 'em in the proper sequence, I mean, otherwise, once you combined 'em to mono you don't know which one of those two channels is actually puttin' out more or less than the other.  So you have to get it zeroed out in the stereo mode first, then combine it to mono, then reverse the polarity of one of those combined channels, and then on this hypothetical test record, you'd vary your vertical tracking angle to get rid of the most sound, in effect, cause the most cancellation.

Dave:    That might be something that would sell.  A lot of people might have an interest in that.

Stan:    Yeah.  We were talkin' one time about cuttin' a test lacquer at different locations: cut somethin' here, cut somethin' over in AcousTech, cut something at Doug Sax's, cut somethin' at Bernie's, just a minute or a minute and a half of some noise from all the different guys, mono, vertical modulation, on one lacquer.  And then on the other side, same kinda thing from the East Coast.  However, I don't know if I want to send a lacquer to the East Coast and have it cut and then have it sent back here and try to have it processed.  You'll lose so much, time is against you.  Temperature variations are against you.  Especially heat, but that'd be kinda neat if we could do that.  Yeah, I think that all Neumann things, provided they're set up according to the regular Neumann mechanical alignment procedures, are gonna be the same.  But, now Bernie's is gonna be different.  Doug Sax’s rig at his Mastering Lab will be different as he has a Neumann cutter on a Scully lathe.  Len Horowitz' Scully's gonna be different and MoFi's gonna be different.  MoFi has a Neumann lathe with an Ortofon cutterhead on it, so it’s different from the others.  And I don't know which difference it is.  I don't know if it has a greater or lesser cutting angle than these other heads do.  They're supposed to be fifteen degrees but I don't think they're actually that much.  I think they're maybe seven or eight degrees.

Dave:    Really?  That's interesting.  Quite a difference.

NAB vs CCIR & Tape Handling

Dave:    Stan, how you feel about NAB vs. CCIR?

Stan:    Well, I think that NAB is a mistake that never should have happened, but it did.  So we have to live with it.  CCIR or IEC, as they call it nowadays, is a recording characteristic that I really like because in the mid bass and bottom end it doesn't do anything: no EQ at all.  Leaves it alone and there is just is a 35 microsecond time rise above a thousand cycles.  By the way, 30 ips is just half of that, just 17 1/2 microseconds time rise.  So you could take 30 ips tape, if you want to master at half speed, just play it back 15 ips on CCIR, after shifting the “knee” of the curve down an octave.  It works out quite well.  But NAB bass-boost EQ has been the cause of a lot of tape saturation in the bass, things like that.  Some of the folks that talk about the soft-fat bass on analog tape are relying on the non-linear saturation characteristics to get that effect, often without being aware of it.

Dave:    Do you have a favorite brand of tape?

Stan:    Well, of the things that have lasted best over the years, the old Scotch 111 has far and away consistently sounded the best, but there's no lubrication properties at all in that tape.  It's like carborundum paper on your heads.  But, God, it retains its signal and sounds very good over many years.  And that German Agfa, it's pink on the back side, PER 535, I think the number is.  Kind of a grayish brown oxide.  And I always liked the Scotch 202.  It would track better through the guides and the head stack because it wasn't glossy on the back side, and was made of mylar.  It was matte finish, so the capstan would grip the tape better.  Both those tapes kept their high frequency response well. The tape that Keith O. Johnson used to do his analog recordings for Reference Recordings was TDK which was also of a large magnetic particle design, very much like the other tapes I've mentioned.  And it really retains its signal well, with very little print through and very little high frequency smear.  But that stuff hasn't been in production for a number of years.  So, other than my experiences with those, I don't have a lot of good first hand experience with recording tapes.  If I see certain Ampex tapes like the 407 or the stuff in that era, 406, 407, I get a little nervous. This was in that time frame around in the seventies when we had trouble with the binder migrating to the outside edges of the tape.  When you tried to play a tape back twenty years later, it was all glued together.  Causes a nightmare trying to rewind it, clean it up and play it when you're re-releasing something from an archive.  Takes too much time to clean it.

Dave:    Was this after the ban on using whale oil as a lubricant, which I think, according to Doug Sax, happened in 1976?

Stan:    Well, that's about right; ‘76 or ‘77. That was Sperm whale oil.  That stuff was one of the major ingredients of the early automatic transmission fluid for cars.  Right around that time, when they quit using that stuff, the failure rate of automatic transmissions in cars in America went from about seven million a year to about seventeen million a year.  So, there was a lot of anguish and a great gnashing of teeth, so to speak, over the loss of that supremely good lubricant.  And I don't know that anything has ever come up that's been as good as that stuff.  Best lube in Mother Nature’s arsenal! 

Dave:    You were saying earlier, too, that you don't really believe in baking tapes, or find that there's much advantage in baking tapes.

Stan:    I have not found an advantage in baking tapes.  Although sometimes I think I must really be in the minority, or I don't have both oars in the water or something, because maybe I wasn't issued both oars.  But the experience I've had with tapes at Mobile Fidelity was that we'd get a tape that would be really sticky and we'd say, "Well, we'll send it off to some place and get it baked," and well, it would come back and be just damn like it was when we sent it away.  Well, what a waste of time this was.  I could have been cleaning it, you know.  Clean it with Freon TF, pulling it between your fingers.  Clean, lint free rags, pads, get all that sticky stuff off, take forever to clean that tape that way, but it worked!  2400 feet through, one foot at a time.  But you could play it thereafter and you couldn't do that after baking.  We put it under vacuum, too, in a bell jar, and sucked the air out of it, in the hope that would do something.  Didn't do anything that I’m aware of!

Dave:    So, there's no substitute for tedious, careful cleaning by hand...

Stan:    I haven't discovered anything that's any better.  You can do a semi-mechanical hand cleaning by just playing the tape on an old recorder[after a good de-magnetization], cause you don't want to wear the heads down on a good machine.  But if you have a second machine that you can play it on, play the tape at the highest possible speed and this grunge scrapes off on the heads and the guides. And what happens is that they get so packed up with this grunge that you can hear the tape start squealing; you stop tape immediately!  You clean all the grunge off the heads and the guides and you back the tape about a dozen turns of the reels and start from there.  Play again until again you get enough buildup where you have to stop, clean the heads and in other words, every guide, and each head, like if you have a record head and a bias head and an erase head, it is like havin' three sets of your fingers for this to go through and friction points to scrape this crap off, you see, so you can achieve more cleaning playing on an old machine.  You cannot put the machine in “play” and turn around and walk away and go to the restroom.  You come back and this tape may have bound up in the machine, maybe either you've stretched the tape or stalled the machine, because that will, and has, happened.  The tape will get to dragging so severely that it will stall the capstan motor if the pinch roller is pinching hard enough not to allow the tape  to slip through.  So you don't want to walk away, ever!.  You have to sit there and baby-sit that machine while it's operating.  You have to pay strict attention to it.  You have to be listening closely for when it begins to squeal, you have to shut it off immediately, clean everything, and go on from there. The entire process is very intense, very tiring.  It's the kind of thing that nobody wants to do.

Dave:    You said, though, that with all the tapes you've handled you've never stretched one.

Stan:    Yeah, I haven't stretched one.  Broke a couple of acetate tapes but haven't stretched any.

Dave:    Do you recall what the worst tape was that you had to handle?  Was there any one that was outstandingly terrible?

Stan:    Well, I remember spending eighteen hours cleaning one tape.  As I say, I don't even remember what the hell the name of it was.  It was a tape that was recorded at 30 ips in Australia, I believe.  We were working on it at MoFi a couple of years ago and the stuff just kept shedding and we couldn't get rid of all the sticky stuff on the tape.  So where you could do a CD, where you could play one song, transfer it, stop the tape machine, clean the heads, do the next song transfer and so forth, you couldn't do that cutting an LP because you have to cut continuously from beginning to end.  You couldn't stop the lathe, you can't stop the tape machine, unless you want a hell of a lot of dead air on the record, between tunes.  Well that's one of those instances where MoFi released a CD but we could never get an LP cut successfully because of those kinds of problems.

Dave:    Yeah, I think that's something people don't realize.  They usually think there's some licensing problems or there's another company that wants to put out the LPs, and you can only put out a CD or vice versa.  But sometimes that's just not the case.

Stan:    Yeah, well, sometimes the licensing thing is the case, but just as many or more times we ran into old tapes where, as I say, you can't play 'em all the way through, can't get a good pass.  You just have to scratch the disk project.  Of course, I know there's companies who would've said, "Oh well, we'll just make a CD transfer out of it, then we can cut the LP from the CD transfer."  Well, if you were cutting at real time that's a distinct possibility for a lot of people.  But doing it half speed, the only way that could be done, in fact, would be to transfer each tune, half speed, to a DAT.  Put the DAT on pause, stop the tape machine, clean the tape guides again, play the tape machine, record the next tune, and so forth.  You could do it that way.  Play it half speed on to the DAT and then take the DAT and record it onto the LP.  There's a lot of people who wouldn't be able to tell the difference under those conditions.  Because if you're doing it at 48K, you'd basically have 96K sampling rate on the finished product.  So there certainly wouldn't be any frequency restrictions.  Concerning resolution, there certainly could be compromises on that, due to only 16 bits.  But on some of the stuff, some of the loud rock 'n roll stuff, there's not that much dynamic range; if it's all medium loud to loud, about six or eight or maybe ten dB dynamic range.  You're not talking 45 or 48 or 50 dB dynamic range or more, like with classical music, where the quietness of the signal equals beyond the noise floor of the environment.  So for classical, the sixteen bits might not cut it.

Dave:    You've done some very famous repairs to tapes.

Stan:    Oh yeah.  Tapes that come apart and go all over the floor and you have to put together about 200 pieces of tape.  Probably the sum total of the length of the 200 pieces is less than eight feet.  The last turns on a take-up reel are going lickety-split during rewind, your splice breaks, and all this acetate tape just fragments into little tiny pieces.  You have to go down, on the floor of the studio, on your hands and knees, and pick it all up, one piece at a time, and lay it down in an editing block.  You talk about assembling a puzzle with no guidelines!  No picture on the front to tell you, the mountains go here, and the swimming pools here.  There's NOTHING!  The only clues you have as to which side is which is: the front side has the oxide on it.

Dave:    Just one example of why you have to have infinite patience to do what you do, to work in your profession.  Patience sounds like it's really a virtue.

Stan:    Yeah, you really do.  'Cause accidents will happen, in spite of the best efforts.  Murphy's Law. Murphy lives under that Scully tape transport!

Repairing LPs

Dave:    There's a sort of a personal interest question that Raymond Chowkwanyun wanted me to ask you, which was if you know any way to repair a skipping LP?  He's got an LP that I think he paid about forty pounds sterling for which has a skip in the middle of it and he's not awfully happy about that.

Stan:    Well, one would have to look at the groove very carefully with a microscope to find out why it skips.  I mean, does it skip because it was overcut?  I mean, do all equivalent pressings of this skip also?  Or does it skip because it was at one time played with an arm and cartridge assembly that either had wrong anti-skating, tracking, or whatever?  Maybe this skip occurs at the top of a warp, which, when combined with an anti-skating situation, de-rails the stylus into the next groove.  You have to get in there and find out where it is that the one groove derails into the next groove and build up the groove wall that's missing in that.  Um, I don't know what you could build it up with.  Does it skip forward or back?

Dave:    I don't know.

Stan:    You can either over-compensate or under-compensate your anti-skating at that point in the record.  As I've done before I've taken turntables and played 'em on a slant, so as to bias this thing in the right direction.  So, that's a very hard one.  You have to be looking at the specific modulations.  I'd like to look at the playback of it on the oscilloscope.  If it's in stereo, there may be some kind of a disturbance that was a pure vertical modulation that was fast enough that it caused the cartridge/cantilever to become airborne over the hump.  Like if you go up and over a hill too fast in your Corrado, you get some air underneath, you know!  And like your car, the only thing that holds the stylus in the groove is basically the effects of gravity.  Not so much gravity on the stylus and cantilever, per se, but gravity on the cartridge-arm assembly, and its associated mass which brings its pressure to bear on the cantilever by means of the elasticity of its suspension.  And if you have a modulation that's faster than that elasticity is strong, well, then the stylus de-couples from the groove. If the anti-skating is wrong, the stylus is going to immediately jump forward or back.  The entire arm and cartridge are simply gonna jump forwards or backwards, depending on that anti-skating at that point.

Dave:    My Corrado at least has traction control, so that helps, which I don't think the Neumann has.

Stan:    Well, we're talking about playback.  Yeah, the Neumann has traction control and it's called variable depth.  So, as an analogy to driving, even though the road goes up and down, if we didn't have variable depth, when it goes up, the road would get skinnier.  When you go down the road would get wider.  If it went up too far, the road would disappear.  That's what would happen here if you didn't have variable depth.

Tell Ray to send his record to me and I’ll see what might help it.

Availability of Lacquers

Dave:    Do you have problems finding good lacquers these days?

Stan:    No, no.  Apollo and the Transco people are still the only ones around, at least in America.  And they still make lacquers of the same quality they have for years.  In fact the Apollo lacquers are just as flat as ever.  I don't have trouble with lacquers.  The lacquer companies now sell the cutting styluses, too.  Apollo sells Adamant styluses [Japanese] and Transco sells Micropoint, [New York] and they're all very reputable.  Both styli are better than the Capp styluses that we had to use thirty years ago.  The burnishing facets often were not the same dimensions, left channel to right channel.  Sometimes they weren't constant dimensions from tip on up to the flank, and so forth.  So, there's much better quality control in stylus manufacture now than there used to be.

That's why, getting back to that question about horns, or dehorning lacquers, there's a lot less of horn-related problems nowadays.  The stylus, the art of the stylus making, the art and science of it, is much better than it used to be.  So, they do a better job.  They do more cutting and less plowing.

Dave:    Can't you get Pyral lacquers any more?

Stan:    No!  Boy, those were good lacquers, I sure miss them!  They're a French lacquer.  But the metal boxes that I carry lacquers around in, those are Pyral boxes.  Those are almost as valuable as the lacquers that came in them.  Really super!

Don't Drink and Drive your Lathe

Dave:    And how about the effect of beer on your hearing?  You seem to have that calibrated, too.

Stan:            (Chuckles)  Yeah.  One beer's a 3 dB pad at 10K, ya know?  It's devastating on my hearing ability.  And it always has been.  I wasn't always willing to admit that it affected me that way but I knew early on, as soon as I got involved with disk cutting and really involved in training your senses to be an accurate listener, that alcohol was very bad for accurate listening.  It just warped it.  And always you wind up listening to it louder.  It's a downward spiral when you do that.

Dave:    Does it matter if it's Mexican beer or German beer or American beer? 

Stan:    Naw.  Chivas Regal Scotch'll do the same thing.  It's not the beer, it's the alcohol!

[So don't drink and listen.  Stop it right now.  We know who you are.  And we're coming to visit you.  We just hope that you have some Negra Modelo on hand...]

Stay Tuned for Part Three

Dave:    Stan, unlike most of the population, you're still doing what you love to do, which I think is extremely important.

Stan:    Makin' records, cuttin' records, makin' music, cuttin' records.

The interview continues in Part 3.