Stan Ricker: Live and Unplugged
True Confessions of a Musical & Mastering Maven
Part 3
Article By Dave Glackin

Dave:    And, while we're on true confessions, I will confess to having listened to Mobile Fidelity's The Power and the Majesty  quite a bit in the late seventies.  It had the trains on one side and the thunderstorms on the other.

Stan:    Oh yeah, sure.  The Power and the Majesty.  I loved doin' that.  Man, that just starts from ground zero, I mean totally quiet, and then you hear, chh, chh, chh, way off, I mean, like far off.  This choo-choo, man, and he just comes chuggin' right through your living room!  And, ohhh, that horn!!!!  What every trombone player needs to know in terms of breath support!!  You put the gain control on your playback device at what appears to be a reasonable level at the beginning.  When you get to where the train's going through your living room, you think you've been run over by the train!  There's a hell of lot of dynamic level on that recording.  Brad Miller

did a super job with his original recording of that.

Dave:    You're not kidding.  I played that for a lot of unsuspecting visitors in the seventies.  (laughs)  They felt like they had been mauled.  It's the kind of thing that gives being an audiophile a bad name.  But I will freely admit to loving MoFi 004.

Stan:    Yep.  That was quite a good one—I love it, too.

Dave:    So, the other labels you recorded for, I'll just run through them and see if they ring any bells... Columbia, Diskwasher, Klavier, London, MCA, Phillips, RCA, Telefunken, Warner Brothers, and then you did all the early Windham Hill's up until...

Stan:    Up until Bernie Grundman started doin' 'em real time and that happened when Windham Hill turned their distribution over to A&M, which was a big bonus for them because when A&M said, "Hey, we'll take on your line of records and distribute them," I mean, their sales went up phenomenally.  Then they said, "Well, oh, by the way, if we're gonna do this, then Bernie's gonna have to cut these things."  Well, okay.

He's one of the very best at real time cutting.  That's for sure.  But real time cutting with a lot of high frequency content really, no matter who's doing it, the physics of it are very difficult to overcome. 

Dave:    I think perhaps this record is your favorite of all time.  The Star Wars  and Close Encounters  on MoFi with Zubin Mehta.

Stan:    Well, it's certainly one of my favorite MoFi things.  There's a number of reasons why it was one of my favorites.  The recording team from Decca, when they came to the United States to do this, invited me.  Jimmy Locke and Michael Mails and Simon Eaden, I had known them all from my previous work with Decca, cutting stuff, and so when they came to L.A. to record Zubin Mehta's orchestra, they invited me to come to the recording sessions.  So, not only was that a real gas, but when we got to this Cantina Band, this cut 4 on side one, it was basically a dance band.  And they weren't sure how to mic it effectively.  So, on that one, that's my mic setup.  We've got some brass here [left], and we've got some saxophones here [right], and we had a guy over on the side [hard right, at the forward edge of the stage] playin' the steel drums, Jamaican steel drums, you know, and the problem was how to mic it so it sounded realistic and also 'stereo-like'.  So, at one time I had three different, mastered versions of this same  album.  We had our half speed of this, and the English release of it, which was real time mastered, an English pressing which was very good, and there was a third one, the regular American London, which was real time, but pressed on American vinyl.  And they were all quite different in the way they sounded.  Of course, this one sounded the best!

Dave:    Of course.  Nobody would argue with that.

Dave:    You were at Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs from '79 to '83, and you mastered all of their LPs up until April of '83, right?

Stan:    That is correct.

Dave:    Another famous LP, or set of LPs that you mastered for them is the Beatles' Box.    Is there anything special you wanted to say about the Beatles' Box?  What the experience of handling the Beatles' master tapes was like, how much they were insured for, how they got here, so on and so forth?

Stan:    Well, what I really like about the Beatles' tapes was, as probably with all EMI tapes, how well their use was documented.  Each one came in a flat tin can, a mu-metal can, and taped inside was a log of when the tape was made, when the original was made, when the two-track tape was made, when it was edited, who edited it, who put the leader on it, and how many times it was loaned out, to whom and for what reason, which was neat; for us [MoFi], or American Capitol, or dubs for European distribution, or whatever.  Except for the stuff that EMI released off of those tapes, everything else was made from tape copies of those originals.  That's why the Capitol things that were released here in the U.S. sounded so different, indeed, from the original.  The copies weren't all that very good.  One of the things that interested me was that with some of the earlier Beatles' tapes the voices singing were all on one channel, and the instruments were on the other channel.  And it's not what you'd truly call stereo.  It was, in fact, two mono tracks which were originally designed to be combined into a mono release.  But we found these things very interesting in their original form.  So a discussion grew into, "Well, how do you think we ought to release these things?  Should we be true to our format and say, we're gonna release 'em exactly as the tapes are, or we're gonna release 'em exactly like the original records were?"  Well, we really didn't want to release them exactly as the original records were.  One of the very interesting reasons for that, among other things, was that the MoFi cutting system was dedicated, hard wired stereo.  There was no mono switch on this thing at all.  I'm sure I could have easily enough rigged up some wiring to make it mono, but we thought it would be really interesting to release the records as the tapes really existed.  And we got into kind of a discussion.  "Well, geez, you think we ought to call them up and ask them?" or something like this, you know.  The net result was we placed a phone call to George Martin to find out, "Well, sir, do you have any preferences, or do you care?" or whatever, you know.  And the tone of his answer was that he seemed to be quite much burned out on Beatles stuff and really didn't give a rat's behind what we did with it.  So we elected to cut it exactly as the tape format presented itself.  And then later I heard that Mr. Martin bitched vigorously about "Why the hell did you release it that way?"  And I believe my answer to it was, "Well, earlier I phoned you up and asked you and you, in your words, told me you didn't give a shit what I did with the things." "So," I said, "It's a little late now to complain about it."  He agreed and so, rightly, it is.  That was the end of that hassle.  But the tapes were extremely well engineered, they were just marvelous things to work with.  And, of course, the acetate tape was brittle and one time, the tail end of one of the numbers just shattered all over the cutting room floor.  Well, I mean that makes it sound really bad, like spilling a bag of potato chips and then walking on them, you know.  It wasn't that bad.  It was probably a length of tape, maybe six or eight inches long, but it fractured into something like 200 tiny little pieces, so it took the better part of a day to put it all back together.

Dave:    Your friends in the Sapphire Club tell me that was the first note of Michelle.

Stan:    Is that what that was?  I enjoyed Yellow Submarine  a whole lot.  I thought that was really cool.  And what was the one, the Sgt. Pepper  was fun to do.  A lot of interesting recording.  What's the one, "Will you love me when I'm sixty-four?"

Dave:    Mmmm.  You've got me.  I'd have to go back and look.  A couple of my favorites were Revolver and Rubber Soul, but it's hard to remember what was on what album now.

Dave:    Stan, in April of '83, you left Mobile Fidelity for personal reasons, right?

Stan:    Yes, I did.  I left for the reason that my former wife was terminally ill. She had a very advanced case of pulmonary fibrosis, from which there is no known relief.  We had great medical expenses that the insurance for a small company like Mobile Fidelity just simply couldn't handle.  So I chose to leave to find better insurance, which you have to do by working for a larger company.  So, I could only think of two large companies, General Motors, or maybe Ford, or the U.S. government.  China Lake Naval Weapons Center was just sixty miles over the hill from Lake Isabella, where we were living, so it was a natural thing to come here.  I applied here in May of '83 and was hired on May 29th of 1984.  Shortly thereafter, my medical insurance took effect, which was really perfect because Mr. Belkin had been gracious enough to give me an extended year's medical coverage, even after leaving the company, and gave me six months' separation pay, so that I didn't have to go on welfare.  And all that was extremely, well, much appreciated.  And my medical coverage here at China Lake took over the day before the MoFi medical ran out so we literally had seamless medical coverage during that transition that had to be an Act of God.  I mean it was typical of my stay here at China Lake.  My first day of employment, May 29th, was a holiday. I got paid for the holiday, Memorial Day!  In reality, it was the stress of seeing my wife just disintegrate, and watching her fight with those damned insurance companies that caused my departure.

Dave:    Well, Stan, thanks very much for sharing that with us and certainly, thanks to Herb Belkin for everything he did.

Stan:    Yes.  It was a little act of graciousness that went a long way towards making a very difficult transition doable. 

Dave:    I know you did go back to MoFi twice between '83 and the present, once in '86 and once in '95 when they started doing LPs again.  But it doesn't sound like either of those stints was too long lived for you.

Stan:    No, it didn't work out too well.  In '86 MoFi had, by that time, moved to Petaluma in Northern California.  That was after my trip to Moscow on behalf of Sheffield Labs with Keith O. Johnson, and I went as a second engineer when we went to record the Moscow Philharmonic, digitally and "analoguely."  Mmmm.  How do you spell that?  It just didn't work out at that time with MoFi.  I wanted to be more than just a lathe slave.  But that was not to be.  So, I just had to not do that anymore.  I came back here to China Lake and then MoFi started doing their LP's again in '95.

I didn't know MoFi was doing this and I saw a CBS News piece, Eye on America.  It was a report on a Friday evening.  "Would you believe it?  Some record companies are still making records."  And here was a real nice presentation of Mobile Fidelity's new plant in Sebastapol, and cutting room, and I was really impressed.  I thought that was a really good presentation that they set up for CBS.  So I called up MoFi and I left a message on the answering machine.  I told Herb that I had just seen this thing on CBS news, and I said, "I'd be real proud of that.  I thought that was really good."  And, "Congratulations" and "Keep workin' on them there LP's," ya know.  It couldn't have been more than a few days when he called me up and asked, "Would you like to come up and cut some records?"  And I said, "Sure.  We'll do as we would a contractor."  And he said, "Yeah, that's what I mean."  So I went up there, maybe every other weekend or once a month, something like that, for a while.  I went up there and cut a bunch of LPs on the system which now had Nelson Pass's amplifiers in it, the Aleph 0's driving the Ortofon cutting head.  MoFi had taken out the Ortofon amplifiers and put in the Nelson Pass amplifiers.  This is a really good cutting system.  Cuts excellent LPs.  So, I did that for the better part of a year and it was really easy because all I really had to do from here was drive seven miles out to the Inyokern Airport and take a United Shuttle to L.A..  Then from L.A. to San Francisco.  And I could leave here at six and by quarter to ten I could be at MoFi.  Really, very fast, direct connections that way.  Either they would pick me up in San Francisco, or I could ride a bus up to Santa Rosa.  But the real cool thing was to take the United Shuttle plane to Santa Rosa and they would meet me there.  And they were just six or eight miles down the road from the Santa Rosa Airport, so that worked out real well, indeed.  Unfortunately, the weather often bombed-out that Santa Rosa flight.  That was when I was last cutting for Mobile Fidelity, and then they stopped doing LP's.  That's the last of the LPs for Herb until I can convince him to do an LP off of a digital original on this system here, and at less than real time.  [.675 speed = 33 cut at 22.5 RPM]

Dave:    There you go.  Are you listening, Herb?  We sure hope so.

Stan’s Days at AcousTech Mastering

Dave:    Stan, would you tell us about the work you did with AcousTech?

Stan:    Well, yes.  I was called to go help with the installation of this system and then cut some stuff for Chad Kassem [of Acoustic Sounds] on the system, which Chad bought from Dave Wilson.  It is a solid state system with the exception that the cutterhead is driven by Audio Research V140's.  Chad had all these new re-releases that he was doing, and so I cut quite a bunch of them on that list.  Amanda McBroom, two albums there, Junior Wells, Sonny Boy Williamson, two albums.  I really enjoyed Sonny Boy Williamson.

Dave:    Ditto.

Stan:    The one called Keep it to Ourselves.  Yeah, that was really neat.  I enjoyed that a whole lot.  Gene Ammons, saxophone player, two albums there.  That was really nice.  Jimmy Dee Lane; that’s an original recording.  Then, Otis Span, and there's others.  I wonder if we left that Acoustic Sounds Catalog outside.  (After retrieving it from the porch)  "Collect them all," it says.  "The Revival Series."  "A lacquer for each Analogue Productions 'Revival Series' was cut by Stan Ricker, using the state of the art Wilson Audio Custom Tube Mastering System recently acquired by AcousTech Mastering, a joint venture between Acoustic Sounds and Record Technology Inc.".  Seventeen albums here.  Sonny Boy Williamson, Otis Span, Albert King, Art Pepper, two or three of them, yeah.  Sidney Maiden.  Ah, now this one, The Alternate Blues.  Now this was a really bizarre thing.  This tape came shipped in a fourteen inch tape box.  So I told Chad, "I can't cut this because the Studer tape machine will only take twelve inch reels."  So I said, "You'd better take it down to Doug [Sax, that is]."  So he took it down to The Mastering Lab and Doug called me up and he said, "Hey, guess what?  That's on a twelve inch reel!"  I mean, I didn't even look in the box.  I mean, you talk about dumb.  I was dumb!   And Chad said, "Why didn't you look in the box?"  And I said, "I don't know.  I've never seen a box of X dimension with a smaller reel inside.  Just never ever come across it."  So it never occurred to me that anything like that would be.  So, anyway, that one, Clark Terry, Freddie Hubbard, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson... the Alternate Blues  there was cut by Doug at his Mastering Lab.  He did a hell of a job on it, too!

Dave:    Yeah, I really like that.  In fact, I brought that along.

Stan:    Oh, good.  You have?  Oh, good.  Well, we can hear it.

Dave:    Great recording.

Stan:    And then Sounds Unheard Of!, I really like that one.  That one was recorded dry, and I had to add echo to it.  That was my first experience with the Lexicon 300 as an echo machine.  It does right well for itself.  I diddled around with it to where... I wanted two kinds of echo.  It's just the way I conceived of it.  Like these guys playing on a nice big stage in an empty concert hall.  So, you have one set of acoustics which is the relatively rapid first reflection time, you see, of the stage environment, laterally and vertically.  But then you have a longer time period of the reverb that you'd hear out in the hall.  I know this from standing in front of a band or orchestra on a stage.  A perfect example of that is here at the China Lake Auditorium, which seats 1,100 people.  The acoustic on the stage is a nice live thing, but it's a whole world separate from out there in the hall where the people would be.  When you're conducting a group, when you're standing right on the edge of the stage, you're in that unique, in-between zone.  So you can hear what's happening in front of you, and you can hear what's happening, reverb wise, behind you.  And that was the way I perceived that album of these 2 guys up here making this magnificent music.  So, there's two sets of echoes on this record because the machine was capable of generating two entirely different sets of echo time concepts.  I didn't really know how it sounded until I played it back here on my system at home.  I've got to say I was really impressed with it.  Now, John Koenig, who oversaw that recording, and some of the others that were on the Contemporary label, he thought there was too much echo and he said, "Well, it doesn't sound like the original."  He's in a unique position to know because his dad, Lester Koenig, was the owner, founder and producer of Contemporary Records.  Sounds Unheard Of!, Shelly Manne and His Men, Curtis Counce, those albums for sure were ones that Mr. Koenig had to do with.  And John had grown up around his Dad's recording studio doing this stuff.  But, with all due respect to John, I really didn't want to make it sound like an EMT echo plate or anything like that because, as I told him, "I like doing reissues, and I think I do them well, but part of what reissues are all about is bringing out the best of yesterday's recordings with today's technology."  And I didn't feel I could just turn my back on the possibilities that the new reverberation devices offer; just making it sound like a couple of echo plates or dry rooms didn’t cut it for me at all.  But it's the kind of recording that also would be very interesting with no reverb added at all, because the raw tape is extremely dry.  You have only two persons on that recording.  You have Jack Marshall playing the guitar, and Shelly all around, with his whole battery of percussion instruments.  And it's a very interesting thing, just totally dry.  I would love to recut it on this system here in a totally dry mode.  That would be an absolutely phenomenal demonstration record of really good sounds of what the various percussion instruments really sound like, intelligently played.  I mean, Shelly doesn't just bash the crap out of all this stuff, you know.  He's somebody who plays very musically, very tastefully, and I'd love to get that tape back and redo it here.  I think of all these that I did in this revival series, Sounds Unheard Of! and Sonny Boy Williamson's Keep It To Ourselves, were the greatest records!

Dave:    Keep It To Ourselves  is my favorite blues recording.

Stan:    Mine, too, and I had the great pleasure of cutting all of these.

Dave:    I wanted to ask about the Miles Davis box set which you cut at 22.5 rpm, instead of doing it at half speed.  I know there was a reason for that choice.

Stan:    There were multiple reasons for that choice, as you will hear.  I enjoyed cutting on that system, especially in the beginning, just for the simple reason that it had been over twenty years since I had cut anything at real time.  And it was truly nice to sit there and dig the music.  That was nice.  But the system is low powered and it had a tendency to produce slew rate distortion on high frequency transients, which you can hear on Sounds Unheard Of!.  So, when the Miles tapes first came in, I listened to them and here's Miles’ trumpet with a Harmon mute in it.  I thought, "Oh wow, what trouble we're gonna have with this."  In order to cut it clean it would have to be cut at a very low level.

Dave:    The Harmon mute is famous for frying cutterheads, isn't it?

Stan:    Well, it's a real nasty thing to pass through any audio system.  If you want to check any aspect of an audio system, just play a trumpet with a Harmon mute near it.  The mute tends to subdue the fundamental, and all that's left out of the trumpet tone is the harmonics.  So when the guy plays this, he doesn't hear very much, so he instinctively blows harder.  So there's a lot of harmonics coming out of the horn.  It's kind of like, if you want to see how good a P.A. system really is, and you think you have it tweaked out just right, just take a set of your car keys and jangle them in front of the mic.  Listen to all the crunching, crashing distortion as it comes out the loudspeakers in the hall.  Then you get an idea of the impulse type of high frequency energy clusters, tone bursts, going through the system, that it just can't handle.  I knew there were at least  three reasons why we couldn't do Miles at half speed.  Number one was because the AcousTech system is transformer coupled; at the input of the console, the tape machine, the Studer output goes into a set of Dean Jensen transformers right at the input of the Neumann console.  So that would tend to make it less than acceptable, in terms of the bass response.  Just like the way the bass response was rolled off in the original JVC mastering console before we made it DC coupled.  There were other transformers in the system; the output transformers of the Audio Research amplifiers, as they connected to the Neumann cutterhead, and the transformers that coupled the feedback windings back to the input of the Audio Research amps. Anyway, we've covered two reasons why we couldn't do half speed at AcousTech.  A transformer in and a transformer out of the system.  So that was a real killer, in terms of bass.  Two other reasons, which were even more important, were that we didn't have half-speed NAB playback on the tape machine, and we didn't have half-speed RIAA record in the cutter system.  So I said, "Well, we're gonna have to make a decision here, because Chad really wants to do these things.  So, the only other option is somewhere between half speed and real time."  Well, twenty-two and a half is just about as half way between sixteen and two thirds and thirty-three and a third as you can get.  And it's a speed that's instantly available on almost every Neumann lathe because, although Gotham Audio and most mastering engineers wanted to poo-poo half speed mastering, just the fact, to me, that Neumann made the speed available, which was a half speed of forty-five, meant that Neumann engineers themselves saw validity in half speed mastering of difficult program material.  So I decided, "Well, let's try this half-way speed thing."  I think I started at seven in the morning by phone, with the help of Krieg Wunderlich from Mobile Fidelity.  He knew where the circuit was in the Studer tape machine motor servo control to change 15 ips to about 10.25, or whatever it was I figured out was needed.  So, I found the circuit and it took me a long time to find the mixture of resistors to tune the oscillator circuit down to the point where I had some plus and minus speed control on the pot that was in that circuit.  I got it just right, and it's really easy to do that.  It's the same way I did it in this system here.  All you have to do is take an alignment tape, or a test tone, 1,000 cycles, and record it on the lathe at real time.  You record about five or ten minutes worth of this stuff at thirty-three and a third.  Then you change the lathe to twenty-two and a half and you play the record you just cut, the lacquer, you play it back on the lathe with the tone arm that's on the lathe.  Now it's coming out at 0.675 of what frequency that you recorded it.  So you listen to that, you hook the lathe playback arm up through one channel of the loudspeaker, pick left or right; the other channel, you listen to your tape playback on.  You just zero-beat tune the damn thing.  It's just like tuning a piano or guitar.  You tune the speed of the tape machine down till it's zero-beat against the signal in the other channel; you can see it on the scope when it finally stabilizes and gets rock solid.  That's all it takes.  So, it took, as I say, from seven in the morning to two thirty in the afternoon for me to get the speed right.  After that, it took all of half an hour for me to work out what EQ I had to put into the Sontec equalizers in order to get a musical product out the other end.  I just used the same process that I used at JVC and MoFi.  First, I’d cut a flat, that is, no EQ, a flat transfer of one or more of the pieces, parts of it, where the trumpet was, the piano, the bass was and the sax, so I could listen to the balance and I'd say, "Okay, the top end needs a little more.  (Cupping his mouth) The trumpet sounds a little muffled, (takes his hand away) and the bass is real weak."  Now what do I have to do to fix that?  I'd think, "Okay, I need this, this and this," if it were real time.  But, because I'm changing it by the ratio of .675 to one, now I have to transpose these frequencies in my head.  This is where the sense of perfect pitch comes into play, along with knowing what frequencies are involved with what keys.  So you apply the transposed frequencies to the Sontec equalizer, which has many, many frequencies close together, and then just fine-tune it until, when you made a cut at twenty-two and a half and played it back at thirty-three, number one, the musical balance sounded correct, number two, the recording level was up to snuff.  So, at twenty-two and a half with that system you could get a lot more power onto the records.  Those records are recorded equal to, or hotter than normal because the two- thirds speed process allowed me to get more power [3 dB] on the record before the cutter system started to go into any kind of distortion at all.  And you want as much level as you can get, consistent with not clipping, or not distorting.  You always want to try to keep your signal up on a disk to get the best signal-to-noise ratio.  That way, when people play those records, the music comes out loud and the background appears to be very quiet.  These are some of the reasons why it was done at twenty-two and a half.  Sonically, musically, it took me half an hour to figure out what sounds I wanted.  But it took me from seven in the morning till two thirty in the afternoon to figure out how get the speed thing accurate.

Dave:    So the half speed didn't have enough bass, and the real time just didn't sound good enough.

Stan:    The real time was just loaded with distortion at the top end of the trumpet spectrum.  We made a test pressing of what the system would do at real time versus what it would do at the two thirds speed.  There was like, very little, if any comparison.  The real time thing had a little bit more, as Chad put it, "air at the top."  But how much "air" is there in a mono recording?  The point is that the cymbals and the brushes were just a little bit brighter on the real time cutting.  I could have put in some more at the top end of the spectrum with the Sontec.  But the trumpet sounded so damn good the way it was.  And the trumpet was the main reason we were doin' this album.  So, I said, "Well, at the risk of not having as much extended top end, I'd just like to concentrate on the accuracy of the trumpet and the sax, and the bass was rich and full.  I just want to leave a quite excellent thing alone”.

Dave:    I would imagine that these are the best of the releases of these Miles LPs that have ever come out.  You've got the originals, you've got the OJCs, what else have you got?  I don't think you've got anything else.

Stan:    A lot of people have asked me, "Gee, how'd the engineers handle it when they originally cut this stuff?"  Well, they used high frequency limiters, they used overall limiters, and they used filters.  Knock down the top end.  Knock down the bottom end.  Furthermore, these records were cut before the RIAA EQ was adopted, so the hi-freq pre-emphasis wasn’t so severe.  It was a fairly forgone conclusion in those days that you can't put a lot of that stuff on the record, unless you put it on at a real low level.  Now, a good example of a real low level, which I have here, is the previously-mentioned Columbia recording of Les Elgart's band, which pretends to be a location recording [Les Elgart On Tour; CS 8103].  It's got applause and night-club type sounds mixed in.  And the band really sounds great and this thing sounds no more like the typical Columbia recording than anything you ever heard.  But that’s the sound that was possible with a Scully- Westrex system when you didn't use any limiters in it and kept the level down so that you didn't get any of those DC offsets, power supply thumps that occurred which caused cutterheads and power amps to have all those low- frequency thumping noises.  You listen to it and you say, "God, I wish all of the Columbia recordings could be that nice."  It's a low program level.  You can tell because there's like six cuts per side and it still finishes at 6 3/8  inches on one side, and 7 inches on the other, you know.  That's totally non-standard Columbia operations.  You could get a recording of this kind of quality at real time, but you have to keep the level down.  You can't just keep saying, "I want it hotter, I want it hotter."

Dave:    I should ask why you parted ways with AcousTech.

Stan:    Well, we didn't really part ways.  I was just hired as a contractor.  I was not an employee.  I was really getting tired of driving the 400 mile round trip every other weekend.  I was also getting tired of the problems we were having with the other work we were doing besides the good guy [audiophile] stuff for Chad.  People would send in dance tapes on digital format and the bottom end just wasn't solid.  It was just kind of loose and flabby.  And some of these people would call up and say, "Well, have you listened to the tape?  Does the record sound like the tape?"  Well, the record sounded a whole lot like the tape.  It turned out that part of the problem was that we weren't recovering the digital information all that well.  There were an awful lot of recuts and I know that Don [McInnis], of course, was justified in wanting to make money on this system and between paying me a good rate of pay and putting me up in a hotel on the weekends, things like that, and all these damn recuts that we were having to do because of customer dissatisfaction with the product, it was frustrating to the max to all.  And I know it had to be frustrating to him because it was just money going out and he wasn't seeing a profit or happy customers, either.  I guess this is what happened because, looking back on it, we never really talked about it, it's just that one day Kevin Gray started cutting there, I wasn't invited back, and that was the end of it.  In fact, when I went to work there one day, the only reason I knew something was happening was that I could tell that somebody had diddled with the lathe.  It was like, "What the f--- is goin' on?  Who was messing with the lathe?"  Some little bird told me, "Kevin Gray was in here yesterday cuttin' on the machine."  Then he said, "I don't know what's goin' on."  Don never talked to me about this.  He just didn't call me any more to come back and do any more work for him.

Now, I don't know if he discussed this with Chad, or if this was just strictly a decision that he made by himself.  I know that Chad still seems to think highly of me, which is nice.  But I don't like the feeling that there's some kind of a bad feeling between Don and me.  I feel really badly about that because if you don't communicate about what has happened then it's bad news all around.  I had talked to Don about the possibility of getting another set of solid state amplifiers for doing these dance records with the kick drums in them, etc.  We talked about that quite a bit, and just using the tube amplifiers for Chad's work, or when some other customer might want a tube amplifier to drive the cutterhead.  I thought it would be a nice option to be able to go either way, especially if you can enhance the product either way.  To my mind, you don't want to compromise the product.  Some folks would or wouldn't care, or couldn't hear the difference.

So, I didn't leave because I wanted to, that's for sure.  I would like nothing better than to have a long-term continuous working relationship with RTI because before Don McInnes bought the company from Bill Bauer, in fact, even before Don worked for Bill Bauer, I had helped Bill over the years with many aspects of that record pressing plant.  For instance, how to get rid of the orange peel on the pressings without using spray glue between the back of the stampers and the record dies.  We experimented with it a lot and came up with a 0.003 - 0.005 mil mylar sheet that goes between the back of the stampers and the die face.  It takes a little longer to press the records because, with the heat transfer and then the cooling water transfer, you're going through a barrier both ways with the mylar.  So, the heat transfer to and from the vinyl is slower than it would be if you just placed the stamper on the metal die, you see.  But we worked out things like that and what are really the RIAA standards for phonograph records and that kind of thing.  There was a time when RTI was pressing those Armed Forces records after Keysor-Century lost the government contract.  I had helped them a lot in getting the standardized weights and things like that for the records, because the more the records weighed, the more they cost to manufacture and ship.  It was a trade-off between too skinny a record and too fat a record which cost more all around.  I've been a staunch believer, supporter and advocate of Record Technology ever since they opened some 25 years ago and I really would like to continue that.  I know, without a doubt, they're the best record pressing plant in the United States. Even today, without hesitation, when asked about the highest quality pressings in the States, I ALWAYS toot the horn loudly for RTI.  There may be some excellent pressing plants in Germany or elsewhere in Europe, but I don't think there’s any place anywhere  that’s the equal of RTI!

So, I can't think of anything I'd be more happy doing than having a long-time, good working relationship with RTI.  Right now it doesn't exist, but I wish to hell it did.

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