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

Dave:    I know that fairly recently you were asked by Stereophile  to do some mastering for them, specifically on their Sonata  LP.  How did that come about?

Stan:    I think it came about because Chad called them up and made a deal that no one could refuse, although it was certainly a highly logical place to do a piano recording.  It's a very random phase recording.  If Bernie had cut it I think that he might've cut it hotter than I did.  But it was right on the verge of tracking-problem breakup at the level we cut it.  There's so much vertical in that recording, in fact, it is totally random-phase.  I have to admit that the tape which was, I believe, 96 K, 20-bit from a Nagra certainly sounds better than the CD that came from that recording.  I asked for a CD so that I could listen to it and get to know the music better.  That way I'd know what I was going to do with the lathe.  The CD didn't impress me a bit, but the original tape was quite good, indeed (the music-making was really excellent).  We transferred it from the Nagra through a Mark Levinson pre-amp to get enough gain to suit the input needs of the Neumann SP272 mastering console.  I don't recall where the D-A conversion was done.  I guess you'd have to read the info on the record jacket; probably it's done inside the Nagra.  The Nagra just had XLR outputs, as I recall, so it had to have been analog out of there.  It looked funny because the Nagra had five inch reels of what just looked like quarter inch audio tape on it.  But the tape wrapped around a large helical-scanning rotary drum.  The tape moves at about seven and a half inches per second.  Reminds me of an old Ampex PR-10!  But the music that came out of that system sounded quite good.

Stan Ricker Mastering

Dave:    Stan, you now have your own mastering facility here in Ridgecrest.  Can you tell us a little bit about what equipment you have set up here at Stan Ricker Mastering, and where it came from, and so on?  You're located here at Ridgecrest because you work at China Lake...

Stan:    China Lake Naval Weapons Station, or as they call it nowadays, China Lake Naval Air Warfare Center, Weapons Division.  Big, long gobbledy gook of a name which we abbreviate as NAWC - Naval Air Warfare Center.

Dave:    And you're the lead buyer for the Telemetry Department.

Stan:    Yes.  And its an interesting and mighty fine group of people to work with, and they're smart.  Most of 'em have Master's Degrees in Electrical or Mechanical Engineering and a lot of practical know-how, too.

Now, back to this magnificent mastering machine, which started life as a Neumann VMS 66.  My first knowledge of this machine, this lathe itself, was when Bruce Leek was mastering on it at IAM, cutting a bunch of stuff for Telarc on it.  He cut a lot of other stuff on it also.  At that time the cutterhead was being powered by Crest amplifiers.  And then when IAM, which was International Automated Media, went out of business, this lathe system was sold to Keysor-Century Corporation.  They used it for a while cutting Armed Forces Radio Shows and then Tam Henderson of Reference Recordings, Keith O. Johnson and I went to Keysor-Century and looked it over, as Tam was interested in acquiring a cutting system.  Tam wanted my opinion of whether this would be a usable device for his products.  And I said, "Yeah, if we can redo the cutting amplifier rack."  So Keith did.  He tried to work with the Neumann VG-66 stuff but it just turned out that, in his words, he said, "This thing is intolerable.  We're going to have to start from scratch."  And so he did.  Keith eventually came up with that chassis. It's a line driver stage as well as feedback circuitry.  It has cutter drive level.  It has low/mid EQ: one dB per step.  This control is where it transitions from constant velocity to constant amplitude [4 choices of turnover frequency].  And then this control is high frequency peaking or attenuation at 12 kilohertz.  It's in half dB steps, and there's EQ calibrate for those high frequency peaks.  And this is the RIAA switching, on or off for testing.  And this is the amount of feedback that's required to make the cutterhead as linear, frequency wise, as possible, and it turns out to be 9 dB.  These two controls here are feedback monitor level.  There's two sets of coils in the cutterhead here on the lathe.  There's the coils you drive to produce the music, and there's a secondary set of coils [feedback coils] which send the corrective signal back, out of polarity, into the front-end of the Spectral drive amplifiers , to correct for non-linearities in the cutter system. This is the heart of the “servo-ing” of the cutterhead behavior, especially in the low end.  This feedback circuitry is totally transformerless, unlike all other systems that are advertised as being “transformerless”.  The signal is tapped off the feedback circuit so you can listen to the cutter, to know that all is well.  All that the Neumann VG-66 stuff in the rack does now is contain the temperature-sensing circuitry that disconnects the cutter if it gets too hot.  So, this new electronics package is very, very carefully built of all high quality components.  As you can see, it's totally a one-off, hand wired, hand designed, hand built unit by Keith.  The output of this drives, through George Cardas Cables, those two Spectral amplifiers down there at the bottom,  which are mono-block design.  They have a bandwidth of something like DC to light!  They actually have a power bandwidth of DC to 1.8 megahertz,-3 dB.  Slew rate is

1,000 volts/ microsecond.  They're very, very fast amplifiers.

Dave:    Fast in terms of slew rate?

Stan:    Yeah, yeah.  Fast and clean.  And they have very low source impedance so they handle the cutterhead very well.  The cutterhead drive coils which, as I recall, are 4.6 ohms.  This amplifier package handles them quite well.

Nowadays, it's the worst of both worlds because so many of the contemporary masters are submitted to me either as a CD or a DAT.  The DAT may be a 44.1 or it may be a 48K.  When a client calls me up to ask my preference, I say, if you can make the DAT at 48K, so much the better.  It never hurts.  Every little bit of resolution enhancement is useful.  Taking that format and putting it on the disk at most cutting facilities makes all us mastering guys really worried about frying the cutterheads because the heads aren't made anymore.  It costs anywhere between $6 - 8K to send one to Germany to have it repaired, plus you're off the air for that amount of time if you don't have a backup.  There's a backup cutterhead here but it's not an SX 74.  It's an SX 68, which has not the power, not the magnet strength, not the transient response, and not the frequency response of the SX 74.

Most disk mastering people will put in filters and limiters and whatever else they may have, because it only takes just a little bit, one little bit too much of the high end - too high and too loud, too much heat - to fry the cutterhead.  Most of the cutterhead safety circuits in the amplifiers aren't all that fast.  When Keith built this system, it was built as a dedicated half speed system.  What I've done is modify it so it will cut at either 0.741 speed or 0.675.  And what that means is I cut a 33 1/3 rpm record at 22 1/2, and I cut a 45 rpm record at 33 1/3.  And that's done by means of this Alesis XT digital piece of gear which is an eight-track variable speed recorder whose basic format is 50.1 kilohertz sampling, and it's a 20 bit machine.  So I take whatever is given me and transfer it to that machine, and it's a variable speed machine so I can slow it down the required amount.

If you record at the fastest speed, and then drop it down to its slowest speed when you play it back, it'll drop it what we call a major third in music.  It will drop it from A major, say down to F major.  Or it'll drop it from C major down to A flat major.  But when you're going to go for an LP, you need to go down to 22 1/2.  The reason that speed's chosen on the lathe is obviously that it's half of 45 rpm, and it's a speed which has existed for years on many lathes.  For example, that's a spare lathe over there that we got from Tam [Henderson] in the deal, an old AM 32.  And it has half speed 45, and it has half speed 33 in addition to the regular two speeds, plus it also has 78 rpm like this lathe does.  So they both have five speed capabilities.  And so, if you want to drop something down far enough so that you can record it at 22 1/2 rpm, it has to go down a musical fifth.  It has to go down from A to D.  Or it has to go from the key of C down to the key of F.  Well, where we're starting is it goes from the key of C down to A flat, and then you have to play it back in the key of A flat onto the DAT at 48K, and then transfer from the DAT back to the Alesis ADAT machine, running at its fastest speed again so that you can drop it down from A flat down to F major.  This discussion is presupposing you know a little bit about music.       

Dave:    Yeah.  Your musical background is showing through here.

Stan:    Yeah, yeah. It’s a rather cumbersome way to do things, but the results speak clean and clear.  Part and parcel of my whole reason for all of this is that it serves the needs of the music really well.  My background is such that I've been involved in music really since I was ten years old, and I turned sixty two last week, so I think it's fair to say that this endeavor, this mission, is my product.  I had a stroke in '92 and God gave me another chance and I feel firmly that was 'cause He said, "Hey, you're supposed to be makin' some more music out there.  Get with it, ding bat!." I think this is part of that extended endeavor.  The goal here is to take a digital original, and it may not be an especially good digital original,  but the goal is to make the best damn phonograph record possible out of it, and not just for people who have a VPI TNT turntable!

These records are what I'm cutting now, and they are being played by DJ's who synchronize them.  They play maybe three or four turntables together and synchronize the chords and the beat on 'em.  And they, fsst, fsst, fsst, fsst, jiggle 'em back and forth.  They do their "scratching" on 'em and so forth and the record that they're working with has to be rugged.  It has to sound good, or they just won't come back.  And so, in an effort to get the clarity of sound, I have no high frequency compressors or limiters or filters.  To realize the purity of the system that Keith built into it, it is necessary that I cut at less than real time to get the most onto the lacquer that is possible and, at the same time, not threaten the cutterhead with extinction.

Dave:    Is this the first time you've had your own self contained business in your own space?

Stan:    Oh God, yes.  It's the first time I've had my own self contained mastering facility. 

Dave:    So, you can take both analog and digital sources here.

Stan:    Yeah, I can take any source.  I can take a live broadcast of a presidential speech or somebody saying, "Yesterday, on a day of infamy that will live forever...."

There is one pair of inputs and you can treat the signal the way you want to.  Then it goes to the summing amp which gives two lefts and two rights, and then through the digital delay device,  which feeds the cutter system. The digital delay is a Yamaha, Model 50k, 20 bit. The other pair at left and right feed the preview  So you could do that real time, plug the bass in and do it real time and we could get preview, if we wish.

Dave:    We were talking about that fact that you have perfect pitch and it could be both a blessing and a curse.

Stan:            Absolutely, when doing this variable speed stuff it's not exactly a perfect fit.  Like from C down to F.  C down to F is about six cents sharp and that's strictly based on the relationship between 33 1/3 and 22 1/2 and 45, you see.  Some people wonder, "Well, how do you divide 33 1/3, how do you deal with 33 1/3 and 22 1/2?"  Well, 33 1/3 is 33 2/6 and the other one is 22 3/6.  So if you do it long division wise, you can work it out with no repeating decimals.  You try to round it off and do it on a calculator, you just come out with a string of repeating crap that you don't wanna see.  But, yeah, the perfect pitch thing can be a blessing or a curse in a way.  By the way, the interval between two adjacent musical pitches, such as C and C#, is divided into 100 equal parts, called "cents".  As one can see, a tone 6 cents sharp is also 6% sharp as well.

There's 3 strobes on the rim of the turntable-flywheel.  Now one of the neat things about this Panasonic SP-02 quartz- lock, five speed motor is you can vary each speed plus or minus 9.9%.  So, no 78's are recorded at 78.  Some are eighty, some are eighty-two, most are 78.26 rpm.  These kinds of things are important if you're transcribing early so- called 78's.  You want to be accurate to the pitch standard because prior to 1935, International A wasn't 440 vibrations per second,  it was 435.  On a piano, that’s the "A" 6 white keys higher than "Middle C"  So, if you want to do a really good transcription from 78s, then you must have a quartz lock  variable-speed table that'll do it.

Dave:    Stan, can you tell us a little bit about the console here and the oscilloscope?

Stan:    This console is also like the amplifier over there that Keith built.  It is entirely home made, hand made, and runs off of two separate power supplies.  The monitor circuit and the preview circuit run off of one power supply, and the program circuit, that is, the amplifier circuitry that handles the signal to the cutterhead, is on its own power supply, and it will go to +40 before it clips.  So, lookin' down in here [inside the console, with the top cover removed] it appears like there's not a lotta stuff in here but there's everything it needs to be absolutely exquisite and very transparent.  This is the meter board, and these are the driver amplifiers for the meters.  This is the program amplifier here and these are the preview and monitoring amplifiers here.

Keith built this when he and Tam and I were doing mastering on this lathe for Reference Recordings.  This was built somewhere between six and ten years ago.  He had to learn about the really intricate details of cutterheads and how flaky they really are, compared with microphone diaphragms, and even loudspeakers.  Cutterheads are really bizarre, and their resonant frequencies tend to drift.  Well, so do speakers.  But you know, you look in there and a non-circuit person, like me, would say, "Well, it doesn't look like there's an awful lot there”.  But on the other hand, I know that there's everything there that had to be there, because it sounds magnificent. Just absolutely gorgeous.  Those LPs that you've heard of Reference Recordings, I think especially of the Pomp and Pipes, geez, ya know, and I didn't get to cut that!  Paul Stubblebine cut that on this system.

It's important to note that when Keith built it, this was only part of the system, because the whole system incorporated his one- of- a -kind analog tape machine as well. The characteristics of the cutter amplifiers and all that were chosen to complement the output characteristics of his tape machine, because Keith is a very astute total-systems  type of person.

His tape machine uses very little record equalization and therefore very little playback equalization, so the group delay characteristics  are very, very good.  And this cutting system was designed to preserve the signal integrity all the way to the cutter stylus.  So, I had no idea what the output power of the main system was until I called Keith.  I moved this equipment down to Ridgecrest around the 16th of June.  Some time after that I called him and asked what the max output level was.  He said, "?????, plus 40 dB in the main driver amps before it craps out."  And I thought, "Boy, that's got balls !"  As I say, it's got its own stand-alone power supply.  There's two power supplies in that box, just for the console.  One power supply does the monitoring and the preview.  They're critical but they're ... critical is none too strong a word to use for them compared to the signal purity that you have to have for the main, what we call the program signal. That's where you've gotta have purity to the max.  All the stuff, for instance, in the Spectral amplifiers that make them famous for their absolute clarity is the same circuitry that's built into this console and is built into that driver amp and feedback device up there. 

Dave:    What are these tanks of compressed gas?

Stan:    One is dry nitrogen for blowing dust and stuff off the lacquer before I cut anything.  And the other one is helium for cooling the cutterhead.  There are small channels inside the magnet structure.  You push the helium in and that helps to carry the heat out.  That's a really important part of the cutterhead design, so you don't want to operate the cutterhead without it.

Dave:    So your business now basically consists of taking digital masters and mastering those onto LP.  I see a source for analog as well.

Stan:    The big Scully 270 logging transport...  This machine does take, as you see, fourteen inch reels.  This happens to be a half inch two track that's on here right now.  These amplifiers are a couple of the old original JVC amplifiers I worked from years ago when we first started doing the Mobile Fidelity stuff.  Those early things are recorded through these amplifiers.  They're okay, but they're nothing outstanding, and I'd really like to get some outstanding playback amplifiers before I start inviting audiophile-type people over here.  There are cases of records which are high on a lot of collectors' lists which were recorded on less than what you'd call state of the art or top notch stuff and I think most of the time it has also to do with the skill of the user, in terms of getting the utmost out of the piece of equipment that he's using.

Now, what's interesting about the way this cutting system is set up is that I could do direct to disk with preview because one of the integral parts of it is this digital delay unit which is 50 kilohertz, 20 bit sampling made by Yamaha.  It has adjustable delay, in stereo, of up to 5 secs, adjustable to the 100th of a millisecond.  The lathe requires a 1200 millisecond delay for doing a 45 cut at 33. This is in addition to the delay built into the Compudisk computer itself.  That's the 0.741 speed thing I was talking about.  The 33 done at 22 1/2, that's 0.675 ratio, which requires a 1600 millisecond delay from the Yamaha.  So, the different ratios have different degrees of speed change on this Alesis machine.  And as it says here, on my cheat-sheet, if I want to cut a 33 1/3 at 22 1/2, I go to -180 cents.  That's the pitch-change designation.  I go to -16 cents if I want to cut the 45 at 33.  You get to the point where you get the timing just right and then figure out what it is and lock it in the memory. It take 1900 milliseconds to do 16 2/3 half-speed mastering of a 33 1/3 disk.

Dave:    We heard some quite amazing playback today, direct from your lathe.  The lathe has to be totally isolated from the rest of the world, right? 

Stan:    Around here, seismic events, such as earthquakes and sonic booms, are relatively common.  The Earth is always moving, but the most prevalent and troublesome kind is man-made ground vibrations such as traffic.  You know, on many of the old recordings, and many of the not-so-old recordings, that are made in New York or Boston or anywhere with a subway system, you can hear those noises.  The recording engineers often had to stop the recordings and start later and splice all these takes together.  And you hear the subway starting up and then, Whoop, it just disappeared, man!  Ya know, when I was a kid I used to wonder, "How’d they do that?" ...until I found out about analog tape and razor blades...

Stan Blows a Gasket, er, Cutterhead

Dave:    The most delicate piece of equipment in the whole operation is the cutterhead.

Stan:    Yes.  And the main reason for the cutterhead being at risk is the high frequency boost of the RIAA equalization.  I've said it many times, and I know people have heard it discussed many times, but they don't really consider how much treble boost there is on a phonograph record.  I mean, you're talking, just at 10K, the treble is up 13 3/4 dB, and the boost doesn't flat-top after that.  It just keeps on goin' up.  So if you get some client’s DAT with a some sweep oscillator or something like that, playing games on some of these digital recordings, and you've got "0" full scale output at 18 kilohertz, I mean, Snappo, there goes the cutterhead right then and there.  What can I say?  You're just off the air then.  It’s absolutely imperative to play all the program all the way through before cutting----no skipping around here and there.

Dave:    In the space business, That's what we call a "single point failure."  If your cutterhead goes and these two guys in Germany are no longer around, what the heck do you do?

Stan:    Well, yeah.  And when I first was setting this system up I had the SX 68 cutterhead on the lathe, with the Scully tape playback machine at the input-end of the system.  While I had it set up, one of those tape machine electronics decided to go noisy - static/static - and it fried one of the channels in that cutterhead.  So I was off the air with it, and then in calling around I talked to my friend, Richard Simpson, down in Hollywood.  He had an SX 68 cutterhead with the opposite channel fried.  So we got together and I'll show you what came out of it. 

I don't think this has been done here in the States.  I don't think anybody here in the States has had the courage; everybody's been scared of these cutterheads.  Nobody wanted to take 'em apart.  And so, when I fried the thing, I thought, "Well, okay, I might as well bite the bullet.  The thing's no good the way it is if it's got one channel dead."  So I thought, "Okay, well, I'm just gonna figure out how to take this damn thing apart."  So I sat and I really studied it for awhile.  I'd studied these things for many years, and then finally figured how to get it all apart.  These two entirely separate magnetic structures are bolted on a nonmagnetic frame.  This is a magnet structure, and there's two voice coil assemblies inside; a tiny feedback coil, and a much larger drive coil.  This silver colored metal frame is not magnetic.  So you unbolt this section here.  You loosen the back plate, and you take this part off the top, which comes off by screws after you take this plug off.  And you wind up with two entirely separate structures which have the coils inside.  Picture this.  Picture a funnel, okay, a funnel whose sides just expand a bit and then become parallel. I remember some old fashioned funnels which were used to change oil in engines, and the sides went up, like a coffee can welded on, or soldered on the end of the funnel, ya know.  That's what's inside here.  You have, in fact, a voice coil former that's shaped like a funnel.  So the sides flare out and then they go up and become parallel, like a spool of thread, with no thread wound upon it.  And on this parallel part was wound this wire which I unwound off the drive-coil former, and it is seven feet long.  And it appeared to be, when I measured it under the microscope, 5 thousandths, rectangular cross- section aluminum wire. This coil is the drive coil, the one which burns out or self-destructs from heat and vibration as it’s the one connected to the amplifier output terminals! 

Now, the “funnel” on which this wire is wrapped comes down to what we might call "the spout," the skinny end, but it's solid.  At this location is wound the feedback coil, operating in its own magnetic field supplied by this separate ring magnet. Then the push rods skinny down even more to these pieces of metal here which are smaller gauge than even the small wire of a paper clip.  The end of that armature has an “X” slot milled in it.  In the center where the two slots cross, is a milled out circular area.  You see that? 

Dave:    Yes.

Stan:    Okay.  Now, what happens is, those push rods from the two coil assemblies come up and they do this.  Each push-rod wire is bent exactly 90 degrees.  They come and they go in, and then they come back out, like that.  Each push rod comes out, and it looks like they're crossing on the end of that armature.  But in reality, they're not.  And the trick was how to get those off of there.  Well, it turns out that it’s epoxy resin that holds those push rods into that armature.  And I found that if I was patient and used methyl ethyl ketone [MEK], and just sat here and put one drop of MEK on the end of that armature, and then scraped it with a razor blade, I could get the old epoxy dissolved and removed.  And I was finally able to get all the epoxy out and then those push rod ends, those links, just popped right out of the armature.  And then I could get the whole magnet structures apart.  So I did this on this one of mine, serial 289, and I did the same thing on Richard's SX 68 and his model, let's see, this is serial no. 24.  It's a real early one.  But one channel was real good and the opposite channel was good on mine so we cross-multiplied the parts and I got 'em all back together, and mixed up a little bit of epoxy, got a real good mix on it, and just one tiny drop off the end of a toothpick was just what sat right on the end of that.  And this thing works great.

It works really great.  And I don't know of anybody who's had the courage in the States here, to take a Neumann cutterhead apart.  So I can repair it, if somebody has two burned out cutterheads where the opposite sides were burned out, as we had here.  As long as we have exactly the same model number, then I could do that.  If two different folks own each of the heads, then those guys are gonna have to resolve who the hell owns the functional cutter. That's a different story, but with that kind of repair I can fix 'em.

Dave:    Well that's awfully amazing.  So we're talkin' to the only man on this continent brave enough to repair . . .

Stan:    Or stupid enough to admit it! (Laughs)  Yeah, to take a Neumann cutterhead apart, and actually get it back together, so it worked.

Dave:            Something you also said you'd like to do is to try to take the Samarium Cobalt magnets off of the Neumann cutterhead and engineer some modern Neodymium magnets for those.  Sounds like an interesting task.

Stan:    Yeah.  Interesting and expensive, I presume.  Anything that's good like that is bound to be expensive- gettin' people tooled up to make that kinda stuff.  I have no idea what's involved.  I know magnet technology has improved big time over the years.  I mean if we're to stay with the small package like that cutter.  There's nothing that says that it has to be that small.  It's gotta stay in a package that will allow the parameters of the cutterhead suspension box to deal with it.  You can  mount a Westrex on that cutterhead suspension box, but it's quite a chore and it's not too satisfactory.  That’s what Keysor-Century had in the earlier stereo days.

I haven't seen Bernie's latest setup, so I don't know what he uses for a cutterhead suspension.  I know he has fully automated variable pitch and depth, of course, and I don't know how he achieves it with the Haeco cutterhead.  The Haecos, like the Westrexes, are very heavy and that poses a different set of problems, trying to do what we call here on this Neumann a "floating" cutterhead.  I mean, that cutterhead just floats over the lacquer, doesn’t touch the lacquer at all, except for the stylus.  The Westrex cutterhead had a small arm that came down with a jewel on the bottom of it, and the jewel rode on the disk, a few turns of the lacquer ahead of the stylus, and alongside the stylus.  Actually rode on the un-cut part of the disk.  It was called an Advance Ball.  And the weight of the cutterhead was mostly offset by a stout spring.  There was just enough downward force to allow this advance ball just to glide over the surface of the lacquer and you could set it up so that if you wanted to cut a three mil groove you adjusted the vernier threaded shaft on this advance ball and it raised and lowered the cutting head the required amount.  But it's very hard to get good variable depth using an advance ball system.  Used to have to run DC bias through the drive coils, push em down harder.  Not good.  Makes audio non-linear as hell!

Woofer Madness

Dave:            Your monitoring system here just sounds phenomenal.  It's awfully nice.

Stan:    Thank you very much.  Totally home made.  Notice that the mid range drivers and the treble drivers have absolutely no enclosures at all.

Dave:    The treble drivers are supported by these beautiful little wooden stools.  Those appear to be plastic milk crates?

Stan:    That is the bottom of a milk crate, cut in half, to which are bolted the black metal frames that support the 2 JBL O75 Ring Radiator Tweeters per side.  Wait 'till the hi-fi guys hear this. 075’S?  (Laughs)

Dave:            Uh Huh.  (Laughs)

Stan:    And, ya know, the hi-fi guys will say, "Oh God, he's listening to them?  No wonder it sounds so bad."  (Laughs) I'm convinced it's how you use the equipment.  And, in this room, to my ears, they sound good.

Dave:            They sure do.

Stan:    And everything about the crossovers, as I mentioned, is distributed.  There's no two elements near each other at all.  It's all just first order stuff.  Totally first order stuff.

Dave:    Here you have a nice, solid concrete floor, you've got six fifteen-inch cones I can see there.

Stan:    Yeah.  Six 15's, four 12's, the mid ranges are JBL Drivers [2445J] with a 4" titanium dome with a twenty-seven pound magnet structure.  You see, those drivers are designed to drive wide band theatre horns.  They're part of the driver system that's used in the THX driver loudspeaker system.  But [pinching his nose] most of the time I don't like horns, see.  They almost always sound like this [making a funnel with his hands at his mouth].  Now when we blow a horn (musical instrument), we say, "That sounds like a trumpet."  Or, "That sounds like a cornet."  Or, "That sounds like a trombone, but not just any kind of a trombone.  That's a skinny bore trombone with a small bell," or, "That's a bass trombone with an 11" bell or whatever."  In other words, the characteristic of the sound is flavored by the physical dimensions of the horn section.  And in an instrument we say, "Man, that's really neat.  Now, I want my sound to be this way, so I'm going to buy this kind of trombone."  We don't like the colorations of horns, most of the time, when we're dealing with loudspeakers.

I haven't heard Dr. Bruce Edgar's horns, but I really want to because I think that horns done right have a very high probability of sounding very good.  But I have not ever heard a horn loudspeaker system that I totally agree with.  These drivers in my system are all direct radiators and what I've done with the mid-range drivers is, you're lookin' at the ass end of them.  There's a die cast dust cover that bolts on this, and seals this up, and the output is from the other side, on which you bolt a horn that's about 4 1/2 - 5 feet long, and has a mouth about 5 feet square.  It's a huge-ass thing, you know.  The output end of this driver is stuffed with fiberglass to kill the cavity resonance that's inherent in the length of air from the diaphragm to the back end which is 6 - 7 inches of metal with a 2" bore in it.  So it's gonna sound like this, you know [pinching his nose].  So it's all stuffed with fiberglass.  Not stuffed real tight, stuffed loosely, so it's a lossy thing, you know.  And then you're looking at, what, in its design, originally, was the back side of this driver.  And I'm using that to do direct radiation into the room with the mid range.

Dave:            Speaking of horns, about three weeks ago I heard what might be the ultimate incarnation of Bruce Edgar's horn speakers.  I was up in New Hampshire at the home of Bill Gaw.  I was picked up at the airport and taken up there by Clark Johnsen.  I wish you could hear that because I think that really is horns done right.

Stan:    And are they wooden?

Dave:    Yes.  He's got 50 hertz straight horns for the woofers with enormous mouths.  I mean you could climb inside these woofers.

Stan:    The laws of physics say you have to have things that big for horns at the low end.  I mean, here we have a Sousaphone that, if I put the bell on, and then unwind it, it will extend 17 feet, and that to generate a fundamental of 27.5 cycles [low B-flat].  But it won't have any “woof” or fundamental to it.  It won't have any well defined sine wave type fundamental to it because the bore is too skinny, like a French horn.  That has seventeen feet of tubing also, but it's extremely small bore so you cannot realize the true fundamental of it because of the internal friction.  In organ pipes we call the comparison of the diameter to the length the “scale” of the pipe.  A larger scale is one that is obviously fatter in diameter, as compared to its length.  You know, you can have a whole bunch of eight foot pipes, you can have real skinny ones, you can have moderate ones, and you can have big round ones, you can even have square wooden pipes! They will all sound the same fundamental pitch, or frequency, but each will have differing tone.  So, the larger the scale, the more power, but it's more fundamental and less proportionate high frequency stuff.  So the choosing of the scale is the balance between the fundamental and the overtone structure.  And that's like building those trombones we were talking about.  Some are real skinny bore and they've got a small bell on the end.  There's an instrument from which the trombone sprang called the sackbutt, which is nothing but tubing and almost no bell at the end [3 inch].  And it sounds like one of those Spike Jones fart machines!  (Laughs)  It has almost no identifiable tonality at all. The bell is the acoustical transformer between the pressure at the driver end, which is your lips if you're a player, or which is the driver if you're a loudspeaker,  and the output of the horn into the surrounding acoustical environment.  The bell is the output transformer and the size of the transformer directly relates to how well the low frequency coupling will be.  So this Sousaphone has a bell diameter of about twenty-two inches.  So it just has a moderate low frequency output, and it's mostly harmonic “blat”.  And guess what this fiberglass tuba is designed for.  Marching on a football field.  So it just has blat, and the high frequency stuff is what carries outdoors.  It takes tremendous energy to generate true low frequency stuff outdoors.

Dave:    There are wires and alligator clips hanging all around.  Generally, a very low spouse acceptance factor, you would say.  (Laughs)

Stan:    Yeah, right, got some under there, where I wired into the console a low frequency combining network.  That's for, when you're doing especially loud records, like these DJ cuts we were talking about earlier.  You want to make sure you keep the bass in the middle [phantom center channel, in phase].  Sometimes the engineers of these DATs that they're sendin' me  don't have equal frequency response in the low end in both the channels.  So there'll be a phase shift or you'll get an elliptical display on the oscilloscope, or one side'll just be louder than the other side, in the low end only.  And so with the low frequency crossover you can combine the bass in the low frequency, and it's selectable frequency.  There's about seven or eight different frequencies you can choose for this to happen, which below that frequency, the left and right bass frequencies are combined, so the bass stays lateral so that it tracks better when they're playin' it back, and so it doesn't occupy as much space on the record, and so it presses better, makes a quieter pressing with less non-fill.  All the reasons for keeping the bass in the middle, primarily in a DJ arrangement so that they can get as much low end as possible by obviously driving both speaker systems in phase.

Until I started doin' this music, I was never involved with cutting records with anybody that wasn't really concerned about high quality.  These people are concerned about price.  They don't seem to be concerned about quality.  Or they haven't said anything about quality.  Well, they want the cheapest price and the best sound.  That's what they want.  Even so, I still send these lacquers to Gary Salstrom at Record Technology.  He does the plating on the jobs I've done so far and then sends the stampers to VFR - Visual Flight Rules.  Actually, Alan Noll is the owner of Vinyl Fidelity Records.  He called it VFR, but he's also a pilot, and he gets a kick out of that.  And everybody's been happy with the product and with the sound.  But most of the time I'm not aware that the clientele I'm dealing with are keenly aware of phonograph record quality.  Although I certainly imagine that they listen to the test pressings and if they sounded any different from what they recall, from their DAT, obviously they'd be concerned.  That's a major thing.  What you see here in this room is what you get and there's no EQ. 

Dave:    Stan, do you have concern about getting your lacquers out to RTI in a timely fashion?  Is all your plating done at RTI?

Stan:  Often, the client wants the lacquers to go to James G. Lee Record Processing in Gardena, Ca.  I don't have trouble with either destination because UPS and FedEx both have evening flights out of Inyokern, which is only nine miles away.  So if I specify the 10 o'clock thing early the next morning, they get the lacquers without fail.  So it's always in the coolest of the evening, you see.  Temperature is important.  Time is important too, but of the two, temperature is much more detrimental than time.

Future Plans

Dave:    Stan, is there anything you'd like to say about future plans for your business?  Future customers you'd like see come in?  Plans for advertising?  I know you're planning on putting your own Web page on the World Wide Web.

Stan:    "Send me a good tape.  I'll cut you the finest record possible from that tape."  I may have a good reputation with the audiophile people, but the audiophile people are few and far between, and they don't do many gigs.  You look at good mastering studios and they've got hundreds of thousands of dollars tied up in gear and facilities.  So, I'm hoping I can make a go of this.  I have felt for years that I could.  You have to get your products out there.  Word-of-mouth advertising is the best kind of advertising there is, but a great interview never hurts! 

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

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

At this point, Dave's half-speed recorder was shut off, and we broke out the Negra Modelo...

Stan would like to express his most heartfelt thanks to George Cardas for underwriting much of the equipment at Stan Ricker Mastering.  George has made it possible for Stan to continue doing the work that he loves.

[Meanwhile, the Iron Man is going to go take a rest...]