Stan Ricker: Live and Unplugged
True Confessions of a Musical & Mastering Maven

Dave:    So Stan, here's the big question.  When did the light turn on for you?  When did you decide to become a mastering engineer?

Stan:    Well, I'd always loved it, loved seeing pictures of what George was doing with his specially modified [every good hi-fi piece of gear was “Specially Modified”] Scully Lathe and then meeting him and seeing that first Neumann computerized lathe, just drooling.  Oh God, I thought, I'd love to have one of those things.  But when it really hit me was when I went to work with my own franchise in Lawrence, Kansas, the Century franchise.  I used to go out and make what I think were pretty damn good basically amateur tapes of amateur bands, and I was using the three mic technique, three omnis in the same plane, same height.  And boy, when we'd have tape playbacks, they'd sound great.  But when you got the disk back they sounded just horrible.  I never really tied the two together until I was dealing especially with a recording of this organ (pointing to the RLDS organ) here.  And it had sounded so good on tape and the test pressing I got back from Keysor-Century was just phenomenally, for lack of a better word, ugly, or not satisfactory.  The cutter systems at Keysor-Century were Neumann lathes but they used the Westrex cutterheads with fixed depth.  Therefore, they used a low frequency combining network, usually referred to in the industry as a crossover, just almost permanently set around, well, the lowest I ever saw almost anybody set it was 250 cycles, which is middle C on the keyboard, and most of the time it was set at 500 cycles so that there was very little vertical modulation in the disk.  The vertical modulation is that part of the signal that's responsible for stereo, being phase and amplitude difference between the inboard groove wall and the outboard groove wall, which are, respectively the left channel and the the right channel.  So I got especially frustrated on this recording and I called up George Piros and talked to him and he said, "Hey, send me the tape.  I'll cut your disk."  So I did and he did, and, of course, I was just blown away, "My God, this sounds just like the real thing, ya know."  I had a good turntable.  I had this belt drive or string drive kludge of a turntable that worked very well.  And I had a Paul Weathers FM Capacitance Mono cartridge and I had a Paul Weathers strain gauge, his first strain gauge stereo cartridge.  They worked phenomenally well and really tracked well.  It was really neat to be able to play this lacquer back and feel, "Hey man, this thing's just like the tape."  Which is what you want.  You want the record to sound like the tape as much as possible.  So I sent it off to Century.  They played it and they were duly amazed.  And they could not cut the tape that way because of their fixed depth thing.  I think what they finally did was to send the tape down to Capitol Records and get it cut there.  Then we finally got a decent recording of it.  Then I was in contact with Keysor-Century so much about the quality, or lack of quality, of the recorded sound, between this compressed sound, which was musically unrewarding, and warped records and records with ticks and pops in 'em, and things like this.  I'd just call up and bitch and moan about all this stuff, and they weren't unreceptive.  They didn't say, "Well, what the hell ya want for the price you're paying?"  They never said that.  They sounded generally concerned.  They just really didn't seem to know what to do.  The upshot of it was that they had a QC position open up because the lady who had been the QC person had died.  And Keysor had the government contract for Armed Forces Radio and Television Service worldwide distribution of radio programs on phonograph records.  And they had to be done every week.  And you had to get these things recorded, pressed, put in sleeves and shipped out.  Every week they went to Korea and all these places.  Remember that movie with Robin Williams, what is it, Good Morning, Vietnam, or something?  He's playin' this damned A-farts stuff, that's what we used to call it.    A F R T S.  That's Armed Forces Radio and Television Service records that we made at Keysor-Century.  They needed somebody in the QC supervisor slot to fulfill their contract obligations, so they offered me a job at about four times the salary I was making recording with Gerry and trying to run my own little thingie in Lawrence, Kansas.  And I said, "Oh yes, oh gee, how long do I have to make up my mind, like can I make it up now?  (Laughs)  When's the next bus, ya know?"

Dave:    Plus you got to move from Kansas to California.  This was in Saugus, right?

Stan:    Yeah.  I drove from Lawrence, Kansas, and I remember filling up at the gas station.  I had a '61 Chevy with a 348 stick overdrive.  That's another car that had been automatic and I converted it to stick overdrive and drove out to California in June or July of 1969, to go to work for Keysor-Century Corporation.  The job as QC there was really quite something.  That was a University of Hands-On Experience because you had a recording department, you had electroplating, matrix stampers, mothers, all that kinda stuff.  You had a print shop which printed album covers, fabricated jackets.  You had mastering and record processing, as they call it.  And just in record processing alone there's like fifty-four steps, any one of which can just sabotage the whole process, sabotage the final product.  So you have record pressing, and the print shop as I mentioned, with printing labels and album slicks on 4-color Heidelburg presses, drying labels, making sure you get paper that's heavy enough that it doesn't split when you're pressing the record.  Ninety pound chrome coat paper works real well.  I learned that from Doug Sax when we first pressed the first Lincoln Mayorga and Distinguished Colleagues.  I was head of QC when we did his very first direct-to-disk, other than he had a limited production one with, I think, Jim Keltner, just doin' his drum set all by himself.  So the Quality Control procedures for label paper and the four color presses for album covers and back liners, fabricating jackets, shrink wrapping…..  I was the one who came up with the idea to not shrink-wrap those damn bags so tight because they pull up the corners of the albums and warp the pressings.  That's when we later got into, not so much at Keysor, but later on with other record companies, got into audiophile stuff.  That's when I said "Let's loose-bag it.  Don't put it through the heat tunnel at all."  Then you had record collating, how to handle the records without contaminating them with your fingers, the playing surface when you put 'em in the jackets.  Now RTI and everybody uses white gloves, but then they didn't.  They just got their fingers on them and hell, when the roach coach came along and everybody went out and bought a burrito, well, you got burritos on the records after the break, you see.  So, just workin' out things like that with people at a higher level of caring about what they did was important.

Dave:    I hope we're not scaring our readership too much with all this sordid detail.  (Laughs)

Stan:    They have a right to know! 

Dave:    That's true.

Stan:    It's what they don't know that can hurt them.  So one of the most interesting things about Keysor-Century is that they manufactured the vinyl.  They would constantly experiment with vinyl compounds.  Remember when we had quadraphonic records?  And we had SQ and QS and CD 4 and God knows what else.  See, all this was before I went to JVC.  Keysor came out with one vinyl that if they had been able to continue with it, they would have made a killing.  It was such high quality, glass hard stuff.  The model number was Q540 and it was introduced right around the time when the quadraphonic stuff was goin' big.  Man, it was hard.  It was like playin' a metal mother back.  Our audiophile friends ought to go to a record pressing plant like RTI sometime and let Gary play a metal mother for 'em.  Because then you have zero groove deformation when you play this thing back and you'd be surprised about the high frequency response of phonograph records.  It can really be quite good.

Dave:    I don't know if I want to run my Benz Micro through a metal mother!

Stan:    I remember one time at JVC,  I attempted to play a metal mother with a Denon moving magnet cartridge.  Denon's got one helluva magnet inside and that ole' cartridge just went Bammm, right down on this mother.  I didn't realize that nickel was magnetic!  Boy, I mean that cartridge just stuck to that mother really vigorously.

Dave:    Talk about a collapsed cantilever.  If you sent that back to Denon for repair they must have wondered what the hell happened to it.

Stan:    Yeah.  They probably thought, "Who ran over this?"  Yeah, that was quite a surprise, indeed, because it stalled the motor, the turntable motor.  Just locked the whole thing up.  Anyway, the experience at Keysor-Century was so very, very valuable.  There were so many things that were being done wrong, but in spite of that, they could, from time to time, produce a really good product.  When everybody focused their minds on what they were doing, I mean these pressings that we made for Doug on that Lincoln Mayorga and Distinguished Colleagues, well, you know, they're highly sought after now.

Dave:    So, did Doug cut that and then you plated and pressed it?

Stan:    No, we didn't plate it and press it.  We pressed it.  It was plated at James G. Lee Record Processing.  Those were the days when you could chrome plate stampers and that really gave a smooth surface to the record.  Nowadays you can't chrome plate stuff anymore because of the EPA.  Chrome plating is a really dirty, messy operation.  But the nickel is very porous and granular when you look at it under a microscope.  It looks like you're looking at a bowl full of Rice Chex or Wheat Chex.  They're very open like that, ya know.  And the chrome plating would fill in a lot of that so you look at the earliest of Doug's pressings that were made there with the chrome stampers.  I got to where I could look at a record and right off the bat know if it was pressed with a chrome stamper.  You could just tell with a glass smooth, shiny black surface.  The matrix facility at Keysor-at that time wasn't all that swift, although they got better as time went on.

Dave:    I'm surprised you don't have some custom made hub caps for your Ranchero made out of these things.  (laughs)

Stan:    Well, I didn't have the [1959] Ranchero then.

The interview continues in Part 2.