Is the Audiophile Vinyl House of Cards Disintegrating?
I watched the In Groove guy interview of the engineers at MOFI a couple of times (in between the ridiculous amount of youtube ads) and a number of things struck me.
I forget that the vinyl renaissance thing has been going on for a dozen years – and that the perception of the value of both vinyl and the master tapes has evolved for the major labels and the heirloom (master tape) owners. Master tapes are extremely fragile, often needing to be baked to even be playable and even then are badly affected by wow and flutter, flaking, cuts et. A variety of digital processes have been developed to overcome these limitations – in particular the Plangent process. This approach that gets rid of hiss, ultrasonic noise, wow, flutter and various other remnants (clicks and pops on the tape from damage) and restores the master – in digital format – to something approaching it’s original form. Vinyl me please released an Errol Garner album a couple of years ago and promoted it as having been restored using Plangent Process (PP). The most recent Bruce Springsteen remasters (2014) have been remastered digitally using PP – and there is no doubt that these are the best sounding versions of the albums that have been released. The Doors, Grateful Dead, David Crosby etc. – lots of recent remasters have used PP. The point I make is that we are living in the period of “peak digital” – digital recordings, digital remasters, digital bandwidth (whether PCM or DSF) are better than ever before and, now that the loudness war is over, this has translated to better sounding CDs and HiRes products (although- in my view the recording quality has fallen off a cliff since artists abandoned high end studios). So, I can see the point that the MOFI engineers made about their DSD transfers of the original master tapes (OMT).
I have great fondness of SACD and DSD (now that we can rip our SACDs) but there are caveats: DSD is great for tape archiving and playback not for editing. Digital audiophiles routinely bemoan the following: a) recorded and edited in PCM and then converted to DSD – completely pointless; b) recorded or archived in DSD, converted to PCM for editing, and then converted back to DSD – an abomination. The labelling on SACDs is as bad if not worse than that on vinyl – we really don’t know what is on the disc and what the chain of custody has been. I realized while watching the video of the MOFI guys that their SACDs were exactly what we want: original master tapes with no compression or other fiddling copied onto DSD256 and then downgraded to DSD64 on the SACD. It is as close to a copy of the master tape that we are going to get in digital – and I think that will make the MOFI SACDs more valuable (to be honest I would prefer a DSD256 download). Unwilling to cough up €175 for the “Mingus Ah Um” one step, I stumped €40 for the SACD – and thought it sounded amazing. Turns out that they were the same product. So these SACDs, on the surface, look like winners. But……the engineers intimate that they do their own Plangent like adjustments to the digital file – to ensure that the levels are the same, to correct tape errors etc. and I wished that the interviewer had asked them what software they used and – horror of horrors – did they transcode to PCM to do this?
Getting back to those very valuable master tapes. It appears that t the major labels won’t let high caliber engineers even look at their master tapes – and when they have a license the technicians have to go to the tape vault area and make the transfers to tape or digital there and then. This makes me ask serious questions of the provenance of a lot of the AAA reissues: for example exactly what are Speakers Corner using for their reissues? We know that they are all analogue – but what generation? Are these German copies of the master tapes that have been copied or do they get the lacquers cut locally from the OMT in the USA. Sometimes a mastering engineer receives an attribution: for example the Dooby Brothers “The Captain and Me” was mastered by Kevin Gray. Miles Davis’ “Miles Smiles” was cut in Berlin by Maarten de Boer. What tapes did they use? The same goes for Vinyl Me Please, Pure Pleasure, Org, Impex and all of the other craft “audiophile” reissue companies. Certainly the current crop of Blue Note reissues are all analogue (we have seen the video). There are also videos of Bernie Grundman remastering the Contemporary records series for Analogue Productions. So we know that at least some of the stuff that is labelled AAA is kosher.
One company that bothers me, though, is the Electric Recording Company. As you are probably aware this is a super luxury craft vinyl reissue label – where only 300 copies of each album is pressed (i.e. a single set of stampers) and the price is £300/£350. All of their releases, that look spectacular, sell out immediately. They make a big deal about how much effort goes into the production of the records. They also state: “To achieve their scrupulous sonic ends, Electric’s engineers have worked directly from the precious original studio master tapes, maintaining a purist, simpatico approach at every stage” and “officially Sanctioned Heritage pressings mastered from the original analogue master tapes.” Curiously, one of their recent releases was “Portrait in Jazz” by Bill Evans: they have done a stereo and mono version. MOFI did a one step of the same album (I bought a copy and cannot honestly say with confidence that it sounds a whole lot better than the OJC version). We know that the one steps have been sourced from digital files – and we know that the Concord music group recordings are very careful to let their crown jewels out of their vaults (and the Bill Evans Riversides are very valuable masters). So, do we really believe that Concord allowed the original masters of “Portrait” to travel from their storage facility in California (I presume) to the UK to allow an artisan group make a single acetate from their tape? Maybe they do, maybe the ERC guys travel to California – but can I see the photographs and the videos as proof? If not what was the real source of this record? As I mentioned before, I bought a copy of “Way Out West” after getting a rush of blood following a refund on expensive concert tickets during lockdown. It sounds really good – but not magnitudes better than my 2009 OJC repress (which may be digital or analogue – difficult to know – but $350 cheaper). Is the ERC version derived from the OMT or a tape copy or other source?
Another issue that struck me in the MOFI engineers’ interview was a discussion about one of the Marvin Gay Reissues for which the engineers at MOFI felt that they could not produce a lacquer “Live” due to the complexities of the settings for each track. Hence the DSD version. As you recall, there was a bit of a furor about “Let’s Get it On’s 50th Anniversary Reissue” a couple of months ago: the European version was cut from digital, the US version was cut “direct to analog mastering by Kevin Gray” – what does this even mean* (there was also a MOFI one step which was cut from DSD)? There is no mention of the Original Master Tapes (OMTs) here. Is Kevin in such a privileged position that record companies (other than Blue Note) are willing to ship the original master tapes to his studio – or is he working off tape or digital copies of tapes? These guys are sworn to secrecy to not disclose their sources (like a doctor patient or lawyer client relationship). I suspect the former in this situation. But – who knows? The whole thing is now hocus pocus and there are audiophiles everywhere wondering if they have been sold “audiophile” CDs on vinyl in nice jackets for the past decade or so.
My advice is that if you want all analogue buy original pressings, or represses or Japanese reissues pre 1982. Pretty much everything since then was recorded digitally – so it makes very little difference. Modern audiophile reissues do not necessarily outperform originals or even represses.
*Under my desk, currently, there is a box of cassettes – many from the 1970s and 1980s. If I sent one of them to an engineer to cut a lacquer – that would be “direct to analog” mastering from an analog source.
I may have said this before – but I believe that the real audiophile boom for remasters was 30 years ago (1988-1994) when first generation masters were transferred to CD pre loudness war using modern equipment but no gimmicks. The high resolution follow up, and to a lesser degree the audiophile vinyl renaissance, has been a disappointment. Given a choice I would buy Pure Audio Blu Ray discs with a surround layer as new releases – yes in preference to vinyl. Unfortunately, that format is practically dead.
Alternatively the closest you will may get to the OMT is the volume balanced files that streaming services use (Apple famously demanded that record companies supplied files without dynamic range compression so that users wouldn’t have to keep adjusting the volume on their playlists).
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