Johnson DeLonghi, On Why Sixties Music Sucked But MP3s Suck More

A friend of mine, who I'll call Johnson DeLonghi, has a recording studio build into the basement of his house. His years of study and experience have left him highly knowledgeable about many aspects of the music industry, and especially about the engineering side of creating recordings. Whenever there's something about the music industry that I don't understand I write him an email, and his replies are always an awesome read. This particular exchange was so enlightening that I thought I'd post it to the old bloggeroo (with his permission, of course).

First off, here's my email to him:

I think you've final gotten through to me. And I have a question. First, the background story.

So I'm doing up a load of dishes in the kitchen tonight. I usually put on music on the satellite when I do household chores, and lately it's been a lot of classical again.

Not being in the mood for baroque (gag) or chamber music (which I dearly love, but just didn't feel like ) I put on the masterworks channel, which showcases entire symphonies, tone poems, whatever. What's on? A symphony by Gorecki, who I don't know at all. Apparently he's Russian, because there was a soprano caterwauling in Russian along with the dirge. Not wanting to risk that this was the first movement of an hour or more of this stuff, I switched to the seventies flashback station that I also normally enjoy.

Well. At some point during the past few days a switch was thrown inside my brain. I think it was a combination of closely listening to your production values foiled against too much Lighthouse, but I'm really starting to despise pre-digital recordings. Half of the stuff I'm hearing tonight sounds just awful, and I know that a week ago it wouldn't have bothered me at all. I also remember that you've said you respect the Motown stuff but you can't listen to any of that era any more because of the shittiness of the recording quality.

So my question is this: what is it about the Eagles recordings that makes them sound so much better than their contemporaries? "Take It Easy" (recorded 1972) came on in the middle of all of this soppy, plunky bassed crap, and it sounds years and years ahead of it's time. What did they do, what did they know, that put them so far ahead of everyone else? (Joni's Court and Spark is equally good. Is there a connection?)

Maybe you disagree and you think the Eagles are garbage too. But to my newly unleashed listening powers they sound distinctly better.

I'm breathelessly waiting for your answer to this, so if it's too long and complicated to write down right away, be sure to send a short answer to provide an iota of relief. I mean, it is partially your fault after all.

Thanks in advance for your soothing pronouncements.

Please note: I don't really hate the Baroque period, but certain elements (continuo in particular) start to grate after a while. I readily admit that some of the music written by Bach and Vivaldi are as yet unequalled in beauty and complexity, and count among my favourite pieces.

Anyway, here's JD's reply*:

OK Marty, here we go. It's going to a long one, but you asked for it.

In the beginning, there were analog, reel-to-reel tape machines. The tape ran at slow speeds and didn't work very well. They were originally mono, and soon became two-track stereo, but generally had poor fidelity.

Very early on, engineers at places like RCA and Bell Labs learned how to build very excellent microphones, some of which are still the very best around today. Many had tubes inside them for amplification. Indeed, early chamber and jazz (and even pop) recordings consisted of one of these excellent microphones and a shitty analog tape deck.

As time went on, engineers learned that by increasing both the tape width and the tape transport speed, fidelity began to improve dramatically. At one point, the 4-track reel-to-reel tape deck (multitrack recording) was invented - either by Les Paul or Leo Fender, I can never remember which.

Very clever engineers began to experiment with "ping-ponging" (as you know) which was the process of recording a drum kit, say, on 4 tracks and then mixing the whole thing down to one track, leaving the remaining three for something else. And so on. Problem was, whatever was "ping-ponged" to the single track left the mix permanent and unalterable. Usually, it sucked.

In these days, there were no effects, no compressors and no sophisticated noise-reduction techniques. Every time you "ping-ponged" you would also transfer all the tape noise and distortion (x 4) to the single track. The result was usually awful.

I am told that some classic albums like Sgt. Peppers, Band On The Run, Smile, etc. were all done on 4 track decks, using ping-ponging. Well, these guys must have had sacks of cocaine and endless patience, because some of them turned out not badly at all. However, you can have the best mikes and performances in the world, but if your decks are shitty and your label has left you no budget, things are going to sound like crap. Those turds cannot be polished.

Enter Motown, early Stones, most of anything done at Sun or Delphi records, and you know what I mean. A classic example is "La Bamba", the Ritchie Valens version. As with most great vocalists of the day (especially doo-wop artists), their voices were so powerful that the shitty decks and great mikes couldn't handle the dynamic range and sound pressure levels they were recording. "la Bamba" is a great example, because not only can you hear the equipment self-destructing, there is also a biblical train-wreck by the band before the final verse that is beyond belief - clearly the label had no more dough to re-record it.

The frequency range of this equipment, at the time, was not much better than AM radio. And it sounds it. Therefore, I cannot listen to it. Plus, the distortion and noise levels are like nails on a blackboard for me. Sure, the songs were great, but I can't get past it.

At some point in time, the engineers started developing effects. Phil Spector is a good example of a pioneer in this field with the "Wall Of Sound". He use to shoot a lot of people and was a paranoid schizophrenic. Get this - do you know how they first invented reverb? It was called a "plate". Literally, they hung a giant piece of tin from the ceiling, perhaps 10 or 20 feet in length, oriented vertically. They placed a microphone at one end, while the vocalist sang his lungs out facing the piece of tin at the other end. The microphone picked up the reverberations carried along the tin, and that's how they did it.

Echo chambers? No, they didn't have 'em. On a reel-to-reel deck, there are three heads. One, the erase head, clears the tape in advance of the incoming signal. Next, the record head applies the signal to tape. Then, the monitor head plays back to the monitor what actually went on the tape, just microseconds later.

The way they used to achieve echo effects (Steely Dan included) was to pull the tape out of the deck, in a loop, at the point where it left the record head but before it reached the monitor head. Then, they would pull the tape out into an adjoining room, or wrap it around a lamp stand, or whatever, and let it run great distances around the studio until they got a satisfactory time delay before the recorded signal came back to the monitor (or playback) head. Again, massive amounts of cocaine had to be involved.

Finally, in our trilogy of shittiness, analog tape has a condition called "saturation", which can be very pleasant, or it can be like a root canal. Analog tape isn't restricted by the limitations of digital recording, in that, it's perfectly OK to exceed a 0 Db signal level when recording to tape. In fact, nothing sounds nicer to me than a nice, punchy snare drum recorded to analog tape with a bit of saturation. Nothing in the digital domain has ever approached that warm, fat sound. Digital guys have gone to their grave trying to replicate it, but it can't be done. The reason is, saturation is a physical process, not an electronic one.

Having said this, the downside of saturation is that, when it's too much, it causes distortion of the most heinous nature, even worse than the digital equivalent - clipping. The early vocalists and bands, without the advent of compression, almost always pushed saturation to it's breaking point, and for this reason also I can't listen to the old recordings.

This is why, if push came to shove, I contend that the most important tool in the studio is compression devices, for both analog and digital domains, and for very different reasons.

Fast forward to say, mid-1970's. Companies like Studer and Revox (and then, Studer-Revox) became very serious about manufacturing high-end analog tape systems, with big, fat 2-inch tapes, blazing tape speeds, and 16 or 24 tracks on a single reel. Engineers had begun to perfect electronic effects, compressors and microphones as well as having the luxury of doing away with the dreaded "ping-pong". Shit started to sound really good, especially if the label could spring for $250,000 decks and $1,000,000 Neve mixing boards. Noise reduction systems (such as Dolby and, even better, DBX), began eliminating tape hiss and distortion as well as increasing the headroom and dynamic range of analog tape to the point where the high end sparkled, and the bottom end was like waves of warm honey. I was there. I have thousands of albums that sound like my first blow-job felt. Eagles included.

Then, just when all was perfect, someone had to fuck it up. Analog recording (and vinyl distribution) had become an incredibly expensive process. Tape machines were finicky, unreliable and expensive. All vinyl records had to be hand-mastered by geniuses like Bob Ludwig to compensate for the fact that the dynamics of a concentric groove on vinyl alters drastically as the circles diminish in size towards the centre of the disk. These were true artists of the day, and they were obscenely compensated.

Enter the digital age, and the end of the world as I saw it. Spoken like a true dinosaur.

Mitsubishi came out with the X32 digital recorder, oh, I don't know, maybe the early 80's. I had the capability of recording music digitally in 16 bits. It was cascadable. If the artist wasn't happy with 32 tracks, fuck it - bolt on another X32 and give him 64 tracks to work with. It instantly became the rage obsoleting multitrack analog decks within days of its release. The only problem was that, although it was pristine and flawless, it also had the characteristic sterility of digital recordings (especially given the 16-bit dynamic range).

Sidebar - at some point I can go on a tear about dynamic range, anti-aliasing, Nyquist's theorem, sampling rates, quantizing noise and all the other stuff that makes digital music sound like shit. That's a weekend-long discussion sometime over tea and crumpets.

Carrying on: engineers came up with what was not a bad compromise - run the output of the X32 (digital) through some digital-to-analog converters, some 12AX7 tubes at unity gain, and mix down to 2-track analog decks! Cowabunga! It turned out that by running digital signals through tube amplifiers replaced all of the warm, lovely odd-harmonics that are lost in the digital recording process, and the analog tape with some sweet saturation sort of restored the sound. I have experimented with this and know it to be true.

This went on for a while, with great success. Quite possibly, the best sounding records of the late 70's and 80's were exclusively done this way. One problem though - the end result (to the consumer) was still these nasty, expensive, hand-tuned vinyl records. This would no longer do, cried the record companies.

Enter the Compact Disc. By eliminating the 2-track analog tape at mixdown (and going strictly digital), mastering (as it was then known) could be eliminated, and the music could be purchased on a little aluminum-spattered plastic disc and could be manufactured for less than 25 cents.

Yeah, it was pristine. It was noiseless. It didn't degrade over time or use. It was rugged. It had many great features. The only problem was, it sounded like shit.

Guys my age are in the worst possible situation because, although we can tolerate listening to CD's, we lament the analog days when music truly sounded great, plus MP3's are just not an option. Marty, you have to believe me, when you were raised on the recordings I was, MP3's sound absolutely awful. I can tell you precisely why, but that's another sidebar. So, on the bell curve of fidelity, we are nearing the bottom. Again. I am sad. I am going to to hug some of my records and have a good cry.

Pretty awesome, eh? And when he says he can talk all weekend about this topic, it's absolutely true. And he wouldn't repeat the same facts twice. And he'd pull out, oh, five hundred albums on a variety of media for comparison's sake to prove his points. I alway's enjoy a weekend's worth of tea and crumpets at JD's house.

*JD: if you're reading this, sorry it took so long to post.