You’ve literally got some coils inside – a bit like the little coil you have in a headphone speaker or something – that vibrate a stylus to etch the groove into the disc. In order to record that in the disc, you’ve got to have 10,000 vibrations per second cut into the disc, which is obviously quite stressful.
For example, if I was cutting a song with a tambourine in, you may have a 10 kHz component within that tambourine. So the longer you can spend carving that intricate groove, the more accurately it can be done. Records are a mechanical recording of the music: think of sound waves coming out of the speakers as a wavy groove on the disc, and that’s kind of what they are – it’s pretty crude technology. So they’re locked together, both of them running at the wrong speed – slowly, basically. It’s a vinyl cutting process whereby the disc-cutting lathe for an LP is run at half the speed – so for an album that would be 16 and two thirds, which is half of 33 and a third – and the master source is run at half the speed as well. For Live At Leeds, however, Showell had access to the highly praised mix by noted producer and engineer Jon Astley, courtesy of a high-resolution digital file that provides the best audio available of that album.īelow, Miles Showell discusses why half-speed mastering at Abbey Road Studios offers the finest listening experience available today…
Record it at different speeds series#
Without studio masters, the two live albums in the series have slightly different sources. Also still sounding like the 60s is James Brown’s Live At The Apollo, the best audio of which is a standard resolution audio file – the only format in which the concert exists. It still sounds like the 60s, but it is a lot cleaner and more open sounding than it was.” “I applied no digital limiting whatsoever to my new transfer as this is totally unnecessary for vinyl records and only serves to lower the audio fidelity,” Showell says, adding, “The result is a better-sounding record than was previously possible. Showell has removed these from the half-speed mastered Back To Black, cutting from “a vinyl specific newly re-mastered digital transfer made from the original studio mix files”. The original 2006 mix of the album, however, features a “Motown pastiche compression”, as Showell puts it, which resulted in some inherent distortion to the audio. Of course, Motown’s production style has influenced countless of musicians over the years, not least Amy Winehouse for Back To Black. The original master tape also played a part in providing the source audio for What’s Going On, as Showell cut the record from a high-resolution transfer made from the master tape in the US. The 2009 mix which features on Disc Two is sourced from the original digital master. “I did a vinyl specific transfer to high resolution digital applying only minimal EQ and absolutely no digital limiting,” he says, adding, “I used an ex-Olympic Studios AMPEX ATR-102 tape machine for this, which I have fitted with my own Flux Magnetics tape heads (this machine and head combination sounds fabulous and is pretty much as good as it gets).” The lacquers for this edition were cut at half speed from this new transfer. They join other illustrious albums, among them INXS’s Kick, ABBA The Album and seminal Brian Eno solo albums Here Come The Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Another Green Worldand Before And After Science, which now take their place alongside half-speed reissues of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black, The Who’s Live At Leeds, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells and James Brown’s Live At The Apollo Volume II.įor the original 1973 mix which features on Disc One of the deluxe edition Tubular Bells, Showell had access to the original ¼” Dolby A encoded analogue master tape.