8/23/2023 0 Comments 33 rpm acetate master![]() “Then it’s just a purely mechanical job to cut it at half speed, which is pretty dreadful to listen to when you’re in the room. "Anything around it – any bright guitar or snare-drum hit or tambourine – is totally untouched, I’m just working on the vocal that’s going to cause a problem.” But in a way it’s good, because I can use a specific digital tool which will allow me to just find the ‘S’. So any vocal you think might cause distortion with your sharp, bright ‘S’ sound, I’ll have to pre-treat that. "Because you’re going so slow it shouldn’t have any sharp edges. They’re looking for two things: listening for a specific frequency band, which obviously is not there any more and also any acceleration, sudden fast transients it thinks are a bit sharp. I’ll go through and spend hours just checking things I have to de-ess before I cut at half speed because the limiters don’t work. ![]() 10 of the best vinyl subscription services.Six-to-eight weeks later I get test pressings back.” In this case, they got shipped off to the Optimal plant in Germany, probably one of the two very best plants in the world, so I was delighted when it went there. "From there it goes off to the client, and if they’re happy I’ll cut the masters. I’ll sit down and listen to it end-to-end on a domestic deck to make sure it sounds okay – there’s no point playing it on high-end turntable, or even on the lathe pickup, because it doesn’t represent the real world. So we insist that every client has an acetate. "When you’re doing a half-speed cut, you can’t hear what’s going down because it’s all slow and just sounds awful. "If you’re cutting everything at half speed, you’re playing the source at half speed and running the lathe at half speed, then the frequencies and the filter are in the wrong place: you need a special one to do half-speed cutting. I have a recently restored and customised Neumann lathe in the room, which is absolutely beautiful – the best I’ve used – and I have a customised RIAA amplifier and filter. “Once I was happy with the files, I started with the cuts. The only way you can fix that is digitally, and it’s next to invisible mending." One of these tapes had been played on a faulty machine that actually damaged it and left clicks all over it, so I went in and took out all the problems that had been created, which you couldn’t do cutting live from the tape. "The beauty of doing a high-resolution digital transfer is you can go in and micromanage the audio. No need for that on records – full level digital is too loud to cut as is, anyway, so it’s completely pointless to add further compression and further limiting to only bring it down even more. "When I did the transfer, I was only thinking of records: there’s no excessive limiting or extreme compression, which you might do for a CD release to make it sound loud. With clicks and extraneous noises, I had to do some de-essing to soften the ‘S’ sounds of the vocals to avoid sibilance on the pressings. I captured it at hi-res digital, 192-kHz/24-bit and, from there, did any repairs that needed doing. "I have a fantastic Ampex tape machine, which just sounds gorgeous – I’ve got custom heads for it, which make it sound even better – so I was able to do a really nice transfer. It’s getting increasingly difficult to get hold of original tapes now, because people are aware that continually playing old analogue tape is a bad idea because it starts to wear away. “The Eno job is a good example, because I was given access to the original tapes – a couple of originals are missing, but mostly I had the masters.
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