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

Dave:    So when you went back to Keysor-Century and they got all the Neumann goodies for their Neumann lathe, was that the first computerized lathe that you worked with?

Stan:    Yeah, that was the VMS 66 lathe, SX 68 cutterhead, and VG 66 amplifier rack.  The VG 66 amplifier rack was solid state, 100 watts per channel and the computer for pitch and depth sampled amplitude and phase information, basically.  It didn't deal with absolute polarity.  If there was a voltage, it just made a displacement.  It didn't care which way the groove went.  So on that point alone it tended to waste space.  And the other fact was that it divided the turntable surface or rotation into quarters.  That is, the computer operated once per quarter revolution.  So, whatever it was, the biggest excursion in that ninety degrees told the computer, "Okay, you can allow space for that biggest one and all the other stuff, although it may have been tiny, the grooves were still far apart and so forth.  Then John Bittner came along.  He was a mastering engineer, and still is a very good mastering engineer, in Phoenix.  He cut records for Wakefield record pressing.  Wakefield was a pressing plant that used Keysor vinyl and made very good, quiet, flat records.  They pressed a lot of the Angel product.  John Bitner designed and built the Zuma computer which so many Neumann lathe owners have now.  It divided the turntable revolutions into, I believe, sixteen sections, and it was amplitude, phase and polarity conscious.  So it saved quite a bit of space over the original Neumann computer, although it would waste space in the bottom end.  Later versions of John Bitner's Zuma computer addressed this wasted space problem in the low end, and they're quite good.  The computer which I have on this lathe is called Compudisk.  And Compudisk was built, I understand, by a gentleman by the name of Jerry Block.  But it was designed by George Massenberg and Burgess McNeil.  It's a very comprehensive computer.  It will, when necessary, just stop the feed screw entirely in order to conserve space.  It's polarity, phase, amplitude conscious and it divides the disk further.  It divides it into thirty-two elements.  One of the neat things about the Compudisk computer is that once you decide how many lines per inch you want in your lead-in and how many lines per inch you want in your lead-out and so forth, then it immediately does that at any speed you're cutting.  All this stuff goes into this data bank and it tells the feed screw motor what pitch to run for all the different speeds.  It will run at sixteen and two thirds, twenty-two and a half, thirty-three and forty-five.  It'll cut in all four of those speeds.  Of course, the turntable will go those speeds, too.  Also the turntable will go at seventy-eight.  And if I had a seventy-eight stylus for that Shure cartridge in that Grace arm, I would play for you some of my old 78s with organ music that goes down to 27 cycles.  I'd like you to hear first hand that some of those old records did have some woofers on them.

Dave:    Well, if Clark Johnsen's reading this I think he just woke up, (laughs) being another seventy-eight lover.

Stan:    People tend to forget about seventy-eights.  They were, by any description you care to throw at them, direct-to-disk records.  They were very direct-to-disk.  Of all the things that were ever recorded on seventy-eight, I tend to think that some of the most exacting stuff was Spike Jones recordings.  Because there was so much stuff going on in that percussion section, they had so many things to work in, and it all had to be gotten in just by the time the lathe is gettin' down to the lead-out.  I mean you're talkin' about just one or two turns, one way or the other, in terms of getting all the music, the whole score onto the record.  It's really amazing.  With classical it was no big deal because they ran multiple lathes, the orchestra just played, and the lathes overlapped in the recording.  So you could do the symphony almost unbroken.  It's just where side one ended and side two took up.  Just start one, stop another and so forth.  But when you're doing complete songs, complete compositions, on one side of a direct-to-disk, that's, to me, the height of difficulty.  And I'm really amazed that so many of those early recordings came out so well.

Dave:    You're probably glad you were not working in that era.

Stan:    Yeah, that would have been really messy.  The wax and in the early days of lacquer cutting, too, they didn't have heated styli, they didn't have vacuum chip pick up assemblies; people standin' there with paint brushes sweepin' the chip away.  I mean that had to be a shitty job!  I don't know that I would have been so keen on doin' that.  Never know.  That's probably the first thing I would've invented, some way to pick up that stupid chip.  (Laughs)  Actually, somebody did.  I don't know who did, but that's a real major step forward to collect that, the part of the groove.  I mean, obviously you cut the groove.  The part you cut out has to go somewhere.  And at seventy-eight it collects at quite a rate of speed.

Dave:    So back to the inevitable march of time, in 1973 did someone make you yet another offer you couldn't ignore, to go to Location Recorders?

Stan:    Well, Steve Guy did.  At Keysor-Century things were a bit more politic than I would'a liked.  Just a lot of politics goin' on.  For instance, they wanted me to teach the other cutting engineers how to get the sound that I was doing.  And I said, "Well, to me it's simple.  You listen to the tape and the tape needs treble or has it got too much bass, make it sound right, now record it.  That's all.  Just do it."  And they couldn't do it, except for Lois Walker.  The rest of 'em were unwilling or unable to, "Oh no, we'll dump the chip, or we'll blow the cutterhead," or something like that.  Well, it wasn't what you'd call a union shop, although they had to account for all their time and they had to account for their production and all this kind of thing.  So it was not really a closed shop type mentality but you couldn't afford to blow a number of sides because if the production was down, the costs went up.  It was just that simple and they didn't like that.  And I can understand that.  But the management wanted me to teach 'em.  I guess what they didn't want was me masterin' all the, I mean I was doin' Jack Renner stuff, and I was doin' Jerry Lewis from Arlington, Virginia, and I was doin' Herb Streitz from up in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.  And I was doin' a fella by the name of John Stewart in Dallas.  And these were all high volume guys who demanded good work.  They demanded better than average work.  These record orders would come in the morning and the ones that were gonna be difficult or had the best chance of sounding the best, I just took 'em and I did 'em myself.  As supervisor I had kind of that option but management just wanted me to supervise, they didn't want me cutting.  I said, "Well, the only way I know how to do this is to teach by example.  If they want to hear a product that sounds good, then, first of all, we have to have a product that sounds good.  Then we can use it to have them all listen to it in their own rooms and say, "This is what we can do with our equipment if you're willing to be just a little more careful rather than just slap it on, and go for it," somethin' like that.  So anyway, Steve Guy offered me a job because there were an awful lot of people who were leaving Keysor-Century, leaving the Century recording franchise.  There was a company called Mark Educational Recordings in Clarence, New York, which was run by Vincent Morette.  And Vince had been one of the highest volume guys in the Century franchise.  But he had grown dissatisfied with the Century recording and pressing quality and so forth.  So he had decided that he'd form his own recording corporation, so to speak.  He took on a lot of these higher quality, higher volume Century guys in Mark Recording.  And Steve Guy was doing a lot of their mastering.  So as that started to build up Steve asked me to come down there and record a master for him.  I thought that was really cool 'cause LRS at that time had a good reputation and Steve was a really nice person.  By the way, he's the one who introduced me to the Sapphire Club.

The Development of Half-Speed Mastering

Dave:    Stan, you worked at Location Recorders from early 1973 to November of 1974, then for Keysor-Century/AFRTS for one year, and then you went on to the JVC Cutting Center in Los Angeles where you were the chief mastering engineer and where you developed half speed mastering.  Can you tell that famous story once again?

Stan:    Well, I can.  But to go back to Location Recorders with Steve Guy, one of his most reputable clients was Hal Powell of Klavier Records.  Hal often had these marvelous imported European tape recordings which he brought by to do disk cutting on.  One of 'em that he brought by was Sir Vivian Dunn directing the City of Birmingham Orchestra.  I think it's a Sir Arthur Sullivan composition, but I don't remember what the composition is.  It's one of these things I see in Chad's catalog listed as a really marvelous re-release, or whatever.  I cut the original of that and one of the things I remember about it was that it was conducted by Sir Vivian Dunn and I had met Vivian Dunn in Lawrence, Kansas when I was teaching at the Midwestern Music and Art Camp during my summers while I was a high school music teacher.  And Vivian Dunn's the one who gave me that baton that's in the house and I still use with my China Lake Band and things like that.  Very long baton, very whippy.  He gave me that baton so I have kind of treasured it over the years.  So when I came across a recording that was recorded by him I thought, "Boy, I want to give this special treatment."   So I was invited to go to JVC [Stan worked there as Chief Engineer from Nov. 1975 - Nov. 1979].  They had an engineer there, Darryl Johnson, who wanted out of this half speed [quadraphonic] stuff.  It drove him nuts.  Also, Brad Miller was driving him nuts.  That was the first I knew of Brad Miller. Brad is the original Mobile Fidelity.  He was a client of JVC Cutting Center and Brad was into quadraphonic when it first appeared, you see.  Darryl used to cut a lot of quadraphonic stuff for Brad and it, for various reasons, turned out not too well.  Primarily because it was being pressed on American vinyl.  Later on, I conducted some wear tests and I found out that the thirty kilohertz carrier that was engraved on the CD-4 records on American vinyl, you played it once and you tried to play it again you couldn't even recover the carrier.  And on the JVC vinyl... mind you these are stampers from the same lacquer master, one set pressed in the United States, another set sent to Japan and pressed there.  On their vinyl we could play back a hundred times and the carrier was down only three dB after a hundred plays!  That was one of the primary things that did in CD-4.  Quadraphonic in general, the CD-4 specifically, was only successful when it was pressed on the Japanese vinyl.  American vinyl just wasn't hard enough.  Didn't have good wear characteristics.  CD-4 was dying.  All the quadraphonic stuff was goin' down the tubes, so to speak.  I think if it had been used intelligently instead of somebody scoring a rock band with the damn drums behind you, if they'd done some logical things, musically, instead of illogical things like that, to try to demonstrate a method of reproducing sound, if they just used it like they do nowadays with these 5.1 Surround Sound concepts where they've got the ambiance around, most of the stuff's up front, it would've been a success.  But the way the engineers and producers misused that medium at that time, it was doomed to failure.  It was very unsettling to sit in the middle of a room with four loudspeakers around you and hear a lot of music in front of you and then some damn guy starts strummin' a guitar over here behind you, or a drummer starts workin' out behind you.  The first thing you do is turn around and talk to the loudspeaker and say, "What the hell are ya doin' back there?  Get up here with the rest of the band."  I mean, it was totally unnatural.  A lot of that stuff was totally unnatural, just from a musical standpoint, to say nothing of the aesthetics of it.  Hell, they'd have the drum set back there, recorded in an entirely different acoustic environment than what these guys up front were in.  It just didn't belong.  It was just being misused and, sure, everybody was just learning about quadraphonic or surround in those days.  But I can't believe there were so many producers who were just out of touch with reality in terms of what real music in a well integrated, acoustic environment was like.

Dave:    Right.  I remember hearing that around 1971 or 1972 in a place in Pasadena.  I think it was University Stereo at the time.  They had four Bose 901's set up, powered with some McIntosh and Marantz equipment.  The Boses of course, were lousy enough to begin with, and in quad it was...

Stan:            (Laughing) Four times as bad, right?

Dave:    ...really screwed up.

Stan:    Yeah.  (Laughs)  Four times as bad!

Dave:    It just made you want to rush out and buy it.  (Both laugh)

Stan:    Enough to make you throw up.  I remember one time somebody asked me about that.  One of the worst things about quadraphonic, especially the CD-4 was the signal-to-noise ratio was so bad that about the best you could get out of it was thirty-five dB signal-to-noise ratio.  Well, I mean, on an unmodulated lacquer, the noise is down about minus seventy-two.  Even the government specifications for stereo phonograph records are minus fifty-five dB minimum for noise in stereo and minus fifty-seven in mono.  And the best these quad things could do was minus thirty-five!  So they were at a terrible disadvantage to start with.  Plus the stuff was being cut on systems that were transformer coupled and there was absolutely no bass.  I remember hearing some Nicholas Harnoncourt.  God I love that orchestra.  I mean, you were so totally involved in that orchestra the way that they miked it.  But it's like they sent the ‘cellos and basses out on a lunch break.  All you ever heard was violas and violins.  You just never knew the rest of the orchestra was there.  The low end was just not there.

Dave:    So you converted CD-4 to a half speed mastering process.

Stan:            Converted the CD-4 mastering machinery because I saw, I envisioned one day comin' to work, I thought, God, if we don't get any clients pretty soon, this place is gonna shut down and we're gonna send all this expensive machinery back to Japan, or just sell it off.  I won't have a job and that's kinda bad dookie.  What can I do to help save this?  So I started doing some experiments with some of Brad Miller's tapes.  That was on the same Scully tape machine that's in here [in Stan Ricker Mastering] with four track, half inch heads on it.  Just turned off the FM modulation, the carrier generating equipment, and raised the cutting level six dB.  With its four tracks the left rear and the left front folded together to make this left channel.  And the right front and the right rear did the same thing, so you combine the two and two.  In fact, you didn't have to combine them at all, they combined within the recording equipment themselves.  You disabled the carrier so if you turned yourself ninety degrees to the side of these two loudspeakers, you just got mono.  But between that mono and this mono you had stereo.  And if you went into CD-4 you had stereo this way, stereo this way, stereo this way, and stereo this way.  That's what you want and that's what you have.  It makes a really, really good sounding record.  A great dynamic range, and one of the things that made that particular system unique was that JVC had requested and Neumann had built into the cutter system, a cross talk cancellation device. In high frequencies where they would take a certain amount of the 10K and above energy and invert the polarity and inject it in the other channel.  This is because of cross talk, not so much in cutterheads, but in cartridges.  So when you cut stereo stuff on this system, when you had a crash cymbal or a ride cymbal that was hard left or hard right, it stayed there on playback.  And, interestingly enough, in this system here that Keith built, he incorporated that concept into the cutter system after I told him about this thing that was in the JVC system so many years ago.  He said, "Yeah, and it makes instant sense, you know."  I really didn't realize that it was incorporated into the system until I started looking at some of the electronic schematics this morning.

Click here for the next page of the interview.