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

The Mysteries of Half-Speed's Gorgeous Sound Revealed

Dave:    You've told me that some of the things that you like about the sound of half speed is that it has lower distortion and better transient response and improved high end, and that one of the big benefits is that when you drop the frequency band by an octave it requires only one fourth the amplifier power to cut the record.

Stan:    Yeah.  You drop it by an octave and you also double the length of time it takes to put the signal on the record.  So you've got the two factors of two there.

Dave:    So how is it possible for a lacquer, which is cut at half speed, to sound better than the master tape from which it was made?  At first blush that sounds like a bit of a conundrum, but I understand that it is really not.

Stan:    Quite a condom, you say?  (Laughs)  You've got to realize that it sounds better played at real time than the analog tape does, played at real time.  One of the primary reasons for doing the half speed analog recording is that more tape playback problems are solved by playing the tape back at half speed.  Hysteresis problems in the playback head, the slew rate problems in the tape head preamplifier; the resonance peak of the playback head circuitry is a fixed resonant peak, so in terms of the music you're transcribing, it's moved up an octave and is way out of the audible range of any of those high frequency resonance circuits.  So when you consider all of this, therefore, the signal is cleaner as it passes through the system, especially anything that involves cymbal crashes, brass instruments [trumpets, trombones, etc.] other high frequency type tone bursts.  At half speed they go through the system quite easily and are not apt to cause any kind of power supply or slew rate distortion, or TIM, or any of this stuff.  So if you can cut a disk that way and you have a really pristine disk playback system like many audiophile folks do, then you get to enjoy the advantage of a record that was cut from a tape in a way that you get away from a lot of these tape playback anomalies.  The tape record and playback anomalies are part of why Doug Sax did all those marvelous direct-to-disk sessions.  The tape machine itself is a huge stumbling block in the transparency of the audio, of the music, of the sound.  The transient response isn't there and with tape, as with practically every recording medium, it's easy to get the signal recorded; it's harder to recover it.  So, if you recover it at half speed, transfer onto another medium, and you have a really good playback of that other medium, the phonograph record, then when you compare the analog tape played at real time versus the lacquer played at real time, the signal off of the lacquer has managed to come out without all the problems inherent in real-time tape playback.  So what you're really hearing is the signal with problems and then the signal without the problems.  That, to me, is why half speed mastering was such a phenomenal process.  I used to think that this was because of the lower amount of power required at half speed.  But I'm convinced now that it's about a 70/30 situation.  That seventy percent of the improvement is due to scanning the tape at reduced velocity, and not driving those tape head preamplifiers into gross distortion.  We just hear people say, "Oh yeah, that's just analog tape overloading, or whatever."  Whereas, in reality, we recover it without those problems.  That's why it's been such a tremendous treat to find some of the really good stuff buried on some of that old Scotch 111.  It really is quite possible that the disks, under those conditions, can sound better than the master tape played at real time.  It's amazing to listen to a good analog tape at half speed, one that's truly wide range, low distortion.  I mean, it just blooms in front of you.  It's just unbelievable.  I think of the experience I had listening to a MoFi re-release recording of Russian music, with the Russlan and Ludmilla Overture in D Major [MFSL 1-517].  I mean it's full orchestra, the orchestra's just going a mile a minute, just lickety split.  At half speed the recorded sound just opens up and wow!  And it was not a Dolby tape, and that was important.  It was pre-Dolby for Decca.  Just such a wide open spaciousness.  When you played it at real time it tended to get congested.  But the record didn't come out that way.  The record has the spaciousness of the original tape, which you could only really perceive in the half speed mode.  There's a lot to be said for half speed transcription.  I tend to like, right now, this two thirds speed thing because the bass frequencies seem to be better integrated with the mid range and treble.  It didn't always happen at half speed.

Dave:    I understand that one problem you had with the JVC system was that it lacked bass due to the transformer coupling.  So, in your usual way, you made a few slight modifications to the system.

Stan:            Mmmhmmm.  The usual way was to bypass this multi-jillion dollar JVC cutting system entirely and just go from the Scully tape machine through the minimalist part of the JVC console, direct to the Neumann cutting rack.  Then, we went even a step farther.  With Zubin Mehta and the Star Wars  album, John Meyer built a line driver amplifier box with which we could take the output of the Scully tape machine and run the audio signal through the Meyer line driver box and directly couple the output of that, by way of BNC connectors, directly to the Neumann cutting amplifier.  We went internal to the Neumann rack and bypassed all the tracing simulator circuitry;  there was a great big delay circuit in it to decide whether or not it would shut down.  It was a safety feature and we bypassed that, injecting the signal directly into the RIAA network.  And Star Wars was the first one that was cut with that configuration.  Sonically, it was a huge step forward from the other stuff.  That's MFSL OO8.

By the way, that John Meyer box which he built for me, and which now lives in this rack out here, is the amplifier that is the line driver box for the woofer amplifiers.  The little box with the gain control, polarity reversal, each channel separately, and the meters on it.  It's about 10 hertz to about 100 kilohertz band pass.  It was designed by John Curl and John Meyer, and it's a one-off hand-built job that really works.

The Development of the UHQR

Dave:    Another big advancement at JVC was the UHQR [Ultra High Quality Recording].  You insisted in the development of that, in your own words.

Stan:    Well, I wanted a record that was just about as thick as a 78 to help it maintain its mechanical stiffness, because we didn't use record changers anymore.  There were two reasons for having the label ramp and the groove guard on a record.  One of them was that if you take the record and hold it as if you're viewing it from the edge of the turntable, edgewise, and slice it from left to right, right through the center hole, and then stand it on end, it's a modified I-beam.  The center section where the modulations are is very thin and flexible.  At the edge there is an expansion into what we call the groove guard, and in the center there is an expansion into what we call the label ramp.  Then beyond the hole is the mirror image down the other way.  There were two reasons to have this.  Number one was for the pressing people to save vinyl because the part where the modulations are which is most of the record, it could be very, very thin, indeed.  Sometimes like ten thousandths, fifteen thousandths thick and that's all.  Try an RCA Dynagroove record, which is a ninety gram jobbie.  And the other reason for having the label ramp and groove guard is that in the days when we used to stack records on record changers, the label ramp and the groove guard would provide the record's rotational drive.  The edges touch, the label ramps all touch, but the modulation areas in between are all separated but the record is still driven nonslip by this format.

Dave:    So the reason this is called a groove guard is that it kept the grooved areas separated.

Stan:    Sure.  None of the modulation areas  touch.  They're separated by several thousandths of air when you put four or five records stacked up there.  It's a rather ingenious way of saving vinyl and saving modulation areas as well.  But when we got into audiophile stuff, nobody in his or her right mind would have a changer. Then, by God, let's make a record that's thick enough to have some substance to it.  So it was the concept of a flat record, no groove guard, no label ramp, so that there would be the minimum possible stresses within the record when it's pressed.

When you look at a lacquer, it’s optically flat.  When you master a wide range of dynamic music on this lacquer, when you then look at the lacquer in a good, straight-line light source such as the Sun, you could see that the surface where the land still is, still is optically flat.  But when you press the record from that, where the heavy modulations were, the record wasn't optically flat.  It had a dimpling effect on it that looked a lot like orange peel or bad paint on a car.  Literally like the skin of an orange, pock-marked, and this created a lot of just subtle background low level roaring and just low level extraneous noise in the music that wasn't there originally, and wouldn't be there if you had played the lacquer from which the pressing was made.  If you look at normal stampers which are typically 0.007 thick, and you look at stampers that have areas of high level modulation in them, you can see the modulation activity from the back side of the stamper.  Now when you put this stamper on a record die, which is a hydraulic ram that's got just about a mirror smooth surface, and you press a record, all the deformities on the back side of the stamper come right through and so you get this dimpled effect on the product.  So I talked to the Japanese fellows about this and they said, "How can we get rid of that?  How can we make so that when you look at the back side of the stamper you have no idea what the modulations are?  No clue as to what the modulations are on the other side.  I don't want any visual or metallurgical dissimilarities."  So we could make the stampers a bit thicker and we can laser trim them.  Ah so.  And that's what they did.  Laser trimmed those back sides and they're just as smooth and flat as they can be.  Now, RTI, kind of borrowing on that concept, they apply a centerless sander to the back sides of the stampers.  The stampers are like, yeah, so big [about 13 inches in diameter] and the sander has two of these five and a half inch size disks with very fine grit that achieve virtually the same thing.  You almost never see any of this dimpling stuff on these RTI records, especially the 180 gram ones.  But that was one of the major hurdles to overcome.  I wanted this record to be good enough that I could look at the surface and say, "This looks like a lacquer."  I didn't want to see any difference and I knew if I couldn't see any difference, I probably wasn't gonna hear any difference.  But you could be guaranteed that if you could see a difference, you had to hear a difference.  I mean, one cannot be there without the other following.  It's an 'if/then' type of situation.  If you hold a lit match to an open can of gasoline, then, most likely, it will ignite, if you're close enough, you see.  I felt that if I could see surface deformities in the record, then, by God, they had to be audible.  You had to be able to hear it.  You couldn't have a visual irregularity on a phonograph record without hearing it.  So, after they got that back side problem smoothed out, boy, I tell you what, those UHQR's are super.  I asked them why can't we do that with our regular records?  "Ah so, too expensive."  I agree.  And the regular JVC records were very good, indeed.

Big Titles and Killer Disks

Dave:    So during those years you were with JVC you cut for Crystal Clear, you cut all the Telarcs, you cut all the Reference Recordings up until Paul Stubblebine started up.

Stan:    I started by cutting Tam's first thing that he did for Reference Recordings.  The first thing I cut for him I believe was called Kotekan or something like that.  Tam'll tell you the exact name of it.  It was basically a random phase concerto for nine bass drums.  (Laughs) Also, the tape was recorded on a Nagra machine for which we didn’t have the right playback EQ, so we had to just experiment with AES and CCIR EQ 'till we got what worked. It was a real bugger to cut.  We had a helluva time with that.  I think it was after that Tam did this interview that you were showing me here [The Absolute Sound Vol. 4 No. 14].  Because at that time I didn't know of Tam.

Dave:    You were cutting something for him during that interview in 1979, as a matter of fact.  There's a sidebar in there saying that he had come to you with something to cut and had done the interview at the same time.

Stan:    I cut David Wilson's recordings.  Remember his organ record, Recital [Wilson Audio W-278]?

Dave:    Sure.  That's a fantastic recording.  I love it.  And it's surely right up your alley.

Stan:    Yeah, yeah.  It's a very nice recording and as I recall, it's one where I was totally bowled over because I think that David recorded it with AKG's [C-414E's] in figure-8 configuration, and it really surprised me because I didn't think there'd be any bass.  And there was lots of bass.  (Laughs)  Yeah, that was one of my happier moments.  I think that was when I first met Dave Wilson, when he brought that tape.

We did the Cleveland Winds with Freddie Fennell.  That was quite an experience.  The first one I did, of course, was on Telarc and that's when we first got it right with the bass drum in the back center of the hall with the drum head facing outboard.  I was at the recording sessions for that.  We played this Gustav Holst suite, Number One in E flat.  The third movement starts off with a little bit of a fast passage in the upper wood winds and brass followed by a triple forte slam on the bass drum which defied all description. 

Dave:    A real kerwhapper, in your parlance.

Stan:    Yeah, it was a real kerwhapper, all right.  Freddie had brought his own bass drum beater with which to whack it.  He had told me that he at one time had gone into an old furniture store and found a four poster bed and bought the bed just to get the posts off of it.  And the bass drum beater was one of these bed posters with one of these eggs on the end of it, you know, and he'd shrunk like a chamois around it.  So with a slightly leather covered wooden beater he went back there and Wham!   And it really made a helluva bang.  I remember that we played a test pressing of it for the 1979 AES Convention or something, and then Kenny Kreisel had just started up his woofer company called M&K Woofers.  I remember I had a test pressing of this thing from RTI.  So we took it in there and we played it on Kenny's system.  It started out rather quietly and then it built up to the horrendous Swat!   I told Kenny, "You'd better not crank it up too high because it's got a helluva loud bass drum on it."  And I remember Kenny's words, "Ah, our woofers'll handle anything."  I bet he'd probably prefer I didn't mention this but then here comes this music pretty loud already, ya know, and it's pretty well filling the room, and here comes this big Swat! on this bass drum.  And I think it deconed all four of his woofers simultaneously.  I said, "I'm sorry, Kenny.  I tried to warn ya."  But it's like those big excursions on that 1812 Overture, the cannon shots.  I remember Steve Temmer of Gotham Audio called me up when he looked at these huge excursions under the microscope and he said, "You can't do that with a Neumann cutterhead.  And I said, "Well, I'm sorry, Steve, but I did do that."  (Laughs)  He said, "But a Neumann cutterhead won't excursion that far."  I said, "But it did.  This cutterhead and cutter system that you sold to JVC, it's the one that did that."  He was really hard pressed to believe that.  He could not understand how we got such a huge, I don't know, 455 microns, no...  It was big.  And you could see it with not only the naked eye, but with the half blind eye.  I can see it without my glasses, you know.  And the bass drum on that first Cleveland Winds record was very similar to that.  In order to cut either one of those, the only way was to cut seventy lines per inch in order to take care of that wide of an excursion.  There was an "Expand" button on the lathe that you could push just after a cut or something that was real loud so that you wouldn't get groove echo.  You could push this thing to spread the grooves out a little bit more.  I ran preview drive up all the way, I pushed expand all the way, and I ran the pitch drive selector clear over as coarse as it would go, in order to accommodate these.  It was like the same spiral rate as doing a spread.  And you could see the feed screw going around like this to accommodate those big modulations.

Dave:    So you were pushing the envelope, but not quite breaking it.

Stan:    Yeah.  (Laughs)  That envelope was more like a trash bag.  (Laughs)

Dave:    That cannon shot's probably still the most famous killer disk of all time.

Stan:    Right.  And it turned out to be just right.  We made a lot of test cuts to try to get that level just right and we were checking it on that JVC turntable with that Denon moving magnet cartridge.  And we made one test cut and we could always play it, and we made another test cut and we could play it part of the time, and then we'd increase the level about one dB more and then could never track it so we backed the level down.  Jack and Bob told me that with those records fifty percent of the people could play them and fifty percent of the people bitched because they couldn't track 'em.  It was such a challenge for them to try to track these things.   Finally, when those stampers wore out, and they made so many stampers from so many mothers, and the mothers were worn out and the recording had to be remastered, then Bruce Leek remastered it on this lathe when it was at IAM in Orange County, otherwise known as the Sound Dome.  IAM was International Automated Media.  So then Bruce cut it and he cut it at just a little less level and then everybody was disappointed because they could all play it.  Later, Bruce recut it again 'cause he said, "By God, I can do better than that."  So he jacked it up two notches and then nobody could play it!  So there's three versions of that 1812 Overture out there.  Two which Bruce cut and one which I cut.  (laughs)  But you make test cuttings and you try real hard to get it right the first time, you see.

Dave:    So by loaning out the third version of that you can astound your friends and confound your enemies by giving them one they can't track.

Stan:    Oh yes, absolutely.  "Betcha can't play this one, kid."  (Laughs)

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