How did you start recording musical artists?
We began 20 years ago with a solo piano album recorded in Zipper Hall, which is a beautiful 430 seat concert hall right across the street from what became Walt Disney Concert Hall [in L.A.]. We had wonderful microphones, two [Neumann] U 47s, I believe. We recorded with about a 10-hour microphone and hall set up. The techniques have remained fairly much the same since then. We usually use classic, vacuum tube microphones. Those U 47s, I think, were from the early 1970s. The microphone I use the most now is an AKG C24 stereo mic from 1969, I believe, which used to belong to Frank Sinatra. From the microphones, we then go straight to our recording media. No mixer. We are also now using SonoruS Audio's Holographic Imaging to capture and incorporate two rear channels so that we can also release surround sound for NativeDSD [Music, audio download site]. Multi-channel is now our norm, as well as the stereo album. We go from our microphone through a Yarlung microphone preamplifier – designed and made by Elliot Midwood for us – and then from there we go straight to the analog tape deck, our SonoruS ATR12. And to record high resolution, we use the Merging Technologies Hapi recording at 256 fs DSD. We also use the SonoruS ADC to capture high resolution PCM. Essentially three different originals split off of the same signal coming from the microphones and the microphone preamps. And that's it. The challenge with this – as you know perfectly well from setting up in very difficult situations outdoors – is that once we have the recording, that's the recording. The mixing and mastering, so to speak, happens onstage with the musicians. If we want to change the EQ, we do that by changing the microphone position or adjusting the acoustics in the hall beforehand. If we want to change the depth of the recording, then we do so in-person, physically onstage. It’s such that once we have the recording captured in its three different media, that's what gets released as analog tape, CD, high res downloads, or MP3s. That's what the end-user hears. It's very simple and it's also excruciating. [laughs] The musicians know this in advance, and I prepare them so that our first day is essentially a setup day. I've learned that on the setup day we don't have the musicians perform any of the music that we're planning to record, because I don't want the musicians to have already worn it out when we do the recording itself. Instead, those moments can then be the fresh takes, after I'm not making any more changes with the microphone setup, with the hall, or anything. For the practice day, we use other material that has similar peaks and loud passages while we get everything set right technically. But avoiding the core material during the setup process helps the musicians to not already get bored with the repertoire that we’re all there to capture.
When you say changing the acoustics of the room, do you mean by utilizing the baffling in some of these halls to soften the sound?
Yes. Zipper Hall, for example, has six different curtains that we can move, located up in the ceiling. The Samueli Theater in Costa Mesa [California] has curtains that can be pulled to any location along the sidewalls in the balcony and behind, so that can affect how much natural decay there is. Since we aren't adding reverb in the post-production process – actually, we don't really have a post-production process – we then have to make sure that the natural reverb and the natural decay is what we want in the concert hall. That's what takes a lot of time figuring out. We used to think we could do this in headphones, but I'm not good enough to be able to guess about what I can hear in headphones and know how that will translate to the end listener. I do use headphones during the recording sessions, but not for the soundstage and not for the ambience in the hall. For that, we set up in a separate space, usually a different room – a playback room – which we laboriously adjust with speakers and compensations in the room to make sure that the sound is as close as what we can get, in terms of the soundstage. We then take a thumb drive from the recording in the concert hall, go to the listening room, and play the recording there with the musicians to figure out what changes we want to the sound. What changes we might want to make during that setup day. We only listen back the first day, when dialing in the technical elements.
I feel similarly that recording and listening are two different activities. When musicians stop to listen it can kill the momentum of the creative process itself, and often they become judgmental, self-conscious, or get stuck in their heads.
The listening room also gives us an opportunity to gently re-coach the musicians as to how they're supposed to approach a particular repertoire. One of the things that is often an issue is that we are usually working with musicians who are used to performing in large spaces, like opera houses and 2,000 seat concert halls for orchestral music or chamber music. Their habits are big gestures. They are used to projecting the emotional content of the music so that it will be obvious to someone sitting in the middle of the concert hall or the last row. Part of what we do with the musicians is tell them about this and help them listen to our approach, which is extremely intimate. The microphones are not very far away. I don't usually have to say too much. When musicians are listening with us in the playback room, they can hear the scale of the emotional content of their music, and they recognize the need to adjust it. Usually musicians pick up on it immediately when I convey the intimacy of our recording sessions and I don't have to say anything. But if they're not getting it, I will say something like, “Now, think of this as performing this piece or singing this piece in the shower. Where you hear all the details, whether you like them or not. That is the way we record. We're in the shower!” [laughter] Huge changes in dynamics are less valuable. Instead, we work with the musicians on making adjustments in color. For those emotional changes in the music, we don't have such extremes of very quiet passages, and then thunderous passages. Loud passages don’t pick up as well when microphones are fairly close. It's a collaborative process with the musicians, and at the talent level that we're fortunate enough to work with, the musicians usually get the concept quickly.
It's like the difference between film acting and stage acting.
That's a good description.
What speakers do you have set up in the listening room?
These are small speakers, designed and made by Arian Jansen [of SonoruS]. They don’t have a brand name or serial number. Arian is the one who also designed and built our tape deck, as well as the Holographic Imaging processor that we use for the surround sound. The speakers are single drivers, so there's no crossover. The purpose for these speakers is to provide accuracy of soundstage. These essentially have no phase errors, which is unusual. We don't want any phase errors, because we have to be able to tell exactly where the musicians are going to be in the soundstage. These speakers don't play very loudly, but that's alright. I'm not listening for that. I'm listening for soundstage and timbre. They work beautifully for that. Arian powers them with an early prototype of tube monoblocks [amplifiers] that he designed for his own studio work elsewhere. We use a simple computer and play our test files through JRiver [Media Center app] through a small DAC. It's not that elaborate, but the key is that it's accurate. We never hear the full glory of what the musicians are able to do in the listening room. That's not what that setup is for.
You said that the microphones are not far away. What distance from the musicians are the microphones?
In the case of the Quartet Integra recording, the group were sitting in a semicircle on stage. The microphone, the C24, was probably four feet from them.
And how are the microphones mounted? Ground level, up in the air, above the artists, or even with them?
We've done different things. In a recent session, I had this massive speaker tripod stand and we have a little gizmo that attaches the microphone to it. It was higher than I’d anticipated. For our first tests, we started out quite low, as we had done in the same concert hall early on – 18 years ago. But that placement wasn't right for this particular group. We wound up raising the microphone. It probably ended up four-and-a-half-feet high off of the ground. The AKG comes with a suspension system, and we’ll sometimes put damping material under the microphone stand itself. For the Sasha Cooke vocal album with full orchestra [If You Love for Beauty], that was two U 47 microphones and Sasha did not have her own vocal microphone. We put her in the center of the orchestra; second row. The conductor graciously moved over to the side, which was a first for him. We had two U 47s set up, one on top of another. And they were about 14-feet away from Sasha, but they were also picking up the full orchestra. We needed to pick up 90 musicians! This was [Gustav] Mahler, John Adams, and [George Frideric] Handel. It worked beautifully.
You must have more mics for the surround sound?
We have additional microphones halfway back in the hall, also rather carefully set up, but that's not so specific – those don’t have to be to the inch. They are omnidirectional microphones on each side of the hall, and they each face toward the center of the concert hall so they're at a 90-degree angle to the stage.
What microphones do you use for that?
Earlier in our days, we used a pair of Schoeps M 222 vacuum tube microphones with specially designed omnidirectional capsules. For the last eight or nine years, we have been using small, omnidirectional microphones for the rear channels, built for me by a friend in Sweden. They are extremely quiet and work very well. They also do not have a brand name!
And this is 1/2-inch stereo or 1/4-inch stereo tape? You record at 15 IPS, correct?
We used to record 1/2-inch tape, using two tracks. Bernie Grundman is our vinyl mastering engineer, and he has a 1/2-inch tape machine. We have a special head that we had built in San Francisco to record two tracks on 1/2-inch tape, and Bernie has the same head. But at one point he said, “Bob, why are you using 1/2-inch tape?” I said, “Because it's ‘better.’” He said, “Bob, it isn’t. We've had the opportunity here to make comparisons, and at 15 inches per second, 1/4-inch tape is always better.” I asked, “Why?” He said, “There are several factors involved. One of them is the biasing. Another is head alignment on a 1/4-inch tape head. With 1/4-inch, the alignment can be absolutely perfect. With a 1/2-inch deck, it's harder to get it exactly right. There can be slight cancellations and phase errors.” He pointed out to me that the slightly richer, thicker sound of 1/2-inch tape does not compensate for the lack of precision in the tape electronics. And, as he pointed out and demonstrated for me, 1/4-inch tape has a better ability to capture the air in the concert hall. He didn't have a theory for why that is, but he said it is true and demonstrated it. Since then, we’ve exclusively used 1/4-inch tape.
And you don't do any editing after you’ve recorded a session?
This is the other thing that usually chases musicians away if they’re feeling apprehensive. We feel that it's important for the musicians to arrive extremely well prepared. In the 78 rpm vinyl era, musicians who came to make recordings were so well-rehearsed. They had to be, because they only had one take. If they made a mistake, then the lacquer had to be thrown out and the whole process started again. Those errors were incredibly costly. This is one of the reasons why the performances from the 78 era tend to be so fine, so well-rehearsed, so in tune, and so exciting, because the musicians had really prepared for the recording sessions. Those were very different days than a rock group today that will book three and a half months in a recording studio without the vaguest idea of what they're planning to do, and then work together with the producer to write, create, and record the music as they go. I prefer working with musicians who are extremely well-rehearsed – just like the engineers in the 78 era had the privilege of working with. The musicians we work with know in advance that we will be recording full movements in one take. There are lots of record labels around who will work with musicians differently and edit the music to death. There's a famous recording – that I will choose not to name – and one of the movements is an alt pizzicato. Rumor has it that there are 115 edits just in that short movement. Yes, the technical result is perfect, but that's not the way we do it. It's also not the way I want to spend my life! But, in addition, there’s a musical reason. I want the musical emotional line to be what the musicians created. If I – as a producer or engineer – am editing the piece after the fact, my own musical tastes are going to inform those decisions. In a way, it will be me playing the string quartet, as well as the four musicians. That's not what I want. I want it to be their musical trajectory, their musical arc, and to the best of their abilities. Yes, our albums have mistakes on them, and that's okay.
Mistakes are often where the humanity enters.
What we often do is we have our first setup day. Then we have another day or two where we record all the repertoires. Then, we’ve got an album. At that point we have takes that everyone is happy with. Then, usually on the last day, we invite in a small audience and we record again with all of the repertoires on the album once or twice. The audience is well-behaved – they're quiet. They’re coming to a recording session, so they're not coughing and stamping their feet or whatever. They're holding their applause until after the tape deck is turned off. But the musicians perform the repertoire in sequence, in its entirety. And, I have to tell you, very often it is those takes that wind up on the album. The musicians have had two fabulous days of what have then become rehearsal. Then the energy of the live performance in front of people that they can see – people that are sitting with them, right there onstage – adds an enjoyment for the musicians to do what they were born to do, which is to communicate with people, not with microphones.
Right.
The musicality and the emotional impact are what we really want, not perfection.
Yeah. Where are you set up onstage with the artists?
I'm right in front of the musicians. In the case of Quartet Integra, we recorded backwards – their backs were to the concert hall audience in Zipper Hall. The musicians were on the stage with their backs to that open space. Myself and our recording team were set up on tables close to the back wall of the stage itself. I was 12-feet from them during the entire recording session – they can see me smiling, grimacing, gesticulating, encouraging, or whatever.
You use the room as your effects unit and accompanist. Is there a decay time that you tend to look for when choosing halls?
Here’s the thing: The mind is so sophisticated at interpreting what we hear – that the decay and the ambience – if you hear, say, a pitch that bounces off the back wall – the brain will know if that's correct. If it's not – if it's not real in the concert hall space that we're recording in – it will sound slightly off. It will sound incorrect, and our brain will hear it as a “recording.” Maybe a “good” one, but the listener will not hear it as a live event. Our goal is to help the listener feel as if she or he is sitting in the concert hall with us during the recording session. The amount of decay that we create by moving the baffles or positioning of the musicians, that’s very important in the experience that will be had by the home listener. We want the recording to be in sync with what we hear, and we want the listener’s playback system to be able to reproduce it well. If we had a ten second decay – which you might have recording in St. Paul's Cathedral in London – it would not work as a recording. It would not sound correct to the listener. It would seem fake or post-produced. Then the mind would reject it as a living, breathing experience. We want the listener to be able to imagine that the musicians are sitting in front of the listener, in the listener’s room. That's our goal.
What's Bernie Grundman's role? I mean, if you're not editing and you're not mixing, what's he doing with the mastering? He's not doing a lot of EQ? He's just cutting the lacquers.
Bernie and I, so far, have always bypassed his mixing board. He has one of the finest boards, probably on the planet. It's extremely well-honed and quiet. Beno May – his senior technician – works on it regularly. If we did want to change EQ, we could. But Bernie and I bypass the board and go straight from his tape deck, through the amplification stage – which Beno also made for Bernie – and then directly to the lathe. There isn’t any mastering happening, in this case, at Bernie Grundman's studio. There's only cutting of the lacquer, which he greatly appreciates. The first session, he said, "This is clean enough. I don't want to use the board.” I said, “Wonderful!”
His amp that the recording is passing through is what?
His amplifier that drives the lathe is a vacuum tube amplifier that Beno designed. Those vacuum tubes are never turned off. They're on all the time, so they keep replacing tubes as needed. Beno May has been working with Bernie Grundman ever since Bernie’s days at A&M Records [as the Chief Mastering Engineer at A&M Studios].
Your mic preamps are tube amps also?
Yes, our microphone preamps are also vacuum tube. They don't really work as commercial products. Our parts costs alone, on the monoblock power amplifiers that we've built for our own studio, are around $30,000 US dollars. That would retail for maybe $125,000 for a pair of monoblocks. They are wonderful, though. We have a special power supply designed for us by Arian Jansen. Those would cost $75,000, probably.
This is Yarlung's 20th anniversary. How many albums have you released?
We have around 60 albums out now. It's not a huge production company. Some years we do five, some years we do one.
How did you get into this? Why did you start engineering?
I did it backwards. I did not go to recording school. I've never taken a class in engineering. Instead, I had a listening buddy, 25 years ago, from South America. That was the era when I was replacing my favorite records with CDs, because CDs were "so much better," or so the saying went. I made that mistake. My buddy, Gustavo, had a very fine listening system. I made the next “mistake” of asking him one day, “Gustavo, here's the CD and here's the record. Why is the record so much better? That shouldn't be the case.” He said, “Oh, you have the disease.” [laughs] Then we started listening carefully to a series of recordings. One of my favorite producers in the 20th century was Wilma Cozart Fine [Tape Op #90]. She was the brains and ears behind Mercury Records. Her husband, Robert Fine [#90], was a great engineer, recording full orchestras with just three microphones. The sound that you can hear on those Mercury Living Presence recordings – those recordings of [Béla] Bartók and [Igor] Stravinsky – are perhaps the finest ever made. I was studying with Gustavo – this listening friend – and I said, “How are they doing that? How is it possible?” The early RCA Victor “Living Stereo” recordings were recorded simply as well, using very few microphones for full orchestras. They are some of the best-sounding recordings of orchestra in the world, to this day. They may not have captured every little triangle hit the way Deutsche Grammophon recorded the Berlin Philharmonic in Vienna. But, from a listener's standpoint, they’re much better than what the industry has done since with 40 or 50 microphones, mixers, and everything. That really spoke to me, and I started to think, “Why can't we record like this today?” I heard David Fung, the Australian pianist, in concert. He’s now quite well-known, and not only teaching at the university level, but performing concerts around the world. I said to him, “I heard your concert last night. Would you like to make a recording?” He said, “Yes." He didn't know me; it was a leap of faith. It could have been a disaster. But that's the same recording that got him his debut in The Queens Hall, at the Edinburgh International Festival. It was not our greatest recording, to be honest. It doesn't sound good to me to this day, but David played superbly. That's what makes it a great recording. We recorded with him again several years later, with different equipment and with the experience that we’d gained, learning from our errors. That recording, Evening Conversations, was picked up by a guy in the Los Angeles and Orange County Audio Society [LAOCAS] – which is the largest audiophile group in the world – and he published a review of it saying it was “the finest piano recording he'd ever heard.” That comment launched my career. It was funny, because I became well-known as a recording engineer for piano. And then, when I was 40, I thought, "Maybe since I'm bossing these great musicians around at the keyboard, I should learn something about their instrument." I took my first piano lessons when I was 40. I enjoyed it, of course. I was no good at it, but it didn't matter. It gave me an additional vocabulary to use when I'm helping pianists through a difficult repertoire.
Right. Were you a musician, previously?
Yes, I was, but not a good one. My parents were supportive. I started on classical guitar when I was five and had a wonderful teacher. Guitar is still an instrument that I love, but I don't have talent for it. I also played the cello very badly, and I sang, a bit better.
Operatic voice?
I studied voice for 20 years. I loved it. In fact, it is vocal imagery that most musicians – even instrumental musicians – use when they’re trying to understand how to phrase something or color something. I'll use vocal imagery with the string players if we're trying to get a different approach. It effectively translates to their thinking. But to be honest, I'm happy that I'm not a successful musician. I'm happy doing what I do.
Do you allow this music to be on streaming services?
Yes, absolutely. Early on, people asked me, “What about all these MP3 formats that people are listening to?” I said, “Yes, let’s do it.” Yes, we are an audiophile label. Absolutely! That is what we do. However, we want to expose our musicians to as many people as possible. That's our mission. We are a non-profit. In every stretch of the word, meaning a no profit. We are not trying to limit our musicians’ reach to only people with home listening systems that cost half a million dollars. That's not the goal. The goal is to support the musicians and increase their visibility with as many people around the world as possible. All of our recordings are available in every streaming platform that we have access to. Here's the fun thing: People tell me, “Well, you must hate MP3s.” And I say, “Well they're not my favorite format to listen on. But if we make a recording really well to begin with, it consequently sounds better in MP3 than if we didn't make it well.” The more effort that we put in on the front end, the better it's going to sound to someone listening with earbuds on a subway in Tokyo. And that's a really good thing. We like that! 
