Bounce to Disk

Bob Weston is a legendary figure in underground music. He’s been making records for more than 20 years as a musician and recording engineer. Best known for his tenure in the rock band Shellac with Steve Albini and Todd Trainer, Bob recently opened Chicago Mastering Service with his business partner, Jason Ward. I contacted him to discuss his new facility and his transition into mastering.

How did you and Jason Ward arrive at the decision to take the plunge into studio ownership with Chicago Mastering Service?

Weston: We both had noticed that there didn’t seem to be a mastering studio in Chicago that was part of our underground arts community. There are plenty of bands, artists, recording studios, print shops, galleries, record labels, etc. But most everybody we knew would send their records off to get mastered in LA, New York, or Arizona.

Secondly, we had both been to mastering sessions over the years to observe in our roles as recording engineers. We both found it fascinating; and while watching some pro mastering engineers, had the balls to think that we could learn how to do what they were doing too.

Then also, for me, I was getting almost no recording work. Few bands had been calling me to record them and so I needed to figure out another way to make a living.

What was the main motivation to move from tracking and mixing to mastering?

Weston: The reasons listed above were my motivation. But I suppose that survival was the main one. Like I mentioned, I had no recording work anymore.

I did have another more personal motivation: I was inspired by a number of good friends to build something…to make something that would be a lasting part of our community, instead of simply floating along freelance taking whatever work sort of drifted my way. The friends who were inspirational: John Loder and his Southern Studios, Steve Albini / Electrical Audio, Ian MacKaye / Dischord, and Corey Rusk / Touch and Go.

I guess another reason we wanted to open the place was to be part of the solution to the insane loudness war thing. We want to educate our clients and try to get CDs sounding good again. There are so many now that just sound loud, but not good. I think a lot of younger guys and girls in bands think that mastering simply means making it really loud.

We want to give the volume control back to the listener. We’ll make it sound good. You guys decide how loud you want it by adjusting the volume knob.

How does your past experience translate to this particular environment?

Weston: In the obvious ways that you would expect. I have almost 20 years of experience in studios (music recording, but also radio broadcast and radio production) critically listening to audio and making judgments about how to use the studio tools at my disposal to alter that audio in order to achieve the desired results. These are both technical and artistic or aesthetic judgments that you get better at making with experience. People are drawn to different mastering engineers due to their aesthetic decisions in mastering. I’m sure that people will come to Jason or me based on the aesthetic decisions we both made in our previous work as recording engineers, and in the future as we build up our mastering resumés.

Also, I feel like my intimate understanding of how multitrack sessions are recorded and mixed will help to inform my decisions when working with stereo masters.

I’m a real know-it-all control-freak perfectionist too. I’m hoping this translates to my being extra careful and picky about the details. A big part of mastering is Quality Control. We’re the last people to hear the audio before the CDs or LPs are manufactured, and we need to be extra careful to make sure that everything is perfect before it’s sent out. We are generating the production masters that the manufacturers use to make the finished product. They have to be perfect.

Before opening CMS, were you mastering records at all?

Weston: Nope.

Making CD pre-masters in your home studio?

Weston: If by home studio you mean my laptop in the living room, then yes. I did one or two in Digital Performer and Toast of jazz material where the clients were already completely happy with the sounds. It was mainly sequencing, levels, some limiting. I wouldn’t have done anything else at home because the most important part of a mastering room is the acoustics and monitoring. You can’t make good mastering decisions unless your listening environment is extremely accurate and resolved, full-range, and quiet.

Tell me a little bit about the acoustic and electrical design of the studio.

Weston: The things that were most important to us in the studio design were getting the acoustics, monitoring, and power done right. You can always buy more fancy gear later. But you can’t ever really get the acoustics or power right if you don’t build it right from the ground up. So our control room was designed as a system by our acoustician, Bob Alach. He designed the room and acoustical treatments including the console furniture, and designed it around the speakers and amps that he suggested we use. So the room and speakers and furniture are all part of the acoustical design.

He also designed the HVAC to be amazingly quiet, and work integrally with the rooms in terms of taking into account the heat produced by the equipment, lights, and humans; and how tightly sealed and insulated the control room and machine room are.

Bob also came up with a plan for making the power in the studio extremely stable and clean. We’re located in an industrial corridor and so we need to have our power isolated from our neighbors, the welders. We drove a new ground rod and did some minor alterations to the building’s grounding scheme. We added a surge protector after the main electrical service entry to protect everything downstream in the event of a lightning strike or other catastrophic event. Then the power is conditioned, isolated, and regenerated in a Best Ferrups Ferroresonant UPS. A winding in the UPS’s transformer is fed by a 60Hz oscillator to regenerate the sine wave at exactly 60 Hz. And the Ferrups is also a battery backup in case of a power failure. When the lights go out, we have enough battery time to finish cutting the album side, and shut down the computers.

Could you go into a little technical detail on your vinyl mastering setup?

Weston: We have a Neumann VMS70 lathe with an SAL74 drive rack (cutting amps, etc), a Zuma variable pitch computer, and an SX74 cutterhead. We are not equipped to do all-analog vinyl mastering. The program material is loaded into our Sonic Studios soundBlade mastering DAW either from tape or digital source files via some outboard analog processing gear. Then there’s some digital processing. The songs are sequenced, levels set, etc, the same as if we’re making CD parts.

When it’s time to cut the lacquers, the DAW spits out two identical stereo audio streams over to the lathe (the second stream is delayed by approximately one revolution of the platter). The first stream feeds the Zuma variable pitch computer. The computer decides how much room the groove is going to need on the next revolution and sends a signal to the lathe to change the spacing between the grooves appropriately. Then the delayed feed goes to the amplifiers that drive the cutterhead and cutting stylus. We use a sapphire stylus made by Adamant, or as we like to call that company around here: Adam Ant.

Oh yeah, the lathe is sitting on a floating concrete pad that was designed to isolate it from any low frequency vibrations caused by the Union Pacific freight trains rumbling past behind our building.

You mentioned that the lathe is fed with digital audio. What resolution and word length is that signal?

Weston: The word length is 24-bit. The resolution depends on what we are supplied with for source material and what we decide on with the client. Most of the time it will be 44.1kHz.

A few years ago, I was mortified to find out that the 24 bit, 192 kHz mixes my band supplied to the mastering house would NOT be used, but rather the 16 bit, 44.1 kHz CD pre-master would be used to cut the vinyl master! Is this a common practice? We were really frustrated. I’m sure vinyl enthusiasts everywhere are unaware of this reality.

Weston: Yes, I’m pretty sure it is a common practice. But we’ll always playback from the DAW using the 24-bit audio to feed the lathe before it gets dithered down to 16-bit for the CD premaster.

Before mastering studios started having to deal with digital audio and CD mastering, the two signals feeding the lathe would come from 2 sets of playback heads on a specialized mastering version of the tape machine. The most common were the Studer A-80 and the MCI JH-110. The tape would pass the first head which would feed the variable pitch computer in the lathe. Then the tape would wind around a series of rollers on the tape machine’s deck-plate (a different set of rollers and path length depending on whether your lathe platter was spinning at 33-1/3 or 45 or …) and then pass the second head which would feed the lathe’s cutterhead. Both stereo audio paths need to sound identical. So you would need processing equipment and a transfer console that could handle 4 channels; 2 identical sets of everything (eq, compressors, limiters, faders).

Having to buy a specialized mastering playback tape machine and 2 identical sets of any processing equipment is an expensive proposition. Also, some tape recorder manufacturers didn’t offer an advance-head version of their stereo mastering machines.

In the late 70’s some mastering studios started installing digital delays in their lathe racks in order to get around these issues. They were then able to use a normal single playback head tape machine and only have to set up a single stereo-audio signal path through the transfer console and processing. After the analog playback and processing, the analog signal would go over to the lathe rack and feed both the variable pitch computer, AND the input to the digital delay. The output of the digital delay then fed the lathe’s cutterhead.

I wonder what the bit depth and sampling rate of those late 70’s, early 80’s digital delays were? I’m pretty sure the first ones were running at 14-bit. How about the quality of the converters and the clock? I’ll bet that an awful lot of LPs cut in the 80’s used the output of a not-very-good-sounding digital delay as the audio source driving the cutter amps. I’ll bet that a lot of these records were labled AAA. And I’ll also bet that most listeners never knew the difference.

During the 90’s, I’m sure that a large number of LPs were cut from a copy of the PMCD.

I’m not sure what different cutting rooms use for their source and their signal path these days. I know a few can do an all-analog cut. I’m sure some simply play back the PMCD after they generate that disk. And then I assume most others, like us, feed the output of the DAW to the lathe.

If you supply high-sampling-rate source material to the mastering lab and expect them to do all the processing, assembly, and output to the lathe at that high rate, you’ll need to talk to them about that and see if they can do it. Not all DAWS or plug-ins or computers may be able to handle the demands of 192kHz. From talking to other engineers and reading the forums in the short time we’ve been doing this, it looks like most mastering houses sample-rate-convert any files that come in at 96, 88.1, 192 down to 44.1 as the first step. Then do all subsequent work at 44.1.

There are many excellent sounding software-based SRCs available these days.

What percentage of your business so far is vinyl?

Weston: Hmm, maybe 10-20% ?

You mentioned the lack of a professional mastering studio serving the indie rock community in Chicago. Carl Saff’s studio is very well equipped and he has several years of experience, having mastered literally hundreds of records. Would you care to comment on that oversight? He may not do vinyl mastering, but you said yourself that vinyl is only about 10-20% of your business. (See BTD interview with Saff here)

Weston: Sorry about that. My mistake. We know Carl. He’s an excellent engineer and does great work as a part of our community.

I guess what I was trying to get across was that for a city of our size, we were surprised at how few options there were. The main places that come to mind right away are Colossal, Carl Saff, Massive, Gravity, and the Boiler Room. That’s not a lot for a metropolitan area with a population of almost 9 million (3 million in the city limits).

We both know many bands and labels who routinely send their mastering work out of town. We were hoping to build a local place that those people would feel comfortable coming to. It seemed weird that a Chicago band would record in a Chicago studio for a Chicago label, but then use an LA Mastering studio. Do you know what I mean? That meant to us that there was room for another Chicago studio.

Are you still doing freelance recording work?

Weston: Not really. Maybe if Fugazi or AC/DC call?

I’m still going to do the jazz recording I’ve been doing for the past few years. It’s really fun and rewarding. Live to multi-track, everybody in the same room, no headphones, no overdubs. Lots of problem solving in the set-up. Then the recording and mixing are very straightforward and fast. It feels more like how we’d make indie-rock records 15 years ago before the protools invasion.

Do you plan to move into mastering exclusively?

Weston: For right now, yes. The design and build-out of the studio required some big loans. We need to be in here every day generating income to pay those off.

Also, record mastering is not the sort of thing you can dabble in and get good at. We are working hard to learn and hone our new craft.

Thanks a lot for answering my questions, Bob. Best of luck with CMS.