#1 Hi, Thanks for letting me join your group.
Posted: Sat Jan 30, 2021 5:35 pm
My name is Mark Williams. A couple of friends, David Loder and Meredith Tanner suggested i join and be part of the conversation.
My background includes fifty years in the recording business, working as a recording engineer, mixer, and producer/engineer. I still do a bit of work from my home office during this period of pandemic isolation, mostly editing and mixing. And with changes in the business and me getting older, I began a new business publishing new editions of thrillers from the late 1800s, although I expect that area of interest is outside of this group.
So, studios, mobile trucks, more studios, and here and there some HiFi involvement. In Chicago I worked for a year at a Musiccraft store, mostly mid-Fi and some relatively high-end Fi, while also building a studio. In mid 1970s Atlanta, I worked for a crazy guy who opened a shop that was soon a very early HiFi store in the late 1940s. He knew Rudy Bozak and Frank McIntosh personally, and I met people at the store like Saul Marantz and Joe Grado.
I maintain that my sometimes maligned field of work in recording is really a form of packaging. Artists need to reach listeners with their music, record labels spent a great deal of money creating recordings and wanted to inspire listeners to buy the recordings, and listeners existed who consumed the recordings through all sorts of devices (at widely varying levels of audio fidelity). At one time, murky car radio speakers and muddy console stereos in the 1960s and early 1970s led to pop music recordings that had projected upper mids and constrained low end so as to better "translate" over those common playback systems. It worked - if your record when played over a typical AM car radio and dashboard speaker could be made to "pop out" of the foggy audio playback, the listener was more likely to pay attention.
I have always had an interest in making recordings that worked well on better playback systems, but the opportunities were few. In the late 1980s - mid 1990s I was glad to help engineer a number of albums for Reference Recordings. Tam Henderson produced, Keith Johnson was the senior engineer and I was the studio staff engineer. More specifically, KOJ handled his 8-channel mixer with mic pairs on key vocals or instruments, and I handled the 36 input studio console for everything else. Live to two-track was the order of the day for those records, and we tracked simultaneously to KOJ's custom built tape machine (he was secretive about tape speed, bias frequency, record curve, etc.) and also to digital through a KOJ modified convertor. Of those recordings, the Jim Brock and John Sharp records remain my favorites. Of course, the guys that played on the recordings eventually got copies and all told me how they had to turn them up huge amounts because they were so quiet, and I tried to explain that was the result of avoiding level processing during the recording. At the same time, Tam told me that on exotic and expensive systems they sounded glorious. If you have heard any of those records, you can make your own decisions. My point is of course, that recordings can be made for different playback conditions and will consequently sound very different in the "wrong" environment.
Enough blather. that is more than I intended to write. Thank you for letting me in and I will probably lurk and learn on most of my visits.
My background includes fifty years in the recording business, working as a recording engineer, mixer, and producer/engineer. I still do a bit of work from my home office during this period of pandemic isolation, mostly editing and mixing. And with changes in the business and me getting older, I began a new business publishing new editions of thrillers from the late 1800s, although I expect that area of interest is outside of this group.
So, studios, mobile trucks, more studios, and here and there some HiFi involvement. In Chicago I worked for a year at a Musiccraft store, mostly mid-Fi and some relatively high-end Fi, while also building a studio. In mid 1970s Atlanta, I worked for a crazy guy who opened a shop that was soon a very early HiFi store in the late 1940s. He knew Rudy Bozak and Frank McIntosh personally, and I met people at the store like Saul Marantz and Joe Grado.
I maintain that my sometimes maligned field of work in recording is really a form of packaging. Artists need to reach listeners with their music, record labels spent a great deal of money creating recordings and wanted to inspire listeners to buy the recordings, and listeners existed who consumed the recordings through all sorts of devices (at widely varying levels of audio fidelity). At one time, murky car radio speakers and muddy console stereos in the 1960s and early 1970s led to pop music recordings that had projected upper mids and constrained low end so as to better "translate" over those common playback systems. It worked - if your record when played over a typical AM car radio and dashboard speaker could be made to "pop out" of the foggy audio playback, the listener was more likely to pay attention.
I have always had an interest in making recordings that worked well on better playback systems, but the opportunities were few. In the late 1980s - mid 1990s I was glad to help engineer a number of albums for Reference Recordings. Tam Henderson produced, Keith Johnson was the senior engineer and I was the studio staff engineer. More specifically, KOJ handled his 8-channel mixer with mic pairs on key vocals or instruments, and I handled the 36 input studio console for everything else. Live to two-track was the order of the day for those records, and we tracked simultaneously to KOJ's custom built tape machine (he was secretive about tape speed, bias frequency, record curve, etc.) and also to digital through a KOJ modified convertor. Of those recordings, the Jim Brock and John Sharp records remain my favorites. Of course, the guys that played on the recordings eventually got copies and all told me how they had to turn them up huge amounts because they were so quiet, and I tried to explain that was the result of avoiding level processing during the recording. At the same time, Tam told me that on exotic and expensive systems they sounded glorious. If you have heard any of those records, you can make your own decisions. My point is of course, that recordings can be made for different playback conditions and will consequently sound very different in the "wrong" environment.
Enough blather. that is more than I intended to write. Thank you for letting me in and I will probably lurk and learn on most of my visits.
