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Michael Mailes worked at Decca for 45 years and 1 day, and I imagine during that time he must have
seen and done it all... I am very pleased, with his kind permission, to include these facinating comments about the introduction of Decca's digital recording system.
Thank you Michael.
"Having been a balance engineer/technical engineer I was involved a lot with Tony and his group in the
early days. We had to put them right in what was really needed by the boys in the field as opposed to people working in nice "BBC" type situations! All classical recording sessions being done in outside locations and in the case of the USA/Canada under extremely expensive time restrictions.
We at the recording studios in West Hampstead, (later to become The English National Opera's building)
had little to do with the Video department, approx. 4 miles away. Only when the videodisc was abandoned did we start to have contact with Tony Griffiths and his team. We knew very little about Digital Recording, only what we had read in magazines. Soundstream was getting some publicity, but to Decca who did everything 'in house', having editing done in the middle of the USA was out of the Question.
Interesting perhaps to note that in 1980 John Williams became musical director of The Boston Pops
orchestra. I had made recordings with Arthur Fiedler/Boston Pops and had experience working in Symphony Hall. Philips made a contract to record J.W and found that they didn't have equipment or crew in America at the time of the 1st proposed recording date. Decca had recording equipment in the States having made contracts with several orchestras. Logical conclusion! Ask Decca!
Together with Stanley Goodall (Recording engineer) we made J.W's first recording; 'Pops In Space'
recorded on the Soundstream system.
Having got the Decca system up and running, with a fair thought for what was likely to be needed by the
recording department, demonstration time arrived. Recordings at this time were being made on Studer B62 machines (2 for safety, tapes being flown back from USA & Canada on 2 separate planes). Tapes ran for 1Hr. Machines and the operator were in the control room; timings were by mechanical counter. IVC Machines would have to be in another room due to the noise of motors and fans, therfore required, remote control, simple box with transport controls? How to locate take start points? Time codes could not be read when tape was spooling. On analogue recordings a 50hz tone was put at the end of each take which by pushing the tape near the heads while spooling resulted in a higher pitch so takes could be located by counting the blips. Using one of the analogue tracks on the IVC and bringing the output back to headphones solved this problem. Tape speed was giving 1 Hr, later extended to 75 mins by reducing tape speed. Having to spool tapes back on to the feed reel was time consuming and could be a problem in America where minutes counted on recording sessions. The 75 minutes made planning tape changes a lot easier. Video practice was to use time codes continuously running, no good to us with machines in another room. Sessions ran on a stop/start process, time being allowed for play back to artists. We would have no idea how much tape was left on a reel. This was easily fixed, machine stops, TC stops!
Analogue machines having record and replay heads meant that rare tape faults were heard at the time,
another requirement for a digital system. The IVC machine of course had this, tales of other record companies having to use parts of analogue recordings edited into digital recordings filtered through to us! Access time for playbacks was just like analogue, none of the clunking and clicking of U-Matics for us.
Another perhaps interesting note, For some years Decca had been making many of the Readers Digest
recordings.
RCA doing the production/mastering. They chose to use JVC as a recording system, on sessions the
producer liked us to use our system as well in order to make play back to artists faster!
The Decca principal for recording was to get it right on the session (apart from editing) so post
production was a no no! wherever possible. However the 'time factor' on opera recordings meant that it was not always possible to do a retake if a singer was drowned out by a too loud orchestra or chorus. Along with our very reliable B62's we used Studer J37 (4 tracks), later 8 track A80. Next project make us a 4 track digital recorder. This was done, almost overnight, by adding extra cards (and modifying others) to a 2 track processor, extending its length some 8 inches. With the aid of the Decca Digital Mixer 2 track masters could be made with out going back to analogue. Very little was changed during the life of the recording system. Better remote facilities came along using a simple computer mother board and VDU. This allowed us to write take data onto the tape and allowed for faster playbacks, locating different takes on both machines simultaneously.
Not a perfect system, nothing was, we suffered a bit with with bad batches of tape, rare faults with the
processors, like most electronics if it works for a month it will probably go on forever. IVC recorders to us (compared to the Studer machines, beautifully built easy to maintain and set up) were perhaps more semi-professional. They didn't always travel well.
In the early days of Digital recording analogue machines were used in parallel, however I think it true to
say that every digital recording issued was made totally digitally.
I believe this to be true: post war, Decca together with EMI were given captured German tape recorders,
EMI as we know went into the recorder market. Recorders and loudspeakers were the only part of the recording chain Decca didn't make. Cutting lathes, cutting heads, amplifiers, some microphones, mixers, all made in house. The reputation of Decca with its Full Frequency Range Recording, came about during WW2 when they developed a full frequency range cutter whilst doing 'secret' work for the navy.
Decca, having its own development engineers (and workshops both mechanical and electrical) was
always looking for ways to improve audio. Cutters were capable of FFRR/FFSS but tape was the weak link in the chain. I believe that by the time Digital Recording came along analogue tape was about as good as it was going to get. Being mostly involved with classical recording with its wide dynamic range tape hiss was always our biggest problem. Putting high audio levels onto tape, sometimes higher than was recommended! produced distortion and compression at high frequencies. Recording to the recommended peak level meant that tape hiss was more obvious. Pre-echo was another problem with analogue tape, loud music 'bled' through at a lower volume to a previous section of tape on the feed reel.
Unlike some companies that copied their 'Master' tapes and used the copies for mastering Decca worked
from the original (edited) tapes. Two machines being used on sessions to give a second chance in case of damage when editing, physically cutting tapes and joining with sticky tape was a shade primitive. With the need to make copy tapes for export to licensee's abroad, master tapes for cassette production, radio stations etc an extra amount of hiss/distortion was added. This also meant that for compilation tapes for records like: The worlds best tenors, Your favourite overtures etc, a copy tape had to be made. Building our own amplifiers for tape machines and tweaking others we had probably got as good as we were going to. The only recordings that didn't suffer from tape hiss were Organ recordings; the instruments always produced their own background noise!
So now to Digital. Signal to noise/distortion, only the A-D's & D-A's to worry about since you got back
from the tape exactly what you put on it. Our converters were 'home designed and built' so we were again able to learn from the horse's mouth how to keep them aligned for best performance. First converters 16 bit, later 20 bit. Tony Griffiths and his team were adamant the sampling rate should be 48Khz, Sony plumping for 44Khz. This meant that when the CD came along sample rate converters had to be made in order to produce master tapes for the CD production process as the factories mastered from U Matic machines. When Mitsubishi produced their 32-track recorder it was capable of 44, 48 and 50K, also the earlier 3M 32 track machines could be used at 48K.
Record buyers heard only the sound through their own audio equipment; they did not have the opportunity
to hear the sound direct from the recording console. We as engineers could compare the console output to the off-tape sound. Comparing off-tape digital sound/off-tape analogue sound and direct from the console sound it was obvious that Digital won hands down. Of course the first Digital records were issued on vinyl. Vinyl versus Compact Disc, another controversial point for discussion! There were many critical comments made about 'Digital' mostly totally invalid. If people preferred analogue sound it was not generally because of technical reasons it was just 'The sound' that they were used to.
I remember after a playback on one of the early digital recording sessions in Chicago, (Solti/Chicago
Symphony Orchestra) one of the woodwind players asking, "was that a digital playback?" on being told it was, he said "I thought so, the woodwinds and upper strings sound much cleaner". There was a fairly large anti digital faction but on many occasions we put on carefully controlled demonstrations and usually convinced people that digital recording were truer to the sound the engineers produced on recording sessions. It was said I believe at an early demonstration of the wax cylinder that it was difficult to tell the difference between the recording and the live sound!!!!!!
I enjoyed just about every day of my working life, all of it at Decca, and I hope that my comments will be
or some interest to you.
Also I have attached 2 photos, taken in the early-ish days of digital recording showing some of the eq in
the (abandoned) United Artist Cinema, Detroit. This was the last 'in house mixer', one of 4 sets, the modules were 4 times 6 chans plus master and monitor units. Capability was 4 track and 2 track simultaneously, all built like a battleship by Mr R.G. Wallace of Decca. Even the knobs were specially made! We recorded I think 4 times, the first 2 were only analogue. Picture 2 gives some idea of the state of the building, this was the ceiling of the machine room, hardly Operating Theatre conditions! However, after brushing off the 'ceiling' from the e.q. every morning, everything worked OK.
... on a session (when I was a young assistant) a musician commented that he didn't think the sound was
very good , well said the recording engineer, what do you expect from a piece of cardboard flapping about in a wooden box |
