It's the mid-60s and tubes are glowing hot in studios from 30th Street to Abbey Road. Wheels are in motion and the legacy of Leonard Chess and Sam Phillips is welling up in the ears of America. In...
Well here's a classic Tape Op interview question for you: how do you feel about digital?Frustrated. [laughs]. There's so many great things about it and yet — there was a thing at the AES called...
I first worked with Leanne Ungar in 1992, when I was an assistant engineer at The Complex in West Los Angeles. The record was Leonard Cohen's The Future. Leanne has been engineering records for...
Howie Weinberg got his start in the Masterdisk mailroom, believe it or not. As a huge fan of music, Howie sought a purpose to support his passion, and he had always dreamed of working in the...
The Bevis Frond's 1986 debut Miasma could have come from any time, or maybe no time. Nick Saloman's home-recorded, somewhat primitive recording techniques would have fallen under the "lo-fi"...
Bart Thurber, once described by a record reviewer as the punk rock Phil Spector, has a favorite expression — "An engineer drives a train — I'm a recording guy". He's a West Coast legend...
When asked to come up with a "do it yourself" tube mic pre project, I thought long and hard about what topology to go with. I designed a number of different hybrid tube/discrete class A designs...
In issue #29 I wrote about an IC op amp upgrade for the UREI LA-4, a '70s-era optical limiter whose ancestors were the Teletronix LA-2 (vacuum tube) and the Universal Audio LA-3 (solid state). The...
Everyone who's had tuning nightmares during a recording session, raise your hand. Gee, that's just about everyone, isn't it?
