Audio engineering and the pursuit of excellence

Regarding Lance Braswell's question about the piano used, I have some information. As a young audio engineer, I unsuccessfully tried to apprentice myself to David B. Jones who was the recording engineer of many of the Connoisseur Society recordings of the early '70s. David worked by himself and did not want his mic placement secrets revealed.

As a boy, I was a classical piano student who developed an interest in electronics and recording. My 1st love was recording classical music, and in the mid 1960s, the center for that activity was New York City. I lived in San Francisco. As fate would have it, I tripped into the movie business and spent 27 years as a production sound mixer in Hollywood and San Francisco. On one of many jobs taking me to/through New York for CBS News, I found David B. Jones' phone number in the phone book and called him.

I was in my mid 20s and would have moved there if he would have taken me on as an apprentice. He was my idol. I'm sure my life would have taken a much different path. As he worked freelance, he was 'in between engagements' when I called, and seemed a little down, but quite forthcoming about the sessions.

Plead though I did, he would not let me in on any of his recording sessions. He told me a great deal about them, however. The piano was a Steinway picked for its recording, rather than its performance, sound. He said it took a long time to find. Many pianos sound good live but do not record well. As a good example, the piano that's been in 'permanent residence' at Capitol Records for years is only a 7' Steinway. They wouldn't trade it for the world! The sessions were done throughout a number of nights with a piano technician and E. Alan Silver also being present.

The recordings were made with David's hand-built tube mic mixer which fed 2 modified Ampex 350, 1/2-inch, 2-track tape recorders at 30 inches per second for which he build hand-truck-like racks for ease of movement. He said the older 350 could accommodate a few decibels more headroom than the current Ampex 351. One tape was edited and the other was stored as a back-up. Four Sony C37a microphones were used, but he would not reveal their placement. I suspect, to achieve the warmth and spaciousness of the sound, the microphones were set to omni-directional. He said minor adjustments of the mic placements were required each evening to compensate for temperature and humidity differences. He told me his mic mixer's 1st stage could handle '0'vu (!) before distortion. That would explain the wonderful dynamic range of the recordings. From an Audio Magazine article done in the mid-60's, I have a photo of him 'on location' with his equipment, and his mixer had no equalization controls, just an array of black rotary knobs arranged in a matrix. I recall 5 mics in and four lines out. He built the mixer for the simultaneous recording and broadcast of the Newport Jazz Festival. And to somewhat confirm the Steinway story, after hearing Mr. Moravec play at Occidental College in Los Angeles in the late '70s, I made a comment to him about recording on a Bösendorfer piano. He made a face and said he liked the Steinway.

He also said Mr. Moravec's recordings were unique because the pianist would record himself practicing, and, later, perhaps while eating dinner, would listen to the tapes. By doing this on a regular basis (at least in the early '70s), the recording process was immensely de-mystified for the artist and enabled him to consider the music in a much longer, all-encompassing view. A piece was approached in totality rather than movement-by-movement. He has no fear of the microphone.

In the mid 70s, I became quite familiar with his CS works and recall hearing only one (!) edit in the Beethoven C minor Variations. The rest of the recordings are seamless. While I am sure both artist and staff have something they would have liked to improve, it has been a wonderful experience for us listeners to know they function on a higher level.