Analog Corner

In the old days, this column would have covered last May's High End show in Munich and T.H.E. Show Newport Beach. Today, live online blogging renders obsolete magazine reports that arrive in your mailbox months after the events. It also makes life difficult for a monthly magazine columnist. I wasn't home a good part of the month, so how much serious listening do you think I managed?

But what a month!

Colleen Murphy's Bowie Fest
On May 5, I attended Colleen Murphy's Classic Album Sundays event at the New Museum, in the Bowery. Part of the Red Bull Music Festival, Murphy's event featured the playing of three David Bowie LPs, and was co-hosted by the albums' original producers. The vinyl was played through an Audio Note UK system and a pair of Robert Lighton Audio RL-10 speakers. Lighton and Audio Note's Peter Qvortrup were on hand to set up and supervise the sound. Though when I entered the room I was skeptical about the system's ability to fill it, it managed to spray a large space with considerable musical depth and weight.

Engineer and producer Ken Scott, co-author (with Bobby Owsinski) of From Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust: Off the Record with the Beatles, Bowie, Elton & So Much More (a great read, and reviewed on Analogplanet.com), spoke with Murphy about Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Procol Harum's A Salty Dog, some Elton John albums, and dozens of others. (Scott also engineered The Beatles, aka "The White Album.")

Next up was Tony Visconti, who's produced Bowie on and off since the late 1960s, from Space Oddity to his most recent album, The Next Day (available on two LPs), Bowie's best in decades, and perhaps his best since Heroes—which was played in its entirety, using a pressing of the original mastering by Greg Calbi, which I supplied.

Brooklyn-born Visconti has a wicked sense of humor, and was entertainingly informative as he played from his computer, for a full house, excerpts from various tracks taken from the original multitrack tape for Heroes.

I had to leave before Nile Rodgers capped off the day with a Let's Dance session, but not before snapping a shot of the three producers.

To Munich via Dusseldorf
Wednesday, May 8. Rather than leave myself a day to recover from jet lag, I opted to land the morning of High End's first day and hit the ground running. Sitting next to me on the plane was a young man headed for a festival of electronic dance music in Berlin, where he was to speak. We talked music for hours, and I barely slept.

Following the bus ride from the airport to Munich's Schwabing district and dropping off my bags at the hotel, I managed to just catch the last morning shuttle bus to the Munich Convention Center (MOC), where jet lag was once again overpowered, this time by the excitement of the show (footnote 1). So far, everything was going according to my tight script.

Thursday evening I had dinner with Mark Doehmann, designer of Continuum Audio Labs' Caliburn turntable, a few of his Aussie mates, and my friend David Hyman, former CEO of Gracenote and founder of the music streaming service MOG, which he sold last year to Jimmy Iovine's Beats. Though Hyman had expected to stay on at MOG, the relationship soon soured and he left.

David was a free man in Munich, unfettered and alive, and enjoying every minute of his first Munich High End show, after which he drove a rented BMW convertible across Europe. Poor guy.

London Calling
Me? Sunday afternoon, May 12, after two more tumultuous days at High End, GoPro video camera strapped to my head, I flew to London. That evening I had dinner with another old friend, former Columbia/Legacy reissue producer and now independent reissue producer (still working for Sony) Steve Berkowitz (Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, etc.), who brought along his old friend, drummer-composer Steve Jordan, who was then touring the UK with Eric Clapton. Clapton likes to stay home evenings, so he nightly flew his band back to London on a private plane. Tough life for an old sock.

Jordan has played in Stevie Wonder's band, Paul Shaffer's World's Most Dangerous Band on the early David Letterman show, the Saturday Night Live Band, and, in the early '80s, toured with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi in the Blues Brothers Band. He also played on the Rolling Stones' Dirty Work (Charlie Watts was having substance-abuse problems), which led to extensive work with Keith Richards, including recording, co-writing, and touring with Richards's X-Pensive Winos. He also played on Richards's spectacular-sounding Main Offender—now impossible to find on vinyl and sorely in need of a reissue—among others. Try bringing your game to that table. I managed okay.

How I first met Steve Berkowitz is yet another reason I love vinyl. In September 1969, my first day at Boston University Law School, I took a lunch-break walk to Kenmore Square. First store I came to was New England Music City, one of a local chain of record stores. Up the steps, atop a point-of-purchase cardboard stand, was a stack of LPs whose loosely fitting plastic bags could mean only one thing: imports! At the time, records made in the US were tightly shrink-wrapped. Imports were loosely bagged to prevent warping.

I walked up the steps to get a closer look. They were copies of the UK pressing of the Beatles' eagerly anticipated Abbey Road, released there weeks before the US version. They were there because the Music City buyer had taken the trouble to import a few boxes of them to sell before the American release, and because he knew the UK pressings would sound better. I didn't know it until a few years later, when I began to write, produce, and voice radio commercials for Music City, but that buyer was Steve Berkowitz.

I bought a copy, of course. I still have it, and play it often. It still sounds incredible—better than any other LP edition, or any CD.

London Recalling
Another Monday morning, May 13: I ran three miles in Kensington Gardens (above), GoPro strapped to my head (see Analogplanet.com; video here), and later had lunch with European importer and distributor Ricardo Franassovici of Absolute Sounds, one of the audio industry's greatest characters, and always fun to hang out with and talk music, not audio.

Afterward, we traveled to the Electric Recording Company, which recently reissued two legendary sets from the very early days of the long-playing record: Johanna Martzy's three discs of J.S. Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for Unaccompanied Violin, originally released on EMI; and French Pathé's sumptuous seven-disc boxed set, Mozart à Paris, both with original graphics and paper stocks faithfully reproduced, and sourced from the original analog master tapes (footnote 2) and mastered on an all-tube cutting system restored by Sean Davies—a real analog guru whom I've yet to meet, but vow to some day soon.

The Electric Recording Co.'s Pete Hutchison gave us a tour of the vintage gear, which includes EMI BTR 2 and Danish Lyrec reel-to-reel record/playback decks, the latter fitted with both mono and stereo Ortofon amplifiers; and a Lyrec SV12 No.4 all-tube cutting lathe. Seeing that stuff in operation was fun!

That evening, I had dinner with Constellation's Murali Murugasu, who was in London visiting family. His favorite Indian restaurant was directly across from my hotel. We discussed the logistics of my upcoming review of the Centaur monoblock amplifier ($54,000/pair), part of Constellation's second-tier Performance series, which VP of engineering Peter Madnick was set to deliver to my house that Friday, the morning after my return from Europe.

I'll spare you the details of boring Tuesday (there was a fantastic museum exhibit of David Bowie artifacts in town, but it was sold out, and my ballsy e-mailed ticket requests to Tony Visconti, whom I'd barely met at the Classic Album Sundays event, had gone unanswered).

Wednesday morning, May 15, I had breakfast with Musical Fidelity's Antony Michaelson, who then dropped me off at Heathrow for a short flight to Amsterdam. There, Ton Vermeulen, owner of Record Industry, Europe's largest vinyl pressing plant, picked me up and drove me to the factory. I had met Vermeulen in April 2012 at a "vinyl summit" convened by Atlantic Records CEO and vinyl megafan Craig Kallman, where we discussed how we might better promote the vinyl resurgence by ascertaining and publishing the figures for the worldwide sales and production of LPs and turntables, both of which we're convinced are being underreported.

The Record Industry pressing plant is in Haarlem, just outside Amsterdam, and was formerly owned by Sony. It's a large, impressive, one-stop facility capable of printing and producing record jackets, cutting lacquers or DMM metal parts from tape or digital files, and plating and stamping LPs of various thicknesses on its 32 presses. I toured the plant that afternoon, and that evening, in Amsterdam, enjoyed a memorable dinner at an Italian restaurant, Toscanini, with Vermeulen, his wife, some friends, and Dutch journalist Robert Haagsma, who was writing a book about the Record Industry, to be published this fall.

On the day I'd e-mailed Vermeulen to tell him I'd be in the UK and available to fly over to tour the factory, he also received an e-mail from Haagsma with a wish list of people Haagsma wanted to interview for his book. I was on the list, and he interviewed me the next morning, Thursday, at a local audio emporium, where I sat for what must have been a bleary-eyed photo. The store had a good selection of used LPs, so I . . . bought some.

After a second tour of the plant, just to be sure I had good videos and stills, I returned to the airport and flew home. This time I was seated next to a young Irish gal, who was flying to New York to be with her boyfriend. He was, she told me, a "huge vinyl fanatic."

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Footnote 1: For our on-line coverage of the Munich show, see here and here.— John Atkinson

Footnote 2: See "Listening #127," July 2013.—John Atkinson