Music and Recording Features

"It's pretty amazing how far digital technology has come since my mother started CD remastering in 16/44.1," Tom says. "We don't have the budget to go back and do everything all over again; it's never going to happen. Besides, we like my mother's CD-resolution remasters. It's a shame her work couldn't have been preserved as the 24 bits that emerged from the dCS converter, but there was no storage system at the time to preserve it."

How Tom entered the business
In 1964, Wilma Cozart Fine retired to Harrison, New York (footnote 4), to better raise the family that eventually grew to four sons. In 1966, the year Tom was born, his father wrapped up his recording for Mercury Living Presence.

"I learned quite a few things from my dad and his right-hand man, Bob Eberenz—my friend and mentor until his death—that I still use to this day. I always had a stereo system. My dad always helped me set up, [to] understand why things worked as they did and what might need upgrading and why. The first thing I bought with the money I earned delivering papers was a Pioneer RT707 reel-to-reel tape machine, at Crazy Eddie's in Paramus, New Jersey, which I still own. My mother fronted me the money to buy it and gave me a little payment book, which taught me how to manage money and repay debts. It was priceless teaching that I much appreciate to this day."

When Tom entered high school, he was already "messing around" with a 4-track Tascam PortaStudio recorder to capture the heavy metal songs of Roast Beast, the band he and his younger brother were in. "I was the alleged front man and allegedly sang," he quips. "Our first single was called 'Squawk at the Devil.' My parents played classical music, but I didn't like it. I was a rock'n'roll kid whose parents hated rock music."

Before his father died of congestive heart failure in 1982, at age 60, Tom had already worked at Sigma Sound Studios in New York during the summers, even as his father worked as a mixing engineer at The Mix Place in Manhattan.

"We traveled back and forth together. Initially, I ran around Manhattan delivering and picking up tapes, and I got mugged twice. If I walked fast and ate lunch fast, I could stop at The Mix Place and catch part of my father's morning or afternoon session and watch how he was doing things. He was sick and didn't want to be mixing, but he was able to do the job well and he needed to make money.

"He asked me to think hard if mixing was something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I didn't want to make sound for TV commercials, which is what he was doing. I liked the idea of music recording and mixing, but the business was very fast-paced with a lot of drug use; it wasn't a recipe for living into middle age. Those who remained in the business grew up and slowed down. My friend and mentor Gerry Block, who was my boss at Sigma and also invented a disc-cutting control system for the Scully lathes, got out entirely.

"People [said] that it was a good life but [a] rough one, and that I should go to college. Since I did local access cable TV production and programming in high school, I thought I would go into television production. I'm glad I didn't, because now it's mainly about being a computer jockey."

At Colgate University, Tom rejected working on the college TV station's antiquated equipment and instead became a sports editor of the school paper. That led to 30 years as a professional journalist, including serving as managing editor of Beverage Digest until 2015. During that time, he began to build a parallel audio career. Having learned tape editing from his father and Eberenz, he gravitated to editing streaming audio books and podcasts for Audible.

"I got into classical music as an adult, when my mother started remastering part of the MLP catalog for CD," he explained. "She'd sometimes ask me to look over the booklets that came back from booklet editor Sedgwick Clark, and I provided another set of eyes. That helped me understand a lot because those old liner notes were far more intelligent [than most of what you read today]."

"As soon as the MLP CDs came out, she'd have four piles of new CDs to give to her four sons when we visited. I really appreciated that. I'd listen on headphones at work and learned a lot about the sound while I was grinding out articles about the beverage business. I guess that's how I got my appreciation for classical music.

"From the Audible thing, I got into analog-to-digital transfer work in the early 2000s. Some of my work was for a collector who needed to transfer classical music from his parents' reel-to-reel tapes. His mother was very into soloists and chamber music, which was different fare from my mother's taste in orchestral music. My mother was not into chamber music, so she didn't record a lot of it."

Transfer work for the collector increased Tom's exposure to classical music and to recordings from different labels. "I came to classical music late in life," he says. "If I get in the mood for it, I'll go on a jag when I'll listen to classical stuff for days. But I work with it so much that when I want to listen to music for pleasure, it's usually jazz or rock. That's why I review rock music for Stereophile; it makes me listen to music for pleasure."

Today
"I've been involved with MLP reissues through Decca Classics, the part of Universal Music Group (UMG) that owns the former Mercury, Philips, and Decca UK classical back catalog, since about 2011," Tom said. "I got deeply involved with MLP Box Set 2 when I helped write the booklet, suggest the bonus discs, and track down the rare interview with pianist Hilde Somer and composer John Corigliano that became a bonus track on the Corigliano bonus disc—the premiere recording of his piano concerto with Somer and the San Antonio Symphony, which Marc Aubort recorded in 1969.

"The success of Box Sets 1 and 2 led to packaging the rest of my mother's out-of-print single CDs into Box Set 3. Because we needed more content, we also dove into what had not been released on CD. Since 2015, most of my work has been with either new-to-digital transfers or newly remastered titles that my mother never transferred to CD."

With dCS now out of the A/D business, Fine uses other equipment to remaster MLP recordings in 24/192. He began to remaster some of the MLP catalog with a Lynx Hilo audio interface. He later added a dCS Bartók D/A converter to assist in 3-2 mixing and mastering via USB. (At Abbey Road, Hawkes uses a pair of Benchmark A/Ds slaved to the same master clock.)

"The actual 3-2 mixing is done on computer using Reaper software. If cleanup is needed, I use iZotope RX; I may also use any of several plug-in equalizers to do tiny nip-and-tuck adjustments here and there. Track editing and sequencing is done in Magix Sound Forge software, and CD mastering uses DDP Creator software. ... I can send signal from the studio computers to any set of speakers or headphones.

Fine, too, uses a Benchmark DAC3 B, for CD and streaming. The power amp is also Benchmark. Studio monitors are Amphion Two18s. Widely spaced Amphion One18s, powered by Amphion class-D amplification, can be found in another part of the studio, affording a different listening perspective. Tom's living room system, which currently houses the Bartók, includes Bowers & Wilkins 808 speakers and a Radial/Hafler power amp.

Tom checks everything on Neumann closed-back and Sennheiser HD 650 open-back headphones. "Some headphones are on a whole other level soundwise, but they're also on another level pricewise," he notes.

"What I do is different than when the recordings were made," he says. "I strive to be faithful to what the original team was trying to do and see if I can improve on it a bit using modern technology.

"I think that the modern 3-2 channel mixing I'm doing works well. I'm not messing with it or trying to impart a vintage sound by using plug-ins to add warmth or anything like that. To my ears, the perspective of my 3-2 mixes doesn't sound that far off from the original LPs, but the sound is more unveiled and right there without the intrusion of distortions and background noise that the early machines put there. I think I'm actually getting closer to what the microphones were picking up during the recordings.

"My mother was very reluctant to remaster any of the monos for CD, because the tapes were very old and problematic. If I didn't have as good a transfer engineer as Jared Hawkes at Abbey Road, I would have been reluctant as well. Jared knows how to alleviate some of the problems on the tapes so I can work with them."

After Fine finishes a 3-2 digital mix, he uses RX software from iZotope to display the sound frequency spectrum on a screen and work with it in a manner similar to working in Photoshop. For clicks and ticks, he accesses a tool, somewhat like the healing tool in Photoshop, to use information on either side of the tick to synthesize over it.

"It works amazingly well," he enthuses. "The Mercury masters are heavily spliced, and splices tend to make a tick or thump after they've been repaired many times over the years. Sometimes the oxide is pulled off; that's a whole other issue. You can also get rid of that squeaking chair in the background that screws up the music."

Many audiophiles will cringe at the potential loss of nonmusical sounds that can demonstrate a system's ability to retrieve low-level detail. Even though Fine insists that he likes to "leave the humanity in" if it doesn't detract from the music, he's not a fan of the shuffling, sneezing, coughing, snoring, and sniffing his father's microphone picked up on the mono recordings of Kubelik conducting the CSO—sounds that were inaudible on systems of the 1950s.

"We are judicious in our decisions," he says. "If something detracts from the sound of the music, we'll take it out if we can. If it doesn't distract, we keep it in. I don't take out the traffic noise that sometimes surfaces between tracks on the mono recordings, for example. I even retain air conditioning rumble, even though I don't like it, unless it interferes with the music. You hear a lot of traffic noise at Watford Town Hall when Mercury recorded the London Symphony Orchestra, but the tonal balance on those recordings is so good that I didn't want to mess with it."

Tomorrow
Fine's focus nowadays is on the Mercury catalog—he's even taken on some of the responsibilities of a brand manager—but he's open to other audio work. "If either of two grant proposals had been funded in the 2021 cycle, I would be busier than a one-armed paperhanger right now," he says. "I am grateful for the breathing space, but of course am always interested in new projects.

"I recently transferred a guy's old rock band recordings from the '70s. His band had done a series of recordings in a real studio and shopped them around to labels, to no avail. I think he intends to self-release on streaming platforms and make some micropennies. I'm interested in all kinds of music and recordings and ... just about any large-scale transfer project. I just don't do one-off stuff like resurrecting someone's wedding music recording."

"Anyway, I'm getting near geezerdom. I may mostly work in digital and have quite a bit of expertise in it, but when all is said and done, I'm born analog and proud of it."

---

Footnote 3: Located in Westchester County outside New York City.