Will the Circle Be Unbroken – An Analog Remastering Tale II

The NGDB recorded a couple of follow up albums using the same concept. Volume II won the CMA 1989 “Album of the Year” and three Grammys.

Figure 3 – Will the Circle Be Unbroken Vol II Cover

The production path from the original session masters to the production master that I received was among the most direct that I’m aware of in the world of commercial music releases (there have been Direct Metal Masters done straight to a disc cutting machines but that’s a specialty production process). The original session recordings were reviewed and edited. The normal transfer associated with mixing down a large number of tracks was not required because the tracks were mixes “live” to 2-channel tape.

The edited master was then “mastered” and transferred using DBX noise reduction to the production master and a safety copy. That means that the production master that I used to create the anniversary CDs was actually a direct “one-off” copy of the master. However, it was encoded using DBX.

DBX was a competitor to Dolby in the professional and consumer marketplace back when cassettes were a dominant consumer format. In professional studios they were used to reduce tape hiss, a very annoying and very perceptible component of analog tape recording. The DBX engineers used a broadband 2:1 companding methodology while the Dolby guys broke the audio spectrum into three discrete bands and worked on them independently. DBX’s method actually had the capability of doubling the dynamic range of an analog recording by first compressing the source audio signal by 2:1. This means that if the signal amplitude was at 5 volts the output of the DBX encoder would be 2.5 volts and that signal would be recorded onto the analog tape. On playback the DBS decoding circuits would double the output amplitude thus restoring the dynamics back to the original values.

So it was theoretically possible to achieve dynamic signal to noise ratios of around 100 dB, which is very close to a compact disc! But there were huge alignment issues associated with the DBX technique. The encoding and decoding processes had to match exactly. And as close as we all tried to calibrate the inputs and outputs, it was never possible to get it perfect.

I aligned the playback electronics of the ATR machine that I rented. I calibrated the DBX unit and transferred the analog tapes into my Sonic Solution Digital Audio Workstation through an Apogee “high-end” analog to digital converter. I did these transfers at 44.1 kHz and 16-bits…that was the normal specifications at the time even though the rumblings of HD-Audio were starting to happen.

What a joy it was to hear the playback of the analog masters. The “Circle” album is among the best sounding albums I’ve ever worked on. It certainly is among the finest analog productions because of the sensitivity of the engineers and producers in making smart choices AND because the musicians that performed on the project were all masters of their instruments. There was not need to go back and “autotune” or punch in and punch out a solo section. If you’ve never heard this record, you owe it to yourself to take a listen. The music making is raw and honest in a way that is extremely rare. It’s not wonder to me that the album was successful and remains a consistent seller today.

My mastering of the project involved very little timbral adjustments and no dynamics compression. The one very interesting facet of the project was the discovery that the previous CD version (which I had for reference) had the left and right channels reversed. It took me a while to figure it out but it turned out to be true. I knew this album as a vinyl LP set and something just didn’t sound right when I listened to the CD. Sure enough I confirmed my suspicions with John during one of the sessions. For almost 20 years, listeners of the WTCBU CD had the channels reversed from the original LPs. That mistake was hugely embarrassing for the record company and the mastering company/engineers that did the original CD work.

I only wish that I could hear the original edited session master and transfer that directly to 96 kHz/24-bit PCM. We would move on step closer to the sound that came through the speakers during the original playback in Nashville. We would hear the sound without the distortions caused by the DBX encoding and relive the magic that happened back in 1972.