by Walter E. Sear

As we approach the millennium, I thought that my overview of our industry as I have seen it evolve from the 1950s might help to counteract the negative directions that I have seen taking place in our industry. RANCOR AND RAGE!! What do you mean, negative directions!! With all of the new technology, it has to be better. Well, I don't think so. There has been a serious deterioration in the quality of recorded sound since the 1960s which continues to get worse to this day.

How many times have I heard people say, "I listened to an old LP, and the sound really jumps out at you." Why is this so, and why is so much vintage tube equipment being restored to use? I think that I can give you an answer.

THE PEOPLE. In the golden era of sound recording, recording was done in very professional studios, by a very professional staff. The training of the staff to learn the engineering art took a number of years. There were a number of prerequisites that were required for an entry level position. Often, an engineering degree was required and certainly, a very good knowledge of music was a must. You were trained in the studios in the various aspects of studio operation and you learned the studio philosophy. Yes, each studio had a point of view about the aesthetics of music and the recorded sound, usually reflecting the views and personality of the owner-engineer. Different studios, as a result of their point of view, produced different sounding recordings. There was a character and personality that could be heard in the product of each studio and each of the studio staff engineers.

Yes, in the olden days, there were ON-STAFF STUDIO ENGINEERS. In fact, the complete studio staff was on (believe it or not) salary. Freelance people were very rare and, as a result, if the client chose a particular studio in which to record, it was because of the philosophy of the studio, for the expertise of its engineers and the quality of its sound. The support staff was equally important. Everyone knew the equipment, the wiring, the sound of the rooms, the coffee maker and the monitors.

Today, the freelance engineer comes into a strange control room, has to guess at what the monitors sound like, has to work with a strange assistant engineer, has to figure out why the coffee tastes like it does, and he has to depend on the varying competence of the maintenance staff. No wonder the music suffers!

THE EQUIPMENT. There is a plethora of equipment available today that we could not have even dreamed of in 1960. Much of it is remarkable. Much of it is garbage. Although Western Electric was the source of much of the research that we applied to the recording profession, they were mostly interested in telephone-related equipment. When they developed the transistor, it was not with the audio market in mind. At this point, the recording industry became a fashion industry. Many people who should have known better decided to keep up with the "flavor of the month" instead of using their ears. "Solid state" (squalid state) became the catchword of the '60s, much as "digital" became the catchword of the '80s. The early germanium transistors were horribly non-linear, and they sounded terrible. However, the people who should have known better junked their old tube equipment and got into the era of transistor-generated third and 13th harmonic distortion. (The research that was done in my studio on this type of distortion was published in the Audio Engineering Society Journal in May, 1973).

As the new equipment got cheaper, lighter and easier to operate, the general quality of the recorded sound deteriorated. True to Gresham's Law in economics, bad product pushed out good product and unfortunately, the new, bad sound became established as the norm. It became easier to call yourself an engineer since you didn't have to know quite as much about signal flow, how the equipment operated or any of those other boring technical things. Since you didn't have to know as much, more people could call themselves engineers and so salaries began to drop. The good engineers became freelance since the studios had to begin to cut their prices and could no longer afford to pay decent salaries. In addition, the age of the unpaid assistant began.

THE MANUFACTURERS. Happy as a lark, the new transistor technology, with the proper hype, now had made most of the studios' equipment obsolete and all of the home hi-fi equipment as well. The factories both here and in the Orient could make new transistorized equipment cheaper and cheaper since the public was now made to believe that "newer is better" and that "solid state" was perfection. There is an old RCA ad from around 1910 with Enrico Caruso next to a wind-up phonograph with a big morning glory horn. The text is more or less "I can't tell it from my own voice." Sound familiar?

Some of the braver people listened, heard the difference and stuck with the old tube equipment. They were accused of being reactionaries or even worse, "golden ears."

SYNTHESIZERS. In the 1960s the first commercial synthesizers began to appear. I was an associate of Bob Moog for many years, and I set up the first commercial electronic music studio in New York, mostly as a showroom to sell Moog Synthesizers. As a musician and composer, I knew most of the music houses and commercial arrangers, and I began to run up some nice sales. At first, my studio was used for its new and unique sounds. Then, on the film scores and commercials that I was writing, more and more of my clients would ask, "Can you make it sound like a violin?" Beginning of the end.

From my earlier studies at Curtis Institute, Columbia University, George Washington University and Catholic University, I knew what the musical problems were going to be with synthesized music. The wave shape from note to note doesn't vary. The subtle timbrel changes that we are used to hearing from acoustical instruments and the human voice cannot be synthesized. Most musical instruments do not play tempered scales, like the piano, organ and synthesizers, so when we fake a violin line, it never sounds quite right because the violin is not played in a tempered manner. Real musical expression is almost impossible to achieve with synthesizers, but they do emulate and synthesize sounds that might pass for the real thing, minus musical expression.

Again, Gresham's Law took over and since it was cheaper and easier to synthesize the music than to hire live musicians, the live musicians lost out. It also meant that you didn't need a real recording studio anymore. You could plug the synthesizer directly into a tape recorder. Didn't even need an engineer. Meanwhile, the middle and lower range recording studios found that their demo work was disappearing because the synthesizer and MIDI rooms could be set up at home. To add to their troubles, commercial rents were skyrocketing. Many went out of business and many of the larger, top-flight studios packed it in. It became less commercially viable to be in the studio business. Economies were instituted, like cutting the maintenance staff, but this was really self-defeating.

THEN CAME DIGITAL. A whole new world of audio fraud was launched when digital storage media became cheap enough to be used in consumer equipment. It became cheap enough as long as you didn't have to store more than 44.1 kHz. worth of sampled information. Also, since no one but a dog could hear above 20 kHz., why not just filter out anything above this frequency, even if that is where the subtlety of musical expression lives.

WAS EVERYBODY HAPPY? You bet! The record companies could re-release all of their old catalog all over again as CDs--new life for dead inventory, and cheap, too. Didn't have to pay those nasty musicians or those expensive recording studios. The manufacturers (now almost all foreign) had a virgin market to exploit. Everyone had to throw out their old analog equipment and buy the new digital technology--even "digitally ready" loudspeakers.

THE PROFESSIONAL STUDIOS. Wait a minute! They were not happy. As the record labels re-released old material, they didn't have to release as much new material. Less studio time was needed. More studios folded. Now that we were told another big lie, "digital is perfection," a whole new industry sprang up. How to fix digital. Bits, algorithms, psychoacoustics, dither, a whole new industry was born. The studio owners had to, at first, buy digital recorders. Then they had to buy all kinds of outboard gear to try to correct some of the problems with digital.

A failed consumer format was foisted off on the studios by the manufacturers and DAT was born. Well, it was cheap enough compared to those old analog recorders, so why not? But then, you had to buy external D/A and A/D converters and a host of other "fix it" equipment. The sound was still quite unmusical. We were putting a Band-Aid on a leper.

After a while people began to realize that the digital sound sucked, and although it was "perfection," it was cold, gritty (much top-end distortion due to the lack of higher frequency samples) and unmusical. The solution? (Don't count on it) --VACUUM TUBES.

In order to try to recapture some of the musicality of older analog recording, the solution (so it was reasoned) was to go back to some of the older vacuum-tube technology. Old tube equipment was snapped up at outrageous prices to try to recapture the lost music. The manufacturers, bless their hearts, began to manufacture new tube equipment, for the most part without really understanding what they were doing. The studio owners, in desperation, bought the old tube stuff to try to keep up. It didn't help. After upping their investment again, they cut their rates still more, tightened their belts and waited for better times. More studios failed.

THE HOME STUDIO. It was inevitable (as I knew many years ago when I began to record whole scores on my Moog), that eventually the end would come. As the professional studios switched to digital recording, the sound got so bad that anyone could do it as badly at home using the same equipment or the newer, cheaper home digital multitracks. They got the same terrible, unmusical results. Why spend money on a professional studio if you could do the same thing at home? The professional studios suffered another round of price cutting and now, the whole scene has become a Middle Eastern bazaar. If you have open time, you sell it for whatever you can get. Since most studios have the same equipment, same sound and same lack of good staff engineers, why not go for the cheapest price. Many studios have become, as is known in economics, an undifferentiated product. One sack of rice is the same as the next.

ARTISTS VS. EVERYONE. Many of the major artists, upon reviewing their royalty statements, observed that they were running up very high studio costs. The solution for some was to build their own private recording studio. This had some tax benefits also, and it made perfect sense that when they were not using the studio, they would sell the open time. With almost unlimited budgets to spend on the studio, the tax saving on high income artists was obvious, and the rates charged for rentals to outsiders could be below market, since the government was picking up the tab on any losses incurred. The bean counters had taken over the industry.

TAPE MANUFACTURERS VS. THE PROFESSIONAL RECORDING STUDIOS. Seeing their sales of tape shifting from professional to home studios, the tape manufacturers have decided to sell to these smaller customers through dealers, and while they were at it, why not make the professional studios buy through dealers, too. Sell to both at about the same price. This cut out another profit center for the studios even though they still had to stock the various brands, gauges and catalog numbers in case their clients, who brought their own tape, ran out in the middle of a session. "Can I borrow a reel of 2-inch tape? I'll return it tomorrow."

THE FINAL, FATAL BLOW. Between the deteriorating condition of many professional studios, and with the constant lowering of audio standards due to the "new technology," many amateur engineers have decided to go from their MIDI-synthesizer-sampling home studios to the "big time." By now, due to the cheap digital recording and editing equipment that has become available, they can purchase a few software programs, install it into their home computers and, bingo--instant recording studio. With new inexpensive consoles, it even looks like a professional studio. All of this can now be done for less than the cost of a professional multitrack recorder.

With good samples of the various instruments, musicians as we knew them, are practically eliminated. You can steal their sounds and organize them any way you want. Working out of your home, the rents are less than commercial rents, and you are spared the trouble and expense of paying business taxes. All things perfect in a perfect world.

Just one minor problem--the results don't sound very good, and the music has gotten lost. The commercials don't work quite as well since the music for the most part does not enhance the action. Since everyone is using the same basic sounds and equipment, the synthesized film scores all begin to sound the same. All music has become a "rug"--it is there, but it doesn't do too much.

However, since everything is digital, it all tends to sound the same anyway, and we are back to the sacks of rice--an undifferentiated product. Any amateur composer can get into the act (the computer can even do the notation for you if you can't read music), any amateur "engineer" can record and any computer person can mix and edit. Is the result music? Mostly, no. Occasionally, yes, or as Shelly Yakus says, "Even a blind squirrel will find an acorn occasionally."

ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER THESE PORTALS? NO. In spite of the foregoing, I think that there is a great future for the recording industry if we return to the basic values of the art, the art of critical listening. In an age of political correctness and financial expediency, it is too rare that dissenting opinions are heard. The "perfection" of new equipment often results from well written ads, rather than critical listening evaluation. Unfortunately, to be able to evaluate and to be critical requires a certain musical and engineering education which is produced by good teachers and a great deal of learning time.

In an age of instant everything, when we begin to believe in the lucky break, winning the lottery and getting rich from a law suit, to say "pay your dues and learn your craft" may be whistling into the wind. If we don't encourage this education and if we don't help to train the next generation of engineers, the fine art of recording will deteriorate still further. It can be done. Recordings can be made which will have the musical sound and musical impact that those better LP recordings of the '50s and '60s still have.

ALL IS NOT LOST. Here and there, there are still a few oases where the tradition of good sound is still pursued. Combining modern technology with the traditional craft of recording, with musicality and taste, with good old equipment and good new equipment, good work is still being done. Just not often enough. This is not a view of the world that longs for the past. Quite the opposite. I am only unhappy about the fact that in many areas of my studio operation, I have to keep ancient equipment running because no one has come up with equipment that sounds better. To keep 40-year-old analog tube tape recorders running is no joke. To keep 50-year-old tube microphones operational is silly but that is what we are doing in an industry that prides itself on new technology.

Because too many of us have not learned our craft and because sonic standards have been allowed to deteriorate through the years, we find ourselves in a very troubled industry. As Pogo said, "We have seen the enemy, and they are us."

What have they done to my art? "They" didn't do it. "We" did, but I refuse to go along with the trend. Today, the freelance engineer comes into a strange control room, has to guess at what the monitors sound like, has to work with a strange assistant engineer, has to figure out why the coffee tastes like it does, and he has to depend on the varying competence of the maintenance staff. No wonder the music suffers!

During the first two weeks of December, 1996, the New York Times discovered the recording industry. In a front page article, an editorial page article and the whole front page of the Sunday Arts and Entertainment section, the Times reported doom and gloom about our industry.

I certainly cannot dispute their reportage. They discuss a drop in the growth rate of the industry, various Chapter 11 bankruptcies of record store chains, the practical cessation of classical recording in this country and of falling revenues in the industry. After a growth rate of 10 percent a year, we have dropped back to 2 percent, and the curve is failing rapidly.

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING? The golden goose has stopped laying. Perhaps it is time to take an overview and try to evaluate what is going wrong. In a complex industry, there is no simple causation of our problems. Some of the problems are caused by those of us who are not farsighted about where we are going. Some of the problems are external due to general economic conditions and there "ain't" much that we can do about that.

THE MUSIC: Some of us have forgotten what should be a self-evident fact--we are selling music, and if the music isn't there, no one will buy the record. Now, to define "music." Of course, this is the hardest part of all. Music is a form of human communicative expression which is based on two elements, the song and the dance. The human voice is the most powerful device and the perfect instrument to which all others are compared. The more that we distort it and make it inhuman, the less communicative it becomes. Words are a plus. Good poetry has always sold, and great words (as in the Bible and Shakespeare) are timeless. We haven't turned out many good poets lately.

The dance. The physiological response of the body to regular repetitive beats, seems basic to many animals. There are two variations to the beat emphasis: breathing rate while awake, a two-beat, and the basic breathing pattern while we are asleep, the three-beat. This gives us the march and the waltz, to reduce it to the commonest forms in Western music. In modern commercial music (other than a little country), we have eliminated 50 percent of the possibilities by eliminating anything with three beats to the bar. I won't even mention non-Western music which uses complex combinations of two-beat and three-beat to render five, seven and 11 beats to the bar. Especially in rock 'n' roll, we have settled on a rigid march tempo of 120 beats per minute, unrelentingly, unvaryingly and mechanically "click track." The subtle tempo changes which emphasize the musicality of the phrase have long been abandoned, or perhaps they were never there in the first place.

Demographics, age distribution of the record-buying public, and disposable income should be re-evaluated. Especially with rock 'n' roll, which is now quite old, not much new has happened in the past 25 years. The chords haven't changed, and the instruments haven't changed, and it becomes endlessly repetitive. Perhaps this is why my contemporaries who are ready to collect Social Security are back out on the road--they still have something to say, besides recreating "wonders of the past."

There is too much product and too much bad product being released. With the advent of the home studio, albums can be produced cheaply. The record labels have taken advantage of this and have released a lot of material that should have never seen the light of day. They have been unwilling to put in the time and money to produce a few good projects and then to invest enough to get them off the ground. The buying public sees too much unknown product in the stores and becomes confused.

Some pressure from the listening public is needed to get the endless top 40 radio stations to play something that isn't on the charts yet. This vast wasteland needs some serious overhaul since the stations are clearly not fulfilling their Federal mandate. How they get their licenses renewed will remain an eternal mystery to me. The delivery medium of CDs and of digital reproduction has greatly reduced the amount of musical satisfaction that the public can derive. I continually hear from both professional audio people and lay people too, that the old LPs had a "sound" that was, if I may translate, warm and musical. All the vacuum tubes in the world will never restore to digital in its present form the warm and musical sound of analog recording. I could discuss technically why this is so. but that is a matter for a different time. While occasionally the music gets through on a digital recording, it happens far too seldom.

So, let's see why the New York Times is so upset. We have allowed the music that has driven the industry for 40 years to go stale. CD prices are high enough so that the usual buyer, the 11 to 15 year-old girl, has to cut back on the number of records purchased since her dollar doesn't go as far. Perhaps the industry should re-evaluate its pricing structure to make list prices a little more realistic in terms of the actual costs of manufacturing. Heresy! The videocassette industry discovered this 20 years ago and dropped list prices from $59.95 to $19.95--volume increased to make up the profit difference.

Musically, not much now has happened. The music that our industry sells provides little song and very little dance, which used to be a very important form of social intercourse. When there was danceable music, girls would buy the records and get together to practice the newest steps. There were also dances, often done to recordings, which were important social events in the life of a teenager.

The A & R people are also remiss. Rather than take chances on something new or different, they have imitated what the latest hit group has done, rather than using imagination and spunk to try something off the beaten track. The rock groups get their education from listening to the latest hit group, and they usually end up doing a poor imitation.

Multitrack recording has also greatly diminished the spontaneity and musicality that is possible to convey in a recording. The advent of multitrack recording became necessary when the quality of musicians went from top-grade professionals to abjectly musically untutored amateurs. Multitracking allowed the amateur musician the luxury of infinite retakes until it seemed to be correct. Albums which used to be recorded by professionals in two days now became two-month or two-year projects. The costs mounted up. To the equally unsophisticated teenage girls, the energy of the new groups was appealing, especially that these new musicians could be seen on television and at live shows. The listening public was exposed to the abomination of TV sound. TV sound did not have to be as horrible as it is, but the television manufacturers, in their infinite wisdom, put in the cheapest possible audio circuits into their product, destroying the potential of good FM reception. This badly reproduced sound, together with the bad amplified sound at concerts has become, in the listener's ears, what the music should sound like. "Louder" has replaced "better."

As the costs mounted, the record companies put more and more pressure on the A & R people to produce more "hits." For the most part, they failed because the bean counters wanted to go the conservative and safe route--copy what was currently successful. By the time the new, duplicate album was finished and released (a year down the road?), the trend had already changed. Often, they would copy a hit group who could not come up with a second hit record.

The blame got passed down the line--the producer was no good, the engineer was no good, the studio had the wrong "vibe" and so on, ad finitum. Rather than hiring good A&R people who had musical knowledge, and who could select musical groups with some certainty, the labels hired good PR people who listened to a lot of records, and who could get along with the groups and prevent personality disasters.

This lack of desirable musical qualifications in the A & R people reflected down the line. Incompetence breeds incompetence. Incompetent producers were hired (many times, I think, because they had the right hairstyle) who in turn, hired incompetent engineers (who had the same hairstyle) who ended up in incompetent studios. The project was doomed from the start.

Especially rock, which had a vigorous anti-establishment beginning during the baby boom era, has lost a great deal of its meaning during the very conservative times that we now live in. The enemy at that time were parents, school and government. Today, all three have abdicated much of their authority and no longer pose a threat. The success of urban music, hip-hop, etc. is because the enemies are still perceived by that segment of the population who is still in conflict with authority.

Are we trapped forever in this downward spiraling mediocrity? Perhaps not. I am not alone in my analysis of "what's wrong?" Martin Polon, writing in the venerable British studio magazine Studio Sound, leads his article on the mediocrity that has invaded our industry with, "When the CD rolled in, the 'professional margin' rolled out, and took with it the quality assurance long offered by the audio pros." Perhaps, broadly extended, this is the malaise which is affecting sales.

In a letter to the New York Times in response to their article on the demise of classical music, the writer says that the modern orchestral recordings sound like they are performed "like automatons playing synthesizers." I can only agree. The music has been lost.

How do we get it back? First, the youth culture is fine for the buyers of music, but it should not be transmitted to the professional selection of groups, their production and recording. This is an area for only the best professionally trained people. Secondly, the technology which is available to us is not the music. The technology is only the means for expressing and recording the music. A good computer operator is not necessarily a good music editor (or film editor, for that matter). Thirdly, we must get away from the prevailing slob-ism of "Let's get by" and "It's good enough."

I overuse the word "professional." What I mean is, for example, a person who is very skilled and very talented at carving the Christmas turkey is not necessarily the person who I would choose to do brain surgery. Rather, I would like to know that the brain surgeon has had four years of college, four years of medical school, two years of internship and three years of specialty in surgery. The professional musician has been trained almost as rigorously. So has the professional recording engineer. Talent isn't enough!

CRITICAL EVALUATION. The lack of critical evaluation is pathetic. This is the type of criticism we hear around our studio, and it is expressed by everyone about everything--from the second assistant to the head of A&R ("It blew me away," "These are the best tracks I ever heard,", "The mastering house never heard anything like this before," "Amazing!" "Awesome!" [my favorite word]). How can everything be the best? There must be some demarcation in quality, and the people responsible for the product should know enough to be able to say, "That sucks" Better yet, they should have known enough not to have signed inferior groups to the label. The criteria for determining the aesthetics of a good composition and a good performance has been established many centuries ago. No mystery here.

The levels of incompetence often start at the top and seep down through the various levels of the recording chain. Too often, the recording engineers are ill-trained. There has been a long "guild" tradition in the training of engineers which is rapidly being lost. As an apprentice, you would learn the basics, built on a previous technical and musical knowledge. You would move up through the ranks to assistant engineer where you could watch and learn from master engineers. Only then could you sit behind the console as full-charge engineer. Through the years of training you developed recording knowledge and, with a little luck, taste.

Today, there are too few studios that still maintain this system of training. Now, many of the people who apply for work have started at the top--they have a home studio, and they have done their engineering in their basement. It doesn't give us much to work with.

We hear too much "music" which is synthesized. Having an active part myself in creating this monster, I am well aware of its shortcomings. No matter how good the violin sample is, there is no way that you can create a line the way a violinist would play it. The subtle nuances that a good violinist adds by playing non-tempered tuning, the subtle changes in the tonal quality from note to note and the dynamic changes from note to note would take an eternity to recreate on a synthesizer. Unfortunately, it is in these subtle elements that the music lies.