Jungle Studios HRA Demo Sessions: Part III
This is the third installment in the series of reports on the CE Week event held at Jungle City Studios on Tuesday, June 24, 2014. You can read the other posts by clicking Part I or Part II.
Next up was Frank Filipetti, another multiple Grammy winning engineer. He was closely associated with the late Phil Ramone and has worked with James Taylor, Barbara Streisand and recently recorded Frank Zappa’s “200 Motels” with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Frank Gehry designed Disney Hall.
During the afternoon sound check Frank played a few of his tracks including one by one of my favorite artists James Taylor. It sounded absolutely amazing…one of the best productions I’ve ever experienced. Each pluck of his acoustic guitar, his voice and the rest of the band were relaxed, detailed and existed as little pearls of sound immersed in a whisper of reverberation. I was thoroughly impressed! The sound was polished and refined but sounded quite natural almost hyper-real…a trait I like to think exists in my own recordings.
Frank is a major fan of high-resolution digital and was quite open about his distain for vinyl LPs and analog tape. It was refreshing to hear someone else state what most of us know is obvious but still hangs on in the minds of audiophiles.
He played a few pop/rock tracks that didn’t do much for me. There was a track featuring a female vocal that started a cappella and sounded raw, gated and was full of noise…very strange, I guess it’s a style. Then the rest of the accompaniment kicked, which consisted of an all MIDI band. The low frequencies were huge and the percussion just plain sterile sounding…a perfect combination. I sure it will be a hit.
A large portion of Frank’s twenty minutes was spent playing the overture and another section from the Zappa composition. He’s right that Frank Zappa was the unusual double threat in both rock and 20th century composition. Pierre Boulez was a strong champion for his music and performed many of his works at IRCAM in Paris.
The Zappa work is no doubt a terrific work but I’m not sure that the assembled group needed to hear over 10 minutes of it. It’s not the style of music that most people appreciate and the opening section went on just a little too long. Franks explained that the recording required 160 separate tracks on a Pro Tools rig…and therefore necessarily mandated the use of 48 kHz rather than his preferred 96 kHz sampling rate. According to Frank, PT wouldn’t have been able to keep up. I would love to have seen the setup for that recording…I thought I used a lot of tracks! Getting 160 channels of pristine mic preamps, and first-rate analog to digital converters would be almost impossible to get together. I fear the equipment was not audiophile quality and my have compromised the fidelity of the project.
Frank closed his remarks with a rousing endorsement of high-resolution audio and his preference for HD PCM recording. Then it was time for another break and Bob Ludwig, one of the prime mastering engineers of the past 30 years.
See you tomorrow.
First,, thanks very much for not only working your butt off this week, but also taking the time to share with others via your website. No doubt the greatest value for you was building relationships this week and adding to the network of rationalists fighting the good fight for higher quality audio, but I am fascinated at the 160 track comments above. May you have the opportunity to ask your new friends many questions in the coming months and years…
…including: does that mean 160 tracks were recorded simultaneously? (I doubt it). If not, how many simultaneously? The comment about PT tools not being able to handle 96k for 160 tracks doesn’t make sense to me as stated. Is there a software limitation that just won’t allow 96k for 160 tracks in PT, or since PT is really an app, was he really limited by his current PC hardware capabilities? And was he really trying to simultaneously process 160 tracks at once from beginning to end, or did he break it up first into something like 80 track batches and then combine for additional processing?
As you know better than me, Zappa was one of the smartest, creative and talented artists of the 20th century (even if I don’t find his music in my favorites list), so learning a bit more about what Zappa had in mind in this recording would be very interesting. But Zappa died in 1993, and I’m pretty sure Pro Tools at that time only offered 4 track processing, so why demonstrate 20+year audio mixing/mastering at a 2014 HRA confab? So my puzzlement grows…
Hi Mark,
Thanks for your efforts and reporting.
If you may say anything further, what was that James Taylor title presented by Mr. Filipetti that sounded so good?
Regards,
Joel
He played his Grammy-winning (Best Engineered Pop Album) “Hourglass”. The tune was “Line ‘Em Up”…absolutely beautiful.
Ah yes, as another poster mentioned, I too have that title on SACD. It’s got a great 5.1 mix, and I don’t think I’ve bothered to listen to the stereo mix much that I remember.
Joel
I didn’t realize that they had mixed it in 5.1 surround. That would take it to the next level.
God bless Frank Filipetti. Someone besides yourself who cares about quality. Quick, let’s have him stuffed and mounted.
Frank does stunning work…there are lots of others but his work on the James Taylor album (using 20 bit PCM on a Yamaha O2) was exceptional.
The performance of Zappa’s composition “200 Motels – the Suites” was on October 23, 2013.
This blog review of the concert mentions that there were 164 performers, and that “Each string player had an individual microphone”.
http://mixedmeters.com/2013/10/frank-zappas-200-motels-suites.html
Great write up by David Ocker, a musician friend from a long time ago. They recorded 160 tracks in a single pass. I can’t imagine the mixing chore.
Mark what was the James Taylor track?
James Taylor’s “Line ‘Em Up” from 1997 “Hourglass”.
Yes that one does sound great. I have it on SACD.