SOUNDING BOARD

But above all else vintage Neve consoles are famous for one thing: their sound. They’re certainly not known for their brilliant ergonomics or comprehensive mixing options – that’s where SSL stepped into the limelight – and, to that end, Rupert Neve has certainly harked back to his earlier designs to develop the modular 5088, resisting any temptations to add any extra bells and whistles. It’s not feature-packed by any means; it’s unashamedly about sound quality. So it makes sense then that everyone is keen – above all else – to know what the console sounds like, as was I.

To cut right to that chase, from my experience with the board, the 5088 is the cleanest, purest and most open sounding console I’ve heard in a long time. Beyond that it’s hard to attribute many adjectives to it without them seeming preemptive or presumptuous – [after all, the sound of a console is assessed over years, even decades, not weeks].

The 5088 has more headroom than my old Ford XC Panelvan. Its so impressive, in fact, that I really never actually heard the board push back against the input signals during the whole time I used it. It seems that before you’d ‘hear’ the console, in a way you might hear an old Neve circuit distort, you’d probably find you’d broken off all the needles on the channel and output VU meters. To many this might actually sound like quite disappointing news, particularly given the ‘retrospective’ nature of its Class-A, transformer-balanced design. But to expect an old ’70s sound from this board is to misunderstand one important fact: although Rupert Neve has reverted to a simpler layout, and chosen quality components to construct an ‘uncompromised’ signal flow, he certainly hasn’t gone back in time to a world of high distortion components and inferior circuit analysis techniques to design the 5088. In every technical respect the 5088 is cutting edge – like the Neve consoles of the early ’70 were in their day. Rupert had no intention of making something “inferior,” as he puts it. He’s obsessed with providing the best possible product – always has been – and, unfortunately, those searching for ‘rock’ distortion specs and vintage 80-Series punch will need to look elsewhere.

What you will find in the 5088 is a stereo mix bus that offers superb depth of image, great phase coherence and a rock-solid soundstage. As a line level summing mixer you’d be hard pressed to find anything better anywhere on the market. And given that Rupert’s aim for the 5088 was to provide “the highest possible sound quality to complex digital or analogue recording systems” you’d have to say he’s been highly successful. Unlike old Neve consoles that everyone rightly or wrongly claims ‘has a sound, no matter what do on the board’, the 5088 sounds open and versatile and will probably never earn the reputation as a ‘one-trick pony’.

RESOLUTELY MODERN

So what does it offer then, if not that ‘vintage’ sound? Well, as the centerpiece of an analogue stereo mixing environment, where a small footprint, high quality summing mixer is required, the 5088 is a great option. There are professional features like VU metering, a built-in oscillator, multiple talkback options, three speaker selection options, as well as the ability to monitor auxiliaries 1&2, the solo bus, and three external inputs. All eight auxiliary sends can be muted (in pairs) while auxs 1&2 and 3&4 (in stereo mode) can have their pan pot overridden by the channel pan, via the ‘Send Follows Pan’ switch. The pan pots can also be switched in and out of service as required, guaranteeing centred audio placement and improving headroom specs. The eight groups each have Stereo Left, Stereo Right and Group Insert switches above each individual group’s pan pot, as well as solo and mute switches (The solo switches also provide simple visual overload informationby changing colour when they’re hit hard, in the same way some VUs might have a small peak LED contained within them). The auxiliary masters also have solo and mute switches. The master section has five talkback routing paths and a master talkback switch that doesn’t ‘latch’.

Although this list constitutes only some of the board’s facilities, while space permits there are a few obvious things missing from the 5088, and other ‘unusual’ design decisions that should be mentioned.

Given the console must surely be capable of, for instance, mixing music, the concept of a ‘line mixer with optional extras’ won’t satisfy everyone’s expectations. Let’s say, for instance, that you wanted to buy a 5088 but you didn’t want the ‘optional extras’ of an upper penthouse filled with mic-preamp/EQ modules etc. In that case you’d be buying a console that contained no EQ and no mic preamps, only line trims and auxiliary sends. Moreover, the comprehensive back panel (that offers a veritable phalanx of connectivity) doesn’t include channel inserts, only group and stereo inserts, which makes the core lower deck of the console feel a little restricted, again, without a patchbay. With an upper deck comprising 16 preamp/EQ Portico modules, and with all the console connectors reflected on a professional patchbay, inserting things like external compressors and EQs etc would be a simple matter of patching between the preamp output and the line input. However, without these extra modules feeding the line inputs, and without a dedicated patchbay, this is impossible without interrupting the signal before it even reaches the console, which isn’t ideal. So, without question, a patchbay is mandatory if you intend using the 5088 for any involved mixing duties.

Other peculiar features are solo switches that only work if you’re monitoring the ‘solo’ bus on the right-hand side of the console. To solo you must first select ‘Solo’ at the monitor controller, at which time you hear silence, and then hit a channel, group or auxiliary solo to hear signal. Conversely, you could solo individual channels first and then hit the ‘solo’ switch at the monitor controller, but whichever way you go about it, it feels clunky.

There is no headphone jack input to monitor signals either, even though there is ample space on the console to accommodate one. Comprehensive monitoring these days really should include some sort of headphone setup and without this facility the console feels a little restrictive. Having to monitor in headphones via a separate system feeding off the stereo output bus during mixdown was a drag, in my experience, especially given there was patently so much wide open space on the board. Lastly, because the console contains Class-A circuitry throughout, the design includes fans to prevent overheating, and these are not as ‘silent’ as the literature suggests. They’re not noisy, but they’re distracting at times when you’re listening to low-level audio. I’d love to see these improved if possible, or, better still, removed altogether.

These criticisms aside, if you’ve got the funds available and you’re looking for a superbly clear, supreme line mixer, the 5088 is a must-see. It’s beautifully constructed and a genuine credit to Rupert Neve’s skills as a designer. The mix bus sounds fabulous and the facilities it offers are first class, and highly spec’d. Having things like VUs on every channel and output bus is very handy indeed and great for managing gain structure at a glance. But without the added penthouse section the console feels a little trapped between worlds (given there’s no EQ, dynamics control or mic preamps on the lower deck). So unless you fill the upper ‘Penthouse’ full of modules and connect it to a patchbay, don’t expect it to comprehensively mix that next masterpiece you’ve recorded. Meanwhile, for summing a pristine DSD recording or feeding an elaborate digital mix into an analogue environment, it’s perfect.

Text: Greg Walker (5043 review) & Andy Stewart (5042 review)

5042 ‘TRUE TAPE’ EMULATION & LINE DRIVER

My first reaction upon seeing the Portico ‘True Tape’ emulator – and the rest of the Portico range for that matter – was that it seemed nowhere near as ‘dinky’ as I had imagined it to be. The units are far slicker and better built than pictures imply – altogether more substantial both in weight and strength. What I inadvertently discovered after handling these new units for the first time was that I had become a bit of a ‘half rack unit snob’ over the years, without realising it: if a product didn’t stretch across the full 19 inches, I wasn’t interested. And as for third-rack units, well…

But this bias (no pun intended) has been utterly irrational, based on nothing more than the fact that half- and third-rack units don’t easily bunk in with all my other gear – unless I strap two or three together of course (although I still have three RNCs that roll about like homeless waifs, never having been given a permanent home). But with the arrival of the Portico range – and a couple of other, quality, half-rack unit designs already on the market – it may be time we each started building our first half-rack bay (easily done), which would open up our studios (and minds) to a whole wave of gear that’s being built with an economy of scale to improve audio performance without increasing manufacturing and shipping costs. Or am I the last one to realise this?

Rupert Neve’s Portico ‘True Tape’ emulator is, of course, tapeless. It’s not like a Roland Space Echo or a Mellotron; there are no tape heads, transport mechanisms or tape loops of any kind (even though an initial glance across the unit’s controls might have you believing otherwise), just transformer balanced line amplifiers and some other tricky Neve analogue circuits that emulate the saturation characteristics of tape… minus the hiss, wow and flutter that, to a greater or lesser extent, make up the other sonic ingredients of most of the world’s tape machines. The guts of the 5042 consist of two line driving amplifier circuits with transformer-balanced inputs and outputs that utilise some refreshingly old-school components which are actually recognisable, and more importantly, easily repairable. Rows of resistors, capacitors, op-amps and transformers adorn a relatively spacious circuit board, and nowhere (apart from on two separate boards that drive the LED metering) is there the now familiar micro-circuitry which can prove almost impossible for local technicians to repair – in the event of failure, of course – and which often means a unit needs to be returned for lengthy periods overseas to the manufacturer. Further to that, the construction also refreshingly lacks an on-board switch-mode power supply (the switch-mode supply is external, to minimise internal heat and noise, as well as to safeguard against a failing supply ‘frying’ the audio circuitry around it).

AT A PLACE CALLED PORTICO…

As Greg has already mentioned in his preceding description of the 5043 stereo compressor, the 5042 tape emulator is similarly subtle in its influence over the audio driving through it. This is no emulation of a wild, unpredictable or erratic tape machine, but rather an archetypical – almost abstract – notion of what a tape machine has historically been. It doesn’t emulate the sound of a dodgy old Tascam with a recalcitrant noise floor and an erratic pinch roller rubber. Nor can the unit really lay claim to sounding like a Studer (although perhaps it feels closer to an A80 MIV to my ears than other machines, but that’s a bit of a speculative stretch, to be honest). There’s nothing about the 5042 that emulates the latent fear of the tape tearing in half as it spools at breathtaking speeds (á la an Ampex ATR100), nor does it have the rock ’n’ roll punch of an MCI. The 5042 is not wholly like any of these machines, but what it clearly emulates is something that all of them possess to some degree, and that’s a characteristic ‘head-bump’ (as it’s always been affectionately known). This characteristic low-midrange boost, intrinsic to the sound of tape machines of all shapes and sizes (which is basically the mechanical side-effect of tape/head interaction) is nicely emulated by the Portico the moment you ‘engage the tape’, as it were.

What’s nice about the 5042 is that not only has Rupert Neve designed the unit to emulate the sound of a tape recorder (albeit a somewhat idealised one), he has also built in certain ‘mechanical’ outcomes reminiscent of a tape machine. For instance, when the input/tape level buttons are pressed, which switches the LED meters from input level to the measure of faux recording levels, nothing shows up on the meters unless the ‘engage tape’ buttons are also activated. This will probably confuse some people initially, but it follows the mechanical logic of a tape machine that wouldn’t register level on tape if the unit wasn’t in ‘record’. There are also two buttons that switch the ‘tape machine’ from 7.5ips to 15ips, which has very subtle effects on the top end and more obvious effects on the bass frequencies.

The 5042’s functionality is actually quite simple. There are two basic controls on the unit (per channel), the first knob being an input Trim. This is effectively the calibration knob – an incoming signal of 0dBu lights up the first ‘lineup’ LED on the meters when the Trim knob is set to 12 o’clock. This is where Rupert suggests (in the manual) you should set your incoming signal peaks, to illuminate this first LED. Initially this is a little odd for someone used to lining up a tape machine where VU meters typically display 0dBu over on the right hand side of the needle’s trajectory. Seeing only one LED light up on the far left of the meter instinctively felt too low to me…

The second, larger knob controls the ‘tape saturation’, and this only affects the sound when the ‘engage tape’ button is pressed (illuminating red). Interestingly, although this knob effectively drives the amount of ‘level to tape’, it has absolutely no influence over the output volume of the unit, which again seems instinctively a little odd. Unlike a tape machine, where the volume of an incoming signal would naturally increase if the recording level were raised up, the 5042’s design melds the record and replay gain controls of a tape machine together as one. As you increase the ‘recording level’ to ‘slam’ the ‘tape’, the replay level attenuates the output to compensate so that the overall output remains constant. Again, this is perhaps a little odd at first, but ultimately an elegant solution that allows you the freedom to mess about with tape saturation levels without having to constantly re-adjust the output gain. This also means that you’re only ever listening to the effects of the saturation, not just the ups and downs of level, which can be distracting and deceiving.

Using the unit across a mix, which I inevitably did, given that it’s a stereo device (I wonder when someone will bring out a 24-track version of this type of thing!), quickly saw me departing from the ‘correct’ gain structure in order to get the emulator cranking. As my instinct had already told me, I quickly found that calibrating my mixes to the Portico so that the peaks only lit up the first input LED left me scratching around for more saturation, which I quickly had open to full throttle. Increasing the input gain allowed more saturation potential, although I was initially just testing to hear how ugly things could get when the unit was fed too much gain. It certainly got pretty ugly, producing some really crunchy and clapped out sounds – this might be beneficial to individual instruments at some point, but perhaps not so for an entire mix. Given that I was in the middle of a session at the time of testing, I quickly backed things off until I eventually settled on a sound that provided me with some power in the bottom end while the top end remained almost unchanged.

I’d have to say my gut feeling was initially that this box was almost too subtle for its own good. But as I used the 5042 on several mixes I was eventually reminded that audio gear shouldn’t always be judged by how radical or extreme its effects are. Extreme outcomes aren’t always what you’re after, and a ‘radical’ box is not, by virtue of its wild changes, somehow better value for money than a subtle one. And besides, the effects of recording to tape are nearly always subtle (assuming you’re not intentionally slamming tape for a specific purpose) and most untrained ears and monitoring environments can barely discern the difference anyway. I soon realised, however, that the 5042 was doing great things to the bottom end of my mix, adding power and weight to the songs long before the signal began to break up. Switching the ‘Engage Tape’ button in and out soon proved that these supposedly subtle effects I was getting were actually quite vivid in the mix, once I knew where to listen for them. The compression effect was pushing the bottom end up through the midrange, strengthening my mix in a way that I soon became reliant upon. Disengaging the ‘tape head’ was then like taking a knife to a football, deflating the mix in a way that was not subtle at all. My conclusion: this box works wonders on the bottom end and has some desirable faux tape compression effects that are very addictive once they become obvious.

It hardly needs to be stated that the Portico True Tape emulator is vastly more practical than an actual tape machine – particularly in the hands of those who, through no fault of their own, couldn’t thread up a tape spool if their life depended on it. Of course, it’s not as much fun as a real tape machine either… tape machines are amazing beasts; their presence, sonic balance and depth, and even their smell can be reassuring at times. But the reality is that tape machines need to be used regularly, serviced regularly, overhauled occasionally, aligned daily, cleaned and pampered continuously and regularly repaired with parts that are often are hard to get, impossible to get or expensive to buy. And that’s just the reliable machines! Although I’m a firm believer that recording to tape is of benefit to at least some aspects of nearly any recording you care to contemplate, owning a tape machine is like owning a dog, you don’t just buy it and then move on to the next thing. You have to form a relationship with it, for better or worse. The reality is that most people’s interaction with the mechanics of a recording device these days scarcely stretches beyond the on/off switch. If you’re this type of person (and that’s fine if you are) the Portico 5042 is the ‘tape machine’ for you. No moving parts to worry about, no alignment issues, no head wear… and the reel of tape lasts forever!

FULL STEAM AHEAD

Andy Stewart: I am amazed, Rupert, that your desire to produce new and innovative audio products seems as healthy as it’s ever been…

Rupert Neve: Well Andy, I try to be an innovator…

AS: Some years ago you moved to the Lone Star State and now your company is based there. Is the Portico range entirely made in Texas?

RN: Yes it is. I live on a two-acre property in Wimberley and I have an office and lab on it where I employ 12 people. The actual production occurs in two places. There’s a fantastic sub-contractor in San Marcos, about 15 miles on down the road, which does brilliant work for us, and there’s a second manufacturer in San Antonio, which also does an extraordinary job. We have our own testers on their premises and they go absolutely over-the-top to make sure the quality is superb. They’ve been fantastic for us.

AS: Has the new range of Portico outboard been born out of a new-found freedom and independence then, or simply a passion to continually improve on your designs?

RN: It’s a progression, really. I started many years ago now with ideas built on from the old valve circuits that I’d grown up with and designed myself in the early days. Then, when transistors came along, nobody really knew what to make of them and the first attempts to use them in audio amplifiers were really disappointing. They were noisy and possessed unacceptable levels of high-order harmonic distortion, but their advantages were that they were small, cheap and didn’t produce a lot of heat. When I started putting together some circuits that other people had published, however, I didn’t like their sound at all and couldn’t figure out why people were so excited about them.

AS: What were the key motivators behind your designs at that stage, given your dislike for transistors?

RN: My main focus – which I s’pose is what started this whole journey for me – was the issue of reliability. In those early days of broadcast, public address, and recording, you didn’t get a second chance, so reliability was crucial. As an engineer, if you messed up the recording of a public performance, that was it – you were given your marching orders the next day! There was no ‘take two’ – and certainly no editing possible – so the equipment had to be reliable above all other considerations, even beyond quality. But when people began to produce transistor consoles and other audio equipment, they tried to go too far with the technology, and the new designs were unreliable. Transistors had heat-related problems and their performance figures changed with temperature. So when I started out I said to myself, ‘right, whatever I do here has to be absolutely reliable’.

What this meant in practise was that I over-designed everything, and competitors of the day were laughing at me, saying ‘Rupert Neve is mad for not taking advantage of these wonderful little transistors. He uses really big ones and he over-designs everything!’ But the point was my designs never failed and, in fact, many of them are still in use today.

AS: Can you explain what some of this ‘over engineering’ entailed, and would you say that this is still an aspect of your design philosophy today?

RN: I hope so, yes. The Portico range is still designed and manufactured applying the original principles of reliability and perhaps some over-designing, making sure the circuitry is single-sided* and doesn’t produce high-order harmonics – or if I’m using integrated circuits I make sure they’re used in such a fashion that they’re not producing those harmonics.

Over-designing is simply making sure that the components you’re using are the right components for the job. It’s not so much that they’re better components, more that they’re the right ones. But typically we’re using resistors and capacitors in the new equipment that are a lot more expensive than, let’s say, a transistor radio manufacturer would use, because he or she is designing with a limited lifespan in mind and they need to get the price right down. Our audio circuits, on the other hand, are made with thru-hole components (which look just like they used to in the old days, albeit a little smaller) that are soldered into place, meticulously tested, selected and quality controlled in a way that no volume manufacturer could ever afford to do. And of course the real key is, I’ve been a transformer designer all my life, so I use transformers… which are expensive.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

AS: Is it odd for you to be releasing the new Portico range into a marketplace where many of your competitors use the Neve brand name, either directly or by association? That must be frustrating, surely?

RN: Well it is frustrating, and I can’t understand any designer wanting to do that, frankly. There are people who try and copy an old design but it’s never going to be as good as the original, and in any case the original is itself now a thing of the past. What we’re producing now is far ahead in terms of actual sonic performance. Nevertheless, people still insist on asking the question: “Is your new design as good as one of your old modules?” But the fact is, it’s just totally different. If you go out and buy a 1950s sports car and then ask the question: “Is it as good as the latest Maserati released last week?” – it’s impossible to say. I mean, how do you define ‘good’?

AS: Well it’s obviously a subjective realm of discussion. It’s as much about sonic preferences as empirical facts, wouldn’t you say?

RN: Well, you have to combine the two aspects into any design and to do that you have to start right back at the microphone front end. Microphones themselves have improved enormously in recent years, but users don’t very often understand that to get the best out of a microphone it has to feed into a circuit that would meet the approval of the designer of that microphone. A microphone is not a power generator; it’s a voltage generator. It has to feed into a high impedance to get the maximum possible level and therefore keep your signal-to-noise ratio high. You also have to bear in mind that if you’ve got a length of cable – which is inevitable – between your microphone and your microphone preamp, that cable will also influence the behaviour of the microphone to some extent.

This is where my team and I do a lot of our work these days, on the measurement side: trying a number of different microphones and talking to the microphone designers and manufacturers to make sure that what the microphone is feeding into is going to give it the best possible chance of sounding good.

That’s why in the new Portico range we give the mic preamplifier a very high input impedance, so the microphone doesn’t have to do a lot of hard work. This makes sure the microphone always gives of its best. The preamps also have a lower noise floor than ever before and the frequency response is tailored to produce the kind of sound that I think people like… a lot of it is subjective, of course, more so than ever perhaps.

AS: I can only assume you’re convinced that there’s still a market for good quality equipment that is primarily focused on superb design then…

RN: ‘There’s always room at the top’, is one of my favourite sayings, and I think we’re now seeing a swing back to high quality. So yes, if you focus on the top and aspire to superlative design, I think you’re always going to strike a chord with someone who wants it. Marketing is a pyramid with a rarefied peak at the top where a few of the high-end people are struggling to provide really beautiful equipment at a price that’s affordable, but is necessarily quite expensive. It’s a very small industry, we have to remember, and it’s very hard work to get a successful design to market, sell it and make a profit.

THE TAPE EMULATOR

AS: If we can focus on the new Portico 5042 ‘Tape Emulator’ for a moment, was there one machine in particular that you were trying to emulate during the design phase of that device? The fact is, there have been so many machines over the years, so many different tape stocks, levels of maintenance etc…

RN: We based our measurements on a two-track Studer. And as you say, we could have spent a hell of a long time measuring many different tape machines but I avoided that idea and just took one as a point of reference. Rather than testing endless machines and their different characteristics, I mainly drew from my own experiences of designing and manufacturing tape machines – that played a big part in the design process. What we eventually came up with was a design that is effectively the circuit that you would find inside a tape recorder.

By simply putting a small ‘tape head’ into the 5042 – you have to bear in mind that a tape head is just a transformer, but without the gap in it or moving tape passing over it, obviously – you can drive that with the same circuit that’s been around for many years and then pick off the response as you would from a replay head. You then EQ it and raise its level so that it’s going through exactly the same processes as it would have done in the old tape recorders.

AS: But presumably the transformer doesn’t emulate the dynamic effects of the tape itself…

RN: No, but the signal is compressed because it goes into this tiny tape head and it has exactly the same effect as you’d get on an actual tape recorder. The unit itself will produce different frequency responses and different harmonic content depending on the tape’s speed and the type of tape – as you say, there are many different types of tape – and how you’ve got the machine adjusted and so on. That compression characteristic is not all there, but there’s a limit to what you can do without actually having moving tape. But I’d say it does about 85 percent of what I would expect a tape machine to sound like. It has a limited dynamic range; you’ve still got to be careful not to overload it. The dynamic range of any of the Portico line amplifiers is much higher than on the tape emulator’s ‘head’ (I think I’m right in saying that we’ve kept that to not more than about 50dB), whereas you’ve got 100dB of dynamic range on the Portico line amplifier. Consequently, you’ve got to use the emulator carefully, as you would an actual tape machine…

But as to all the variants, as I say, there’s a limit to what you can do with a unit of this size. But next year we’ll be bringing out a much more elaborate piece of equipment with a lot more switches and adjustments on it to simulate a number of different tape recorders, although it will be more expensive.

AS: Most engineers, particularly young engineers, employ the services of a tape machine to do ‘radical’ things to the sound these days, rather than merely store information. Were these ‘failures’ and ‘shortcomings’ – if you like – of linear analogue tape something you considered incorporating into the 5042’s design?

RN: In the days of tape recorders the designers were doing their best to make a really accurate means of storing sound and reproducing it. The strange thing today is that the ‘failures’ are what people seem to celebrate in the designs. It’s part nostalgia and part well-considered desire for these ‘shortcomings’. But I don’t think they don’t want too many failures; people want a tape recorder that really works well and sounds good. An awful lot of listening went into this to make it sound desirable and, as you alluded to earlier, there are a lot of tape recorders of different vintages that didn’t sound good at all and people would not want to use them for this kind of musical effect. So having disposed of those machines, you try and design a piece of gear that’s going to embody the desirable features of a tape machine’s sound, if you like, minus the cost of the actual tape and the moving parts. It comes back to subject opinion again – I didn’t set out to make a bad tape recorder, I set out to try and make something that was going to sound like what I thought people were hearing when they were nostalgically wishing they had an old tape recorder.

THE SELF-EMPLOYED

AS: Has being your own boss again made realising your new ideas easier?

RN: Well, I’ve worked with Amek and others and am very pleased to have done so, but it’s not quite the same as being your own boss. I’ve brought some of my new ideas to the table in the past and everyone has looked as me as if I’m mad! But being my own boss now, I can do what I like, which is nice. The fun of it is that I can go back to finding out why, for instance, a CD recording doesn’t sound all that satisfactory. So I get involved in frequent day-long discussions about that. The fact of the matter is, the sound will never be as good as when you’re using single-sided amplifiers. What we’re designing now is some single-sided circuitry that’s very similar to my old designs, but cleaned up and brought into the 21st century. They sound sweet and clean and devoid of all the problems of the old days.

It still amazes me that just putting a CD through the Portico line amplifiers makes it sound better straight away. There are psycho-acoustic reasons why this is so, that’s why I want to enable people to have a pair of these line amplifiers, because things sound a darn sight better than without them!

AS: So how is the sound ‘improved’? I’ve always thought that perhaps the horse had bolted once the sound was converted into the digital domain. Once you have a digital signal, how does going back through single-sided analogue circuitry somehow restore integrity to the signal?

RN: That’s a very hard question to answer, really. The fact is it does clean up and there are things in the analogue circuit that fill in the cracks, as it were, and make it sound sweeter and smoother. Some of the new designs on the bench, that are coming up in the near future, will really start to make people sit up and take notice.

AS: When you say that you’ve fixed the problems of the past and made the new designs ‘21st century’, is there debate, either with yourself or your new company, about whether or not you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater when you ‘clean things up’?

RN: No, because what you’re cleaning up are some of the undesirable things like noise, and then if you look at some of the old modules and do some careful measuring you’d find that there were a number of artefacts that you really would not want. When you take those out it sounds even better, and that’s what we’ve done.

SLAVE TO SPECS

AS: Given the amount of gear out there boasting similar specifications – even though it all sounds quite different – do you ever feel enslaved by specifications, or throw your hands in the air and wish that you didn’t have to even publish your specs any more?

RN: Well, Andy, that’s a very important point, and specifications today really don’t mean a great deal. We all talk subjectively when we review a piece of equipment and you can publish all the minute figures you like and it doesn’t mean anything to most people. That’s not entirely anyone’s fault, we’ve just never really found a satisfactory way of defining, on paper, the performance of a piece of equipment that is going to tell you what something really sounds like. But even so, the specs have to be there, you’ve got to understand what something’s limits are, what it’s capable of doing before you can even venture to listen to it… at least that’s my opinion.

A few years ago, when I was working for Amek, we were designing new transformers and some new circuitry, and during the process we got the distortion figures down to almost unmeasurable levels. It was really astonishingly good, if I do say so myself. It was fairly expensive to do because we had to make sure that none of the IC or transistors were under any kind of stress. There was no high-order distortion in the signal; it was squeaky clean in every way that I could think of. Some of my engineering friends were very complimentary about it too, saying things like: “How on earth did you do it Rupert?” But the fact was that stuff actually didn’t sound that wonderful. Those enviable specifications were not reflected in a better sound at all.

AS: That’s what I was alluding to earlier, when I asked about ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’. Specifications don’t tell the whole story, and these supposedly ‘better’ specifications that so many designers publish aren’t necessarily related to superior sound quality.

RN: Well, I think that’s right. And I think we’ve got to go back to psychoacoustics and what it is that we’re actually listening to. The ear itself – your hearing mechanism – is full of non-linear processing, if you like, and it’s an extremely interesting area of study. You’d think that if you reproduced a sound through a distortion-less channel it ought to sound absolutely superb. But it’s not always the case. You can take that distortion-less channel and a first-class microphone and all the rest of it, and it still won’t sound like the original.

If you were to make two recordings of an artist, one in a wonderful concert location that you love, and another in a location where the acoustics are pretty terrible, the singer won’t sound the same or give the same performance. You can try and combat this, but you will never succeed because it will never be – and can never be – the same. But when we find something that’s beautiful to listen to then I want to analyse that and find out why. That’s my all-consuming interest.

AS: Is this interest going to lead to designs and equipment that we’ve never seen before?

RN: I hope so. I’m letting the cat out of the bag here a bit, but certainly the Portico range is just the start of things. There are four pieces out there at the moment and we’re planning on another four or five over the course of the next few months; each one is going to have a different slant on traditional equipment and hopefully will be very useful in filling in the gaps in the market and making sounds that are already recorded sound sweeter. Then we go onto the next range, which is still a year or so away, and there I can really have fun. I’m working on new circuitry now, which we couldn’t fit into the Portico range. It will be more expensive so it won’t be for everyone, unfortunately.

One of the new designs is a stereo field editor (which is coming out shortly) which is something that’s very dear to my heart because it enables us to manipulate, if you like, room acoustics and change the relationship between the direct and the reverberant sound, and the apparent location of a soloist in a mix and so on, all done from acoustic knowledge. What you’ve got with any stereo recording is whatever the engineer believes you want to hear. And many recording engineers have been brought up to think that almost any ambience is bad and you want to get as close as you can to the sound. But it’s all getting a little bit too dry and uninteresting in my opinion. I’ve always felt that not enough of the concert hall is present in these recordings and I’d like to have more. (I like to hear the audience coughing from time to time!)

AS: What has spawned this interest?

RN: Years ago I did some recordings in St John’s College, Cambridge, and it was amazing how that, even in the dead of night through these massive stone walls, there’s low frequency ambient sound coming through – I know I shouldn’t carry on about this – but it all contributes to a very small degree to what you hear in the recording. You couldn’t record the choir in any other location and use artificial ambience to make it sound the same. You can come close but you can’t get it like the real thing. So I got those old recordings that I made in the ’70s and with the Stereo Field Editor I can give you more of St John’s college chapel or less of it, I can change the relative position of the choir and the organ and so on and so forth. I think it’s a very fun thing and it’s very powerful as well.

AS: Is this new device a simulator; by that I mean, is it loaded with samples of these places or not?

RN: No, we don’t sample them (apart from my memory). It’s built around differentiating between the ambient sound, which is non-coherent, and the direct sound, which is coherent. You can play with these using directional microphones, sum and difference techniques and so on, which is what we’ve done. It’s a very powerful unit that’s very hard to describe! I’ll just have to get one to you to have a look at!

AS: I’ll look forward to it. When is it due to come out?

RN: We’ve just released it to production, so it should be out within a month or two.

AS: Thanks for your time Rupert.

RN: My pleasure!

There is evidence that the presence of incredibly small quantities of the ‘wanted’ signal (e.g. true harmonics of musical instruments) enhance the listening experience whilst incredibly small quantities of ‘unwanted’ signals (eg, noise, high order harmonic distortion, non-harmonic switching ‘splat’ or clicks) have the opposite effect – producing a puzzled and tired brain response that is trying to relate this unnatural sound to its in-built data bank of real sound acquired from the natural world around us. (Many people, of course, have no such data bank and their brain thinks CDs are the real thing!) Some time ago Professor Oohashi and his team, from the Institute of Mass Media Education in Tokyo, read a paper to the New York AES: “High Frequency Sound Above the Audible Range affects Brain Electric Activity and Sound Perception” (AES preprint no. 3207) He claimed that extension of the frequency range beyond audibility was beneficial to sound quality and produced brain electrical activity from the area associated with pleasure, etc. Read our interview with Rupert Neve for more.

I visited Professor Oohashi in Tokyo and was treated to an impressive series of demonstrations comparing music recorded and reproduced with:

(a) Very wide bandwidth;

(b) Bandwidth restricted to 20kHz;

(c) The same material through standard Compact Disc;

(d) A new wide band one-bit digital CD system designed by JVC.

There is no doubt that the wide bandwidth is more enjoyable.

Music actually sounds sweeter and warmer when high frequencies are extended (distortion and noise-free) beyond audibility. No obvious sensation of a stronger or more aggressive high frequency response. I was able to relax and stop ‘listening’ — just letting the magnificent sound flow over me.

This accords with opinions from many well-known ‘golden ears’ of the industry. For example, George Massenburg has more than once gone on record (unintentional pun!) to say that he likes listening to an LP for relaxation. Having worked with sound all day, he prefers the LP; a CD with exactly the same music makes him restless and unable to relax. An LP in good condition, played with a good cartridge, can have a response well beyond 20kHz.

But it seems to me that there is more than frequency response, as demonstrated by Professor Oohashi, which plagues the standard CD. The digital process is always badly flawed by non-harmonically related switching transients which are dumped in the critical area above 20kHz, resulting in a substantial increase in noise beyond audibility (where, it has been thought, it does not matter).

The fact that digital is limited to 20kHz or so is, to me, less important than this distressing signal break-up, because it means we’re back to noise. In my previous column I discussed the many types of noise, and their effect on the sound we hear. Noise that is part of a performance, such as the sound of an artist breathing, is not necessarily bad and in fact authenticates the performance, making it sound more realistic and believable. But the non-harmonically related switching transients of digital audio certainly belong in the category of ‘all bad’ noise!

I like the (in part) American Heritage definition: “noised, noising: To spread the rumour or report of [From Old French, possibly from Latin ‘nausea’.]” Add, if you like, Rupert’s plain English interpretation “Nausea; it makes me sick!” (But unlike Ludwig Boltzmann, who I discussed in my previous column, I don’t feel the need to commit suicide over it.)

Some months ago another consignment of accumulated junk of mine arrived here in Texas, from various places where it had been stored for years in the UK. I found some old 78 RPM acetate recordings I had made around 1948 to 1950, more than 50 years ago. They are noisy and have quite limited response, probably not exceeding about 10kHz. But they sound great. I’m sure this is partly subjective (“Did we really do that?”) and possibly there is a deeply embedded memory of the location and what it really sounded like in the flesh.

We (my partners, Gerry, Alf and I) used to record male choirs, brass and silver village bands, amateur operatic productions, children’s concerts, music festivals and the like in Devon and Cornwall (South West counties of the UK), hoping to sell discs to the performers. We became quite a feature of the local scene, and it was considered prestigious for our ‘Recording Van from Plymouth’ to be present. One local paper, writing about a school concert, reported: “The curtain was waiting to be raised: there was an excited buzz of conversation; the RGA (Rupert Gerry, Alf) microphones were in place to capture youthful talent and the hall was filled with expectant mothers anxiously awaiting the arrival of their young”. (I’m not sure that our microphones succeeded in all that was expected of them!)

Capturing recording and reproducing sound is not merely a matter of devouring equipment specifications – the meat and potatoes, as it were. We have to know and understand the technology we are harnessing and be skilful in its use. But far more important is the vision for what we want to do and the perspective we bring to the feast, which frees the creator in us to produce a sound of beauty which is a joy for ever.

I don’t think that we have ‘proved’ anything with our simple experiments from my previous column, but there is abundant evidence which suggests there is a great deal we don’t yet understand.

In his letter to the Colossians, St. Paul says:

Colossians 1:16 & 17

16. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

Let’s keep open minds, go on seeking perfection and developing a reliable point of reference which holds together.