When did you come up with the idea of the Plangent Process?
In the early '80s I was working in New York at Howard Schwartz Recording. Howie wanted to prove that Scotch 250 was the best tape, because it's what he was using; everybody else was using [Ampex] 456. He bought one of the first Hewlett Packard digital frequency synthesizers, which put out a perfect sine wave without drift. He also purchased a very early General Radio spectrum analyzer. I was assigned to sit there and prove that 250 was the best tape. I, being an idiot and not understanding business and politics, proved to him that actually AGFA 468 was the best tape,which wasn't what he had in mind. I learned a lot from the experience! [laughing] But what started this all back then was that I was laying down a 10 kHz tone and then looking at it off tape, seeing how much level the tapes could handle and so on. I noticed that the digital frequency synthesizer would put down a perfect spike in input mode, but in repro off the tape it looked like a pine tree! I asked the tech guys,"What is that? "They said, "That's the wow and flutter." They showed me that if you've got sidebands of 60 Hz on either side of 10 kHz, then you've got a 60 Hz flutter. I was scrubbing the tape very slowly at various points, and I'd hear this whistling noise. I asked, "What is that?" They said, "That's the bias." Because at 30 ips, a 100 kHz bias tone, if you scrub it slow enough, you'll hear it. Many of us have heard this when the tape comes up to speed. I was hearing the bias and that it had a pitch. Meanwhile, I was seeing that the machine was much more messy in the time domain than the digital frequency synthesizer was. I questioned, "Why hasn't anybody used the bias to servo-lock the machine?" Older tapes were recorded with a bias oscillator that was way more stable than the transport was. When you get into the quartz oscillators that you see in the MCI, Studers and later machines, it's pretty awesome how stable they were but how much worse the transport was. I don't think that people realize how much residual wow and flutter we are sensitive to. We're just used to it.
And now you can take that bias and virtually "lock" the audio, post tape.
Yup. It's not easy to do, and the bias tone has a very low signal-to-noise ratio. I took what I'd learned about FM theory from David Smith, who at the time was chief tech for Phil Ramone. David had gotten his Masters in FM theory from RPI [Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute]. Then I went and talked to all the guys that have been in the tape business for many, many years — Dale Manquen [3M/Flying Faders/P&G], John French [JRF Magnetic Sciences], Greg Orton [Ampex, Flux Magnetics], Mike Spitz [Ampex/ATR Services] — and I said to these guys, "What would you have done in 1975 when digital was starting to come in? What if you would have had the opportunity between 1975 and today to improve on the tape playback system? What would the bean-counters not let you build?" So they taught me as much as I could comprehend, and a lot I couldn't. These guys are the analog ninjas! [After that research] I hired a team of great prototypers, and we went ahead and built it with a basic electronic design from David. When they first assembled it, we were very excited. We were all together in a hotel conference room. I had an [Ampex] ATR-102 that had been rebuilt by Mike Spitz,so I knew that it was stable, and I had a tape that was made by MRL that had a 70 kHz bias on it. I stuck a pencil in the machine to make the tape speed go all over the place. My buddy, Dr. Patrick Wolfe, who taught at Cambridge University, UK, [he wrote the math and coded the software] loaded the audio transfer in his laptop. About a minute and a half later, he had ten seconds for us to listen to and it was perfect. It worked on the first try!
So the software had been written?
I had the software written simultaneously to the hardware being manufactured — I took a lot of risks. I thought this would work, so I spent a bunch of bucks on having the preamp made and the software developed. I went out on a limb. Flux Magnetics made the heads; Greg wasn't sure whether they'd work and I told him to go ahead and build one and bill it anyway.
Is there a separate head that picks up the bias?
No, it's all one head. It's a custom single head with a very wideband quiet preamp — built by engineer John Chester — and it's a great playback system.
Does it use a crossover and record on to two separate audio and bias tone tracks?
Yeah, we filter it out separately. Dan Lavry [Lavry Engineering] consulted on the complicated filters. The audio is minimal and transparent. We did everything that we possibly could to get the best possible sound. This is not me — this is the A-team. The DSP [digital signal processing] was written very carefully. It's non real-time. This is not something that you can do with a pitch-shifter, and it's also not something that you can do by analyzing the musical material. You don't know what's vibrato or not. We're working to hundredths of a percent, at 5,000 or 6,000 parts per second, and we can knock out everything the machines did. We see 120, 220, and 440 Hz artifacts all the time — people don't realize how much that's actually contributing to the sound. You also get "scrape flutter." The metal-to-metal contact on the head creates a violin bow effect with the open parts of the tape; the tape "sings" at 3 kHz. And that's modulating all of the music, all the time. Generation loss now appears quite clearly to have been a result of the transport mechanism more than any other thing.
Really?
Yeah, the fast flutter clouds everything. Look, everybody loves the analog sound, especially us, but nobody wants the wow and flutter part of it. The thing that's really been the hardest sell is that obviously you can use Plangent Processes for triage, for stuff that's stretched or where the machine is in trouble; but listen to what it does on a well-made, hi-fi recording from the '60s or the '70s, in terms of clearing out all the debris that was caused by the transport. That was the surprise. Listen to how much better and fresher the imaging is, how much more depth there is, and how solid it feels.One of the more famous producers in the world, known for his EMT plates and chambers, listened to our work and said, "My reverb tails are longer, and that's what it sounded like in the control room. I've never heard that off tape." Something that I want to be really clear about is that we're not "fixing" their work. There have unfortunately been some misapprehensions about our claims with that.We didn't mix the damn record! They mixed the record, and it sounds awesome, but the mixdown machine hurt them a little bit. If we can get that hurt out of there, it's going to sound closer to the console and more like what the original intent was. If Elliot Scheiner, Jimmy Iovine, or any of these wonderful producers are sitting at the board and hearing something and the machine is changing it slightly, we can remove that filter; that's for the better.
Absolutely.
We want to hear what the mixer heard, what he did, and what he tried like hell to get to us when the best transfer mechanism that was possible at the time was tape.
You worked on the Grateful Dead's Europe '72: The Complete Recordings set a couple of years ago, right?
Yeah, that stuff was awesome. That was 85 reels of 16- track, 2-inch tape. They recorded the entire tour on an [Ampex] MM 1000 — they took a generator over to Europe, I guess. They had to have the Hammond at 60 Hz, and they ran the Hammond and the multitrack off the same power source.
What type of issues were on those tapes that required your process?
The machine was one of the early AC motor servo machines, if I recall correctly, and since the synchronous motor drive was based on 60Hz it did show a lot of 120, 240, and 480 Hz flutter. I'm not sure whether that's just because it was running off a generator, or whether it's just the nature of the beast; but in theory they should hold pitch pretty good. They used strobe tuners onstage to get A 440; but, even though they used them, you can see that the machine would climb from one end of the reel to the other by about 50 or 70 cents. But it was certainly audible, and it changed the energy. The middle of the reel was usually where the tape machine was best, with equal weight on both the supply platter and the take-up platter. When mixer Jeffrey Norman got back the "plangented" versions, he was very happy with the results. Then [David] Glasser did an awesome job of mastering the stuff [at Airshow Mastering]. It was literally a ton of tape to work on, and it took about six to eight months. We would transfer and transfer, and Jeffrey would mix and mix, and Dave would master and master. We were obviously taking a fair amount of time to get the results right, so we caught up with them. We started off about ten weeks ahead of Jeffrey and ended up about a week ahead of him.
I know it's a process, more than just hardware or software. But how many of these setups exist right now?
About seven or eight of them, at this point. We have three, Chace Audio has some and so does Airshow Mastering in Boulder, Colorado. Steve Rosenthal [Tape Op #66] at The Magic Shop uses one; he helped us win a Grammy when he produced a restoration of a Woody Guthrie wire recording. We tend to be called on a per-job basis. John Chester went to London and did a couple of mag transfers for Charlie is My Darling; the Rolling Stones documentary film from 1965 that is just awesome. Steve Rosenthal, who mixed the music for the picture, called me up and said, "You know, you could probably give the producers [Robin and Jody Klein] a hand with this one scene we can't fix." Turns out to be a hotel room where Keith [Richards] and Mick [Jagger] were writing "Sitting On a Fence" and it was pretty rugged sounding. We were able to recover enough bias off of the mag film that we were able to successfully de-wow and de-flutter it, and it's really moving. It's a great documentary, released in November by ABKCO. We've also done a big project recently with Bob Ludwig on a major artists' catalog; you should be hearing about it real soon.
I know you've done other film restoration work too.
We did some very interesting, very good fixes. The acetate films break down very badly due to vinegar syndrome, and they don't play well [it releases water and acetic acid over time]. Chace Audio is using a whole bunch of tricks to try to maximize the head contact and make sure that the film's pulling as clean as it can, but it still moves around. There are a couple of places in South Pacific where it almost jammed to a halt! But it came out fine. We also did some stuff that had no problems, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind — that was a pristine element. We did West Side Story off the original 6-track mags, and the sound is crazy good. 35 mm is a pretty good medium to begin with, but one of the things that you can hear in every 35 mm film playback is a 96 Hz flutter that's really high. It's 24 frames per second, times four perforations per frame.
That makes sense.
So you get a very pronounced 96 Hz flutter, and it's not sinusoidal. It's pretty square, because of the way that the sprocketing is pulling it and smacking the film. So you've got 96, plus a bunch of harmonics, and that does create intermodulation distortion [IM]. Again, people aren't used to thinking of the transport as the IM source, but IM is nasty. You've got an A 440 flute, and you've got 536 and 344 Hz flutter — you get those sidebands going on fairly hefty and they're not part of the music. They're not supposed to be there, but they're on everything! Our process is good for ambiences. We did a scene in The Agony and the Ecstasy, a Rex Harrison/Charlton Heston moment, where the Pope yells at Michelangelo and says, "Silence," and you hear this great echo. There's a guy on the fishpole boom, and you can actually hear the fish pole move because he's near a boundary. So you hear a little bit of flange as he moves and it pans from Charlton Heston, but the echo that's on it is natural, and it just sounds fabulous. Rang forever, like the guys who mixed it had meant it to.
Are you staying pretty busy dealing with all of these projects?
Not as busy as we'd like to be. It's funny, the film guys get it. The record biz? Not so much. We're not cheap, and we're trying to figure out ways to minimize the cost onit; but one of the things that has to happen is that our customers need the hardware package. There's a lot of questions like, "Why can't I do this by pressing play on my ATR-102? Why can't I do this myself? Why isn't it a plug-in?" Well, you certainly can get the capture with our hardware package. And the audio is outstanding, thanks to John and sadly David, posthumously. We do merchandise the head and preamp system for the transfer and capture part of it; but the de-wow/de-flutter part of it is proprietary at the moment, partly because it's not easy to do. I don't want to be on the phone all the time explaining to guys about FM theory!
What do you see for the future with Plangent Processes?
I'm a little bit ambivalent these days about how mono focused the industry seems to be on "vintage" — as if the beauty were in the flaws of the equipment of earlier days, when engineers and designers had to live with a certain amount of distortion as they conveyed the art to the listener. I'm saying that it is possible to remove some of that distortion now. I'm not talking about de-hissing, where you lose some of the ambience; we have found a way to remove a significant amount of distortion from every tape ever made, with no harm. While the fad, ironically, is to add "vintage" distortion with a convolution filter plug — in to make it sound nostalgic. The focus of a lot of people with good intentions is so "respectful" toward the older material that they emulate the older recordings, and so they're finding ways to emulate the older tape recorders. I'm going the opposite direction, which is sort of swimming upstream. We believe the music was meant to shine as clearly as possible, without the machines getting in the way. And that's what's timeless. Not the "vintage" aspect of it. The Bill Putnams and the Phil Ramones weren't making antiques, after all.
!!!
that last line says a lot!
So essentially what you are saying is that analogue/tape deficiency is actually a strength where the ear is concerned. This compared with digital distortion (where levels are bumped way too high nowadays) is what helps give that signature warm but cutting sound. 
