Bob Ludwig Interview Excerpt

After having worked on literally hundreds of platinum and gold records and mastered projects that have been nominated for scores of Grammy’s, Bob Ludwig certainly stands among the giants in the mastering business.  After leaving New York City to open his own Gateway Mastering in Portland, Maine in 1993, Bob has proved that you can still be in the center of the media without being in a media center.

What do you think is the difference between someone who’s just merely competent and someone that’s really great as a mastering engineer?

BOB LUDWIG:  I always say that the secret of being a great mastering engineer is being able to hear a raw tape and then in your mind hear what it could sound like, and then know what knobs to move to make it sound that way.

You know where you’re going right from the beginning then, right?

Pretty much.  It’s a little bit like the Bob Clearmountain school, where after 45 minutes of mixing he’s practically there and then spends most of the rest of the day just fine tuning that last ten percent.  I think I can get 90 percent of the way there sometimes in a couple of minutes, and just keep hanging with it and keep fine tuning it from there.  It comes very, very fast to me when I hear something.  I immediately can tell what I think it should sound like.  And the frustration is, sometimes you get what I call a “pristine piece of crap”.  I call it that because it’s like a bad mix, and anything you do to it will make it worse in some other way.  But 99.9% of the time I hear something and I can figure out what it needs, and fortunately I know what all my gear does well enough to make it happen.

Like today, I was doing something while training one of the guys that works with me.  I put this song up and said, “I know this piece of gear would be perfect for this thing.” He said, “Man, I haven’t seen you use that in like nine months or a year.”  I said, “I know it’s gonna be great.” I fired it up, plugged it in and boom, it was right there.

How many of your sessions are attended?

When I started my own business after working at Masterdisk and Sterling Sound before that, our business plan called for a twenty percent reduction in overall business but the opposite actually happened.  We thought that half the people that had attended sessions in New York would attend up here.  It turns out more people attend sessions here than in New York, which was a total surprise.

Do you think that there’s a difference between the way people master from coast to coast? 

BOB LUDWIG: I don’t think there’s so much a difference between coast to coast as there is just between some of the major personalities in mastering.  Some engineers might master almost everything into the analog domain because they love working with analog gear. I certainly do that sometimes, but I would say that I’ve tried to accumulate what I think is the very best new gear as well as funky old gear that has a certain sound.  If a tape comes in sounding really, really good, I have gear that will stay out of the way and do exactly what I need without inflicting any damage on the thing at all. 

Occasionally we’ll get a tape in that’s so good that I’m just happy to change the level on it if needed.  The level controls I have are made by Massenburg and some engineers over at Sony and are as audiophile as you can get.  If you’re not using the level control, you can take it out of the circuitry so it’s as much a straight wire as possible so at least I’m convinced I’m inflicting as little damage as possible on a great sounding tape if all it needs is simply a level change.

Is that in the digital or analog domain?

Analog.  Talking about different engineers, there are some engineers that just like to slam the hell out of everything.  It seems like their only criteria is how loud they can make it, not how musical they can make it.  And for me, I’m under pressure from A&R people and clients to have things loud, but I try to keep the music at all costs.  I’ll think nothing of doing a Foo Fighters record one day where it’s totally appropriate to have it smashed, then the next day do something that’s perhaps even 4 dB quieter than that because it suddenly needs the dynamics for it to breathe.

The dynamics wars… where did that come from?

I think it came from the invention of digital domain compressors.  When digital first came out, people knew that every time the light when into the overs or into the red that you were clipping and that hasn’t changed.

We’re all afraid of the over levels, so people started inventing these digital domain compressors where you could just start cranking the level up.  Because it was in the digital domain, you could look ahead in the circuit and have a theoretical zero attack time or even have a negative attack time if you wanted to.  It was able to do things that you couldn’t do with any piece of analog gear, including an Aphex Compellor or (Empirical Labs) Distresser.  It will give you that kind of an apparent level increase without audibly destroying the music, up to a point.  And of course, once they achieved that, then people started pushing it as far as it would go.  I would say the average level of a CD has peaks on a VU meter that are at least 3.5 dB hotter than they used to be, if not as much as 6 dB hotter than they used to be. 

I always tell people, “Thank God these things weren’t invented when the Beatles were around because for sure they would’ve put it on their music and would’ve destroyed its longevity.”  I’m totally convinced that overcompression destroys the longevity of a piece.  Now when someone’s insisting on hot levels where it’s not really appropriate, I find I can barely make it through the mastering session.

Another thing that has contributed to it is the fact that in Nashville, the top 200 Country stations get serviced with records from the record company, but apparently there’s some kind of an agreement that the major record companies have for stations 201 on up to get serviced with a special CD every week that has the different labels new singles on it.

It’s called CDX.  Glen Meadows does that.

And of course, when they started doing that, the A&R people would go, “Well, how come my record isn’t as loud as this guy’s record?”  And so that further led to level wars even in Nashville, so that everyone’s record would be the hottest record on the compilation.  And of course when the program director of the radio station is going through a stack of CDs, a mediocre song that’s twice as loud as a great song might at first seem more impressive, just because it grabs you by the neck.  It has a certain impressiveness about it so you listen to it before realizing there’s no song there, but at least on first listen it might get the program director’s attention. 

I suppose that’s well and good when it’s a single for radio, but when you give that treatment to an entire album’s worth of material, it’s just exhausting.  It’s a very unnatural situation.  Never in the history of mankind has man listened to such compressed music as we listen to now.

In mixing too, if you don’t put bus compressors on, or if you don’t compress something, clients inevitably say, “Why are you not doing that?  That’s what I want.”  You can’t get into trouble if you squash something, but you can if you don’t.

Tell me about your monitors.

I used to have Duntech Sovereign 2001 monitors.  I think around ’86 when I was at Masterdisk, I decided to find the best monitors I could so that when I was working on digital I would have something that could really reproduce sub-sonic defects.  So I went down to New York to some of the audiophile shops to see what kind of audiophile speakers I might be able to find for mastering that would be professional enough that I wouldn’t have to change the tweeter every other day.

I found these Duntech Sovereign 2001 speakers.  Tom Jung, the engineer that owns the DMP label, had a pair at his house in the basement.  His basement had very low ceilings.  The Duntech speakers are in a mirror image arrangement; the tweeter is in the middle and then there are the midrange speakers and then there are the woofers on the top of the speaker and the bottom.  So in the basement of his house, that upper woofer was coupling with his ceiling as well as the bottom one coupling with the floor and he had bass for days.  So he sold me his pair of Duntechs and that’s what I used at Masterdisk from then on.

I also bought one of the first Cello "Performance Amplifiers" from Mark Levinson when he was there at the time, and subsequently he told me that somebody in Japan had actually bridged a pair of these things and it was really worthwhile.  Of course his amps are mega expensive, so he loaned me another pair so I could try to bridge them together.  Doug Levine, who ran Masterdisk and was in charge of all the money, could actually hear the difference between the bridging and the non-bridging enough that he thought it was worth spending the extra money on it. 

Then when I started Gateway, I got another pair of Duntechs Sovereigns and a new pair of Cello Performance Mark II amplifiers this time.  These are the amps that will put out like 6,000 watt peaks.  One never listens that loudly, but when you listen, it sounds as though there’s an unlimited source of power attached to the speakers.  You’re never straining the amp, ever.  So I used those Duntechs for quite awhile.

Then when I began doing 5.1 surround music, Peter McGrafh, a Classical engineer friend of mine, had fallen in love with these Eggelston Works "Andras" speakers that are made in Memphis.  Bill Eggelston has been designing speakers for many years and Peter told me that he thought those were the best speakers that he had heard at the time.  Peter used to own an audiophile hi-fi shop and he’s heard everything under the sun.  As he’s a very good Classical engineer, I give what he says a lot of credence.  So I had made it a point to seek them out.  I really fell in love with these Andras and for the 5.1 music, I use five of them.  They retail for around $14,000 a pair, and I have 2 1/2 pair of them.  They were Stereophile Magazine’s "Speaker of the Year".  With five of them in the room, they move plenty of air with no problem whatsoever but I felt that there needed to be a bigger speaker to work right in stereo. 

I told Bill Eggelston if he ever decided to build a bigger version of the "Andra"s to let me know and maybe I’d consider changing my Duntechs if I thought they sounded better.  He decided to build what he thought was the ultimate speaker which is called the Eggelston Works "Ivy" speaker (he names all of his speakers after former wives or girlfriends).  These speakers are a little bit taller than Duntechs and they weigh close to 800 pounds a piece.  They’ve got granite on the sides of them.  There’s three woofers on the bottom, a couple of mids, the tweeter, and then a couple of more mids on the top.  Actually each cabinet had 23 speakers in it.

You know how M&K uses the isobaric principle in their subwoofer?  The Eggleston Works "Andras” use that same isobaric principle in their woofers.  Well, Bill extended that principal to all of the speakers, so behind each speaker is two others.  I guess if the isobaric principle is carried out to purity, you’d have an infinite number of speakers.  But he has two behind each of them and they’re amazing.  Every client that comes in, once they tune in to what they’re listening to, starts commenting on how they’re hearing things in their mixes that they had never heard before, even sometimes after working weeks on them.  It’s great for mastering because they’re just so accurate that there’s never much doubt as to what’s really on the tape.

One reason I’ve always tried to get the very best speaker I can is I’ve found that when something sounds really right on an accurate speaker, it tends to sound right on a wide variety of speakers.  I’ve never been a big fan of trying to get things to sound only right on an NS-10Ms.

Do you have a specific approach to mastering?

BOB LUDWIG:  To me music is a very sacred thing.  I believe that music has the power to heal people.  And of course a lot of the music that I work on, even some of the Heavy Metal stuff, is healing some 13 year old kid’s angst and making him feel better, no matter what his parents might think about it.  So I treat music very, very seriously.

I love all kinds of music.  I master everything from Pop and some Jazz to Classical and even Avant Garde.  I used to be principle trumpet player in the Utica, New York Symphony Orchestra, so I always put myself in the artist’s shoes and ask myself, “What if this were my record?  What would I do with it?”  So I try to get some input from the artist.  If they’re not there, at least I try to get them on the phone and just talk about what things they like.  I just take it all very seriously.