On Track

[petermontg]

This was broadcasted on channel 4 in the UK and Ireland in the latter half of 2011.

Live bands cut straight to vinyl.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/on-track-with-seat/episode-guide

Sam Wheat was the live engineer, Broadcasted out of Metropolis studio A. There's a small piece with Sam in MusicTech issue 104 covering his side of things.

http://www.metropolis-group.co.uk/services.php?m=1&p=11

I could never find much info on the cutters side of it (Maybe someone could fill in the blanks)But anyhoot bit interesting all the same.

Best
Peter

[Serif]

Neat story. For a minute there I thought they found a way to go straight to vinyl! (;

One of my mentors did a live to lathe cut from the mix room in his studio, years ago. The cut was good, but a low level line hum in the long harness to the cutting room from the mix room caused them to recut, later, from the safety reel.

One thing about direct to lathe cuts is that they are mostly fixed pitch (with optional manual adjustments), or else there'd have to be a conversion to digital audio (or tape), and that wouldn't be "direct." Al Grundy used to do direct cuts, but he could read the score, so he could adjust the pitch manually for piano versus forte passages. It's not going to be as efficient, however, as a well tuned advance signal computer working the servo motor every 1/5 revolution. So, as nice an idea as direct cuts is, there will possibly be a sonic penalty for dynamic LP sides in that the cutter head will be arriving at low fi radii sooner than necessary (since one could have made a tape and used a preview head machine). Of course, the lowest flutter is only achievable with a single-head reproducer (according to Fred Thal). So many compromises.



- Doug Intuit

[petermontg]

I would love to hear some of the quailty of the cutting.

I think it was a max of 12" @ 8mins from what i gather. Maybe what the cutters gathered was that this would be the max without losing much quailty.

Am sure these recordings never went to pressing prob into the BBC archives or somewhere along those lines.

[mossboss]

More than one direct cut has been done by us down under
It's no more full of compromises than doing any other cut really
Get the band/artist to practice whatever they want cut and see what length of time it takes by putting it to tape or cd if you wish
Do a cut on a reference lacquer of the recorded material so as to see what is what and see what you get you get than allow for the the session to be cut live Forget preview just straight in as you already have a good idea of what is going to be any way so ther will be some surprises but so what
We have an SP 72 Neumann console which has quite a lot of the empty slots filled over the years with some extra modules
This is a full mastering input console with an input bay patch bays and all the requirements for the task
Nothing that cannot be achieved by a good mixing deck with a good man behind it really
This is how we did it and it works just fine as you are not faced with a lot of unknowns I am sure there are other ways as well
There was a lot of direct to disc records issued these where done in a very similar way by getting the raw tracks mixing them in a relatively quite place and time see what settings gave good results recreate them when the live cut was to take place
Lots of preparation work but the results where invariably excellent the resulting records some times been sold as master recordings
As funny as it may sound these day with a two step process most vinyl is a master pressing but that was not the case in the past
A master pressing was done with the first negative which may have been cut from tape and they cost lots extra
If it was direct to disc and master pressings they where expensive not many around to my knowledge but certainly out there
Cheers
Cheers