Sound Rated at 11
MusicAngle.com rates CDs for music and sound. Spooked scored
10 for music and 11, the very highest, for sound.
Sage Studio chief engineer Daniel Protheroe tells why Sage Studio gets such great sound:
The recipe for a great sound is always to start
with something that
sounds great, like Marley's Ghost.
These guys have spent a lot of time and care in choosing fine
instruments, and they know how to play them.
Then add some killer arrangements. Van Dyke Parks took the Ghost's natural ability to milk the most out of a tune and ramped it up several notches. Van Dyke's layering approach gave us a vast, deep and dense forest of sonic timber to harvest (no trees were hurt).
With so much good sound coming at us, it was our role to stay out of the way as much as possible. We've always taken a minimalist approach to our recording gear and techniques. Our philosophy is to get the best gear we can find and use as little of it as possible.
Start with some great DPA, Nuemann and AKG mics. The next and probably one of the most important steps is the microphone preamp. We rely heavily on our Forssell Technologies transformerless tube preamps; there's really nothing like them. From the preamp, it's straight to the Studer 16 track analog recorder. We like the warm, clear, open sound of analog. Digital is getting better all the time but analog is, well, analog...
After it's all recorded we mix through our Forssell Technologies mixing console with Flying Faders. This console is a special beast. Where most consoles will have over a dozen opamps and 3 or more transformers in the signal path, Mr. Forssell designed and built us a console that has only a couple of amps (and really good sounding ones) and no transformers between the music and mix. There's that minimalist thing again. The high quality equalizers and compressors in the console pretty much eliminate the need for outboard gear.
The mixing of Spooked was really straight ahead. We used a couple of different reverbs from our Sony 777 and maybe a little delay here and there but that's it for effects. All those interesting sounds on the CD were made by real people playing real instruments.
We put the mixes down to a 1/2" 2 track Studer analog recorder. Analog again, we love it. Actually we mixed simultaneously to analog and to digital.
We then sent Bob Katz both copies of the mixes and let him decide. He chose the analog mixes hands down. Which brings us to the final stop in our sonic journey, Digital Domain and the mastering expertise of Bob Katz. We like Bob because he's a minimalist too. He works hard to do as little as possible, and the little things he does are quite effective in getting a big bunch of sound on to a tiny little CD. I always mix with confidence knowing Bob's at the end of the line.
From there it's off to the pressing plant and then into your home...