Hoffman quote:
"So now that we are finished with the new White Stripes LP mastering (four sides) I can tell you of something neat that happened.
As some of you know, when cutting a record, a special tape machine with a "preview head" is needed. This preview head tells the computer a few seconds before the audio hits the cutter head if the groove needs to get bigger or smaller. This of course saves space on a side of an album. In the 1960's this was done by hand, if the cutting engineer saw an increase in volume on the preview head VU meters he manually increased the width and depth of the groove until the loud part was over. With our computer this can be done very accurately now. It's a great invention.
So, the new White Stripes album is delivered on four master reels of analog tape. (Jack is an audiophile and loves recording and mixing in analog.) In Nashville (where this new album was recorded) the engineer used a special tape recorder with a gigantic one inch width tape to capture the mix. The folks at WB were very excited that we were going to cut an album from these special reels, they found us a 1" two track machine here in LA, delivered it to us and we were on our way. The tapes by the way sound wonderful; very dynamic, big gigundo bass drum, great punchy sounds.
The problem? Well, we didn't want to tell WB but we had NO idea how we were going to pull this off. Can you guess? That's right; the special one inch machine (a specially modified Ampex ATR-102) HAS NO PREVIEW HEAD. So, no way to get a preview signal to the computer to tell it what to do.
Kevin Gray came up with the solution. He said it came to him in a dream. In simple terms, he did this: First, rehersal. A pass was made into Sonic Solutions with the tapes mimicking our mastering moves, level changes, etc. Then during real cutting he managed to split the feed and sync the playback of the digital up with the actual master reels and back the digital off exactly the right amount of seconds to mimic the preview head on an analog tape machine. The computer had a preview feed from the digital at the all important correct level and we opened the pots and cut each side from the 1" analog masters.
This is the first time in recording history that a vinyl master was cut in analog straight from a one inch master mix.
The WHITE STRIPES rule! Oh, and so does Mr. Genius Mastering Maven Kevin Gray!"
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