Recording - October 2014 - 58

The three echo bridges
were tied to the two acoustic
chambers and an old EMT
thunder plate. That was the
main echo that was used on
everything. I spent so much
time in the 44 reverb chamber; we had eight speakers
up there, all of them with volume controls you could
change; four microphones in different spots,
all going into a mixer. And you could play
with that thing to your heart's content, but
you could not turn it into an echo chamber
no matter how hard you tried.
The 48 echo chamber had one set of
speakers in it, and one microphone. That
was it-an old SM57 was the microphone.
We used a three-way crossover network;
there was nothing above about 300 Hz in
the woofer, and then it would pick up the
midrange, and the tweeters. There were four
tweeters, I forget the model number. They

midrange, crossed over to
an AR tweeter and an AR
supertweeter. This was a
quadri-amped system, with
an industrial McIntosh 200
watt amplifier on the
woofer, which was only a
12" woofer; a Mac 60 on
the Bozak midrange, and
a Dynakit Stereo-70,
which was 35 watts per channel, on the
tweeter and supertweeter. And we built
two speakers, with a Jones connector on
the back, so that I could replace something
quickly. [laughs] Because the average lifespan was about two weeks. The normal failure mode was, they'd rip the voice coils
right off the cone of the woofer-just tear it
right off. One time, it lasted long enough
that the braid that went from the basket to
the cone got so thin that it glowed incandescent, and set the packing inside the
speaker on fire. [laughs]

looked like vacuum cleaner heads; they
were made by Electro-Voice. [Probably T-35
or T-350-PJS] I think the midrange was
some JBL thing with a phenolic diaphragm,
that they made for foghorns. Because we
wanted the power-handling capabilities.
Engineers would rewind tapes with the head
gate closed; you could stand on the other
side of West Grand Boulevard and hear the
echo chamber! They really abused 'em.

We did that for, I don't know, about a
year and a half, and then we finally got
disgusted and put an Altec 604E in there
and said, "That's it."
The producer would come into the room
after the session and ask to hear it back, and
the engineer would say, "I got it, don't worry
about it, you don't want to hear it back!"
What do you think a 604E sounds like in a
room that's got no sound absorption in it
whatsoever? The sound just comes out and
bounces around, there's no definition to it; it's
really bad. But that's the way it was. We'd
take it down into the mix room and, "It's all
there; don't worry about it." I know it sounds
crazy, but that's the kind of stuff that went on.
You could go on and on and on.
George Gordy blowing up the speakers
in the control room deliberately, because
I was hassling him, because he was supposed to have been done an hour ago...

And you were using AR-3s for your
main mixdown monitors. And tracking
monitors?
Not tracking monitors; tracking monitors
were a whole different thing. In the early
days, we had this Bozak setup, which had
three channels going across; there are pictures of that floating around. What happened was, that thing was so loud, it did
in a couple of people's hearing. Berry
said, "Take it out!" And Brian Holland
said, "No, no, no-I've gotta have the
power!" So we said okay, and Berry said
there could only be one speaker in there.
So we dreamed up this nightmare that
we thought might come close to playing as
loud as what we were taking out. It was an
AR-3 woofer, crossed over to a Bozak
58

RECORDING October 2014

Mastering,
and the Master
All the actual disc mastering was done
at RCA in Chicago. A lot of the decisions
about which mix or master to release were
made on a $79 record player, simply

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Recording - October 2014

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