Recording - November 2017 - 72

FadeOut
THE BØRJA LEGACY
Guest editorial by Scott Dorsey
This is a story of two stories that become a single story...
One story is about recording studios back in the 1970s. A
number of forces from different directions had converged to
dramatically affect how studios were being built.
First, multitrack recording (and the ability to punch and
edit) had people searching for really good isolation so bleed
wouldn't affect edits. This led to very dead-sounding studios-
and boomy ones at that, since acoustic treatments mainly
deadened the highs and mids.
Second, cheaper gear led to a lot of smaller studios popping up
like mushrooms, for everything from music recording to voiceovers
to language training tapes. A lot of these rooms used speakers
designed for PA, which sounded terrible in the near field.
Third, the popularization of third-octave spectrum analyzers
and EQ, combined with the idea that "if we EQ so the
analyzer looks flat, everything will be great", created a lot
more problems than it solved, because a lot of room problems
are narrower than a third of an octave.
Fourth, people were monitoring at higher and higher levels.
By the early 1970s it was not unusual to find rock concert
levels inside the control room, something that made effective
listening nearly impossible.
All of those factors contributed to a generation of new
studio control rooms that just sounded awful.
The other story is about Svein Erik Børja, a record and television program producer in Norway. Back in the 1960s, he
was one of the major producers on the Norwegian jazz and
pop music scenes. His real talent, though, was in recognizing
audio problems and implementing solutions...
In 1973 Børja attended the AES convention in Rotterdam and
saw a paper called "An Audio Amplifier for Ultimate Quality
Requirements" by Jan Lostroh and Matti Otala. Lostroh and Otala
had discovered that in spite of excellent distortion specs, the new
generation of solid state amplifiers didn't sound very good. They
figured out other problems like crossover distortion and slew limiting, and told the world that these could be measured-and fixed.
Børja enlisted Per Abramsen to make such an "ultimate"
amplifier for him, and they liked it enough to go into production
with it. This venture became Electrocompaniet, the well-known
maker of high-end home audio products. By putting these
ideas into practice, Børja helped make the first production
solid state amplifiers that actually sounded good, and helped
spark a revolution in the US and Europe.
Changing tastes and changing technology has caused studio
sounds to change over the years in interesting ways. Early
72

RECORDING November 2017

studios were made as dead as possible because the horns
used for recording created an artificial liveness from internal
reflections. With the coming of electrical recording, that went
away and there was more of a demand to reproduce the actual
room sound. The contrast between the live-sounding orchestra
and the close-up dead sound of the vocal created a whole
new genre of popular "crooners" in the 1930s and 1940s,
and that required the ability to control sounds with baffles.
By the 1950s, the use of the new "acoustical tile" created a very
distinct and artificial sound that you can hear, for example, on the old
Sun recordings from Memphis. In the 1960s, things started opening
up a bit with better quality absorptive materials and more use of polycylindric diffusers in larger rooms, but then multitrack came along
and pushed us back to the dead sounds of the early acoustic era.
So, in 1977, Mr. Børja was disappointed with the results of
mixing down a project and decided to investigate the relationship between the control room monitoring system and the end
result. He took the 16-track master tape for his project to four
different studios and mixed down four times. Then he compared
the measured tonal balances of the end recordings with the
measured frequency response of the monitoring system.
It seems obvious to us today that if your room or monitors
boost one frequency, that frequency will be deficient in the
mix because the engineer compensates for the room problem.
In 1977, though, no one had ever thought about this before!
In a paper for the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society
titled "How to Fool The Ear and Make Bad Recordings,"
Børja describes just about every room-related mixing problem
known today. One example: a studio with small peaks at 400
and 1000 Hz that affected the ability to balance vocals with
backing tracks. He also described how he could get an acceptable mix in a deficient room, by combining an idea of what
the room was doing with crude changes to speaker EQ and
placement. This paper was a landmark in the long battle
toward understanding what is needed for proper monitoring.
"Far too much emphasis has been put on the ability of a
loudspeaker to play loud, and too little attention has been
paid to the quality of other factors in the recording and monitoring
chain, such as loudspeaker listening response, low distortion,
high resolution, focusing ability, and energy response. If more
attention is paid to these factors it may not be necessary to
have loudspeakers play as loudly as they are in many control
rooms today."-Svein Erik Børja
Sadly, Mr. Børja died of cancer in 1992 at a fairly young age,
but his work lives on in just about every studio today.



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - November 2017

Contents
Recording - November 2017 - Intro
Recording - November 2017 - Cover1
Recording - November 2017 - Cover2
Recording - November 2017 - 1
Recording - November 2017 - 2
Recording - November 2017 - 3
Recording - November 2017 - 4
Recording - November 2017 - 5
Recording - November 2017 - Contents
Recording - November 2017 - 7
Recording - November 2017 - 8
Recording - November 2017 - 9
Recording - November 2017 - 10
Recording - November 2017 - 11
Recording - November 2017 - 12
Recording - November 2017 - 13
Recording - November 2017 - 14
Recording - November 2017 - 15
Recording - November 2017 - 16
Recording - November 2017 - 17
Recording - November 2017 - 18
Recording - November 2017 - 19
Recording - November 2017 - 20
Recording - November 2017 - 21
Recording - November 2017 - 22
Recording - November 2017 - 23
Recording - November 2017 - 24
Recording - November 2017 - 25
Recording - November 2017 - 26
Recording - November 2017 - 27
Recording - November 2017 - 28
Recording - November 2017 - 29
Recording - November 2017 - 30
Recording - November 2017 - 31
Recording - November 2017 - 32
Recording - November 2017 - 33
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Recording - November 2017 - Cover3
Recording - November 2017 - Cover4
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