Recording - January 2010 - 18

and your whole dynamic range just gets eaten. It’s like putting it through a little blender or something. I experimented with many different things, and what I did was, I got these new converters; I tried Apogees and all sorts of things I settled on the [Lynx Studio Technology] Aurora. They really sounded the best. I come out of the Auroras with 32 channels and I go into various pieces of outboard gear. I got these beautiful Neve eq’s, I got some Purple Audio, I’m using a couple of racks of 500 Series things, I got Pultecs, Urei, LA-2As, LA-3As, I’ve got some Chandler stuff that’s really nice, Neve compressors, SSL compressors, Avalon it goes on and on. I’ve got half a million dollars worth of stuff sitting in here. remastered it through this eq, and then I go into this Steve Firlotte Inward Connection Limiter, these are all big pieces of tubey gear. It really adds a different life. And then coming out of that, I’ve tried going to various digital stations, I tried going back into Pro Tools, all these different recording devices, and I ended up with an Alesis, the MasterLink ML9600; it’s a master disc recorder. It really sounded the best. And then, I had to experiment quite a bit on the frequency rates to mixdown at, you know, because my session is recorded at 96 kHz, but what do you mix down to? Some people think, “Well, you’re at 96; you gotta mix to 96”. It’s gonna be 44.1 kHz, so how do you dither it down? What’s the best way to dither it down? So the signals come out of that and into the piece of gear of my choice, and then out of the gear it goes into a summing mixer. I have custom-built summing mixers that are just Well, I’ve tried everything and these are it for me! They’re Inward Connection by Steve Firlotte, and they’re very simple; the only thing on them is a pan.There’s no level on them or anything. They’re completely discrete; everything’s Class-A, and when you go into it, what comes out of it is better than what went into it. And it takes your stereo buss and it widens it, it keeps all the frequencies real. So then summing all those two together, I come out of that and I go into this Inward Connection Stereo EQ. It’s phenomenal. There are no words that I can use to express the beauty of this eq. It just kind of like If you are familiar with my first solo record, Flex-Able, I justRECORDING JANUARY 2010 [Editor’s Note: Steve used the term “dither” as shorthand for what are actually two complementary but separate processes: sample rate conversion, e.g. 96 to 44.1 kHz, and word length reduction, e.g. 24 to 16 bits. Dither is a process applied to reduce word length with maximum sonic accuracy; see www.recordingmag.com/ glossary/D/155.html for more.] I tried everything, it took weeks. I tried dithering within the box, and comparing it to all sorts of different things, and what sounded the best to me, was the process of coming out of Pro Tools (the way I just explained it) into the analog world. Once you’re in the analog world you have to come back to digital. The thing that worked best was going into the Alesis at 88.2, because at 88.2/24 what’s happening, when you dither it, it’s getting cut in half, when you’re at 96 and you dither it down to 44.1, the math doesn’t add up, and I could hear that. As a

http://www.recordingmag.com/glossary/D/155.html http://www.recordingmag.com/glossary/D/155.html

Recording - January 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - January 2010