Ron McMaster Retires From Capitol Mastering

[JSngry]

Somebody had to do it, and nobody was going to make a CD sound like an LP, especially back then. I congratulate him for not really fucking anything up and for putting it all out there the first time. I bought a few RVGs that were supposed to "sound better" than the McMaster, but I listen functionally most of the time, not recreationally, and to be honest, I didn't hear such a big difference one way or the other, and on one Horace Silver RVG, Rudy made it sound like a fucking mid-70s Muse record. And you KNOW that ain't right!

 

6 hours ago, jlhoots said:

If / when you get to my age, you'll be happy just to hear the music in any format.

This, and not necessarily due just to age.

[mjzee]

I always thought Ron McMaster was a fake name; it was just too good for someone in his profession.  Kinda like Johnny Rotten or Richard Hell.  I'm still suspicious of Mickey Bass.

Anyway, I wish McMaster (or whatever his name really is) a long and happy retirement.

[BFrank]

2 hours ago, mjzee said:

I always thought Ron McMaster was a fake name; it was just too good for someone in his profession.  Kinda like Johnny Rotten or Richard Hell.  I'm still suspicious of Mickey Bass.

Anyway, I wish McMaster (or whatever his name really is) a long and happy retirement.

... or the up and coming jazz singer, Jazzmeia Horn. 

[JohnS]

14 hours ago, jlhoots said:

If / when you get to my age, you'll be happy just to hear the music in any format.

Very true.

[felser]

23 hours ago, mjzee said:

I agree; get the music first.  It's funny that the same CD can sound so different from one stereo system to another.  There really is no reference standard.  Just enjoy the music.

Me too.  I've never listened to a Blue Note reissue on the Blue Note label and thought "I'm not enjoying this as much as I could because of the remastering, and I've got almost all of the reissues from the late 40's- early 70's.  If you want to hear music ruined by the mastering, pick up some of those Blue Notes on the Applause label.  Sound like  bad needle drops (which is probably what they are).

[Kevin Bresnahan]

On 7/18/2018 at 10:16 PM, mjzee said:

I always thought Ron McMaster was a fake name; it was just too good for someone in his profession.  Kinda like Johnny Rotten or Richard Hell.  I'm still suspicious of Mickey Bass.

Anyway, I wish McMaster (or whatever his name really is) a long and happy retirement.

The man himself (from his Facebook page):

[sidewinder]

Some of the early ones he did were very good indeed - Chick Corea’s ‘Now He Sings, Now He Sobs’ comes to mind.

Hope he has a great retirement, well earned !

[Bluesnik]

On 17/07/2018 at 2:14 AM, Ed Swinnich said:

I still have most of the original McMastered Blue Note CDs I picked up in the 90s.  Hope that doesn't start a controversy - but I'm pretty easy to please

As do I. I still think the nineties were a golden age for reissues. Still have all those orange-black mid-nineties Impulses. And the RVG series started at the end of that decade.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

Over the years, there has been a story repeated over & over that Ron McMaster's Blue Note LPs were always cut with a digital look-ahead circuit that resulted in them all being cut digitally. He refuted this several times but not with a lot of detail, probably because he was still cutting LPs and didn't want to get in any trouble with the boss.

So this came up again on the Hoffman forums with this post:

It's been documented several times on this site that Capitol isn't able to cut AAA because their tape machines lack the crucial preview head (which is prohibitively expensive to implement after-the-fact). So even if they master from tape, that tape gets sent through a digital delay, i.e. being digitised. Which is virtually the same as cutting from digital files.

Figuring that Ron might be able to give us more detail now that he is retired and Capitol Mastering Studios closed for good, I messaged him on Facebook and told him what some people are reporting and asked him if he could elaborate further on his LP mastering of Blue Note LPs and he replied:

Hi Kevin,

My disc mastering rooms at EMI and Capitol were all analog rooms. All tape-to-disc projects were cut to disc completely analog. We used NO digital preview like some studios had to because we had a Studer A80 Mastering machine which contained an analog preview head.

You would make different tape paths on the A80 for the preview head depending on the speed of the master tape. If it was 15ips it was one path, if it was 30ips, you would use a different tape path. There was also a different path between cutting an LP or 45 depending on if the master was 15ips or 30ips.

Yes, some studios that cut from analog did have a digital preview, because they did not have a fully equipped analog mastering tape machine, but we never had to do that. Both Wally’s* room and my room had Studer A80 mastering machines. The person who made the comment is correct in that some studios had to use a digital delay because they didn’t have a specific mastering machine with built in preview path and preview head but we never had to do that.

I hope that this will help you. Nice to hear from you and I hope this helps.

Ron

* Wally Traugott

So - to be clear - all of Ron McMaster's LPs were cut fully in the analog domain when he was given an analog tape to work with. Ron has told me that he was sometimes only given digital tapes for some LP cuts. He didn't control that. However, he also says that he always worked with the analog tapes for all Blue Note cuts. His words were something like, "Why wouldn't I? It only took a few moments to pull the tape". I believe that back then, the masters were not stored very far away.

BTW - I told Ron that he needs to write down his mastering stories and he agreed, saying it was something many of his friends have been asking him to do for years. I hope that if anything, someone can at least interview him and get a few of his stories out there. If anyone knows of someone who is looking to talk to a retired mastering engineer who has mastered almost every Blue Note title ever recorded, let me know & I'll see if I can make it happen.
 

[Dub Modal]

1 hour ago, bresna said:

Over the years, there has been a story repeated over & over that Ron McMaster's Blue Note LPs were always cut with a digital look-ahead circuit that resulted in them all being cut digitally. He refuted this several times but not with a lot of detail, probably because he was still cutting LPs and didn't want to get in any trouble with the boss.

So this came up again on the Hoffman forums with this post:

It's been documented several times on this site that Capitol isn't able to cut AAA because their tape machines lack the crucial preview head (which is prohibitively expensive to implement after-the-fact). So even if they master from tape, that tape gets sent through a digital delay, i.e. being digitised. Which is virtually the same as cutting from digital files.

Figuring that Ron might be able to give us more detail now that he is retired and Capitol Mastering Studios closed for good, I messaged him on Facebook and told him what some people are reporting and asked him if he could elaborate further on his LP mastering of Blue Note LPs and he replied:

Hi Kevin,

My disc mastering rooms at EMI and Capitol were all analog rooms. All tape-to-disc projects were cut to disc completely analog. We used NO digital preview like some studios had to because we had a Studer A80 Mastering machine which contained an analog preview head.

You would make different tape paths on the A80 for the preview head depending on the speed of the master tape. If it was 15ips it was one path, if it was 30ips, you would use a different tape path. There was also a different path between cutting an LP or 45 depending on if the master was 15ips or 30ips.

Yes, some studios that cut from analog did have a digital preview, because they did not have a fully equipped analog mastering tape machine, but we never had to do that. Both Wally’s* room and my room had Studer A80 mastering machines. The person who made the comment is correct in that some studios had to use a digital delay because they didn’t have a specific mastering machine with built in preview path and preview head but we never had to do that.

I hope that this will help you. Nice to hear from you and I hope this helps.

Ron

* Wally Traugott

So - to be clear - all of Ron McMaster's LPs were cut fully in the analog domain when he was given an analog tape to work with. Ron has told me that he was sometimes only given digital tapes for some LP cuts. He didn't control that. However, he also says that he always worked with the analog tapes for all Blue Note cuts. His words were something like, "Why wouldn't I? It only took a few moments to pull the tape". I believe that back then, the masters were not stored very far away.

BTW - I told Ron that he needs to write down his mastering stories and he agreed, saying it was something many of his friends have been asking him to do for years. I hope that if anything, someone can at least interview him and get a few of his stories out there. If anyone knows of someone who is looking to talk to a retired mastering engineer who has mastered almost every Blue Note title ever recorded, let me know & I'll see if I can make it happen.
 

Thanks for posting this. Glad to see a bad rumor bite the dust. 

[jcam_44]

Very cool. Thanks for the info 

[Shrdlu]

This stuff about Ron McMaster's CDs has dragged on since the 90s, and most posters who have been around awhile are probably sick of it. There will never be all-round agreement.

If some are happy with Ron's CDs, then fine. If some are happy with the U.S. RVG series, then fine, too. 

My own position is that, right from the late 80s, the CDs from other companies (that is, not Blue Note/Capitol) were good and the McMasters were, for the most part, lousy, though some are good. I have resentment toward McMaster because it has cost me a lot of money to upgrade to Japanese versions. For me, the definitive Blue Note CDs are the "Blue Note Works" ones. Of course, these never have the alternate takes or previously unissued tracks. I like most of the U.S. RVG CDs. The small number of Japanese RVG CDs that I have are fine, and I love the tiny LP jacket style, though you need a magnifying glass to read the notes.

The Japanese Blue Note CDs from about 2013 are almost invariably good, and contain a lot of previously unissued tracks.

I have pretty much upgraded all of the McMaster disks by now, and it is good that all that is over.

It puzzles me that Japanese CD reissues are way better than U.S. ones. If I had been mastering CDs in the States, I would have found out what equipment the Japanese were using, and got it myself. Why didn't they do that? It can't be hard. I have transferred some LPs to CD at home, and the CDs sound great. McMaster had no excuse for producing bad CDs.

But, no ill feeling to Ron, or to other posters here. There are far more important things in life than a few CDs.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

As I understand it, Ron McMaster had customers. These customers had their producer get him to pull a tape, get the playback set up (bake the tape, align the azimuth etc), add EQ per the tape box recommendations and then digitize it. The producer gets a CD-R, listens to the music and gives it a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

Ron McMaster is not a producer.