I hope this will clear up speculation as to how this Ragged Glory "Smell The Horse" edition was mastered for the new ORS box sets of CDs and more importantly the vinyl. This should also clear up some recording and subsequent mixing workflows that have been talked about on the Steve Hoffman audio forums.
The flowchart block diagram that was illustrated on his forum page (reprinted below) was very accurate with only a few exceptions. The stage monitor mix in fact did not come from the Record Plant truck at all. It was mixed originally as a setup by Tim Mulligan on the stage on a separate monitor console in the barn and came from a split of the microphones I set up for recording. The other side of the split (direct) went to the truck mic pre-amps which saw several consoles in employment. The UA "Green" board got all the guitar amp mics, the Neve BCM-10 and the API main console got the rest of the microphone inputs as well as some floater Neve 1066 modules were used for the bass guitar and amp. The individual tracks then were routed to the Sony 3324 digital multi-track tape machines.
The API sidecar was what I derived the running stereo log mix (what I listened to at all times in the truck- also called my "monitor mix", which could have caused some confusion in some of the forum threads as to what got heard on stage in the barn during recording). That same stereo mix from the API sidecar fed the DAT machine as well as the 1/4" Ampex tape machine we used for selected on the spot remixes.
When David Briggs, Neil and I mixed this album at Indigo Ranch in July of 1990 we employed a hybrid situation for mixing. That being, we captured the analog console stereo buss to two separate places. One, an Apogee first generation two channel A/D converter that then sent the newly encoded digital 44.1k sample rate/16 bit mix to a Sony BVU helical head recorder, and most importantly for this project - also to a 1/4"Ampex ATR analog two track tape machine.
We spot checked the analog mixes off of the 1/4" every now and then but the 1990 mastered album came from the 44.1k/16b digital for both the CD and later that year or the next – the vinyl as well. One has to remember that vinyl was on its way out the door back in 1990 in favor of the CD format. Vinyl then was an afterthought, at least in rock 'n roll.
Yes, the multi-track Sony 3324 tape machines were feeding their 24 channel audio through their onboard D/A converters via XLR analog snakes to the Indigo Aengus console inputs but the record was in fact mixed in analog via the console stereo buss and only captured to digital (yet again) and to two track tape. The tape gave us a mix safety at that time in case anything happened to the digital two track master mixes.
I always had wanted to hear the tape mixes (same exact mix as the digital) as they would ensure that only the multi-tracks were a digital source. If one counts the path of the CD (or vinyl back then) the album would have been from microphone to CD in the format of A/D/A (mixing) to A/D again to the Apogee converter and CD (including vinyl) mastering.
By utilizing the analog tape mixes instead, the sound only went through one set of A/D converters (the Sony 3324 multi-tracks). Thus it is A/D/A for the new release of this Ragged Glory "Smell The Horse" album on vinyl, and now at a good signal to noise ratio by not fitting all the music on one LP disc but spread across three discs and with the extra songs we recorded then.
In addition, the Ampex tape machine has a slight low frequency head bump that helps the bottom end and sounds better. Also, the old 1990 vinyl was cut from a digital master whereas this edition is cut from the original analog edited to mirror exactly the original album content!
This is why Neil always puts the source guide on every record that is part of the NYA re- releases. One always knows what the mastering source is for the vinyl and CDs. In this case it says, “mastered from original analog tapes” and that is the truth. The source guide always indicates the master source, not the multi-track recording format.
Finally, the songs that were the DAT mixes on the original album had the Record Plant remote truck 1/4" tapes that also got generated at the same time with the truck DAT mixes. Same mix, and that is what i remember. That's my story and i'm sticking to it, but the brain memory does fade with time!
John Hanlon