INVESTIGATION

Making the cut

Barry Fox talks to Miles Showell about reviving the tools of the vinyl trade
RIGHT: Miles
Showell poses
for the camera
in his office/
studio at Abbey
Road where he
plans to have his
VMS80 ‘super’
lathe installed
once it has been
hot-rodded
with the help
of London-
based lathe
maintenance
expert Crispin
Murray

BELOW: One of
around 20 lathes ome things about Abbey the installation of a new plaque by record artists like Paul Robeson, was
found by chance
in a German
salt mine by
Flo Kaufman of
Swiss company
S Road Studios never change.
The tourists who traipse
across the nearby zebra
crossing (now a National Heritage
landmark) while friends photograph
the front door to commemorate
Alan Blumlein’s pioneering work on
stereo, alongside the original plaque
for Sir Edward Elgar. There’s now a
live action webcam covering the
up for sale to property developers.
Abbey Road was then saved by
activists who managed to have the
building granted an English Heritage
Grade II listing. This prevents major
Flokason. Due them to mimic the original Beatles crossing (see www.abbeyroad.com/ alterations being made, though
to the scarcity sleeve; the absence of a normal crossing). There are audio training insiders fear it probably would not
of aluminium Abbey Road street sign because they courses and the studios are hired stop someone turning the studios
during the war are immediately stolen; and the out for corporate events and parties. into a Beatles hotel, complete with
years when they spidery graffiti messages to John, An official Abbey Road shop in the Penny Lane restaurant and Yellow
were built, the Paul, George and Ringo. basement of the house next door Submarine Suite.
lathes are made Some things have changed over stocks the kind of memorabilia that The vinyl revival is also helping
from cast iron recent years, though, and not just was previously sold elsewhere by to make Abbey Road pay. The
enterprising third parties. corridors between the main studios
are packed with old analogue tape
MAJOR SCARE decks and four rooms are equipped
The famous front of the elegant for vinyl mastering. There are three
building is currently an ugly building disc-cutting rooms – two with
site because an Atmos immersive ubiquitous Neumann VMS80 lathes
audio dubbing theatre is being and one with a VMS82, the only
constructed over half the private working Direct Metal Mastering
garden. It’s all part of a new push lathe in the UK. A fourth room
to make the studios pay. There has will soon have what analogue
already been one major scare in proselytiser Miles Showell calls a
2009 when the complex, which ‘hot-rodded’ VMS80.
was acquired in 1931 by The Miles Showell started out in 1984
Gramophone Company (later EMI) to at Phil Wainman’s Utopia Studios,

26 | www.hifinews.co.uk | MARCH 2017

near the Roundhouse in London’s RIGHT: Old
Chalk Farm, went on from Utopia analogue tape
via Metropolis to Abbey Road in decks and mixing
2013, where he is now based as consoles fill the
a freelance mastering engineer. corridors at
Although the scope of his work is Abbey Road for
wide, his heart is in analogue. easy access
‘Give me analogue every day,’
he says. ‘There are so many ifs. BELOW: Where
The mastering, the cutting, the it all began in the
pressing, the materials, and then the 1930s – original
playback; setting up the cartridge Blumlein cutter
and getting the bias and alignment head (left) and
and tracking weight all right. But ribbon and
if you do get it all right, there’s binaural mics
nothing to touch it.’ (right) on display
at Abbey Road
GROOVE CENTRAL
‘For more than 20 years London
has been the world’s vinyl cutting
centre,’ he continues. We have the
largest concentration of cutting
houses in the world. Why? It’s a
legacy of the 1990s Dance Music
scene. DJ’s want to be able to
“scratch” with 12in singles, but
more to the point they soon found
that CDs skip and stop playing.
‘The last thing in the world you
want when there is a room full of
dancers in front of you is for the
music to cut out. With vinyl you can
put a 10p coin on the arm and track
at 10g. It may not be hi-fi but the BELOW: Cutting Media in Germany, which for me is with audio grade components.
music keeps playing. discs is a mix currently the best pressing plant Some people will say that replacing
‘It was the club culture that saved of mechanics, in the world, is running 24/7 and it a capacitor with a higher grade
vinyl. Without it vinyl would have rugged electrics, still quoting three to six months for equivalent makes no difference. But
died. It kept the mastering houses intelligent fulfilling orders. if there are a hundred of them the
and cutting rooms and presses electronics ‘I have bought my own VMS80. I difference really adds up. We are
working. It kept up the demand for and gas pipe found one in storage that had been upgrading the limiter too. Getting
equipment and lacquers. plumbing to broken up for spares. But fortunately that just right involves aligning a
‘Now everyone is stretched. cool the heads the broken parts, string of 14 pots.
There’s far more demand for vinyl and remove any mainly the groove Our attitude was
than capacity to produce it. Optimal lacquer debris packing computer ‘He was taught “Let’s Do It”. We
cards, had been have the time and
kept, so can now
the secret of the enthusiasm.
be repaired and
restored. It was
how to wind I’m paying, not
EMI or Universal
20 years in a cutter head coils’ Music Group,
warehouse, which which owns Abbey
is bad because it wasn’t being Road. I’m freelance so I can do it the
maintained, but it’s good because way I want. This is for me. It is going
that lathe has had 20 years’ less to take as long as it takes.’
use than all the others. With Crispin
Murray – who is pretty much A SALTY TALE
London’s go-to lathe maintenance There are no new Neumann lathes
guy with a wealth of experience with because founder Georg Neumann
the BBC, Manor Mobile, Townhouse died in 1976 and Sennheiser bought
Studios and Metropolis – we are the company in 1991, pulling out of
hot-rodding it. vinyl when seeing the rise of CD.
‘We had to pull it to bits anyway Showell continues: ‘Flo Kaufmann
so I thought, let’s turn it into a of Switzerland realised that most of
modern version of the ’80s lathe. We the original Neumann VMS team,
are replacing every single capacitor, who had three or four hundred years

MARCH 2017 | www.hifinews.co.uk | 27


of collective experience on lathe
design between them, had written
nothing down. All that knowledge
was going as they were dying.
Kaufmann sought out Johannes
Richter, who was “Mr VMS80”
at Neumann in Berlin before.
Johannes Richter was an old man. So
Kaufmann got Richter to train him.
‘Kaufmann has since been able
to build on that experience to
re-engineer the original cutter amps.
Richter also taught him the secret
of how to wind cutter head coils.
You have to crush
the wire flat before
winding so that ‘Showell then
you get many more
turns in the coil, so
proceeded
there is less risk of
burn out.
to share an
‘It’s heat that intriguing story’
kills the cutter coils.
Actually it’s the feedback coils that
are most at risk, not the drive coils.
That’s why the Neumann cutter head
has helium cooling. But helium can
cause metal fatigue. The extremes of
hot and cold stress the metal. I only
use helium for real time one-for-one
cutting, not for half speed which is
using a quarter or a third the power.’
Showell then went on to share an
intriguing story that reminds me of
the 2014 movie Monuments Men in
which – based on a true World War II
story – George Clooney and his army
buddies rescue works of art stashed
in a mine by the German army.
‘Flo Kaufmann has now found a
collection of early cutting lathes,
stored in a salt mine. There are
INVESTIGATION
around 20 of them. Some are
incomplete and just good for parts,
but their condition is good because
the air in a salt mine is dry and clean
and perfect for storage. They were
for 78rpm discs and Kaufmann’s plan ABOVE LEFT: resonance. Flo Kaufmann wonders
is to restore them and update the The Flokason why Neumann never went back to
motors for LP cutting.’ project at www. using cast iron.
flokason.ch and The recovered lathes have now
SHROUDED IN SECRECY (above right) been sandblasted clean, and work
The project is at an early stage, and pictures of the is in progress on updating the
details are shrouded in secrecy. But first lathe from bearings for use with a modern Lyrec
there is a little extra information the German salt motor so powerful that it cannot be
buried in the website of Kaufmann’s mine to have stopped by hand.
company Flokason been restored by
at www.flokason. Flo Kaufmann COIL KILLERS
ch. The lathes – ‘I love analogue’ repeats Miles
dubbed Neumann
AM44 by Flo
BELOW: Showell
spent 120 hours
Showell. ‘There is so much more
that can go wrong. Especially with
Kaufmann because
of the year they
of studio time
ridding Freddie
half-speed cutting, for instance
with sibilants. The limiter is there to
were stashed – Mercury’s vocals protect the cutter head coils from
were discovered of unwanted overload by signals that are rich in
by chance during a recent hunt sibilance while harmonics – like a harpsichord or
through tunnels in East Germany for remastering muted trumpet. Anything with a
the rotor wheels used in the Enigma Queen: The lot of high frequency energy and
encryption machine. Old men in the Studio Collection harmonics. Miles Davis is a coil
region remembered a whole lot of killer. At normal speed the limiter
secret storing going on. also works as a de-esser. But at half
Because aluminium speed it doesn’t work. It is looking in
was in short supply the wrong place. There are no sharp
during the war, the edges in the waveform.
lathes are made ‘For the Queen box-set I had
from cast iron. This to pre-treat every single “s”.
makes them two or Freddie Mercury, God bless
three times heavier him, had one of the best
than later lathes ever rock voices. But those
which were made big teeth were very vinyl
from aluminium. unfriendly. Every “s” needed
The extra weight individual treatment, which
makes them far less meant literally thousands of
prone to unwanted individual edits. I spent
MARCH 2017 | www.hifinews.co.uk | 29

120 hours of studio time de-essing
Freddie’s vocals. I could have just
passed the whole track through a
limiter to catch the various “s”s in
the vocal but that would have also
softened the sound of the guitars,
percussion and the cymbals.
‘It was the same with Phil Collins,
especially on the
song “Sussudio”,
with whole strings ‘Sony said vinyl
of “s”s. I obviously
didn’t want to let
would be gone
a limiter interfere by 2000. Now
with his drum
sound. So I had to CD’s in trouble’
use a digital tool –
sorry, I don’t want to name the tool
and tell others how I did it – but
essentially it allowed me to micro-
manage the audio by showing me
the small area of the waveform that
was the “s”. That way I could treat
just that small area and leave his
snare drum and hi-hat untouched.
‘This was possible because Queen
own their own archive. So do Phil
Collins and Genesis. All wanted the
best possible results.
‘No-one could have believed or
predicted that we are where we are
now with vinyl. I
remember when
CD was launched,
and Sony was
saying that vinyl
would be gone by
2000. Now it’s CD
that’s in trouble.
It’s been so
de-engineered. Analogue degrades
of course. There are many analogue
master tapes from the 1950s and
’60s that have been played to within
an inch of their life. I heard a BBC
radio interview once with Roy Halee
INVESTIGATION
(Simon and Garfunkel’s engineer)
mourning the Bridge Over Troubled
Water masters which had been worn
out. But ultimately they will still play,
but just not as well as they did when
they were new.
‘Digital just falls off the cliff. And
there are digital recordings around
the world which can never be played
again because the equipment used
to make them is no longer available
ABOVE: The and no-one can make it again. For
single ‘Sussudio’, instance, there are just not enough
first released working DAT heads in the world to
in 1985 by Phil recover all the information recorded
Collins (left) on all the DAT tapes in the world.’
and taken from
his No Jacket FALLING APART
Required album. Showell then went on to give me
Showell worked some examples. ‘The earlier Collins
for nine months tapes are analogue, ¼in 15ips and
remastering ½in 30ips respectively for the first
Collins’ eight solo two albums. Later recordings, such
albums, which as No Jacket Required, were digital
were originally 44.1kHz/16-bit on U-Matic video
recorded on a tape. Both the analogue tapes had
variety of media gone sticky and needed baking
spanning some before they could be played and
30 years. The copied for re-mastering. Although
analogue tapes video tape is less prone to stickiness,
of the first two
albums had gone
because the coating is thinner, it’s
not ever-lasting. One track from the
sticky while a Collins U-Matic tapes would not play.
track from a ‘The error correction had fallen
U-Matic tape off the cliff. It could no longer
wouldn’t play correct. But fortunately they had
made a safety copy and that played.
Even when the error correction is
supposedly working, in extreme
cases the jitter stacks up and the
stereo falls apart. It’s unpredictable.
‘That’s why digital storage is a
worry. If you want to guarantee
LEFT: Showell that something can still be played
pictured in a hundred years, then put it on
alongside a an LP. You will always be able to get
Neumann lathe, something back, if only by putting it
which is used on something that spins and playing
for cutting half- it with a pin.’
speed masters. Showell has another worry...
Half-speed ‘Supermarkets are now saying
mastering is “vinyl is for everyone”. It isn’t. Vinyl
less stressful is not for everyone. It’s for people
on the lathe’s who want to devote an hour to
feedback coils, listening, and don’t mind turning
says Showell, over sides. My big worry is that
since it requires a people will think they want to play
third or a quarter LPs and go on the High Street and
less power than buy one of those £80 all-in-one vinyl
real-time cutting. players. They will then wonder what
On top of the all the fuss is about, and go to the
lathe can be seen iTunes store to buy a download
a mirror-finish because it sounds better. That will
lacquer blank kill the vinyl market.’
MARCH 2017 | www.hifinews.co.uk | 31