Interview of Bernie Grundman by Tommaso Gambini

July 7th, 2017

The following is copied from an AudioNirvana forum post by Myles B. Astor, Senior Editor for positive-feedback.com. Story goes, Tommaso Gambini interviewed Bernie Grundman with the plan to write an article for PF. That never got published, so Myles posted the following:

In the early to mid sixties Mr. Grundman was living in Phoenix, Arizona. He was an audio fanatic and would acquire hi-ﬁ gear with his extra money. He would hang out at a hi-ﬁ store that would sell Contemporary albums (only that label), as the owner believed in the sound of that label.

After serving in the military, Mr. Grundman returned to Phoenix and started focusing on entering the recording industry. He was attending Arizona State University, studying Electrical Engineering.

He called up one of the bigger studios in Phoenix, Audio Recorders, and explained to the owner his intention of entering this ﬁeld. Roy Dunann, who Mr. Grundman knew from the Contemporary albums he had been acquiring, turned out to be working at that very studio.

Mr. Grundman then started working at Audio Recorders, sometimes with Mr. Dunann.

Mr. Grundman recalls that Mr. Dunann had previously worked at Capitol, ﬁrst assisting John Palladino; Lester Koenig, founder and owner of Contemporary subsequently hired Mr. Dunann to work his label. Later, probably under the inﬂuence of Mr. Dunann, Mr. Koenig hired Howard Holzer, also a former Capitol employee. Mr. Holzer later went on to founding his own company, Haeco, which manufactured various audio equipment. The company was based in Van Nuys, California.

Several cutting systems put together by Mr. Holzer were in use at Audio Recorders, when Mr. Grundman was working there. Mr. Grundman was very curious about these systems, and decided he wanted to meet Mr. Holzer. He then drove from Phoenix to Van Nuys, “wearing suit and tie”, determined to meet Mr. Holzer.

When he arrived at Haeco’s workshop, Mr. Grundman recalls that Mr. Holzer, “kind of a crude individual”, “was handling all of that expensive equipment, dressed poorly”, with a T-Shirt.

Mr. Grundman introduced himself and told Mr. Holzer of his connection with Mr. Dunann, and how “he was learning everything from Roy”. It turned out that Contemporary records was looking for an engineer. Mr. Holzer promised he would help Mr. Grundman get an interview with Mr. Koening.

Mr. Grundman thought he wasn't prepared, but he was was at an age when he was “ready to just jump in”. Mr. Grundman recalls Mr. Holzer telling him that “if you love your work, you’ll be able to ﬁgure it out”.

Mr. Grundman then drove back to Phoenix (“it must have been February or March” he recalls). He was still working towards his Degree in Electrical Engineering. A few weeks later Mr. Grundman called Mr. Holzer wondering if he had been able to talk to Mr. Koening about the interview. Mr. Holzer responded “you got the job, when can you start?”.
In September, after the summer term had ﬁnished, Mr. Grundman moved to Los Angeles to work at Contemporary. “I drove down with a trailer”, he recalls. “It was a dream”, he adds.

When Mr. Grundman started working at Contemporary all of the classic albums (Way Out West, Tomorrow is the Question, Art Pepper meets the Rhythm Section etc) had already been recorded. All of the original equipment was still there, though, including the C12s, U47s, KM56s, Ampex Tape Machines, the mastering chain etc.

Mr. Gundman recalls that they were not recording a lot of music in those days; he was mainly cutting masters, engineering a few sessions for Contemporary, engineering some sessions for other labels, who would rent out the gear.

Some of the ones that Mr. Grundman engineered include “Firebird” by Prince Lasha and Sonny Simmons, some records for the “Society for Forgotten Music” and Joe Henderson’s “Live at the Lighthouse”.

Since the tapes at Contemporary were cut “ﬂat”, they would spend time adjusting the sound before cutting the masters. Mr. Koenig was truly a perfectionist and “you had to match the sound exactly”.

Mr. Holzer and Mr. Dunann had developed a very advanced mastering chain, that allowed them to pan different frequencies differently, as a way of making up for the direct two track recording.

The reputation Mr. Grundman had acquired during his time at Contemporary helped him establish himself as an engineer, and later getting a job at A&M records. At A&M he worked with many artists, including the Doors, Burt Bacharach, Herp Albert.

Mr. Grundman says he was one of the few (if not the only) engineers who would “alter” the sound, and eq it.

Mr. Grundman recalls the Contemporary studio didn't change for very long. In the early 70’s Mr. Holzer sold one of his ﬁrst solid state consoles to Contemporary. He says it’s likely that this is the one that was used for Barney Kessel’s “Poll Winners Ride Again”, as it appears in the picture in the back. Mr. Holzer also sold a solid state console to A&M. It was a solid state console featuring discrete circuitry. “Still, it didn't sound as good as tubes”, Mr. Grundman adds.

Mr. Grundman recalls that Mr. Dunann would mike the double bass using a Stephens FM microphone (likely the Stephens CM-1) inside the bridge, wrapped in foam.

Mr. John Koenig, Lester’s son, owns all of the microphones in use at Contemporary, including the C12s, the 47s, KM56s, and the above mentioned Stephens.

The cutting lathe in use at Contemporary is now at “Bernie Grundman Mastering” in Los Angeles, as are the racks used to house the cutting ampliﬁers.

Mr. Holzer designed and built the power ampliﬁer used at Contemporary to cut the masters. An ampliﬁer also built by Mr. Holzer is now in use at “Bernie Grundman Mastering”. It is the same model as the one in use at Contemporary; it has been modiﬁed slightly. The input transformer has been replaced with a better one.

In use at Contemporary was also a mono EMT plate. Mr. Grundman recalls that Lester Koening would tell him to “turn the reverb up until you could hear it, and then roll it back a little”. When remastering the Contemporary tapes (which were recorded “dry”, with no reverb), Mr. Grundman used a stereo EMT plate at his facility.

Mr. Grundman has two technicians working full time at his facility: Len Horowitz and Ben O’ Mary. They are experienced with vacuum tube equipment. They are “the guys to call for vintage audio in LA”.

The tape machine in use at Contemporary was the Ampex 350, “the one with the black tubes”, meaning the older version with octal tubes, as opposed to the 351 which uses smaller noval tubes.

Currently, Mr. Grundman’s tape deck of choice is a Studer machine with Flux Magnetic tape heads.

The tube Ampex tape machines, such as the 350 in use at Contemporary, had ﬂutter problems and had a high distortion ﬁgure (4-5%). Although, Mr. Grudman admits that “sometimes when it’s too clean it sounds dead”.

Roy Dunann “didn’t fully realize what he was doing— he was just trying to save money”. “He wasn’t aware that was he was doing was amazing, and that by cutting corners trying to save money he was accomplishing a cleaner signal path”.

A trick that Mr. Dunann would use when recording at Contemporary is as follows: he would be recording at 15 ips, however he would set the NAB curve on the tape machine to 7.5 ips. This way he would achieve a cleaner sound in the high end because the NAB curve for 7.5 ips is steeper at around 10k, and “you can get away with it with Jazz because there’s not that much information up there”.

“Roy was a rare person” — Mr. Grundman recalls — “he was like those pilots; the plane is an extension of their body; they are not thinking, they just do it. Roy was be like that, except with machines”— he would just do it. Mr. Grudman believes his chief technician also has a similar quality.

“Roy would know intuitively what to change in a circuit if there was an issue, say a bump at 100 cycles, or something like that”— Mr. Grundman recalls — “and at Audio Recorders in Phoenix we would sometimes get mad at Roy because he would patch in components in the equipment (for example by putting resistors in parallel to alter their values) without annotating it on the schematic”.“And when we would get a new piece of equipment that he had already worked on, Roy would go right to the same spots and perform the same modiﬁcations”.

Mr. Grundman says he never met famed audio engineer Rudy Van Gelder. Mr. Grundman believes that the audio quality achieved by Mr. Van Gelder is deﬁnitely inferior to what Mr. Dunann was capable of. When asked what his favorite sounding record that Mr. Van Gelder engineered, Mr. Grundman comments “it’s probably Freddie Hubbard’s First Light”.

Mr. Grundman however appreciates the sense of ambience that Mr. Van Gelder was able to accomplish in his smalls studio. “Having remastered and recut several Blue Note albums, I know that Rudy’s quality is very inconsistent; you get a lot of distortion on trumpets and drums, the bass can be quite boomy, and that has to do with the fact that Rudy would be overloading his equipment very often”.

Mr. Grundman says that, while he appreciates some recordings made at the famed Columbia 30th Street Studio, engineered by Fred Plaut and Frank Laico, he still believes that there’s a certain inconsistency in all of the records made in this historical period.

When asked about modern engineers, Mr. Grundman comments that “Al Schmitt delivers material consistently of the highest quality and musicality— nobody knows how he does it, not even his assistant who has been working with him for many years”. Mr. Grundman believes Mr. Schmitt is recording to high resolution digital (24 bit, 192 Kh/s), sometimes to tape. Mr. Grundman comments that “it’s hard to bring that kind of consistency, it’s like being a performer”.

Mr. Grundman recalls that the reason why Contemporary albums have a generally consistently good sound is because of the simplicity of the system. The German and Austrian microphones in use (C12s, U47s etc) had really high output, so no extra gain was needed except the gain provided by the tape recorder after the passive mixing board. The passive mixing board in use at Contemporary was comprised of eight channels, and a panning switch for every channel.

Mr. Grudman’s own label, Straight Ahead, used a similar approach for their sessions. They used a passive mixing panel, with a very simple tube stage at the output.
“We stopped doing those sessions because we were losing money; if you take into consideration paying the musicians, the artwork, the set up costs for vinyl and so on, you can easily spend twenty or thirty thousand dollars; it’s hard to make that kind of money back. Plus, audiophiles are mostly interested in classics, in reissues, and it doesn't cost anything to do those, the music is there, the artwork is there”.

When engineering the sessions for Straight Ahead, Mr. Grundman and his colleagues recorded simultaneously to three mediums: analog tape, high resolution digital and DSD (the format used in Super Audio CDs). The tape machine in use was a Studer ATR 102, running at 30 ips. When comparing all of the diﬀerent medium, Mr. Grundman says that tape sounded “exactly what came oﬀ the microphones, while digital sounded a little artiﬁcial”. The tape copies for the audiophile market were made directly from the master tape, four at at time.

Mr. Grundman comments that “some audiophile labels use sub-masters (copies of the master tape); you have to be careful, because analog generations deteriorate quickly”. “However when people say that digital copies sound exactly the same, that’s not entirely true either, because if you do any kind of processing in the digital domain, and that could even mean turning the volume up or down a db, that changes everything”.

Mr. Grundman admits that “CDs, as a mainstream medium of distribution, can be quite good; you get the booklet, you have the physical object, you can achieve consistency of the audio quality, don’t need to wear gloves to handle them, and they can sound pretty good through a nice system”. “The limitations of Vinyl are pretty evident to me; tape is the best in terms of sound quality, but it’s too expensive; a reel of tape alone can go for a hundred dollars”.

The analog to digital converters in use at Mr. Grundman’s facility are from Lavry. “We rebuilt the power supply, though; we rebuild the power supplies for all of our gear”. “We have upgraded our Antelope Clock (the best clock out there, in my opinion), with a new power supply, and now it’s even better”. “We have tried JCF converters, which I think sound good, they have a tape quality to them (every piece of gear, is it a converter or a preamp, essentially acts as an equalizer)”. “It depends on what kind of material you’re working on. If the recording is messy, it’ll be better to go with a cleaner converter, like the Lavry; if the recording sounds simpler, less instruments etc, you might want to you something like the JCF”.

“Electronic theory is never quite perfect, because we don't live in a perfect world”.