Mahalo to my Celtic cousin Scott for the pointer to this piece on the recording process. It talks about the lost art of using dynamic range in recording and mixing. Here is a classic quote from Roger Nichols (Grammy Award-winning engineer for his work with Steely Dan), who I met in through a mutual former employer on Maui:
“Last month, I listened to all the CDs submitted to NARAS for consideration in the ‘Best Engineered Non-Classical’ Grammy category. We listened to about 3 to 4 cut from the 267 albums that were submitted. Every single CD was squashed to death with no dynamic range. The Finalizers and plug-ins were cranked to ‘eleven’ so that their CD would be the loudest. Not one attempted to take advantage of the dynamic range or cleanliness of digital recording.”
So who won the 2001 Grammy in this category? I don’t remember, but this passage describes how it was selected:
After listening to over 200 CDs, they couldn’t find a single CD worthy of a Grammy based on the criteria they were given… they wound up doing was selecting the CD that had the least amount of engineering. In reality, the winner didn’t win because of great engineering, he won simply because he had messed with the signal the least.
Amazing.
Update: This is interesting. I did a search, and found that the 2001 Grammy for Engineered Album, Non-Classical was Steely Dan’s “Two Against Nature”, which was co-engineered by Roger, Dave Russell and a few others, not just one person. So I’m not sure if the year they are referring to is wrong or there is something wrong with the story. The plot thickens.
Update #2: Mystery solved. The discussion mentioned above was in December 2001, so that means that the Grammy they are referring to was for the 2002 Awards. The 2002 Grammy for Engineered Album, Non-Classical was “Come Away with Me” by Norah Jones, engineered by Husky Huskolds, Arif Mardin, and Jay Newland. It makes sense that they wouldn’t be trying to bury the needles (or plugins) on that one.
