The neuroscientist formerly known as Prince's audio engineer | Hacker News Reader

The neuroscientist formerly known as Prince's audio engineer

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99 pointssohkamyung21 comments

Love Susan Rogers, and the Prince albums she engineered or worked from are standout-brilliant, from Purple Rain to Sign O The Times, but good gracious me are they sonically pretty terrible. I didn't expect much from the 2020 Sign O The Times remaster, and wasn't disappointed: there's not much there to begin with. I mean, fine, it shows just how strong the music was, and you can argue that Prince was too busy to care about sound quality. Indeed he figured that the songs themselves would override those issues, and was correct. Whatever Susan did to help those sessions aside from recording the stuff, it was probably amazing.

But when you compare that album against the live rehearsals, a few weeks after recording was completed, you are left somewhat wanting.

Live Rehearsals #1: https://www.mixcloud.com/moontroll/prince-sign-o-the-times-r...

Susan Rogers has always been an interesting person to listen to, hopefully I'll get a chance to read her book.

Mixing decisions have to be understood in context.

The live rehearsal recording might sound warmer and more natural on a decent pair of headphones, but it'd sound like complete mush on AM radio. The very sparse, crisp mixes of the 80s can sound harsh and synthetic to a modern listener, but they sound superb on a cassette boombox.

Most pop mix engineers habitually toggle between a high quality monitoring system and a "grot box" speaker (often in mono) with good transient response but very limited frequency range. They understand that their job isn't to produce a mix that sounds good in the studio, but a compromise mix that sounds as good as possible across a wide range of low-fidelity playback systems.

Modern mixes tend to be more neutral because of the general improvement in playback fidelity. Still, a competent pop mix engineer is giving a great deal of thought to how well a mix will work in a noisy restaurant or through the built-in speakers on a TV. They're thinking about people listening in the car or listening through one earbud.

Sure, but the mix is not the recording, and it's the masters that are the bone of contention here.

And we have hundreds of contemporary albums that were all designed to be heard on all the same equipment, in 1987 alone we had Terence Trent D'Arby's debut, Pet Shop Boys' Actually, Fleetwood Mac's Tango in the Night, Whitney Houston's second album, Guns 'n Roses' Appetite for Destruction, U2's Joshua Tree, so I don't buy this argument that albums were mixed for these compromises all the time. All of those albums sound fantastic.

The fundamental recordings of those Prince albums seem to be sub-par, although that has not been helped by some of the mastering of original CDs or cassettes. I originally had it on tape, but then did buy the CD, years later bought a newer CD and then bought the Super Deluxe. No big differences!

Yamaha NS10s are still the go-to “shitty stereo system” monitors found in most studios. Bounces listened to in cars and on phones are a basic mixing practice these days as well.

> Love Susan Rogers, and the Prince albums she engineered or worked from are standout-brilliant, from Purple Rain to Sign O The Times, but good gracious me are they sonically pretty terrible.

Can you explain to a layperson like me what that means? Cause they sound like two opposing statements. Namely: the albums she engineered were brilliant but they were sonically terrible?

Well, several people in the thread have pointed out how subjective my original point was, so fair enough, but on this particular point, the brilliance is in the songwriting, arrangements and performance. They're amazing, even in their imperfections.

I mean, nobody really cares that Prince's drumming is all over the shop in The Cross, it doesn't matter, the performance is incredible.

But I think the recording is pretty flat and dull, and I've heard it at a Classic Album Sundays event on a high-end stereo and there wasn't anything that stereo could dig out that I hadn't already heard. And I then bought the remaster in 2020, same same. But in a way, maybe it just proves that album has always been perfect in every way and I should stop giving a shit about the recording.

Interesting. Thanks for explaining.

This is always an interesting point of discussion as well because 'sonically pretty terrible' is still somewhat subjective even from an audio engineering standpoint.

If the artist has got the sound they want, the producer has the sound they want (who was also Prince for these records) and the songs are incredibly successful and well loved, it's very difficult to argue that they're sonically terrible.

In fact, you could argue that any 'improvements' would be ultimately reductive overall. These are incredibly distinctive sounding records.

Yeah, fair point, it's subjective but here it's a case of different things being important to different people. The album - SOTT in this instance - sounds the way it does and I've been listening to it for 37 years and wouldn't want it any other way, but it still evokes a feeling of dissatisfaction compared to other recording unearthed from the same era amidst the evidence that Prince just didn't care enough because he was too desperate to get the music out, and that attitude never really changed much until he died. It just wasn't a priority, but then other engineers came along, I mean, just one album later, and just captured more of him and his work.

A lot of stuff he didn't really care about that much actually made a massive difference to his work - Laura LiPuma's artwork, graphics, visuals and designs were all hugely important to those albums - and when he went off on his own years later, those things fell off a cliff and the art was worse for it.

As brilliant as he was, there were a bunch of things he really wasn't great at and other people very much improved his output.

As for sonics, I feel that all those albums he made with Susan Rogers have a low ceiling for getting the most out of them - i.e. they don't sound any better on a £50K system than they do on a £100 system - and if that was an artistic goal, I'd give up arguing, but because he outsourced caring about that to others, it feels like we missed out a bit. But we will never know, and that's ok too.

> …Prince just didn't care enough because he was too desperate to get the music out, and that attitude never really changed much until he died.

As a huge early-/mid-career Prince fan, this is a surprising take. Prince was famous for his meticulous attention to detail and perfectionism in the recording studio. The lore is that "Purple Rain" (the song) went through 91 mixes before Prince was satisfied.

Susan Rogers on Prince:

"It’s really important. I think that’s a really important question. People have asked me, or they’ve prefaced questions by saying, “Prince was known to be a perfectionist.” I always have to correct them. He was not a perfectionist. He wouldn’t have had that output if he’s been a perfectionist. What he was was a virtuoso player and a genius with melody, a genius with rhythm, a genius at writing songs. It just poured out of him – he couldn’t wait on perfection. The important thing was to have the sound serve the ideas, not the other way around. Working quickly was fine with him and only a beginning engineer would have no bad habits to break. Only a beginner would be willing to go that fast."

Love that, thanks!

She's mentioned elsewhere about messing up and them leaving it in too - like the Forever In My Life vocal was an error I think, but how good does that sound!

I thought he was known for not being a perfectionist. Like he recorded so much unique music that is currently unreleased and literally sits in a vault.

I suppose this depends on how perfectionism is defined; where the barrier lies.

If a perfectionist is concerned only with perfection at release time, then lots of imperfect unreleased material can exist. Prince is likely an example of this case.

If, on the other hand, perfectionism is applied to every step of the artistic process, then I'd reckon that very few imperfect unreleased materials are likely to exist. Steely Dan are a good example of this case.

Couldn't agree more. You can't really speak about sonics in absolutist terms. Even so-called audiophiles can't agree on ideal sonics - is it a hyperclean recording with zero distortion and incredible dynamic range on CD, or is it the sound of tubes and tape on vinyl?

Somewhat is an understatement. I haven’t heard the rehearsals on the link (thanks) but i’ve heard a lot of live stuff (then and later) and it makes the recordings sound very thin and compressed. I think part of that was just The Times, so to speak; but it’s a minor travesty one of the best runs in pop music history (prince’s controversy to lovesexy) overlapped with those production trends.

It's the trade-off with Prince, as Susan Rogers explains in another comment I made, where he needed to get his ideas out first and foremost. There were a lot of stunning-sounding albums around at the time!

My impression has been that they were experimenting sonically, looking for new sounds. Sometimes the result seems flat and dull to our ears 37 years later, and sometimes absolute brilliance emerged (viz: The Ballad of Dorothy Parker). But the result was always something quite distinct from the sonic landscape of its time, and it had a huge impact on music production that followed. For example, it's hard to overstate the influence of the mid-80s Prince albums on the entire genre of New Jack Swing.

It was definitely a highly-experimental time, pulling old tapes and recordings in too, and the result was flat and dull to me on a high-end Walkman even at the time, because I had cut-glass quality recordings from folks like Quincy Jones to compare with. But it was an amazing album and would be even if it was recorded on a Sony Walkman. As for New Jack Swing, Jam and Lewis were from The Time, right?

Interview with Susan Rogers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Iv__walYL4

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