Messing with Memory

Producer and engineer Phil Nicolo reflects on the rush to spiffy-up the audio of classic recordings

The press release makes it sound like the most natural thing in the world. Announcing newly updated and remastered versions of Tom Waits’s output from 1983 to 1993, Island Records emphasizes, celebrates really, the fact that the work was “personally overseen by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan.”

Waits joins other prolific legends of music – among them Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Steely Dan – who have been involved in the process of bringing older works, many originally cut in analog, into the streaming era, or the vinyl-reissue game. Often that means going all the way into the land of Dolby Atmos, where a conventional mix is reconfigured to send signals to 11 speakers.

Meet those Jetsons! There are overlapping assumptions operating here: That the artists know best how their old works should sound; that of course the latest technology will sharpen and improve the sonic images of the familiar 2-channel stereo versions; that the market for old music is such that “updating” the title for one delivery system (like streaming) is a win across all formats and platforms.

Running right alongside that are some unspoken potential pain points: In most cases the artists are older. They may not be hearing with the same discernment as they did when doing the original mixes. The temptation to correct errors or artifacts created by previous transfers may derail the goal of staying true to the decisions of the original. The new technology requires the ability to balance if not reconcile sonic approaches from different eras, made with different technology: That warmth from the original analog source can vanish in all the location mapping and digital wizardry required for Atmos.

Example: While the bulk of press attention around Joni Mitchell’s catalog campaign has focused on the meticulous chronological narrative provided by the demos and rarities of her excellent Archive series, the singer/songwriter has done corresponding updated audio versions of classic albums – recently, Court And Spark and three other titles released between 1972 and 76. These CDs sound slightly different from the first CD versions – they’re a touch more brittle, ever so distantly “digital” in their rendering. Still, in an interview with the UK’s Uncut magazine, Mitchell, now 78 and still recovering from a 2015 brain aneurysm, enthused “I can’t believe how good my voice sounds!”

Ah, but alas, not every detail on those titles is quite so crisp: The percussion heavy “The Jungle Line,” one of the highlights from The Hissing of Summer Lawns, has always suffered from a strangely blurry instrumental mix, possibly from an early approach to looping. The latest upgrade retains the blur, but because the other instruments and the vocals are intensely sharp, the mix feels more diffuse, less knit-together than it was on the initial release.

This doesn’t surprise Phil Nicolo, the Grammy-winning producer and recording engineer whose credits include The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and Urge Overkill’s Saturation, and who is currently working on updated versions of the Bon Jovi studio albums. In recent years Nicolo has built a vinyl pressing operation; through it, he’s learned the challenges of returning old source material to the culture in respectful ways. He argues that the technology is not a replacement for musical sensitivity.

“When this is done well, it can be just so cool – it draws your ear to things that might have been in the shadows of previous mixes. But then you get these ones like the Eagles and Joni Mitchell…and they show what a learning curve there is. As I’m listening I’m saying “You know what? I don’t want to go down to the pixel level.” In fact, these versions send Nicolo back to the original vinyl whenever possible, because, as he says, “This doesn’t automatically open up the sound – you have to work to [recapture] the tones and colors of the originals.”

That’s not a small thing: The enthusiasts who have purchased every iteration of Rain Dogs know each accordion wheeze and breathy Waits pause and creaky percussive crevice of the original. Those details – the sounds, how they’re balanced, where they’re placed – worm their way into memory. It can be startling when, as happens sometimes on these new Waits projects, those memories are jostled by some Atmos positioning or whatever else occurred in the transfer. It can register as a kind of unsettling betrayal.

It's unlikely that Waits and Brennan went to Atmos school before embarking on the reissue work – they’re artists, not techs. “Do you really think Tom Waits was the one pushing the fader?” Nicolo asks. “No – he was just making suggestions and responding “this sounds great.” Which means Waits was relying on the engineer to translate his notions. “That,” Nicolo says, “is called mixing as it’s been done since 1940.”

Nicolo says that default assumption that Atmos is better – along with the fact that labels now believe they’ll snag more streams with an Atmos mix – has created a problem for heritage artists. “You listen to modern records and they can sound like they were pressed on asphalt. They’re harsh and horrible sounding. These older artists want to be current, so they go along with it….not realizing that it can, in some cases, actually create a different product.”

“This whole Atmos thing reeks of Quad,” Nicolo continues, rattling off a long list of sonic “innovations” that, over time, became gimmicky – “surround sound” and 5.1 and all the rest. “11 speakers, with one above your head? In a movie theater, fine. Not in a music listening situation.”

Still, the labels are demanding Atmos versions for their legacy reissues. In preparing the upgrade for the first Bon Jovi album (which will be released on its 40^th anniversary, January 24), Nicolo said that he was forced to go to the multi-track masters, create stems of each track, and suggest to the engineers doing the Atmos mix they’d need to rebalance each instrument – and to do that, they need to refer back to the mix on the original release. This is a massive extra step that not every artist or label will undertake.

Should they bother? When industry people ask Nicolo about it, he treads gingerly. “I tell people it’s OK to do it. To see what happens. Just don’t let anyone else hear it. People who do this for a living can “unhear” it. But the consumer doesn’t understand that concept.”