Doug Sax一代录音巨匠走了

The great mastering engineer Doug Sax passed away on April 2 a few weeks short of his 79th birthday. It would not be an exaggeration to say that virtually everyone who has listened to recorded music has heard Sax’s work; the list of albums he’s mastered is staggering. For the past five decades Sax’s The Mastering Lab has been the first choice of everyone from chart-topping pop stars to audiophile-reissue labels. Consider that he mastered The Doors' first album in 1967 and Bob Dylan's 2015 releaseShadows in the Night.

But Doug Sax was much more than the world’s greatest mastering engineer; he is also the father of the modern direct-to-disc recording, and also of stereo direct-to-disc recording. Before the advent of magnetic tape, all recording was direct to disc (and mono). But two decades after the widespread adoption of tape in the late 1940s, Sax resurrected this lost art and built a record label, Sheffield Lab, around the technique. He recruited his high-school friend, Lincoln Mayorga, to be the musical half of Sheffield Lab. By bypassing tape, and recording a musical performance directly into the master lacquer in real-time, Sax thought he could make better-sounding records. Those Sheffield direct-to-disc LPs are now legendary for their sound quality. How many audio systems were sold during the 1970s and 1980s through a demonstration of Thelma Houston and Pressure Cooker? Or Harry James’ King James Version? Those records, and others in the Sheffield catalog, still stand today as stunning reminders of how great direct-to-disc can sound.

Doug Sax inadvertently played a pivotal role in my career. I was a recording engineering student in 1981 when I came across an article in Recording Engineer/Producer magazine detailing the creation of Sheffield Lab 17, Tower of Power Direct. I came from the professional audio world whose values are often not aligned with those of audiophiles. I read in amazement about the hand-made tube microphones with integral preamps that put out line level signals. About how all connectors in the signal path were removed and hardwired in place with silver solder. About how the entire recording/mastering chain was pure tube (including the amplifiers that drove the cutting heads), and how the engineer mixed the band on the fly while the cutting engineer captured that signal in the master lacquer as the band performed the entire LP side without interruption. For me, discovering these extraordinary recording techniques that were never taught in a college program fundamentally changed the way I viewed recording and reproducing music. It was like discovering a whole new world. As I learned more about Sheffield's techniques, and listened to the records, Doug Sax became my hero. He embodied an ethos in which no measures were deemed too extreme in the pursuit of musical realism.