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The needle drops It seems that every significant musical artist has a few important recordings that have only been preserved on vinyl – The Beatles, Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, the list goes on and on. Unfortunately, in recent years, we’ve had to add ABBA to this list. Well, not ABBA as such (apart from the alternate mix of ‘Waterloo’) but tracks from the solo careers of Agnetha and Björn & Benny now only exist on records. In Agnetha’s case, the masters for a sizeable portion of her early work and one late A-side ‘It’s So Nice to Be Rich’ no longer exist. In Björn & Benny’s case, four bonus tracks issued on the new expanded edition of Lycka had to mastered from vinyl as no tapes could be found. It seems that Polar Music never kept its own copies of the tracks the duo sent to Germany and Japan – a trend that continued into the ABBA days when copies of the group’s two German tracks and both of the remixes of Ring, Ring weren’t retained in Sweden. Thankfully, the technology involved in transferring vinyl for use in reissues has improved greatly over the years. Compare, for instance, any of the Björn & Benny tracks with the single version of ‘Love Me Do’ found on the Beatles’ Past Masters Vol 1 collection. The noise reduction on ‘Love Me Do’, which was transferred from vinyl in 1982, is intrusive: John Lennon’s harmonica is often mangled by the processing used. The Beatles track was also transferred at too high a speed, as Beatles’ experts at audiophile website www.stevehoffman.tv revealed last month. In fact, the whole thing sounds precisely like what it is: a 20-year-old record hurriedly copied to analogue tape. By contrast, I’d venture that many people wouldn’t realise that some of the Björn & Benny tracks on the Lycka remaster were taken from vinyl unless they read the sleeve notes first. That said, the basic technique behind vinyl transfers, or needledrops as they are also known as, has always been the same. In fact, the same technique is used daily by people transferring their old record collections to their iPods or CDs. Basically, you get a turntable, you hook it up to a computer or mixing desk (with a tape recorder attached), you put the vinyl on, you adjust the levels and you record. The actual act of transferring is simple. The secret to a good-sounding transfer, however, is to use Mint records and to process the resulting transfer carefully, without using too much noise reduction, decrackling filters etc. The temptation to use huge amounts of noise reduction in particular to get a ‘perfect’ noiseless result has ruined many a vinyl transfer in the past. In fact, you can hear the results of excessive processing at the very start of ‘Hey, Musikant’, where Benny’s piano intro sounds like its been recorded underwater. Thankfully, the processing lessens as the song progresses. Getting Mint records can also prove problematic. Some songs would have sold poorly on release or were so popular that surviving copies would have been played to death. No amount of processing can get a non-Mint quality record to sound like a Mint one. Take ‘Was die Liebe sagt’ on the Lycka remaster for instance – you can clearly hear surface noise during the intro despite all the effort made to achieve a high-quality transfer. At least, however, Universal were able to find a decent copy of ‘Was die Liebe sagt’ even if it was imperfect. Elvis Presley’s ‘That’s All Right’ has been unable in its original Sun version for years due to the absence of a decent 78 to use as the basis for a vinyl transfer. When Elvis transferred from Sun to RCA, his master tapes went with him. Unfortunately, RCA never did a clean transfer of ‘That’s All Right’ before destroying the master in 1957. While there are tape copies made by RCA before 1957 in existence, they all feature additional processing and effects that would have been missing from the original. Hang on, maybe ABBA sound engineer Michael B Tretow has a Mint Sun copy under his bed…. Ken Griffin
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