- -From Tom Fine: "... the mastering operation at Fine Recording was a big
part of the business and encompassed a whole separate area of the building.
At peak time there were two stereo rooms and two mono rooms, and formats
ranging from 78PRM vinyl kiddie records to super-loud mono 45 singles to
stereo LPs were being cut. A lot of material recorded elsewhere was mastered
at Fine Recording, and a lot of private-release stuff like corporate-promo
records and network-distributed radio programs and ads were cut there, so
the cutting was sort of a stand-alone operation more than an adjunct to the
studio. In the mid-50's, Fine Sound was the largest independent LP cutting
operation in the country, doing work for just about every label except RCA,
Columbia, Capitol and Decca..."

Tom, didn't you say that Fine Recording was originally formed as a mastering
specialist before there was ever a Fine studio?

Something a lot of people today don't understand about mastering is that any
title that needed to support significant sales required a lot of masters.
Most mastering facilities ran 24-7 in multiple rooms with custom and
independent label work filling the time between big hits. One of the
reasons we at Motown prototyped masters for production to actually be cut by
RCA in Chicago was that we couldn't profitably run a large enough operation
in Detroit to cut the number of masters we needed in order to support a
hit. This was because we were virtually the only game in town. Universal
Recording in Chicago also ran a massive mastering operation that I'm told
did a great deal of work for Mercury.


Bob Olhsson Audio Mastery, Nashville TN
Mastering, Audio for Picture, Mix Evaluation and Quality Control
Over 40 years making people sound better than they ever imagined!
615.562.4346 http://www.bobolhsson.com http://audiomastery.com