![[Pierre Sprey]](../jpg/mapleshade.jpg)
Record Label: Mapleshade Records
Reviewer: Arvind Kohli - TNT USA
Published: June, 2006
Second in my series of articles, on what I consider high-end record labels is Mapleshade Records. Foreshadowing a trend of similarities, Mapleshade Records like Water Lily Acoustics, is the fruit of one man's passion to record beautiful music to the highest degree of fidelity possible. That one man, in this case is Pierre Sprey, and this article is the result of my interviews with him.
Arvind Kohli >
Can you give us a little history on Mapleshade?
Pierre Sprey >
In the mid 70s to mid 80s I had a consulting practice (defense and environment-related stuff), but I was also a passionate amateur recordist. I had several close friends who were jazz musicians, including Shirley Horn. I would hang with them and sometimes record them live in neighborhood clubs in downtown DC. Soon, I began to get specific requests from these friends to record their gigs; that was the impetus to keep on honing my recording technique and equipment.
The pivotal event, perhaps, was one day in 1986 when Shirley Horn came by to try out my recently refurbished 1911 Steinway. She fell in love with the piano, started practicing on it, then looked up and said she wanted to record her next album on that piano and wanted me to be the engineer. We spent a couple of weekends using my dining room as a studio to record her album; I had so much fun I decided to start Mapleshade as a weekend recording studio. That album, by the way, was “Softly” and was released on the Audiophile label. The studio gradually took over my life, squeezing out my consulting business.
Arvind Kohli >
So, initially, you did not print and sell your own recordings?
Pierre Sprey >
Not at first. The thing that I really wanted to do was to record music rather than to package and market CDs. And initially that was the route I followed: I would record the music in partnership with musicians, and then sell the master tapes to a record label who handled the rest of the commercial process. Over time I found out that I really didn’t like dealing with the people in the business side of music, and thus was compelled to create my own music labels.
Mapleshade became a record label in 1990, focusing on jazz, gospel and blues. In 1994 we started the Wildchild! label to focus on traditional acoustic and roots music, including R&B, Appalachian, Irish, African and other world music. Finally we started the Mapleshade Classical label in 1997 to record interesting, non-warhorse classical music.
Arvind Kohli >
Tell us a bit about the gear and techniques you use?
Pierre Sprey >
My earliest experiences were building my own playback gear as a child, using kits. I started experimenting, as an amateur, with a purist high end approach (that is, a by ear only approach) to recording gear and techniques in the early 1980s. The learning has never stopped. I am still overwhelmed and humbled by how much better live music sounds--and as long as that happens I will continue to experiment and evolve how and what I do.
Because of my academic background in mathematics, I soon confirmed, empirically and theoretically, that the sine wave-based theories used by almost all electronics engineers and acousticians are hopelessly inapplicable to music waveforms. The sine wave-based measurements (frequency response, THD, IMD, group delay, etc.) proved to be of no help at all in distinguishing better sound from worse sound. So, ever since, I’ve done all of my experiments and all of my design work by ear. Measurements are simply a time-consuming impediment to progress in good sound.
Arvind Kohli >
If you use your ear as the judge, how do you keep the testing objective and not influenced by any biases/preferences within your mind?
Pierre Sprey >
All our design changes are repeatedly tested with at least one other person--usually my partner, Ron Bauman of inSound, who has very different aesthetic and sonic preferences. All participants in the test must unanimously agree before any change is made in gear or technique.
I believe it is also very important that the people that I rely on for such tests keep their ears “calibrated” by frequent listening to unamplified, live music up close in a smallish room setting. That is the sonic standard at Mapleshade, not the “absolute” sound‚ fallacy perpetuated by some.
Arvind Kohli >
What is the “absolute” sound fallacy and can we have your perspective on it?
Pierre Sprey >
The absolute sound standard holds up the sound in row M of a concert hall as the ideal, as the proper benchmark for reproduced sound. I disagree with that. I feel the sound in row M of most concert halls is seriously flawed. For instance, in row M you hear almost none of the amazing treble energy of the violins. Violins are extremely directional and their upward-beamed treble gets lost up in the much-too-high ceiling of most concert halls. (If you haven’t heard a fiddle from a few feet away facing the soundboard, or in a small, live-sounding room, you don’t know what a violin should sound like.) To really hear the knock-you-down power and gorgeous timbres of a full symphony orchestra, there’s nothing like being at the conductor’s position or a little higher. Row M is but a pale shadow. [I agree, unfortunately we cannot all sit there during a performance. But at least Pierre can place his mikes there-AK].
What the best setup will look like will vary greatly, depending on both the instruments and the room. But in general the mic needs to be placed close enough and at exactly the right spot relative to the instrument(s) to pickup the full beauty of timbre and detail, but far enough away to capture some resonant interaction with the room. For instance, with omni mics (I use nothing else for recording), listening to an acoustic guitar from about 2 feet away is roughly right in a small room, double that works in a good, clear-sounding concert hall.
Arvind Kohli >
Can you give us an idea of the commercial scope of Mapleshade today?
Pierre Sprey >
We have over one hundred titles in our catalog; these are available directly from us or from record stores like Borders or Barnes & Noble. We also sell online quite a bit of the radically purist audio gear we developed in the studio to set new sonic standards with our CDs: wires, vibration control mountings like footers, platforms, equipment and speaker stands, and some innovative treatments for CD discs. The gear brings in a good portion of our income; it definitely helps subsidize the music side of the business and allows us to record the great music that artists really want to play, without the usual commercial compromises.
Arvind Kohli >
Tell us a bit about the venues used in Mapleshade recordings?
Pierre Sprey >
About a quarter of the recordings were done in clubs or small concert halls. And about 75% of our recordings are done in our studio, which has always been in my home. Since the original Mapleshade, I have moved the studio twice, each time to another historic home that I chose for its sonic qualities. I’ve been in the present one for about a year and a half-it’s a satisfying acoustic improvement over the previous ones-particularly for small group jazz and traditional acoustic music, as well as chamber music.
The best acoustic space I have ever recorded in was probably Sanders Hall in Cambridge, the old Boston Symphony venue. The acoustics were so stunningly clear I was able to record a grand opera (“Ethan Frome,” probably my best ever CD sound) there - six singers and full orchestra with only TWO mikes. I never use commercial studio spaces. They generally have very poor acoustics, much too dead, for the way I record.
Arvind Kohli >
How would you define a good acoustic space? What were you looking for when you were shopping around for these houses?
Pierre Sprey >
I cannot describe a good acoustic space in geometric terms. I have heard concert halls with really promising shapes that sounded horrible and weirdly shaped rooms that sounded great. I have found no computer model or mathematical approach that has a prayer of predicting whether a space will sound good or not. As far as I can see, the current understanding of this topic is startlingly primitive; the computer modeling of acoustics is in an infant and ignorant state. Given that, the only reliable way to evaluate an acoustic space is to listen: hearing 30 seconds of actual voice or instrument in the space is all it takes. That’s exactly what I did to pick this studio/home and the previous one.
A crucial ingredient of the good sound of my last two studios has been a really solid planked floor suspended on heavy old beams. I always found solidly suspended wooden floors to sound great, far better than concrete or wood-on-concrete floors. Suspended wood floors are CRUCIAL for good bass. Concrete is always a bass killer for musical instruments AND for speakers and electronics. Ask any upright bass player; they hate concrete floors. [That is an interesting contradiction to the point-of-view held by many audiophiles on suspended wooden floors - AK]. Remember the highly-touted acoustic renovation of Carnegie Hall, designed by the most sophisticated of acoustic consultants and their computer models? While renovating, they filled the entire space under that great old wooden stage with concrete and totally wrecked the legendary bass warmth of the old Carnegie. Almost a decade later, after denying for years that anything was wrong, they finally restored the old glorious bass by spendig a few million dollars to jack-hammer out all the concrete. Another interesting clue: the famous early recordings on the Blue Note label were done in the living room of Rudy Van Gelder’s parent’s home, which also had suspended wooden floors.
Arvind Kohli >
Do you prefer recording “live” or “studio” sessions?
Pierre Sprey >
Without a doubt live sessions sound much better. My definition of live is that all the musicians are in one space, where they can see and hear each other and there is a modicum of an audience, it does not matter how big or how formal.
Opposing this is the now-standard commercial practice of acoustically isolating each instrument/musician and recording them on individual tracks. Each musician is also usually physically isolated form the rest and hears the sound of the rest of the band fed over a headphone.
There are three main reasons for live sessions being so much better:
The first is that the musicians see, hear and interact with each other-and with some kind of responsive, enthusiastic audience. This is absolutely critical to generate real, down-in-the-gut emotion and groove--or to foster truly spontaneous, heartfelt improvising [which in my books is the highest level of performance - AK]. It’s nearly impossible for a player to generate any of that when he’s sitting alone in an isolation booth, hearing his fellow players only on headphones - or even worse, hearing a previously-recorded canned track that he’s overdubbing.
Secondly, a typical studio session is acoustically horrible because you need a dead studio with ambience-killing acoustic barriers separating instruments in order to minimize any “leakage” between tracks. Making things even worse are instruments that are usually too closely miked. In lots of cases, such as with a drum kit, piano or bass, the poor instruments are even multi-miked. Picture this, individual mics hanging inches above each tom and each cymbal in a drum kit. You can probably imagine the mess the acoustic cross-talk and cancellation between all those mics would cause. But worse yet, is the fact that you do not hear the complete acoustic body of the instrument. For that, you need to sit several feet away so you hear not only the soundboard or drum skin, but also all of the resonances of the rest of the body of the instrument-and the echoes of all those resonances in the room. That is why it is so very important to have a good, clear-sounding venue, one whose echoes do not color or uddy the inherent beauty of an instrument.
Thirdly, overdubbed, multitrack studio sessions are electronically horrible because you have to use timbre-altering directional mikes; large and complex bad-sounding mixing consoles with hundreds of transparency-robbing op-amp amplification stages; hundreds of feet of signal-muddying mike cables; a studio AC power supply “poisoned” by dozens of digital devices and computers all feeding RFI hash into the AC line; a mix-down process that forces you to copy the original master a second time through the same bad-sounding console that corrupted the original master; then you have to band-aid the resulting witches’ brew with heavy EQ to honey-coat all the electronic harshness and distortion you’ve introduced along the way; and lastly, you have to kill some more natural timbre and transparency with a healthy dose of phony-sounding artificial reverb to make up for the acoustically dead studio you had to use in order to be able to overdub.[That process sounds more like making fastfood, rather thana gourmet meal - AK].
Arvind Kohli >
Can you tell us a bit about the typical setup for a Mapleshade recording.
Pierre Sprey >
For most of our recordings, which are small groups recorded in our studio, I use a set of battery-powered PZM mics mounted on a 2’ x 2’ wedge. The mics are semi-omni directional (i.e. they cover one hemisphere each), thus they have a pickup pattern similar to the human ear. The wedge provides a baffle between the two mics, much like a human head would.
The musicians are placed in roughly a semi-circular pattern around the mic array, and a lot of effort is put into getting each instrument at exactly the right distance and height relative to the mic. The placement of each varies according to the directional characteristics and loudness of each instrument. The instrument's directional characteristics are all too often ignored in setting up recordings and performances. I also pay a lot of attention to building the platforms on which any of the floor-mounted instruments need to rest (for example, bass, piano, drums, guitar amplifier). This ties in my focus on vibration control of the resonances of instruments; we use exactly the same techniques and mountings as in our vibration control devices for electronics and speakers. All of this instrument tuning and setup is, of course, judged by ear.
My aim here is to reproduce the exact, unaltered sound of a session where a live ensemble is playing for one listener who is seated in the ideal listening spot. Obviously, that means I have to record with the shortest and simplest signal path possible - without any form of signal manipulation at any stage in the process. That’s notably different than the most modern studio engineers think; they like to picture themselves as great painters (cosmeticians would be more accurate) improving on the colors and forms of their subjects.
Everything at Mapleshade is subject to challenge and change. But one of the few rigid rules at Mapleshade is the unlimited amount of time allowed for a recording. Musicians start and stop when they feel like it. They can take and retake until they’re completely satisfied. For example, the “Ras Mek Peace” album by Midnite took about four months to complete. That was a landmark album in the history of reggae; it was the first ever recorded without any EQ, mixing or overdubbing. The Midnite players immediately understood and loved that we were trying to record without cosmetics. Once they saw that the final CD would reproduce their instruments just like they sounded in the studio, they turned out to be even pickier than I am [Come now Pierre, is that really possible? - AK]. So it took them four months of changing and tweaking their electric bass, guitar and keyboard amplifiers to arrive at the sound they wanted on the CD. But it was well worth the wait because their groove is killing an the electric bass is the best I’ve ever recorded.
Arvind Kohli >
How would most commercial studios control the sound levels of an instrument?
Pierre Sprey >
Generally, instruments are close-miked--or for an even more unnatural sound, electronic pickups on the instrument are often plugged straight into the mixing board. Either way, the peak dynamics may exceed the digital buffer limit or the tape saturation limit. Life is much easier for the engineer if he uses an electronic compressor to automatically squash these peaks-rather than having to stay on top of every peak by riding manual level controls. In my books the only good compressor is a dead one; they all deaden the dynamic excitement in the music and they all harm transparency.
I sometimes do lose a take because an instrument plays louder on a transient than I had anticipated and saturates the tape. But that retake is a price worth paying, when you consider the musical and sonic degradation caused by compressors.
Arvind Kohli >
You have mentioned platforms a few times and also have some as a line of products for sale. Can you expand on your thoughts and experiences here?
Pierre Sprey >
My studio experiments showed that the vibrations created by signal current fluctuations WITHIN a playback or recording component have a major muddying and distorting effect on the final sound. Airborne and floor borne vibrations are, contrary to audio guru opinion, demonstrably inconsequential (except for subsonic frequencies affecting turntables on wobbly stands).
Isolation is exactly the WRONG concept in vibration control. Instead, draining out that internal vibrational energy through properly designed rigid footers into platforms of the right material makes as much difference as improving wires or source components. The factory standard rubber feet on most electronics are the worst possible mounting. They trap the vibrations inside the component instead of letting them drain. For conducting vibration out of a component into a sink, brass is by far better than any other metal or space age material-though shape and mass also counts heavily. For the sink (that is, the platform) that receives the vibrations, wood is much preferred over sand, lead, granite, marble, glass or any space age composite regardless of damping properties. The sound of different wood species varies tremendously, as all instrument makers know very well. My experiments show that, for receiving vibrations, air-dried maple is head and shoulders above all commonly available species (xactly what instrument makers have known for over 400 years).
Again, none of this is based on theory, but strictly on our listening tests.
Arvind Kohli >
Tell us about some of the other gear you use in the recording process.
Pierre Sprey >
Virtually every piece of gear and every technique has been heavily tweaked and modified over the years. One example is the Sony tape recorder we use. All the covers have been removed to reduce vibrations and the feet have been removed and the unit mounted on a wooden platform. The tape machine allowed you to switch between 15 ips and 7.5 ips; we only use the 15 ips setting, so I bypassed that circuit. The improvements were unexpectedly tremendous. Why? Because that circuit also attempted to equalize the levels between the settings, through the use of transistors. We bypass unnecessary circuits, connectors, switches (even power-on switches), LED and neon lights, remove metal covers, and of course, improve wiring and passive components on almost every piece of equipment we use.
The mic preamp array I use is battery powered and has six input channels and no controls of any kind other than volume for each mic input. That is the only means I allow myself for mixing. I also put in a lot of effort on keeping the rest of the recording chain equally short, from mic to tape. It’s probably the shortest in any studio anywhere. Compare that to almost any commercial studio; where you see the artists acoustically/physically isolated from each other, multi-miked instruments, all fed into a large console that feeds a multitude of signal processing components (or their digital plug-in equivalents) before it ever makes it to a recorder and a recording medium. How such a process with so many signal-degrading stages can be expected to result in a recording that comes anywhere near its artistic or sonic potential is a mystery to me.
Having talked about the recording chain, I will say that the analog-to-digital conversion and final mastering process is just as important. All that careful recording would be in vain if I did not take just as much care to preserve pristine sonic quality in converting to digital, loading sound files into computer memory, editing tracks and burning CD-R masters to send to our CD pressing plant. .
Arvind Kohli >
What is your perspective on formats such as CD, vinyl, SACD and DVD-Audio.
Pierre Sprey >
Listening to the most highly praised SACD and DVD-Audio recordings and gear hasn’t shown me anything that sounds notably better than a really carefully recorded CD, even though CD has plenty of inherent flaws of its own. Of the two, DVD-Audio seems to have more interesting possibilities since it is less intrinsically dependent on feedback. But the argument is moot since both formats are probably not going to survive.
If I had my way I would publish in vinyl, but the audiophile community does not buy enough new music on vinyl for me to even break even on such a venture. Yes, there are people making a profit in reissuing collectors’ classics on vinyl, but that’s not very interesting to me. I feel that vinyl is by far the best sounding medium, but it takes a lot of effort to do it right in recording, mastering and playback. If the necessary amount of care and effort are not applied at any point in the chain, the result can be quite disappointing. [I am learning that myself - AK].
Arvind Kohli >
Do you seek out specific artists, or do they seek you out?
Pierre Sprey >
Generally artists hear of our work through other musicians or fans of Mapleshade. Then I either go hear them live or set up a listening session here. We never tell artists what to record. I much prefer it if the artists come with a project they very passionately want to record.
Sometimes I encounter an artist or group performing somewhere and approach them. For example, I heard Tao Ruspoli play for a bit at a friend’s daughter’s wedding; he played a couple of solo flamenco pieces after the regular band was done. I’d been looking for flamenco exciting enough to record for half a dozen years and here’s a guy who plays a couple of tunes at a wedding and totally knocks me out. So I asked him whether he wanted to record. He was very surprised by the offer because, just like his gypsy teachers, he plays flamenco for the love of it and not to earn a living. [This is an amazing album indeed, review upcoming. - AK].
Arvind Kohli >
Can you tell us about playback gear? What is the best you have ever heard? What are the most important aspects of playback? What do you currently use? What would you love to own?
Pierre Sprey >
The most important piece of advice I can give to audiophiles is that they must have their ears regularly calibrated by listening to live, unamplified music, preferably up close in smallish rooms rather than in concert halls. Otherwise they are building systems to an artificial standard - colored by the failings of the recordings and electronics they get used to.
The other common error I see is seeking out components to compensate for the flaws of other components in the system, the so-called synergy-between-components approach. This is nothing more than using components as tone controls to band-aid flaws in other components. Instead, a better [and in the long run, cheaper- AK] approach would be to trace the flaws to their source and correct the flaws themselves. [ This is so true in other aspects of life too - AK].
All parts of the chain are equally important. I’ve heard $200,000 systems where poor choices in platforms, mounting, setup and wires resulted in sound that drove me out of the room. I’ve heard $1500 systems set up with some intelligent tweaks and a lot of sweat that sounded mesmerizing.
There are two main systems we use. One is for monitoring in the studio; it necessarily consists of gear that is fairly rugged because it does get knocked around a bit. The second is in our joint Mapleshade/inSound wire lab and is made up of finer and much more delicate stuff.
The studio monitoring system starts with a pair of Stax headphones. All monitoring during recording is done through these. For playback after recording, I have a vintage EL-84 Scott amp highly tweaked and modded (we also sell these), Omega Mikro wires made by us in partnership with inSound, and Gallo Reference 3 speakers. The speakers are being modded by us, and we plan on making them a production item available for sale. We have compared them to the tweaked Martin-Logan CLS that we used to monitor with; the Gallo’s sound better.
The all-out system in the Mapleshade/inSound wire lab consists of components that have been either designed, or heavily modified, by Ron Bauman and me--with particular attention to vibration control and a minimalist approach to the signal path. The CD transport and DAC are our radically minimalist, all-out assault on the state of the art; they are all-new designs using multiple, highly complex battery power supplies and are about two months from production. The turntable started as a Maplenoll air-bearing unit but has been tweaked with a new outboard motor and a purist, Bauman-designed synthesized AC power supply, not to mention a huge, massive maple base. The battery powered-phono stage and the amp, an ultra-radical 12 watt single-ended solid state amp with earthquake bass and stratospheric treble, are both designed and manufactured by inSound. The speakers are out-of-production Gallo Nucleus References, almost certainly the most extensively tweaked pair in the world; Anthony Gallo comes dwn regularly to hear them in comparison to his newest designs. Our stem-to-stern modded Gallo Reference 3’s should be ready for production in about 8 months.
His education and background in the sciences have largely been cast aside, rather he pursues attaining perfection in his craft more as an artist would. Here is a man who does not guard the knowledge he has gained through his painstaking effort over many years, he actually is only too glad to share it with us. He seems less concerned with the possibility that someone may steal his ideas for their benefit, but like a saintly professor he shares so others may learn. Much like Kavi Alexander of Water Lily Acoustics, Pierre is a thorough gentleman and it cannot be any surprise that the two of them are good friends and have nothing but the highest praise for each other. The level of professional respect and mutual admiration, I have seen between them, is only possible when individuals are so accomplished in their pursuits that there is no place for competition. After all collaboration and co-operation are the highest levels of human interaction, not competition, as is often believed.
Pierre has strong convictions on some controversial audio-related topics; such as wires, platforms and tweaks. I myself, am not sure if all of his practices necessarily yield a sonic improvement, but even as it is my nature and duty to be skeptical I have to admit that the proof is in the pudding. And indeed his recordings are as acoustically resolving as I have ever heard which leaves me very vulnerable to his suggestions. Who knows, I may even end up trying some of his methods for myself.
© Copyright 2006 Arvind Kohli - www.tnt-audio.com