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POSITIVE FEEDBACK:

the audio analyst — Pierre Sprey and Mapleshade Productions: The Artist and the Artistry

Part 1: The Impression

Part 2: The Interview

by Greg Weaver

Background To A Journey
My first exposure to Mapleshade products came while I was with the previously mentioned high end audio store in central Pennsylvania in early 1993. One of the first discs I auditioned from this label was a thing called Jazznost. It was the first collaboration of a fine Soviet Union horn section and an outstanding American rhythm section led by pianist Walter Davis, Jr., and was recorded by Pierre Sprey and Mapleshade in May of 1989.

I was overwhelmed by both the truly spontaneous feel of the performance and the sense of ease of the recording. One cut in particular, Water Lily, starts off with a saxophone solo which floats in space and whose every note excites the strings of the grand piano which is near by. It is a very haunting recording, and represents, to this listener anyway, some of the best of what the digital recording format has to offer.

I had contacted Pierre near the end of last year and made known my desire to learn more about both him and his label. He was very receptive and sent me the press kit I had requested. I mentioned during our initial conversation that I had not kept up with his catalog since about 1994. To my surprise and considerable enjoyment, a box arrived on my door step with not only the press kit — but six recent releases!

I was again off on an exploration. These new discs contained a wide range of music: from re-workings of standards by both fine newcomers and old hands, to some very unusual performances by some unexpected combos. The music was exhilarating and the recordings themselves were unbelievably realistic and approachable. The nuances and subtleties of the performance were transited, along with the emotion and "vibe". I had only experienced this level of involvement from my beloved vinyl, and then only with some very precious recordings.

Of the six discs I received, Norris Turney's Big Sweet N' Blue, Sweetman's Austin Backalley Blue, Hamiet Bluiett's Bluiett's Barbeque Band, Drink Small's Electric Blues Doctor Live!, Ben Andrews and the Blue Rider Trio's Preachin' The Blues and A la Carte Brass & Percussion's Boogeyin'!, all but one, in my opinion, are absolute must-haves, even if you're not the biggest blues fan in the world! The last one I mentioned, from A la Carte Brass & Percussion, although truly well recorded, just doesn't get it for me musically (It may for you, so give it an audition. Don't pass on it just because it doesn't whet my tastes).

But the others, in particular the Norris Turney, the Hamiet Bluiett and the Sweetman, are both sonic and musical nirvana. I have never heard saxophones sound this real, both in terms of timbre and their signature "bite"! Cymbals are captured even more pristinely than in Pierre's earlier work, allowing you to pick up such subtleties as circular motions applied with brushes! This newer set of recordings offers even more of the "thereness", the original acoustic of the environment, than the earlier offerings had revealed. Wow!

And, can you say "jazz legends"? Norris Turney played with Duke Ellington, Ray Charles and John Coltrane, to drop just a few names. The Ellington gig started out as a two week stint for an ailing Johnny Hodges, and turned into a four year, eight album career. Playing with Norris on the album is Jimmy Cobb, the drummer for all the way-cool Miles Davis sets like Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain. Pierre has the enviable job of recording some of the greatest names ever associated with blues and jazz.

This was like the first time I had driven a Porsche 911! Sheer unbridled exhilaration!

In case you are unfamiliar with Mapleshade's work, their watchwords, which are printed on just about every one of the new releases are "Music without compromise."

This is best embodied by the tee shirts which Pierre had made up which emphatically states "NO mixing board, NO filtering, NO compression, NO equalization, NO reverb, NO noise reduction, NO multi-tracking and NO overdubbing. Nothing but the excitement of Live Music". The liner notes also boast "Mastered live to two track analog tape at 15 ips, 18-42,000 Hz (+/-3 db). Digitized on a custom A/D converter at 5,645 K samples per second. Minimum-length cabling. Omega Mikro interconnects; microphone cables by Audioquest and Mapleshade." Minimalism survives — no make that "thrives!" — in Pierre's work.

I simply had to make a visit and find out what made Mapleshade so unique. But how? I couldn't just call and say I was a big fan. That wouldn't get me in the door. I had to have a real plan.

I thought about it a while, and then the obviousness of the situation hit me! I could get my Editor to assign a piece on the Mapleshade label for Positive Feedback. Yeah, that's the ticket! E-mail was sent, facsimilies transmitted and phone calls made. It only took a couple of days and it was all arranged. I love it when a plan comes together!

On The Road Again...
The day chosen for the first of my several visits came on a glorious day in early February with the sun shining and the temperature in the high 50's. The trip itself was relaxing and calming, with Mapleshade recordings in the Clarion in-dash player the entire way! Research, you know? It took just slightly over an hour to make the journey as it is barely sixty miles from my home in southern Maryland.

I found the entrance to the driveway with no difficulty at all and marveled at how many times I had passed by with no clue as to what lay so near. The house and its grounds are about three tenths of a mile off Route 301, known locally as Crain Highway, just south east of Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Pierre had said the dirt road in was rutted and eroded. He wasn't kidding! It was dotted with deep, wide puddles and the foliage grew quite close to the passage way itself. You would not be likely to travel down this path without purpose. It certainly served to keep unwanted and uninvited visitors from driving down the road simply to see what was at its end! And I'm sure that the UPS driver, who stops every day to pick up outgoing packages, LOVES this stop.

The Mansion itself is a large, white pillared, two story home with an enormous brick stairway leading up to the main entrance. Looking as if it could stand a coat of paint, it was quite stately nonetheless. I knocked, but somehow sensed that I should just go on in.

Once inside, I was met by Rick Hallock, Mapleshade's Director of Marketing. This entry hall is quite large with ten foot high ceilings and though it leads both into the rest of the house and also up a staircase to the upper floors, is part of the studio area itself. Off to the left, through a big sliding double door portal, was another larger room. Obviously the largest of the downstairs rooms, it comprises the rest of the studio and sports acoustic foam attached to the walls and corners to tame reflections. In the middle of this larger room was a glorious old grand piano, a fully restored Steinway Model O. I could also make out some wooden reflector panels, an array of PZM microphones and Fender and Ampeg amplifiers.

I moved through the entry hall and into the living room where Pierre met me with a warm smile and a friendly handshake. In this living room at the time were several other day people to Mapleshade and the days recording. First was Larry Willis, Mapleshade's Music Director.

Larry has a very rich and expansive history, having played piano or keyboards on over 300 albums and having worked with some of the greatest names in the business! He has played with Cannonball and Nat Adderley, Stan Getz, the Blues Brothers, Jackie McLean, Dizzy Gillespie, Clifford Jordan, Miles Davis, Carmen McRae and Blood, Sweat and Tears, again, to drop just a few names. He is a 1992 and 1995 Grammy nominee, has been featured on many Mapleshade productions and is a remarkable man, as shall be seen.

Next, I met the artist who would be making his first recording here, or anywhere else for that matter, Mark Silent Bear. Mark would be joined later in the day by the percussionist for this work, Kahlil Bell. It seems that Larry had heard the two of them in a club in New York and was impressed enough to ask them to record a session here at Mapleshade, with Larry as producer.

The living room also holds the house playback system. A pair of modified (like everything of Pierre's, as you will soon learn) Martin Logan CLS II's, with a leaf tweeter bolted to the top front center of the frame, were parked along side two seven and a half foot tall cylindrical subwoofer columns from Rohrer. There was a large black amplifier off to the side by the fireplace with only the words "the magic" stenciled in white on the front.

In the connecting doorway itself resides a small white table. Upon that table are Pierre's own hand built microphone pre-amps (remember, he doesn't use a mixer), which like nearly everything else in the chain is battery powered, and whose outputs feed directly into the Sony 10" reel tape deck. They are the meat of a nice vibration/resonance control sandwich. A lead brick resting on three tip toes provides the base for the pre-amp, with another three tip toes toped by another lead brick poised on top of the pre-amp.

Just to the right of that, now actually in the living room and out of the studio doorway, rests the Sony TC-880 open reel deck. That's right, 15 inch per second analog tape! Pierre is quick to mention that very little of it is still stock. Lots of rewiring and component changes have been made. He points to the changed tape path and notes that the cover has been removed to avoid unwanted resonance. He pointed out numerous slivers of lead which have been jammed into every little crevice and opening in the head block, as well as throughout the rest of the case and mechanisms, to assure no unwanted resonance. The unit, now more properly damped, weighs over 120 pounds!

And he still isn't done tweaking this deck! He plans to remove all but the final vestige of A/C. Except for the motors which drive the tape take-up spool and capstan, the entire audio circuit will soon be de-coupled from A/C and fully D/C powered.

Pierre used to lug his creation with him to New York when he did his mastering with Bob Katz at Digital Domain. He simply could not find anything there which sounded anywhere nearly as pleasing as his modified unit. He now produces his masters with a little studio in Fairfax, Virginia since Bob has moved his mastering plant to Florida.

"I have to work with small studios. The big ones won't shut anything off"! He is of course referring to things like large appliances and computers which spike, surge and generally grunge up the electricity supply during recording, mastering and playback. I myself have a switch on my refrigerator and shut off my furnace/air conditioning for similar reasons when critically listening or reviewing. Pierre continued, "The man and his wife think I'm a nutcase, but it's good for their reputation (having Mapleshade master there), so they tolerate it." He did mention they got pretty irate the first few times because they forgot to turn the refrigerator back on. But I assured him they should have only made that mistake once — just like me!

Pierre then took me back into the studio area. Mark was getting ready to try one of the Fender guitar amps that Pierre had modified. No, the tweaking doesn't stop with the recording equipment, but carries over to the instruments and all other electronics.

The Fender Pro Reverb guitar amplifier Mark is playing through catches my ear. Wow! This thing sounds great. Lush and warm but not muddled or loose at all. Pierre smiles as he catches my reaction. "You like that? We've replaced the two 12' drivers and added our Mapleshade/InSound planar speaker cables. Then we spent a tremendous amount of time tuning it. We spent hours with it, tuning and tuning. We first thought we would just by-pass all the capacitors, you know? But it got that real "hi-fi" sound, not very instrumental. So we went back and listened at each change. It was tedious hard work." Yeah, but was it ever worth it. What a magnificent sound!

I asked about his Pressure Zone Microphone's, or PZM's. There was one real cool looking stereo rig over in front of the piano. He said that he had made some real serious changes to the standard Crown mikes. He has pitched all the Crown drive electronics and replaced them with battery driven versions of his own development. Then to top it off, the units are mounted on four lead feet to their plexi panels.

Cabling throughout the studio is all of his and Ron Bauman's creation and assembly. Some of his cables are only a few ten thousandth of an inch in diameter! Most of his cables are insulated by extremely thin polypropylene sleeves, but he also uses active cables as well. Cables with batteries to bias the shields to reject RF and EMI. As a matter of fact, the coat and hat tree standing in the entry hall holds silent testament to some of his cable designs. Numerous unused cables, mostly consisting of the very flat variety, hang loosely over the rungs. His minimalism runs to his cabling length as well. Not one of his mike feeds is over 15 feet long!

"I could have built a sound booth right here," as he gestures to where his current pre amps and deck reside. "But, then I would have to use long cables to go up and over the walls and down into the booth. I couldn't take the phones off for a live reference to the master either, I'd have to use some kind of monitoring system. No, this is much better!"

What a concept! It truly is unique and at the same time admirable. I was able to sit with him as he worked during some of the session, and he is absolutely right. Why would you use any electro-mechanical reference system when you had the music just a few feet away? Why would you dilute the process with any more wire length than you actually needed?

About this time, Mark encountered a problem with the pedals on the phase shifter he was planning on using with his guitar for one of tonight's tracks. His feet were simply too big! No problem, Pierre stepped outside and cut some pieces of wood and attached them to the pedals with double sided tape so they spread out wider due to their increased length. "How's that Mark?"

"Great, man" was his reply.

Mark and Kahlil disappeared into the kitchen with Larry. I was told they were going to work on some arrangements for the bassist and backing vocalists. I wandered in, trying to be unobtrusive, but anxious to see how this worked. Larry was telling basket-ball stories and demonstrating wildly in the small space. Both of the young musicians were laughing with him and seemed quite taken with him.

Larry is an honors graduate from the Manhattan School of Music who can compose and transcribe music upon hearing it only once. Pierre told me later that his role as a sensitive producer and arranger for many of the young talents who record here is one of the things which have gained him such tremendous respect. He offers quiet encouragement and is seemingly selfless with young artists. He was quite a catalyst throughout my experiences that afternoon and evening. After a short time, they moved back to the studio to try some of the arrangements and get a feel for each other. Larry has, after all, never played with them before, and they want to work together a bit before the session.

Just after they had exited the kitchen, Pierre walked in. "Are you hungry?" was his question to me. Yes, as a matter of fact, I could eat, if it wouldn't be any trouble. He assured me he had prepared LOTS of food for the days events, and that it would be no trouble at all. As he prepared a plate of spiced chicken, Basmati rice and spinach with lemon for me, I asked why he had a little cheesy Sony boom box in his kitchen.

He recounted a tale about going to a big chain store to pick out something for this room and listening to all the boxes available up to $600. He settled on this one for $109. He found out, as most of us who have been in the consumer electronics industry already know, that primarily all he got as he moved up in price were features and gizmos that usually degrade the sound quality. He even suggested that in the near field this thing sounded quite good. After having positioned myself accordingly I can tell you he was right!

As I started on my meal, he excused himself to take care of any one of a hundred things he needed to prepare before tonight's recording. I enjoyed my meal quietly, with no one else in the kitchen. Tasty!

After my meal, I headed back into the studio to find Larry at the piano and Mark and Kahlil starting to run through some of the songs on tonight's agenda. Pierre now had a sparkle about him and was busily positioning mikes and taping wires up here and there. To walls, to mike booms, even propping them up on wood blocks, all presumably to keep them off of the floor. Air is the best dielectric!

The bassist for tonight's session, Steve Novosel, arrives with his enormous upright bass. Steve has played on a number of Mapleshade projects and is well known in the jazz scene around the DC area. He teaches privately and has worked with jazz masters like Roland Kirk and Al Gray. For him, our studio Maestro has constructed a special rostrum.

This Bass platform is fashioned from a 5 foot square piece of plywood which rests on tip toes. It curiously has a small v made from thin strips of plywood and attached to its top near the front right corner. The purpose of this v is to keep the point of the double bass at just the correct spot for the resonant quality of the bass and the platform itself!

During this time, Larry has transcribed some of the music for Steve. As Steve and Mark have also never worked together before, Steve wants to see what they are doing. Kahlil suggested that they just go through the work several times, as Mark's work is a bit difficult for an accompanist because of his unusual use of time and tempo changes, many of which are improvised. All the while they are exchanging ideas and phrases laden with words like space, color, flavor, nakedness, timber. After every exchange, the interaction becomes more whole. After a few runs Kahlil says they should stop, they need to preserve some of their spontaneity. They don't want to overwork the piece.

They begin to rehearse another piece they will try to record that night now that the backing vocalists, Nizam Smith and Ester Williams, have arrived. Ester has formed a vocal group called "Metafour" which highlights, you guessed it, four voices and both have done sessions here before. They work with Mark on the subtleties for a tune called "Seven Arrows." For about an hour, they work back and forth, first with Mark explaining and demonstrating what he has in mind and eventually evolving to Nizam and Ester contributing their own suggestions, much to Marks approval.

Someone has taped a sign to the outside of the front door which simply reads, "RECORDING IN PROGRESS, DO NOT DISTURB." It is now 8:00 p.m. and they feel they have the right energy to cut "Seven Arrows." I positioned myself in a chair just about three feet to Mark's left, and in front of the main door to the Mansion. They experience a host of false starts, followed by lots of discussion as they try to decide just where the vocals should come in. Perhaps more importantly, they question what happened to the vibe they all had just minutes ago during the rehearsals. Kahlil finally identifies it as something in Marks timing and they are ready to try again. Mark makes his adjustments and they roll tape.

Although everyone is apparently okay with this first take, they decide to do a second one while they are all still in the groove. Looking to Pierre, he fires up the Sony, points into the room (remember, he is sitting about three feet behind Kahlil at his recording position) and says once again, "It's all yours."

This second take gels. Everyone is smiling when they finish because they all felt it. Pierre lightly slaps Kahlil on the back and says, "You played your ass off on that one!"

It is 8:55 and everyone takes a break to listen to the second take on Pierre's Stax headphones. The switch over to use the living room system is too time consuming when they are trying to record. But the consensus is unanimous, take two is the one they will release.

By 9:30 everyone is back at their places for the next song, When the Clown Begins to Sing. This one is a little harder to get going. There is both a timing problem and a noise problem as Steve has to get rid of his bow after the comparatively quiet opening of the track in preparation to go back to finger work.

The first take, the bow lands on the floor with a very resounding crack. Over the next three or four takes, Steve is more quiet, but the extra time he spends to keep the bow from making any noise holds up his timing. Finally Pierre says he will get a table and a towel.

With one problem solved, the tune wasn't ready to be immortalized just yet. More false starts as the entrance of Marks vocals don't coincide with the rest of the ensemble. They finally agree to have Larry do a silent count, so it won't be heard on the tape, so everyone has the right cue and can start in time. It works! This first take, though, is a little tentative.

Pierre suggests to Kahlil that he should strike his congas just a little more softly for two reasons. Firstly, so they don't overload the mike, thereby allowing him to capture more of their unique skin sound. Secondly, this will allow him to turn up the gain to record all the percussion a little hotter and get more of it's signature on tape. Kahlil agrees this makes sense.

The second take is better, but nearly to the man the musicians are all shaking their heads. They start it a third time and this one is very different! Kahlil has picked up his percussion work, sounding much more lively than during the first two attempts. His new found energy is infectious to the entire ensemble and the energy level in this third cut soars. I can't keep my feet still during this third take. Everybody in the living room behind Pierre is smiling. Pierre looks at me and gives me a wink and just the briefest of thumbs up indicating that he too knows they have nailed this tune. I know we have a keeper.

Now 10:35, this break is for more than just a playback. Nizam and Ester have to call it a night. They will be back tomorrow evening for work on several other cuts. They both take time to hear the playback and both are smiling. The rest of the musicians, especially Mark, makes a bee line for the kitchen. They are hungry! So a long time out ensues while our troop eats and generally refreshes themselves.

During this break there is lots of community and interaction among all present. Myrrh (she has a last name but doesn't care to use it), who handles Mapleshade's radio promotions, has arrived and is chatting with Steve's girlfriend. Pierre is busy fixing plates of food, pouring wine and just generally making sure everyone is accommodated. Conversation is the mode of the moment. This is a very relaxed and social time for the entire household, with many of the guests, due to the lateness of the hour, offering their good byes to everyone as they slowly head toward the door.

Finally, with Kahlil finished eating and grumbling that everybody is just sitting around picking at food and not doing anything productive, they agree to get back to the task at hand.

It is now shortly after midnight, and with everyone gone but Larry, Pierre, Mark, Kahlil and myself, the lights are turned out in the studio area. Only a few lights in the living room are left on. Mark had told me just before he had taken his position back in the studio that this piece was going to be something more traditional, more spiritual. Hum, what could that mean?

Mark began to burn some sage and got out an instrument made specifically for him which he had been showing off proudly when I first arrived. It was a ceremonial drum, made from a light colored octagonal wooden frame about a foot across and four or five inches deep, covered with a stretched elk skin. It was decorated in native American fashion and had a very unique timbre.

This third work was entirely improvisational. Mark began chanting while tolling his drum. Kahlil accompanied with all his percussion instruments from both side tables and the floor. This was an unusual piece, more of a native American ceremony or rite than a song.

The synergy between the two musicians was astounding! Mark's chanting took on an eerie air, all the while pounding his drum to differing rhythms and at different intensities. His voice alternately soared and plummeted again, taking on an almost magical, lyrical quality. Kahlil seemed to feed off of this energy and complimented it with his own driving rhythm, offering reinforcing feedback which in turn drove Mark even further into his trance-like performance. Wow, this was something special! This went on for about 15 minutes. It was almost as if we were witnessing some religious ceremony or shamanistic ritual. No one moved; we were all seemingly hypnotized by this mystical and profound performance. When the two had obviously reached a conclusion and the chanting and drumming had ceased, Pierre just shut off the deck and turned to me with this incredulous look on his face.

One thing was obvious. We were all moved by the effort. Larry was the first to speak and he was only able to manage that, without a doubt, the "vibe" was definitely there. Mark asked Pierre how long it had run. When he found out, he almost apologetically suggested that perhaps the piece could be edited down. Both Pierre and Larry were quick to insist that this piece was untouchable, they didn't care how long it had run! No, it should stand exactly as recorded!

It was not a tad after 1:00 a.m. I had been there over twelve hours and still had a road trip ahead of me. I was emotionally wrung out from the days performance and physically burnt out from the sheer length of my day. I wanted to stay because I knew the session wasn't anywhere near over, and that likely, the best was still to come. But prudence and weariness took command. I thanked Pierre and Larry for their unbelievable hospitality, Mark and Kahlil for a unique and exhilarating experience, and then excused myself into the night air. What a day!

On the drive home, several things began to congeal as I looked back over the day's visit. The most obvious of which was that of Pierre's part in all this. He appears to be more of a nurturing parent, providing support, encouragement and a comfortable set of circumstance for the artists, rather than "just" a recording engineer employed to simply capture whatever comes out during the session. His part in developing the mood and participating in the process took a front seat to just getting the master. He was constantly taking time to make sure that everything the artists needed or wanted was accommodated. I honestly cannot recall him saying no to any request the entire day.

The other significant attribute which surfaced, that of the prevailing air of casualness, of no pressing time table or deadlines, of no urgency to be "on" right now, was obviously most conducive to the flow of creativity and the high level of interaction I had witnessed among the artists. The natural talent of creativity just flowed when it was ready; it wasn't cramped, constrained or fettered by a time table and the need to "produce" on demand.

These would appear to be the major contributing factors to what I had described earlier as the ability these recordings have to present a sense of accessibility and ease. The artists were obviously under no pressure to get something on tape, so they were able to wait until it just felt right, and to then cut some very special music. And it comes across in Spades on the recordings!

It is my belief that in the not too distant future, based upon both their consistent superior sonic qualities and the remarkable caliber of the musicians and subsequent musical performances, the body of work recorded by Pierre at Mapleshade will be looked upon as the embodiment of contemporary recorded blues and jazz. In essence, Mapleshade is an evolving body of reference recordings.

When I asked for this feature, I told my wizened editor that my goal was to be able to ascertain just what made Mapleshade recordings so unique. I believe I can sum up that quality in one word. PASSION.

There is a passion at Mapleshade, from it's founder all the way on down the line, to record real, vibrant, human music. A hunger to capture all of the emotion present during that event. A desire to not dilute that wondrous sound and emotion by utilizing only the most articulate equipment and ancillaries that can be had, fabricated or modified as the case may be; and to that end, incorporating the fewest of those components absolutely necessary to capture and present wonderful music from splendid artists which regular labels would not release in the first place, and if they should, would only do so given the right to contaminate the work with all their "wisdom" to the point of unrecognizability. Pierre records music for one reason, and one reason only! A deep love of music and a driving desire to communicate its emotion with any who care to listen!

Part 2: The Interview

I hope that my editing of the hours of tape conveys the essence of what Pierre and I talked about. Be prepared for some unorthodox yet refreshing views and ideas about recording techniques, microphones, cabling and the music business!

Greg: Obviously, a good place to start would be at the beginning. Tell us a little about yourself, schooling, the Pentagon background, a basic run down.

Pierre: I was born in Niece, France and came here when I was three years old and grew up in Q Gardens, New York. I was always basically interested in science and engineering. I grew up in an atmosphere of music. My father was a trained classical violinist, although he didn't make his living as a violinist. I was surrounded by classical music at a pretty early age.

I went to one of those New York City high schools for gifted kids, Forrest Hill's high, and always did a lot of science, biology and physics. I went to Yale on a five year program doing a major in French literature and mechanical engineering oriented to aeronautical engineering, which is basically what I wanted to do. I wanted to become an airplane designer.

I worked summers at Grumman Aircraft from the time I started college and continued to work for them all the way through graduate school as a consultant and as a summer student. By my last year at Grumman, I'd decided I didn't want to become an airplane designer because the road to getting there was too long.

At the same time, I fell under the influence of a bunch of mathematicians there. I became really fascinated with probability and statistics. So I went to Cornell for my graduate work and took probability and statistics and operations research.

When I got out of graduate school I moved to New York City, to the heart of the lower east side ghetto. I got an apartment, fixed it up pretty nicely and commuted against the traffic, so to speak, out to Grumman Aircraft every day. I became very deeply involved with the life of my block. I started a reading center with the only other white guy on my block for kids from 7 to 11. I also got more deeply involved in music.

Mind you, all through high school and beyond I had friends who were jazz musicians. But as it turned out, the block I lived on, 3rd Street between Avenue C and D, was one block over from a place which was just becoming legendary in the history of jazz, a place called "Slugs", which is where free jazz was basically born in New York City.

I got more and more deeply involved with jazz in New York because I was within walking distance of "Slugs" and also "The Five Spot." I became friendly with more jazz musicians in the city. After about four years on the lower east side, I moved down to Washington to work for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamera and became one of the "Whiz Kids" working on analyzing the effectiveness of military weapons systems and trying to save the taxpayer from taking too bad a bath on the budget.

Greg: I've only heard stories.

Pierre: I stayed on at the Pentagon as an official there from 1966 to 1971 then left to work on pretty much the same project as a consultant.

Greg: During the time you were in the lower east side, involved with all the jazz, were you doing any recording or were you mostly just listening and enjoying?

Pierre: I was just enjoying it. I built my own amplifiers, just putting together kits and things. I had kind of designed a speaker and built it. Oddly enough, at that point already, I'd gone to lead lining the speaker cabinet. I'm the largest user of lead in the high end now! (lots of laughter from both of us)

I'm not sure I understood all the real reasons why I should be using lead back then, but it was heavy as a coffin. I fiddled with and rebuilt the suspension, stuff like that. I'm not sure it was very good sounding! (lots more laughter)

Greg: I'm sure it was a lot of fun. And you probably learned a lot, too.

Pierre: Oh yeah. For a long time, I was a monophile. You know, long after stereo arrived I didn't see it, I just didn't see it. There were a lot of things that sounded better to me about mono.

Greg: Quite a few people still cherish the tonal characteristics and timber that is available from some of the old mono's even the classic rock releases from the late sixties.

Pierre: Yes, but I wasn't an audiophile at all through those years. I was a record collector and certainly into music, so I started to do a little recording with battery powered recorders.

Greg: This was in 1966?

Pierre: Yes. But it wasn't until I came to Washington that I really started to get more deeply into recording. By 1970 or so, I was fairly interested. Not in a high end way, but because I liked the music and was hanging out in a network of neighborhood black clubs in Washington. They're very warm and hospitable places, and there is a whole social scene that is great for musicians because it is much more open than in New York. People can just sit in. In a sense, because of that open atmosphere, they didn't mind my recording.

At first it was just purely to be there and record the event, but all this started to come together in the early eighties. A number of things happened at once that really steered me towards high end.

One of the journalists I was hanging out with at that time who became a very good friend was Fred Kaplan. At that time he was just finishing his PhD. thesis which was based on a certain aspect of nuclear weapons. I was helping him with certain statistical material that had to do with accuracy of those weapons.

Greg: So this was well before his days at The Absolute Sound. What was he like in those days?

Pierre: He was really hard over, very knowledgeable jazz enthusiast. We traded a lot of jazz lore and collected records together and started listening together. And he was very rapidly heading towards the high end at that time. I wasn't. I was very resistant to all that.

Greg: What changed all that?

Pierre: Well, at the same time one of my fighter pilot friends named Bob Dilger, who was a brilliant production engineer and fighter pilot, acquired a turntable company.

He had been doing some consulting in defense. One of the company's he had been working for went bankrupt, and, in way of paying him for his work, they gave him this teeny branch company which was building a pioneering air bearing turntable called the Colony. Hardly anybody remembers what it was. A horribly impractical thing, but a great concept. The way they had executed it, you had to clean it every five minutes as it was so susceptible to dust and junk in the air supply.

Being the great production engineer that he is, he was just going to be damned if he wasn't going to re-design that thing to make it producible and make it practical. And that became the Maplenol Turntable.

Greg: Hum, is there some common thread here between Maplenol and Mapleshade?

Pierre: None whatsoever. It was a total accident. I think he had a farm called Maplenol. I called my thing Mapleshade because I was living in an historic house called Mapleshade. But that was still a few years off.

Bob was very modest and always claimed to not be a great audiophile himself! At the time, the turntable sold for about $600 to $1000, which I thought was total lunacy. I had no concept of what it was about. When he explained the air bearing principal to me I just said that was totally ridiculous. Any turntable that turns at the right speed sounds as good as any other turntable, right?

Greg: That was the theory for a long time.

Pierre: I told him I couldn't believe he was selling $1000 turntables. He didn't bug me about it. He just smiled and kept on building his turntable. By then we were very close friends. He used to stay at my place when he came to Washington to do consulting business.

Well, one day in 1984 he showed up for a visit and brought one of his turntables, a good cartridge, one of the first Audible Illusions tube pre amps and power amp and these wonderful little $400 Dayton Wrights, little triangular black things. Just a modest little speaker, really brilliant in their own way though, and ugly as sin.

I had no idea he was bringing all this and while I was off consulting downtown, he just set it up in my spare study at the old Mapleshade. When I got home, he just said, "Have a listen. This is what I'm doing." He made no claims for it or anything. I put on one of my old records and in thirty seconds I was an audiophile. It became perfectly clear to me that everything I had said up to this point was horse shit! (Big laughter) It was like the blinding light on the road to Damascus.

Greg: What effect did this awakening have?

Pierre: It redoubled my interest in the collection of records and it impacted heavily on my recording. Remember, all this while I was using a little $250 JVC. I had started to get into Radio Shack PZM mikes, which I started to fool with.

Now, I moved to a Nakamichi Dragon, which I still have and which is a great, great cassette machine. It will, to a ludicrous extent, out perform any DAT in the world! People don't even begin to realize this because the high end is so prejudiced against cassettes. I guarantee you that I can make recordings on that Nakamichi Dragon! Or for that matter, with something which comes very close and is one of the great secrets of high end cassette work, the Sony Pro Walkman which sells for under $300, that will totally blow away any DDD recording you have ever heard. I could do symphony orchestras, jazz groups, you name it. Particularly on those old Sony ceramic cased metal formulation cassettes.

This sudden interest in high end immediately impacted my recording. I got much more deeply involved in recording and I liked it much better.

Greg: When you say more deeply involved, do you mean with things like microphone type and placement and your recording techniques?

Pierre: Yes. And I moved from my Radio Shack PZM's to Crowns. I started playing with changing the voltages on the mikes and a lot of little tweaky things like that. Not the kind of stuff I've gotten into now. I also did a lot of work on mounting the PZM's on panels and wedges and all that.

Greg: Now that you were playing with a new deck, new mikes and new techniques, what did you notice that was different?

Pierre: It was everything I was listening for on a shaded dog. And also at this time I started working with Dilger on redesigning his turntables. I was doing some of the tweaking and was responsible for some of the major model changes. I was the one who did the first experiments on locking out his suspension.

He had an interesting spring suspension on the Athena's. I remember hearing something about Japanese audiophiles who believed in mass rather than suspension, and I worked out a way to lock out the suspension without really changing the turntable in any other way. And when I tried it, it was like a revelation. It was so much better. We immediately started to do a whole bunch of experiments on how to make the whole turntable more rigid. It made a huge difference. That was really the beginning of Dilger's designs becoming world class.

All this led to an inevitable improvement in my recordings. They were improving in every direction, imaging was getting much, much better, better transparency, tonal balance, detail.

That is when I started getting my first emphasis on timbre and detail. Remember I was recording on headphones. That was a whole evolution, how to get to better headphones because they were so crucial. The major step was due to hanging out at a really elegant high end shop in Alexandria called Excalibur.

The guy who was the manager of Excalibur at the time, was moving and sold me his Stax headphones, which I have tweaked and still use.

That provided a major step forward for me. Now I could really hear some details of mike placement and things like that. It was like going to an electron microscope after using a high school lab microscope. They were a tremendous tool for advancing my recording capabilities.

By 1985 or '86, musicians were asking me to come around and record them because the quality of my cassettes was already somewhat better than the quality of the commercial recordings and people were beginning to recognize that. My masters certainly sounded significantly better than almost any commercial jazz recordings I had heard to that time. At that point, I realized how dificient standard recording techniques were. And I could acknowledge that I didn't know that much.

Greg: In some ways, that probably helped you. Because not knowing that you shouldn't or couldn't do certain things allowed you to act on your instincts and try things you likely would have known wouldn't work.

Pierre: Yeah, from time to time I would look at books on recording and the stuff was so obviously hog wash that I just didn't pay much attention to it. I just went back to doing things that I learned on my own. The wonderful thing about high end is the principal that only your ears count. And that's a way of making brilliant advances in designing anything that has to do with audio, and certainly in designing ways of recording.

One of the musicians I was recording then, and would record today in any circumstances, was Shirley Horn. I had met her in one of these funky clubs where she would come and hang out because she liked the music, even though she was a level way beyond the music in these clubs.

At that time, she wasn't very famous. She had a cult following. Miles Davis had discovered her and brought her to New York, so people in New York knew how good she was. I had just gotten to a point that some of the latest recordings I'd done of Shirley were clearly better than her albums. Just at that point, another thread joined all these others.

I had a 1911 Steinway, a smallish grand, that was in horrible shape and was unplayable. A friend had given it to me years earlier and it was just sitting around, a piece of furniture, going down hill. I started to feel guilty about the piano.

Greg: That is the Steinway in the studio, right? That thing sounds great but I read you had a ton of restoration done to it.

Pierre: After spending a couple of years of looking for someone to rebuild it I was seriously contemplating not doing it because I wasn't finding people I trusted and the shock of what it would cost. Then I found this wonderful young pair of partners just starting their own piano restoration business, Rick Jordan and Ronnie Guilardi. They had founded Potomac Keyboards and they came out to give me an estimate and spent like two hours going through the piano.

It was so obvious from the way they were going through it that they truly loved pianos. They were so meticulous with their inspection and careful about not promising me things they could not deliver that I gave them the piano and said do everything needed to preserve the sound and to preserve it structurally so there would be no further deterioration, but don't even look at the cosmetics. Cosmetic restorations can be very expensive, and were of no interest to me.

Greg: How long did all that work take?

Pierre: They had it for three months or so. They gave me weekly reports on its progress and what they found as they were disassembling it to it's constituent atoms. They did a wonderful restoration job. Every part that could in any way be restored, they kept and put in twice as much work instead of just buying a Steinway replacement part. They re-felted all the felt bearings and jacks just in order to keep it as original as possible. To this day, they are the only people who I will let work on the piano. It turns out, it was like a really fortunate circumstance.

Rick is really good at the mechanical aspects of pianos, the wood, the structure, the actions and Ronnie is a brilliant tuner. You just don't know how important that is, how different my piano sounds if one tuner tunes it rather than another, and Ronnie is a genius at it. She is a very modest woman, and gets rather embarrassed when you tell her how good she is. We go crazy if we have a session here and she is on vacation. It's like a disaster because we have to put up with inferior tuning.

They do all the maintenance and have made many audioproducts to the keyboard since the magnificent job of restoration. They have done a lot more work and made many advances in the meantime. That piano sounds far better than it did when it came from the factory.

The first restoration of the piano was a success way beyond what anyone would have thought. You know, you can't tell with a piano. If a piano is unplayable, all you can do is rebuild it and figure out afterward if it sounds any good. It's a real gamble. It just turned out that this was one of those one in a thousand Steinway's that sings.

When it came back it sounded good to me. I didn't know how good at that time. But I was excited so I called Shirley to come over and check out the piano. She fell in love with it. So I told her just treat it like it's your own, any time you want to come and shed on it, shed all night, that's fine with me. She used to come every two weeks and play till dawn.

One of those nights, I was sitting on a stool by the piano, very happily listening to her when she looked up from the keyboard and she said, "P. baby, I want to do my next album on this piano and I want you to be my engineer."

Greg: That sounds like a pivotal point? Who was she recording with at the time?

Pierre: She had a little record contract with a label down south called Audiophile. They were certainly not an audiophile label, they had just bought the name from a very famous 78 label. They had a wonderful catalog of singers, which included Shirley. They were astute enough, even though she was basically a cult singer, and gave her an itty bitty contract for her to do a recording. There was barely enough money in the engineering end of the contract for me to rent some equipment to go make a reel to reel master. But I scrounged enough equipment here an there and dug up some Neumann mikes to try out.

Greg: What was that experience like?

Pierre: It turned out to be a big flop. That cured me of big condenser mikes right there. I had my PZM's, but I thought that now that I'm doing a serious recording, I have to get these serious mikes. I tried them and they were just awful. They were devastatingly undetailed, which for Shirley was a disaster because she has the most wonderful subtle inflections of voice. That cured me forever of famous mikes. Let me assure you that famous mikes aren't worth the powder to blow them to hell!

Greg: Fortunnately for us, you've gone beyond that.

Pierre: We did the recording over a couple days.

Greg: Was that recording made here?

Pierre: No, that was at the Old Mapleshade, which was the previous house where I started the studio. It's about ten miles from here.

Shirley loved it because of the atmosphere. There was good food, and we told her she was welcomed to bring good friends. Shirley hates to record to just four walls. She is one of those people who has to have a live audience, even if it's not large. So we had people lounging around in the room beyond and a couple in the room with her so she had some live communication.

Greg: That sense of community seems to have stuck with you, the cooking, the fraternity, all of it.

Pierre: Well, she was one of the key people who taught me that. The people who really taught me how important the atmosphere in a recording studio can be were Shirley, Clifford Jordan, and Walter Davis. They really shaped the way I think about how a studio ought to feel for the musicians. They all share the characteristics that they liked to eat very well and could hang till dawn and beyond. For Shirley, if a session or a night breaks up when the sun comes up, that's called a light hang. A heavy hang goes till noon the next day.

I'm very proud of the fact that there has never been a session at Mapleshade that got cut short because the engineer couldn't hang. I enjoyed that session so much, and we got a very good album called Softly, which I still think is one of Shirley's finest, even though it is not very well known because it is on this little label.

Greg: Was that your first credit as an engineer?

Pierre: Yeah, that was my first paid, professional gig.

Greg: When was that?

Pierre: It was 1986, and I enjoyed it so much I decided to put out my shingle as a weekend studio. I wasn't giving up my consulting company or my work on fighter airplains and tanks, but I was definitely on the road to running a studio. My goal at that time was to do projects with artists like Shirley and Clifford Jordan, people like that. We would do them as joint partners and then we would take the master tapes and shop them to established labels. I had no desire to be a label at all. I had only the vaguest idea of how much scud work was necessary to be a label, and even that vague notion was enough to repel me. I just wanted to do recordings in partnership with musicians.

And that is just what I did for three or four years. The whole experience with dealing with the kind of people there are in the music business was extremely distasteful to me. I hated the fact that I was forced to try to establish business relationships with them. They had unbelievable ways of taking what was a good master tape and telling the little bits you had to add in order to make it commercially salable. It would totally wreck it. They would take something that was a totally enjoyable work of art and turn it into trash. And they were wrong about what would help a record sell.

Greg: Well, that is because they are in the "business" of music. They typically work by formula. This sold, so if we make this new product like the formula, it too will sell.

Pierre: Yeah, it turns a lot of great music and great artists and singers into plastic. One of the very few that I know that ever recovered, and only partially so, was Aretha Franklin. They had her put out a whole series of totally forgettable albums from which she has partially recovered and regained her soul in a way. But the damage to what she could have done is appalling. And there are a zillion singers and musicians like that, who have all been touched by the dead hand of the recording industry.

I just really didn't like the people in the industry. I hadn't opened a studio to find a job, I had a job. I certainly wasn't going to do it if the experience of dealing with the record business was going to take the joy out of what I was doing. So in a sense, I was backed into the corner of having to put out the records myself to avoid dealing with the people I didn't want to deal with. And that is essentially how Mapleshade was born.

Greg: When was that?

Pierre: Right about 1990 I started working turning out some albums. By this time, we had quite a back log of some really wonderful master tapes.

About that time I hooked up with the Musical Heritage Society, which had just started the Jazz Heritage Society branch. They are the largest independent record club in America. He set up an arrangement where we would do ten albums for them.

So we got hard at work developing covers and liner notes to put out ten albums. Some of the people who collect Mapleshade's know those as the old black and whites. The deal we struck with them was that they would distribute us through their catalog and we were free to distribute ourselves through other means.

Greg: Those titles include the now famous Clifford Jordan Live at Ethell's as well as one of my favorites, Jazznost. Also in that group are Sunnyland Slim's Live at the D.C. Blues Society, Archie Edwards' Blues 'N Bones and Walter Davis, Jr's In Walked Thelonious among others, correct?

Pierre: Yes.

Greg: This was the catalog of material I was first exposed to when I was still managing a high end store.

Pierre: The reason you had it was that as soon as we hooked up with Musical Heritage, we promptly went after the high end world since I was a committed audiophile and thought that we could get a good following in the audio world. We did then and we still do today. We have about 200 high end dealers who carry our catalog and we are very careful to preserve good relations with them.

In a funny kind of way, the high end audio predilection to place sound over music, which I think is perverse, is our road to artistic freedom. It allows us to record unknown artists and bring along people that you didn't know. If we do a good job of recording a really fine young pianist, like Frank Kimbrough, who was totally unknown at the time, audiophiles will buy it.

Greg: Actually, it's kind of a turn on because when you have your audiophile buddies over and play it for them, it's like, "Wow, what is that? I've got to get that"!

Pierre: In the regular music business, it is a much harder fight to put across someone like Frank. All those record buyers and distributors have a built in bias. Who is he? I don't know that name, why should I sell him?

Greg: Of the many things we talked of the last time I was here was your work with interconnects and cables. I have played with speaker cables a lot and actually just published a piece wherein I try to codify the sonic attributes of the differing types, materials and constructions. I'm fascinated by some of your ideas in this area; you're into thinness and even build some D/C biased cables. Can you go into this for me.

Pierre: I started working on wires back in '86, both because of my audiophile playback and recording interests and my need for microphone cables. On both sides it became obvious that wires made a big difference.

My first experiment with wires was a huge disappointment. I added huge sub woofers to my Martin Logans, and with that same mindlessness that we all fell into, thought I've gotta' have really big wires. But I didn't want to spend audiophile prices because I had already paid too much for my main panel wires.

So I went out and got myself some 12 guage house wiring stuff. And boy, my sub woofers sounded awful, bloated and muddy. Still to this day, big wires are terrible. Particularly in the bass, which is why everybody buys them. The thinking is that it takes more current to drive big speakers. All this stuff that nobody tests by ear allows them to fall into the plausibility traps.

Greg: How did you evolve past that trap?

Pierre: I started to do modest experiments. Fortunately, I was reading one of the British magazines which I still read avidly. It always had a few treasures of technical information, more so than either The Absolute Sound or Stereophile! That was Hi Fi News and Record Review. They always had coverage on Dennis Morecroft, who was one of the pioneers of solid core wire and to a more limited extent, thin wires. It registered on me that this was an avenue to explore.

Greg: I have had great success with solid core wires. What were the results of all your experimentation?

Pierre: Solid wires worked out very nicely. So did my work with dielectrics. I pretty quickly got onto teflon, and then thin teflon. I wasn't pushing any boundaries as far as thin wire went because I wasn't spending any time fabricating, I was just getting fairly thin wire and then trying it out. Then after a short while, I started building solid core interconnects for Bob Dilger and his turntable customers with fairly thin wire, thin enough that I could still deal with it.

Just about that time, 1990 or 1991, a mutual friend who had retired from the Pentagon, introduced me to Ron Bauman, who was someone he greatly admired for having extensively rebuilt and tweaked amplifiers. Ron is my partner now, and has his own company called In Sound. We've been working together on wires and things ever since.

We've done an extraordinary set of experiments in the last seven years, often working three nights a week for six or seven hours at a time.

Greg: Is that the Omega Micro line?

Pierre: Yes, Omega Micro is the line which grew out of that research. At first we were just getting together out of mutual interest in the subject! I was interested in his circuit design and he was interested in my recording style. I had access to some equipment that he didn't have.

Greg: So it was just two friends sharing ideas at first?

Pierre: We didn't have the intention of doing something professional, we were just trying to help each other with each others systems and bring each others strength to bear on the work. I started showing him solid core wires. He already had an inkling about wires, feeling that wires did make a difference. But he hadn't gone to the lengths of thin wire I had, which even then weren't so extreme. We've gone way beyond that now, but it was a little radical for him then.

Greg: Radical in what sense?

Pierre: Right from the start we heavily influenced each other. He is a brilliantly innovative and original Radio Frequency engineer. I was impressed that he was so surprisingly open to some of the radical ideas I was introducing to him.

I introduced him to my deep hatred of sine waves, which is based on the fact that sine wave theory has completely screwed up electrical engineering in the audio world. My statement is based on some mathematical prejudices about the piss poor mathematics the electrical engineers use and their piss poor attitude toward mathematical fundamentals. It was like a battle I'd fought for years in statistics against a similarly ingrained and supposed fundamental proof, the gaussian distribution. This is the normal distribution which is almost universally used in statistics and is universally wrong! Well, sine waves are exactly in the same boat in that they are universally used and, at least as far as audio goes, universally wrong! There is no area of audio that isn't completely corrupted and destroyed by the wrong conclusions that come from using sine waves as your test signal or as your theoretical construct around which you build your conclusions.

That was a little radical for Ron. Particularly as an RF engineer, where they do use sine waves. It's really been an extraordinary partnership between us.

Greg: Where was that initial work done, here at this house?

Pierre: No, he has a beautiful brown-stone in Georgetown. We used to work in his living room, to the horror of his very artistic and extraordinarily gifted wife, Marci. She was patient enough to put up with the mess we were making in her living room. You had to see it to appreciate what it was like in those days.

Ron had this practice of building amplifiers with about four chassis per channel. All these chassis wired together with this funky wire, right? Towards the end, with what I thought was a sarcastic comment, I apparently fomented his building a brilliantly good water cooled amplifier called the Poseidon.

You had to see this scene in this wonderfully elegant brown-stone, almost a mansion, that they had restored. Now, here is this destroyed living room filled with wires and 1942 transformers. Ron loves to build with ancient stuff and never throws anything away. He's got Korean war components and North Africa Signal Corps. components, World War II stuff, its amazing. And here, through the middle of this living room are these two plastic tubes running back to the sink in the kitchen, nearly the full length of his house, carrying water to his amplifier. (a moments pause for extreme laughter)

Every time Marci walked through the living room she was horrified. Then came the day one of the tubes sprang a leak and soaked her wonderful Persian carpet. (more laughter)

We finally put together a basement lab which invades the family much less. It's a little peculiar acoustically, because it's right next to the furnace, but we get surprisingly good sound out of it. We've carried on the rest of our experiments there.

Greg: You've come up with some interesting theories on silver. How did all that come about?

Pierre: We had done all the experiments using silver, and every time we had silver plated our cables, it always sounded bad. We record all our experiments and experimental findings and we often go back and redo old experiments because of a suspicion that we may have screwed it up. That is very helpful. Sometimes we make real progress like that.

Lloyd Walker, our distributer for Omega Mikro, kept on bugging us about silver because he had heard good things from silver cables. So out came the notebooks so we could redo the experiments.

Greg: What were your conclusions about using silver?

Pierre: We had discovered that when applying silver, you cannot apply too little. In order to make silver really work for you in conductors, the secret is to use it super thin. We took out our super thin copper ribbons and hand silvered them. The very latest version of our speaker cable is silvered on only one side. With our hand silvering process, we apply a super thin, mono-molecular layer. It is very labor intensive and is very difficult and is a major factor in contributing to their higher cost. We have tried to replace it with a commercial process, but it hasn't been as effective as the hand application.

Ron had just finished silvering one side of the ribbon and, before doing the other side, I said, just for a lark, let's listen to it. Although my reason for doing it was totally stupid, it turned out like perfection. When we had listened for a while, we then silvered the other side. When we listened again, it was terrible, much worse than just the bare copper.

In retrospect, I don't think it was because we had half as much silver, I think it applies to the change in the shape of the field around the conductor and how the field of the two conductors intereact. I think the benefit is that we have simply created an asymmetrical field around the conductor which has somehow either improved or reduced the extent to which the interaction muddies the sound. That's a guess, but it is certainly much closer to the right idea than anything else we have come up with. This is pretty recent stuff.

Greg: That is VERY interesting. Let's back up and find out how you got to this point.

Pierre: We started out about seven years ago going in this thin wire direction. From time to time we would check other constructions when people would insist that this or that type sounded good, but basically all our experiments have revealed that the thinner the wire gets, the better it sounds, without limit!

In the case of interconnect, we have never found a wire that is too thin, we have reached a limit based on it's practicality. I can't handle it, Ron has trained himself to do so.

Greg: Can you give me a dimension?

Pierre: We're talking about a diameter of about one half a thousandth of an inch. If you soldered it to two terminals here and turned on a fan, the wire would break!

Greg: What do you use as your dielectric?

Pierre: Super thin teflon. We are always looking for ways to make the dielectric thinner, just like the wire. Those are the two major areas that we have followed. The thinner the wire, the smaller the skin effect, which if of overwhelming importance in a wires resultant sound. What really counts is less skin effect and less dielectric absorption. All this business with resistance, conductance and capacitance being crucial to wire is hog wash. As far as we can tell, they are almost irrelevant to wires. And I don't mean the conventional inductance interactions, We don't understand all that real well yet. But the proximity to each other has a powerful effect. In general, we recommend you keep our speaker wires at least six inches apart. And further is better.

Greg: And you don't recommend this for induction related reasons? You think there is something else going on?

Pierre: Well, obviously it is induction related, but not in the sense that with twice as many milli-Henries of induction or half as many, that you are able to predict what will happen. It is not that at all, it has to do with the shape of the field and other things we don't completely understand. To give you an example, just twisting the ribbon changes the sound. Even how you twist the two ribbons relative to each other will either worsen or improve the sound. That has nothing to do with conventional notions of inductance.

Greg: Is there a rhyme or reason to what you have found; can it be codified?

Pierre: Yes, there are real patterns, and we provide those in our instructions to our users.

Greg: Now, this application of thinness does not apply to loudspeaker cable or power cables, does it?

Pierre: Now obviously, with speaker wire and A/C cables, you can't use stuff that's hair thin because of the current limits. And by the way, the current limits are totally different from what peoples intuition implies. The thought that power wires for amplifiers have to be fourteen gauge to really transfer the power is hog wash.

You can run an amplifier very succesfully off twenty two or twenty four gage, and not even feel the warmth of the wire. People have come up with the notion that a wire needs to be as thick as a lamp cord, or hopefully twice as big. Well, that's just wrong!

Greg: That's just wrong!

Pierre: Yeah, try it. It doesn't sound good so you try a thinner one and it sounds better. When you are dealing with round wire, there are clear optimums and trade-offs. Round speaker wire tends to be the best around 18 gauge. We're not the first to say that, we've reconfirmed it. When you get thinner than that, midrange and treble continue to improve, but bass performance falls off.. However, sixteen gauge is a much worse compromise than twenty gauge!

Greg: The arguments I've always read say the longer the run, the larger the gauge needed to avoid insertion loss.

Pierre: Hog wash!

Greg: We've touched on power cables, are you using flat or round wires?

Pierre: For interconnects, we went to thin round wire. That worked out once we learned how to drag super microscopic wire through copper tubes. We had a whole development program on copper tubing. The copper tube changes the sound. It was the copper tube that lead us to the silver plating. We found out that even the alloy of the copper in the tube makes a difference. This shield is not a conductor, remember our wires are balanced. We're not big on the need for RF protection. But we needed the tube for protection of the conductors themselves! The original copper tubes were simply grounded at one end, floating at the other, so they were pure shield, they were not music conductors.

Despite that, the thickness of the copper made a tremendous difference to the sound. Too much silver plating of that copper, which is where we first applied silver, made a tremendous difference in the sound. Like our wire, even the shield turned out to be directional, and it isn't even carrying a signal! One of the principals we discovered as we went along is that you want to arrange the metallurgy to make the wires as directional as possible. It was an odd result! But from that point on, we made arrangements with our rolling mill to make the wires as directional as possible. That in itself was a project, working out correct annealing temperatures, rolling proceses and such.

Once we got to experimenting with these tubes, we got into tubular conductors. Remember there were those guys who went that direction.

Greg: Yes, Cogan-Hall. They built the first tubular wire I heard.

Pierre: Yes, they were pioneers of tubular conductors. I'm still convinced that the ultimate conductor is a super thin wall tubular conductor. But our experiments led us to determine that to achieve the kind of results we wanted, the walls had to be hopelessly thin, so thin in fact that they would work only in a straight line! Bend them and they kink.

Greg: Have you found some relationship to wall thickness and performance?

Pierre: The rule of thumb for manufacturing a wire which won't kink is to have the wall thickness about one half of the radius of the tube, and that turns out to be too thick to achieve really cutting edge sound. If you could keep your wires in a straight line, then a tube made of foil would produce the best results. Since that isn't possible, we have just unwrapped the tube, yielding our flat ribbons.

In this respect, the flat ribbons were just like the thin round wires, the thinner we made them, the better they sounded. We just pushed it.

Greg: Several companies are enjoying varied success with flat conductors; namely Goertz and Nordost.

Pierre: From our point of view, these are not cutting edge wires because they are far too thick, like one or two orders of magnitude thicker than ours. Our speaker cable is now around one thousandth of an inch in thickness.

You know, if we wanted to make it really hopelessly impractical, we could make it a couple of ten thousandths of an inch thick! And it would sound better. But we have to incorporate some level of practicality.

The same principal applies to our A/C cords. We call them Planar Power because there are three ribbons inside a silver plated shield.

What we have done is create no compromise wires. We are the only people in the country who are doing so. What that means is that the wires are delicate and a pain in the ass to handle. We have not compromised them to be able to haul boats or lift a well bucket or anything like that. They are not bullet proof. Some are really fragile. None can be stepped on. You certainly can't vacuum clean over them!

Greg: Now, average folks can buy these right?

Pierre: Sure. They are on the expensive side because they are all hand constructed and they are very labor intensive to manufacture.

Greg: What kind of pricing are we talking about for what length?

Pierre: We don't build anything less than eight feet long. We found that four and six foot length don't sound as good as eight, so that is our minimum length. We are not the first to come to this assumption. All these people who have their amps parked right behind their speakers and use really short runs of cable have made a horrible mistake.

Our passive speaker cables are $599 a set, our biased cables, which we call the active are $999 a set, and our active with silver runs $1350 per pair.

Greg: That's not ridiculous in today's cable pricing. What do you suggest for people who don't need an eight foot long run, draping?

Pierre: Yes, you obviously don't want to coil them. But they don't have to go up to the ceiling either, just keep them up off the carpet or floor. And that is true with any cable, not just ours.

Greg: Now why does the battery biasing improve the sound? Is it done for RF and EMI protection?

Pierre: I don't know why they sound better!

Greg: I KNEW you were going to say that!

Pierre: It was a guess we took. We had gone to this open mesh shield that is actually a single conductor even though it looks like a braid. We had gone to that in order to reduce the dielectric interaction. We used to have a sleeve with a very thin polypropylene sheath we called a condom. They were nice, but people really hated the way they looked and they were very delicate. The sheath was only six ten-thousandths of an inch thick.

One of the off-the-wall methods we came up with was a copper mesh tube. It was very open, like the mesh on an onion bag at the grocery store, with a very thin dielectric over it. The idea being that the dielectric didn't need to support itself, the copper did that for us to we could go down to one or two ten-thousandths for the sheath. That is now our passive cable.

But fooling with it, we realized it was a single conductor all the way down the bundle. So we thought, why don't we try what they did in the thirties in old RF transmission line designs, which was to apply a voltage on the shield. Our original thought was that maybe speaker cables need an RF shield. It wasn't clear that they do, but then again, it is possible that they act as antenna's.

Another theory of our was that it polarized the dielectric with an electrostatic field, maybe you are getting closer to a perfect non-absorbing dielectric. We tried to do some experiments to confirm the hypothesis, but were never satisfied as to resolving the issue.

But for some reason, things that effect RF frequencies and are not audible can have a very striking effect on audio. Well, we gave it a try and WOW, it sounded great! It was a major improvement. Then we spent a great deal of time optimizing the proper voltage. There are some real mysteries about what turns out to sound optimum. You can change the sound by paralleling too many batteries, we even found we had to do some filtering of the battery output. So it wasn't at all clear that we were doing what the old guys in RF were doing. But what was clear that we found great sound.

Greg: What do you hear as the differences between your passive and active cables?

Pierre: Two things. When you go to the active, everything comes out of a quieter, blacker background. And you get a cleaner transient. Leading edges are cleaner, not necessarily louder, although that is something we listened for. Going to a thinner gauge wire always makes the transients louder. But the leading edges sound cleaner and quicker, and the reverberant trial on notes extends longer, is more sustained. And there is a sweetening of the treble. I'm note sure there is an extension, but it is sweeter sounding.

Now the silver clearly extends the treble. Detail gets a lot better. We had tried lots of silver configurations, solid ribbons, solid thin wires, high purity silver, thicker silver plantings, but they all added an edge. They increased detail but to the point of edginess. Our mono-molecular application allows the detail without the edge. We would not settle for the graininess even for the sake of detail, so we settled on themono-molecular, single sided silver coating.

Greg: What has been the reaction to your cables?

Pierre: Well, our distributor Lloyd Walker took them up to New York to Sound By Singer. He just told me last week that our active silver cable blew away three different $15,000 brands. We had thought that Andy would be very resistant to a delicate cable like ours, but he said, "Fine, put them in the reference room." So with that in mind, if you have a listening room you can exhibit control over we feel our wires are unbeatable. There are wires that are awfully good AND bullet proof, but they have to make compromises.

Greg: I hope to get a chance to hear some of these cables. It seems that you are almost applying technology through an anti-technological approach.

Pierre: Yes, but you know we've branched out. We're working on capacitors, resistors and inductors, following basically the principals we started with. And it has opened up a lot of vistas for us. Out of our wire research, we learned loads about amplifier layout, physically how you place transformers and other components relative to each other.

Particularly with coils! People don't understand that coils speak to each other over distances of even three and four feet. There is something very peculiar about the way the magnetic fields do not follow the square law. The audible effects at three and four feet of two coils "speaking" to each other, like a crossover coil speaking to a speaker coil, are very noticeable and can be demonstrated by just turning them while listening.

Greg: Obviously this is something you haven't shared with Bose? (much laughter)

Pierre: Well, no. They are complete slaves of the sine wave mentality, which is why their speakers sound so bad. After all, Dr. Bose is one of the brilliant sine wave theoreticians.

The whole trap comes in that the mid fi world doesn't use its ears! It's dominated by a few testing laboratories that put out sine wave results! If they say that the distortion is .001, then a speaker sells. It's just ludicrous.

One thing that pains me is when people talk about what I'm doing as this low tech revolution. I don't think of it that way. The reason it pains me is that it reminds me of my twenty years in the Pentagon where I had to fight exactly the same battle. People kept accusing the fighters I was working on of being low tech. They were not! They just were not complex. They actually have a technology at a cutting edge well beyond the conventional high tech fighters. We simply picked and chose our technology to be super effective.

Greg: Pierre, my statement about anti-technology wasn't meant to offend you. What I meant was that you ignore the accepted rules and re-examine things with no preconceptions in an effort to make it simpler or to make it sound more to your liking. I certainly wasn't trying to insult you! In fact, in my own back-handed way, I was trying to pay you a compliment.

Pierre: Oh no, I realize that, and thank you. In a way, I'm very proud of being a Luddite.

Greg: That is an excellent analogy.

Pierre: I'm happy to blow up conventional technology. It is just that I don't want to be tarred with the feather of using low tech or ancient tech.

Greg: It is kind of refreshing to see someone step back from almost dogmatic adherence to conventional theory and approach the design of sonic components with their ears in mind.

When I was younger and first got involved with the martial arts, there was a great deal of Zen Buddhism involved. It struck me that the eastern methodology for dealing with things was much different. For example, I saw fifty and sixty year old men do things that I KNEW through conventional knowledge that people just couldn't do. Jumping straight into the air, moving at blinding speeds, breaking things like tree trunks and steel fire doors with bare hands, things that just could not be done! Yet they were able to achieve them with relative ease.

I think I can directly attribute any success I may have had in life to that association. I stopped believing in that I couldn't do something just because someone said it couldn't be done. I see your work to be similar in philosophy.

Pierre: On that subject, I have to say that my involvement with music and recording has made me vastly more open minded than when I was at the Pentagon. I was always radical and a destroyer of the old there, but the battles were so fierce. You had to defend your turf every day against people who wanted to destroy your project and ideas. You become very rigid in a way.

Greg: That has to be so counter productive and frustrating.

Pierre: And it takes forever between having an idea and having it implemented. Where as here, if I have an idea tonight while I'm talking to you, I can stay up an extra hour and solder a few resistors together and see if it works. Then tomorrow morning I'll have the satisfaction of knowing that I made some progress. It's very gratifying.

Greg: You must be very happy with your work.

Pierre: That is one of the wonderful things about the wire work with Ron. We come away from night after night of work with this well of accomplishment. One of the things which really has made me much more flexible and open minded and is one of the reasons I'm so happy doing what I'm doing is that I have finally learned to enjoy blowing up my own ideas.

The turntable work was the first thing that really did that for me. You know you get into one of these designs and experimental paths of trying to create better sound, you start to do a few experiments then you build some theoretical construct about why your experiments are working. That construct leads to more experiments which further confirm your theory. You start to get pretty proud, thinking this is pretty good theory, this is pretty bright, right? Then you do one crucial experiment and the whole damn structure dissolves and it turns out that everything you thought was wrong!

The first two or three times that happened to me while working on the turntables, it was just devastating. It was similar to the feelings I had after suffering a major defeat on one of my airplane programs at the Pentagon. By about the third time it happened, I said to myself, you know the last two times this happened, within a week or two, I really made some big progress.

Greg: I suppose now you almost look forward to these things?

Pierre: Both Ron and I are ecstatic when some two year development of ours falls apart! Now when we do a crucial experiment that shows that our thinking was totally wrong, it's wonderful! You know, we just step back and say, "Look how stupid that was!" (big laughter break) Even if you don't make a big step at that time, you know it is about to happen.