Eric Valentine & The Best Sounding Console, Ever

HOLLYWOOD: Eric Valentine keeps a relatively low profile. But here in his studio – Barefoot Recording in Hollywood – he has engineered, mixed, and produced some of the biggest-hit rock records of the last 15 years. Work with Smash Mouth, Third Eye Blind, Good Charlotte and Maroon 5 has cemented his status as one of modern rock’s top producers.

Valentine has a brilliant head for the uber-technical – as I found in this Q&A he did with Gearslutz – while being totally grounded in the real world of rock recording. He is, after all, the guy in the band that got into engineering.

Eric Valentine in the shop at Barefoot

As a young drummer in the early 90’s, Valentine more or less self-produced his first band, T-Ride; convincing Hollywood Records to let him use the band’s recording budget to buy gear so they could work on their own. In a much less DIY-friendly era, Valentine was able to competently produce, engineer, and mix on his own with stellar results.

Looking around Barefoot, many of the pieces in his studio today are from that era, including his beloved Ampex 24 track tape machine. The console, however, is new – and like the T-Ride record, the result of an uncompromising DIY work ethic that has launched Valentine into new professional territory.

Valentine’s 60-channel Class A analog console is the flagship model of his and partner Larry Jasper’s Undertone Audio (UTA) product line. When we met up with him, and sat down at the “LC Series” console to talk, the company was in the process of completing their first order for an outside client – a version designed for seamless integration with a DAW system.

So, you went to all the trouble of building an analog console from scratch. You must have had some serious needs to fulfill?

Well, in finally deciding to do this, I had developed some significant issues over the years: I definitely prefer the sound of vintage consoles, and in particular, the ones that I really like are based around Class A circuitry. So that’s like the early generation 80 series Neves – my favorite module is the 1084, because of the selectable high frequency control.

I love that sound, and I actually owned an 8038. It was an incredible tracking console, and for certain things, was an amazing mixing console, but it only had 32 channels and Necam automation. The EQ’s sound great, but at least half the time, there are situations where I need to get really surgical…

They just don’t do that…

They don’t do that. It’s a beautiful sounding, broad-brush equalizer. But if I needed to boost a specific low frequency on the kick drum I couldn’t. If I needed to notch out a specific, weird overtone in the guitar I couldn’t do that.

More of a GML kind of thing…

Yeah, so I find myself using a GML or these crazy old Orban EQ’s that get really narrow to do all the surgical stuff. So that was one issue: I wanted an equalizer that had the vintage sound that also had the flexibility. That was goal #1.

The other issue with those old consoles, at this point, is that I think they are literally, physically at the end of their lifespan. I’ve tried, in the last three or four years, before I built this thing, to book time in highly regarded studios that have classic Neve consoles. As hard as they are trying, and they work very hard at keeping these consoles healthy and reliable…

…There’s always something.

I don’t think there is any amount of contact cleaner you can spray in these things, or switch exercising, that’s going to make it so my f**king floor tom doesn’t disappear halfway through my goddamn mix pass. It was driving my insane. There’s a nervous discomfort while you’re mixing that is so unpleasant. You know, you’re running a mix pass, and…I couldn’t just relax and listen; I was always trying to make sure that nothing would disappear!

So I just don’t think those consoles can really be revived anymore…I wanted the sound, but I was tired of cleaning switches. I don’t even think they are cleanable anymore.  There really isn’t a good replacement for the shadow switches that were used in old Neves. They are wildly expensive now, and there are a lot of other proprietary parts in there, like in the mic-pre gain select and stuff that I don’t think anybody is making anymore so…

Valentine (3rd from left) with the UTA crew and console at Barefoot Recording. Larry Jasper on far right.

Did you look into any of these other, smaller companies that are “cloning” vintage consoles and modules?

I did, sure. I was considering a Brent Averill option, where I’d just get a bunch of shiny new 1084’s, but then I’m still faced with the thing of like “ok, now it’s time to get a kick drum sound”, and I’m going to put my head down here at a rack away from the speakers and try to sculpt a kick drum sound? I was just tired of it.

And you still don’t get the surgical EQ that you are looking for…

Exactly. So at the end of the last console that I owned, I finally was like, I’ve had it with this thing. I may be done with consoles.

What was that board?

It happened to be a Neve 88R, which is a great console, and I think they’re great for a lot of people. But it ultimately didn’t make sense for me because, at that level, when they’re building a console to satisfy record-makers, film mixers, scoring stages, all these different people; they have to include so many different options, and so many different features to try and satisfy all of those different work flows. It becomes a giant behemoth of controls, the majority of which I never used.

And it’s not fully discrete…

They had to make compromises sonically – like using op-amps everywhere (these little 5532 op-amp chips are all through that thing) just to be able to have everything fit. And so, ultimately I felt like I was paying for all these features that I didn’t want, that end up compromising the sonic performance. It just didn’t make sense for me. And it was the size of a bus, it was massive, the channel strips were three feet long. My NS-10’s were so far away, with this vast sea of metal…

Did you have a 72 or a 60?

I had a 60 channel. So I made the decision to move on from the 88R, and started working with various different setups, and was forced to do a lot of mixing in the computer for a period of time; but there were things about it that were kind of impossible for me – sonically it just didn’t respond the way I’m used to.

Did you use a control surface?

That really wasn’t the issue. I was fine manipulating stuff with a mouse or trackball, it was just this “ceiling” in the high end that I could never get to open up, and the compressors just sounded like they were strangling everything…I don’t know, it just didn’t work for me. But the thing that was really striking was that when I didn’t have that big metal surface sitting in front of me the speakers sounded incredible…I’d never had my nearfield monitors sound so incredibly accurate. So then I realized the crazy, f**ked up thing that goes on with the reflection off of the face of the console that causes all of this comb filtering in the worst possible place, from 1k to 5k. It looks like this (gesturing wildly in the shape of a frequency response plot).

It’s an epidemic that everyone touches on but that no one has really done anything about…

That was another thing. So while we were working on the equalizer, I told Larry, “If we can’t resolve this whole console reflection thing, I’m not going back, I just can’t, I’ll figure out another way to do it, but I can’t have a big flat metal thing in front of me anymore…”

Eventually, we stumbled onto the solution. I had a session set up and there was this old AKG mic – the D-200 – that has a really peculiar grille on it. It looks like a bunch of little metal beads molded into a windscreen shape over the top of the microphone. Larry was the one who was like, “Wow, this could work!” It was stiff enough to be the work surface, it was acoustically invisible enough that you could sing through it; and if that much sound was passing through it, it wasn’t’ reflecting very much. And so we found a company that works with the material, got some flat panels of it, and I did some acoustic testing with it and it’s insane!

I had an NS-10, a simulated work surface made of the material, and one from some regular flat metal and the difference was amazing. It was incredible – I was just blown away. So we went through the process of trying to implement it as the faceplates for everything and figured out all those logistics, and it really works! The near-fields really sound like they’re on stands and there’s no console there.

Larry Jasper building one of the LC Series Consoles at Barefoot Recording

Wow!

It’s pretty sweet.

So those were the three really significant issues for me. I really wasn’t going to do a console unless those three things could be resolved.

1. Flexible EQ
2. Acoustic transparency.
3. Fully Class A circuit design.

So that’s where the impetus came from…

That was the reason for it…and through the process I was super lucky to meet this guy Larry Jasper, who is unlike anyone I’ve ever encountered.

I’ve worked with dozens of techs over the 20 years that I’ve been making records, and this guy is just really unique.  He has a fundamental understanding of audio electronics that I’ve never seen before. He knows all of it. I mean it started with me calling him to fix my tape machine, and he would sort of casually say “oh you know, if you change a few values here this machine will sound better.” And I was like, “Yeah, right, like you know better than Ampex how to set up and design a tape machine…”

Right…

…and he kept on mentioning stuff like that, and finally I was like, OK, let’s try one of these ideas; and he was right about everything! It was amazing. He reads schematics like the f**king sunday comics. He worked for GML. And he was a circuit designer for Quad 8 back in the late 70’s, and so he’s very familiar with most of the gear out there.

For instance if you said, “I’m having trouble with my 1176” he’d say “oh, well they used this type of amplifier, and this FET for the compression, and blah blah…” Like he already knows it all, he’s memorized all of this gear. He has such an incredible wealth of knowledge, so encyclopedic that I just said let’s see what happens, let’s really try and build the theoretical “best-sounding” console, ever, in history. Let’s see what happens (laughing). If we actually try and do that what will the results be?

So how did you get started?

We started by designing our own Class A gain stage. Our version of the Neve BA183, which was their version of a single plug-in module of a Class A gain stage, and it was used all over the place. It’s used in the summing of a 1272, it’s used in the 1073 EQ, it’s used in the mic pre, just everywhere. It ends up being the engine that drives all of the circuitry. So we had to start there. He would build one, and I would use it as a line level input on a monitoring box. I would patch different sources and listen…

Oh my god…

(laughing) It was just ridiculous..

How long did all this take?

It took 5 years before the console was actually up and running…it took almost three years to have the first prototype of the equalizer.

Undertone Audio LC Series analog console

How did you keep your head on straight about what would actually matter to anyone else out there in the real world?

(laughing)…Right. It’s the most inflammatory issue within the realm of audio: how to judge whether something actually sounds different or not, and whether people are able to casually just listen, knowing what they are listening to, and make a personal observation about what they do or don’t like about two sound sources. Or, if you have to listen, not knowing which is which, and do a blind listening test, and through my experience developing the circuitry for the console, at a certain point, it’s the only way I would do it.

I just had to stop doing these casual listening things, because I was being given so many of these options by the circuit designer. It’s like, ok, we’re going to try this polypropylene cap…I don’t really know if it’s going to sound different, but if it does, it might sound kind of like this…tell me if it sounds any different! You know?…(laughing)

You’re just piling on tiny relative experiences, and just getting yourself into a hole…

Yeah, so I had to come up with a system, I had to be able to quantify, for sure, that I am actually hearing this difference…and I can prove it. And it was amazing how many of the things I thought I was hearing…I wasn’t! And it turns out that the psychological influence on sensory perception is so profound. It was so much more significant than I ever thought it was. It changed everything for me.

To what degree did you get to work with each iteration of a particular design? I feel like, for it to be effective, you’d need to work on a record for a month with one particular option, at which point you really know whether it works or not, and which way to go from there…

That’s true, you know, the vintage equipment that has been vetted out as being the collection of desirable stuff, like Neve, API pre’s, or Pultec equalizers, and all these pieces that have been in use for 40-50 years. Thousands of records have been made and all of those collective realizations are incorporated. Like, “Man, when I used that 1073, that record just came out kind of sweet, you know?” and to develop gear like that, you need more than a half hour listening session.

It’s really difficult, it takes a lot of time and you have to be incredibly disciplined and incredibly meticulous to try and get meaningful results in more of a  “laboratory” context. So, with the Undertone stuff, when there was a really significant change, like for instance when we were developing the mic pre, I would test different options by recording complete songs; so for instance, I did three songs of different styles, each one comparing all of the transformer options.  There were 4 transformers and transformerless. I would have to play each part 5 times for each of the 3 songs to be able to compare them properly.

[In this video, Valentine explains the basics of the UTA Equalizer design found in his console – known as the “LC Series Console”.]

Are the mic pre’s all transformer balanced?

They are optionally transformer balanced. It’s one of the first mic pre’s where you can bypass the input transformer, which is typically not possible. When you bypass it, it’s an actively balanced input. Larry, the circuit designer, came up with a gain stage that makes it possible to do that, so the transformer we used is one-to-one, not a step-up, which is pretty much what is used in every other mic pre out there. That offers some other interesting flexibility in the transformer design, and we experimented with that a lot with [transformer manufacturer] Cinemag. We tried a few different iterations with them and settled on something.

The tube summing buss is really cool. Is that something you liked before, or was it something you encountered through testing…

It was a theoretical thing that Larry felt strongly about. There are qualities that tubes have over transistors that make them inherently better for handling intermodulation distortion. Meaning, when you have lots of frequencies going on at the same time, the way a tube gain stage adds coloration is generally considered to be more musical than the way a transistor would. The coloration, of course, is unavoidable – all active circuitry is going to color the sound to some degree. Some are more transparent than others; they all have their varying amounts.

And you’ll get props from the guys on the audiophile forums for building it this way…

(laughs) Yeah for sure – the way the whole mix buss path is built is essentially an “audiophile” path. The actual control room volume is also tube as well. So everything sums together into a final tube output stage, and that tube stage feeds the control room monitor, which is also tube and feeds the power amp.

The tubes we chose are very robust – they were actually designed to be used in televisions, but the specs were perfect for what we needed.

Are they modern tubes?

No they’re old: a pentode that has one stage that’s more like a preamp tube, and another that’s more like a power tube, similar to an EL84. It has a lot of current drive.  The final output of the console can be mult’d, out into 600 ohms, and it will never sag or crap out. We run a pretty comfortable plate voltage on them so the lifespan will be very good.

So are you building any of these consoles for other people yet?

We actually are in the process of doing a special one right now. It’s a really cool, unique setup. It’ll have eight full input channels, with the full equalizer and everything. Then there are 16 additional inputs that are just line level that will sum into the mix buss. We also came up with a unique bussing architecture where there are two pre-busses that feed into the final mix buss. So, for instance, you could assign all of the music elements to one buss, and all of the vocal elements to the other; so they can be processed separately and then summed through the final stereo output that goes through the tube circuitry.

I actually wish that I had had the forethought to have to build it into the consoles that I have here. It can definitely be done without the A and B busses on the larger consoles, but it’s much easier to use when it’s just built in like that.

That sounds great! Thanks so much for talking to me!

You’re welcome!

For more on Eric Valentine and Undertone Audio, visit http://www.barefoot-recording.com and http://www.undertoneaudio.com.

Bo Boddie is a Grammy winning engineer/producer and composer who has worked with Santana, Everlast, Korn, Reni Lane, and many others. He just completed work on Imperial Teen’s second release on Merge Records, as well as composition work on the new ABC sitcom Don’t Trust the B@#$% in Apartment 23.

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