Stevie Wonder, ‘Superstition’ and the Immersive Music Pioneers, Part 1

In 1972, Stevie Wonder, my producing/ engineering partner Malcolm Cecil, and I were looking for a studio in Los Angeles that we could call home. Gary Kellgren and Chris Stone, proprietors of the Record Plant, offered us Studio B.

We had a detailed conversation about our needs for Stevie and our epic synthesizer, TONTO (The Original Neo Timbral Orchestra), and they offered to rebuild the studio to our specifications, including space for TONTO and a separate and secure tape library for Stevie’s masters, if we booked the room for a year. It was exactly what we were looking for.

The plan was to upgrade Studio B to support the then-emerging Quadraphonic format, which offered a way to put a four-channel discrete master on a vinyl phonograph record. Quad was becoming a significant innovation in the audio industry at the time and was being embraced by several major labels, including EMI, Decca and RCA, as well as by recording artists such as Pink Floyd, The Beatles and The Who.

None of us had any experience with it, but the Record Plant always had to have the latest and greatest of everything first, so we happily dove headlong into the unknown.

When the Record Plant opened in 1969, Tom Hidley, who was then the facility’s chief engineer, built the original Studio B as a stereo control room. It wasn’t huge, but it was big enough. We didn’t realize then that its smallness served Quad monitoring quite well. It had wrap-around windows and Hidley’s specially designed monster audio monitors flush-mounted in soffits, almost at ear level. They later became known commercially as Westlake Studio Monitors, and they are still in use today all over the world.

With Gary’s blessing, we invited John Storyk, the architect and acoustician who designed Electric Lady Studios in New York, as well as TONTO’s unique housings, to join our dream team. It was the first and last time that Hidley and Storyk, the future giants in studio design, would work together. The room was a gem. It seemed that every record we did in it turned to gold!

THE QUAD CONTROL ROOM

The physical space was relatively easy to set up for Quad monitoring by putting two speakers in the back, just like in the front. The room already had a “compression” sloped ceiling because that was a part of Hidley’s original 1969 design. We constructed a “second-floor” bass trap built over the back half of the control room ceiling that was cantilevered over the hallway behind the control room’s back wall, where the new rear speaker soffits stuck out into the hall. We had to put padding on them because they were at ear level! That one move invisibly doubled the cubic volume of the control room.

The good news was that the sloped ceiling and the additional trapping gave us an impressively powerful, phase-coherent, clean bottom end from the eight 15-inch JBL full-frequency drivers, two in each cabinet; a compression midrange driver; four JBL 2405 slot tweeters; and White 1/3-octave EQs on each speaker, which was essential for room tuning.

The bad news was that the sloped ceiling and the parallel sloped console surface created a subtle comb-filter effect at the mixing position. It was a slight reflection of the audio from the high-frequency waves bouncing off the console. It wasn’t apparent initially, and Malcolm and I only noticed it months later when we started mixing. We solved the problem by gaffer-taping a moving blanket over our mix position at the console.

Gary and Chris purchased a new API 16-bus console with a simple Quad monitoring section. The 550A EQs were warm and easy to use, and I loved that console. The master 16-track and 2-track tape recorders were 3M M79s running at 15 ips, then with Dolby noise reduction when we later upgraded to 24 tracks. The quality of the sound from these records speaks for itself to this day.

RECORDING AND MIXING IN QUAD

Sansui had just debuted the QS system for encoding Quad sound on vinyl records in March 1971, so that’s what was used; there weren’t a lot of competitors. My first experience feeling the power of immersive/surround audio was the QS Quad mix of “Superstition” that Malcolm and I did with Stevie in Studio B in 1972. The mix was printed on an Ampex 440B 4-track tape recorder, and the master sounded the way we intended.

Although Quadraphonic records enjoyed a brief blip of fame, QS was not successful due to its technical limitations, the primary one being that it could not store truly discrete analog audio on vinyl, only providing around 3 dB of separation. This meant that the four channels were partially independent and it compromised the listening experience. Additionally, specialized equipment was needed for playback, which further hindered its adoption. The technology was new and untested, and it was a failure in the marketplace, so the QS system was abandoned.

Classic Tracks: Booker T. & The MG’s’ “Time Is Tight”

And that’s when I began thinking about why my brain knew where a sound was coming from. I found out that it’s due to Head-Related Transfer Function, or HRTF, and I realized that vectors could be as powerful as pitch and duration.

Basically, the unique, highly asymmetric construction of the human outer ear—and the fact that we have two of them, plus our very efficient brain to process the input—allows for a rapid and precise determination of where a sound is generated. The difference in distances (and therefore arrival times) and slight sound coloration by the ears and the head is HRTF, and it varies slightly from person to person due to ear and head shape, as well as the distance between the ears.

Almost by accident, I had discovered the principles behind what we now call immersive audio. It became of immense value in the control room for monitoring during the recording process.

COME BACK TOMORROW FOR THE CONCLUSION!

Robert Margouleff is a record producer, synthesizer pioneer and Grammy Award-winning engineer known for his co-producing and programming on Stevie Wonder’s classic albums Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale.