Absolute Sound

L E T T E R S
rich and famous.” In fact, Cello’s customers
included many people who were
neither rich nor famous, a good number
of whom had purchased what HP recommended
and were not satisfied. Many of
these people still have their Cello systems,
enjoying them almost twenty
years later, with no service required.
The bankruptcy of Cello is a truly sad
tale. In an apparent gesture of support,
one of our customers acquired a controlling
interest in 1997 and, in a totally
shocking move, decided to stop manufacturing
products. He closed the factory,
putting 20-year veterans in the street,
and reoriented Cello as a custom-installation
company selling conventional products
through ultra-costly installers. The
only reason the Cello factory closed was
that a very wealthy man chose to discard
it. I should have made a better deal that
allowed me to protect the company.
It is true that I allowed men with
hidden agendas to come into MLAS and
Cello without adequate protection for
the companies and myself. It is important
to recognize that it was my former
partners who forced MLAS through
bankruptcy, took my name for nothing,
and have tried all these years to blame
the troubles on me. These are facts, not
opinions. Mark Levinson
Taking Issue with Garcia on
Stones
Editor:
I am a longtime reader and subscriber
to The Absolute Sound. I have also
been a mastering engineer for over 22
years (www.Dongrossinger.com). I respectfully
disagree with Wayne Garcia’s review
of the recent releases of the early Rolling
Stones on vinyl [Issue 146].
I am the mastering/cutting engineer
who cut most of the releases in question.
The cutting of this project was clearly a
labor of love for ABKCO, which actually
went to three other mastering studios to
attempt the project’s completion (without
success) before coming to me, on Bob
Ludwig’s recommendation, to finally get
the job done to everyone’s satisfaction
(please excuse the pun). ABKCO went the
extra mile: Jody Klein went past release
date after release date and I would guess
over budget as well to get the best results.
There were extensive comparative
listening sessions done at Europadisk
Mastering, at ABKCO, and at other
facilities in New York City to determine
the new album’s “trueness to the original”
under the most stringent conditions.
I worked closely with Teri Landi,
ABKCO’s chief archivist, who located all
of the original masters used in the SACD
and vinyl project. I believe she is,
because of her painstaking research, the
most qualified person for an authoritative
comparison between sources.
Additionally, a complete set of vinyl test
pressings was sent for evaluation to Bob
Ludwig at his mastering facility in
Maine and were approved by him as
well. As a fanatical Stones fan myself, I
would not have let the project come to
completion without feeling that the
work was done right.
It is indeed curious that the album
mentioned by Mr. Garcia as having “a
grainy edge” which he attributes to the
D.M.M. process, Let It Bleed, was not cut
on the D.M.M. lathe, but rather to lacquer
at another studio. This would have
been easily determined if he chose to do
his research because each of the albums I
cut using the Direct Metal Mastering
process was clearly marked as such in the
lead-out groove of the album. I
cynically suspect (with no proof) that
Mr. Garcia read the press release that
stated “D.M.M. cutting” and automatically
damned the entire set of albums
with a preconceived idea of their sound.
It has also been my experience in over 22
years of cutting for vinyl on all sorts of
lathe setups, that D.M.M. is uniquely
suited for a transfer of this vibrant, yet
archival, material to the vinyl medium
because of its accuracy.
The albums were indeed cut from
the SACD masters using a custom, stateof-the-art
Ed Meitner DSD digital-toanalog
converter and a purist, analog
Neumann cutting chain to retain all of
the qualities of the recent remastering.
The entire setup was assembled exclusively
for this project. The remastering
process as done by Bob Ludwig was
extremely involved and the noise reduc-
14 THE ABSOLUTE SOUND ■ JUNE/JULY 2004