And for Coltrane, which also was not originally a gatefold, we got a really beautiful photo that was used as a promo photo for Atlantic in the day. Not to get too geeky, but in the case of The Cars, since there was an inner sleeve in the original record, we made that the gatefold art since the original album was a single album. We’re reproducing all the original artwork. Yeah, they make this satisfying cracking sound when you open the gatefold for the first time.Įxactly, yes. They’re super heavyweight, tip-on, glossy, gatefold jackets. We’re doing 180-gram and we decided that we were going to elevate the packaging to be as nice as it could be. I know Kevin Gray had mentioned that, certainly in terms of European pressing plants, Optimal is pretty much top of the game. There are US plants that are very revered and probably equally as good, but Bernie Grundman has told me several times he thinks that Optimal is the best pressing plant. I think we all feel like Optimal is certainly the most consistent, really quiet, clean, pressings. I know people are very opinionated about pressing plants, and we use a variety of pressing plants. But for this, we just thought, “Well, what if we control every aspect of this to be the highest quality – use the tapes, use Kevin Gray, and we press these at Optimal?” And we do use Kevin on other projects, too. We do other albums and we typically cut from tape when we can, so it’s not like we don’t do that in other projects. So we decided, “We’ll amplify what it is that makes the good records that we do great” – like mastering and cutting lacquers from original analog tapes, and using Kevin Gray, who I think is one of the few mastering engineers that everybody seems to know because his work is so respected, and people are anxious to get anything that he’s cut.
It was first suggested to me that we consider doing half-speed masters, and I’ve always been a little bit ambivalent about that because a lot of mastering people I talked to feel like you take a tape and you’ve got something at a low frequency that reproduces at normal speed, but when you slow it down to half-speed, those low frequencies don’t reproduce so you lose low and you probably gain some detail in other areas.īut when I found out that the current process of half-speed mastering is digital, I just didn’t want to go that route. We’ve never really done that, and we thought we should maybe try to get in that lane. Patrick Milligan: Rhino Hi-Fi came about because we’ve obviously licensed material over the years to Mobile Fidelity, Acoustic Sounds, Electric in the UK – they do these $300, limited to 300-copies kind of things. In Sheep’s Clothing: What was the reasoning behind the launch of Rhino High Fidelity? The below conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Too, Milligan talked about Rhino’s new Quadio initiative, which has been mining the Warner archives for recordings, mostly from the 1970s, released in quadraphonic (four-channel) sound.
#Rhinoceros sound driver
The curatorial driver of Rhino High Fidelity is Rhino senior director of A&R Patrick Milligan, who took time to hop on a call to discuss the imprint. “These high-end, limited-edition vinyl reissues of classic albums represent the pinnacle of sound and packaging,” boasts the label on its website. Devoted to producing remarkable albums from Warner’s massive trove of recordings, Rhino High Fidelity’s initial releases are at opposite ends of the musical spectrum: John Coltrane’s Coltrane’s Sound and The Cars, the debut album by the Boston new wave band. The Tone Poet/Blue Note Classic series, Acoustic Sounds/Impulse/Verve series, Craft’s Original Jazz Classics reboot are a few examples of such endeavors.Ī few months ago Rhino, the archival arm of Warner Music, issued the first two records from its new Rhino High Fidelity imprint. Created for audio obsessives whose quest for perfect vinyl copies of their favorite records has less to do with original pressings than with optimal sound, labels like Music Matters, Acoustic Sounds, and Electric Recording Company seem to have taken cues from the art and book collectors’ markets, where rarity and quality combine to create bliss (and value). Over the past five years, a growing number of specialized labels or sublabels have cropped up whose mission is to produce limited-run, no-expense-spared represses of classic albums. A breathtaking new vinyl version of John Coltrane’s ‘Coltrane’s Sound’ comes to the market.
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