With the demand for lacquer disc cutting at Bernie Grundman Mastering in Hollywood consistently high over the past couple of years, the facility has added Cut-2, a second cutting room, tothe facility’s seven mastering studios in Hollywood, California.
‘Our primary cutting room is equipped to handle any full-service mastering job but a good portion of our cutting projects are for albums which have already been equalised and mastered and only require an expert, high fidelity transfer to lacquer,’ explains mastering engineer Scott Sedillo, ‘So this second room is streamlined for that purpose.’
‘This new room is highly simplified, so that it’s more straightforward,’ says Bernie Grundman. ‘It’s the result of all of our experimenting in the first room and is set up to be direct from the signal source right to the cutting system resulting in the closest to what the master sounds like on the disc.’
The lathe in the new Cut-2 studio is a reconditioned Scully Lathe with BGM’s custom head suspension. The HAECO SC-2 stereo cutting head was rebuilt by Jacob Horowitz of History of Recorded Sound, and is fitted with a diamond cutting tool. The lathe is supported by a pneumatic table for isolation and the Compudisk CD-20 system provides variable pitch and depth for maximising groove geometry.
The console is an audiophile grade Preview/Program disk cutting desk with only a single, discrete amplifier in the signal path. All analogue filters and de-essers are bypass-able with coin silver switches. There is no patchbay, with all connections direct. The centre section provides metering and monitor controls. Tannoy SGM-10B loudspeaker monitors are driven by modified Yamaha P2002 power amplifiers. All electronics use custom BGM power supplies.
The adjacent sidecar contains an in-house built digital audio workstation running WaveLab and Pro Tools. An Antelope Trinity word clock unit is resolved with a BGM custom 10MHz time base generator. Clients have the choice of Lavry DA-N5 or JCF Audio Latte D/A converters for audio playback.
Grundman attributes much of his success to CTO Beno May, with whom he originally worked at A&M Studios before both went independent at BGM. ‘Without Beno, we wouldn’t be where we are today,’ he says. ‘It’s the combination of Beno’s technical expertise and my mastering experience – I wouldn’t be able to get the sound and quality that I’m looking for without Beno’s imagination and ability to fabricate the unique tools that we use here.’
