[TR24][OF] Antonio Forcione & Sabina Sciubba – Meet Me In London - 1997 (Jazz, Vocal)

Naim Label guitar virtuoso Antonio Forcione was touring Europe, when he chanced upon the stunning tone and control of twenty-something Sabina Sciubba at an after-show celebration in Hamburg. Upon his return to the UK, he made a beeline for Naim Audio with a spur-of-the-moment idea to take this amazing young lady into the studio. Antonio and Sabina exchanged demo tapes and song ideas until in the autumn of 1997, the two met at September Sound Studio in Twickenham to record an album of popular reinterpretations and originals. The resultant LP, Meet Me In London, became Naim's most successful album to-date and is to this day cherished by audiophiles and music lovers the world over.

As our most treasured album, MMIL was the perfect subject for launching Naim's first Super Hi Def 24bit 192kHz download. Far from being a simple remaster, this multi-track conversion, remix and remaster at 192kHz took months of hard work to preserve the sonic and emotive qualities of this fascinating album at some of the UK's finest studios.

Naim invited the legendary British record producer and engineer Tony Platt, whose musical CV includes The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley, AC/DC, Gary Moore and Buddy Guy to undertake the challenging project.

"I was absolutely delighted to be asked to oversee this remixing project for several reasons. Most notably because I have been a fan of Antonio's playing for some time but also because the chance to open the subtle nuances of such wonderful music with a high resolution remix doesn't come along every day!

Normally, in my role of producer and engineer, I am trying to record and mix music to sound good through the worst possible playback situation so I had to re-adjust my perspective slightly without letting myself becoming so carried away with the process that I lost sight of the album as a musical work. This was occasionally difficult because the world of 192 KHz is relatively uncharted and the technical challenges kept us very much on our toes.

However, I think we have stayed true to the original whilst releasing aspects of the performances that were hitherto not so clear and accessible. I find this version to be extremely listenable because the space and perspective this format allows enables the listener to really enter the room with the musicians."

Tony Platt, Platinum Tones

The Technical Process

The original album was recorded on 24-track Ampex tape in analogue and without any Dolby noise reduction at September Sound in Twickenham, by Peter Williams. The playback of the analogue masters and capturing as 24bit digital WAV files was being undertaken at the famous Strongroom Studios in London. Fortunately, the master tapes were found to be in good condition and did not require any oven baking to consolidate the oxide layer - a problem that can plague old masters.
The process of capturing the digital WAV files in 24bit resolution at 192kHz in Pro-Tools began by playing the original masters on a Studer A800 MKII analogue tape machine. The A800 is universally regarded as one of the most faithful and accurate 2-inch reel-to-reel tape machines ever built.

The playback feed from the Studer was carefully aligned to the original tapes using the test tones recorded at the time, was routed into a Digidesign analogue to digital converter and monitored via Digidesign D-Control ES mixing console. This state-of-the-art console is fully integrated with Pro-Tools HD, enabling control of the recording to be undertaken either via the console or from within Pro-Tools itself. The captured 24bit/192kHz WAV sound files were saved to hard disk.

The next step of the process was to convert the digital files back into analogue to enable them to be mixed on a Neve analogue mixing console. Why not just use the original analogue master on the Neve and avoid all the A-D and D-A conversion? Given their 14-year age it was considered that the tapes wouldn't have survived the repeated playback required during mixing. Making a duplicate analogue master and mixing from that would have introduced additional tape noise, which would have been obvious on 24-bit/192kHz playback. Alternatively mixing on the Digidesign console entirely in the digital domain would have meant using certain plug-ins that only operate at 16- or 24bit/44.1 or 48 kHz and would have necessitated down-conversion of the digital signal. None of these other options were considered desirable from a sound quality point of view.

The Neve was chosen for mixing because of its superb sound quality. The Apogee Symphony was used post mix to convert back to digital as it interfaces directly with Pro-Tools HD and sounds fabulous and Tony did not want to feed the audio back through the same converter twice.

Mastering again presented questions in whether to convert to analogue to apply final EQ and limiting or to stay within digital but with a smaller choice of tools. Listening tests determined that staying in digital was the obvious choice - a decision made easier by the availability of the excellent Sonnox plug-ins that are capable of supporting 24bit/192kHz. The plug-ins were used to add slight touches of EQ and gentle limiting to maximise the overall musical presentation.

As Antonio Forcione says "Remixing Meet Me in London was a very rewarding experience. Listening back to it now is like observing a starry night through a very powerful telescopic lens - suddenly you see things you didn't realise were there in the first place ... Amazing!!"