Sold Date: March 3, 2017
Start Date: February 2, 2017
Final Price: $45.00 (USD)
Seller Feedback: 17
Buyer Feedback: 78

JAMES II/James Leary

VTL 005


2 x LP (4 Sides)



NEW and Factory SEALED.


Audiophile 180 Gram Virgin Vinyl.


Very Special All Tube Audiophile Recording.

Every single piece of equipment in the recording chain

was entirely tube and entirely analog.


No equalization of any kind was employed.



Produced and Engineered by David Manley of VTL.


ViTaL Music / A Division of Vacuum Tube Logic of America Inc.


Released in 1992 and Long Out Of Print.


Shipping will be combined.


*** ABOUT THIS RECORDING ***

The heart and soul of any recorded sound must surely be the acoustical properties
of the room or hall itself, and the microphones being used within that acoustic. I
designed the acoustics of the VTL studio in Chino, California, for 'purist' recording-
techniques only, with all the music played 'live' and captured straight onto 2 stereo
tracks.

Measuring 40 ft x 30 ft with a cathedral-peak ceiling height of 16 ft, the entire
acoustic treatment is finished in Oregon Oak and Douglas Fir timbers with continuous
Helmholtz tuned resonance absorbing slots. The floor is rubber over high-density
particle board over concrete with a resultant reverberation time of approximately 1 1/2 seconds,
providing a totally neutral and resonance-free acoustic.

Every single piece of equipment in the (entirely tube, entirely analogue) recording
chain is of my design and is built in our factory in Chino. Somewhat unusually, this
includes the microphones themselves. The MANLEY 'GOLD REFERENCE' STEREO
CONDENSER microphones is the centre-piece and the only microphone used for this
recording. No other additional microphones were used at all. The Manley microphone
is of the so-called 'large capsule' variety, and has a diameter of 1 1/4 inches
with 3-micron gold-deposition Mylar diaphragms. The stereo version has one fixed
capsule and one rotatable capsule, which offers a continuously variable 'pick-up
pattern'. I most often choose the 'figure of 8' in the classic Blumlein coincident
crossed-pair mode. For our own recordings, we use custom version of the
"REFERENCE GOLD' microphone. The entire vacuum tube amplification is built
into the microphone body (8 triodes in the stereo microphone!), and no transformer
coupling or external amplification is used at all.

The microphone is connected via VTL 'Quad' double-screened cable right into a
unity-gain mixer for level-setting and metering. The mixer is base around the MANLEY
REFERENCE preamplifier and can mix up to 10 microphones into 2 busses. Mixing
of microphones is achieved by each input having its own dedicated grid, and not by
the usual 'opt and buildout resistor' method as found in everyy console in use in the
recording industry.

No equalization of any kind is employed (although we do have MANLEY PULTECS
and SHELF-PARAMETRIC EQUALIZERS on hand to patch in if needed, say, with
electronic based instruments that might be played on a rock or pop session). The
patch-bay itself is comprised of audiophile-quality 4mm silver plated banana-plugs,
all fixed wiring in the patch-bay and control room is VTL 'White wire' - 3 x pure copper
and 2 x silver cores in Teflon.

We fully updated the mechanics in the 1/2 inch 2-track Studer C37 analogue tape
deck, which contains only our Manley pure tube circuitry. At 15 ips this machine is
flat from 20 HZ to 20KHZ +/-.2 dB. Hours and hours and hours of listening convinced
us to make the CD releases from the analogue master tapes (transferred
through our MANLEY 20-bit ANALOGUE to DIGITAL CONVERTER) in preference
to using simultaneously-recorded digital masters we'd made at the sessions
(also directly recorded to both DASH and DAT storage media through our converter).
These recording sound pretty darn good, but without the naturally rich and
faithfully sonorous accuracy of analogue recording at its best.

AGFA type 468 tape was used at 200 nano-Webers, but run somewhat on the 'hot'
side (+5dB) without any kind of noise reduction. Again, we chose to accept a small
amount of tape hiss, in preference to the sterility and inherent phase-shift distortion
produced by (sodid-state) noise reduction.