Back in December of 1986, I flew to Denver, Colorado to interview the great recording engineer Bill Porter. Part II of that interview has already been published on musicangle.com.divided into multiple parts If you search Porter’s name you’ll find it. Why was part II published before part I? Don't ask! As promised, here’s part I of part I— MF

Note: The intro that follows was written in 1986

Face it: Too many of today’s popular music recordings are garbage. I just slipped Bryan Adams’s new album Into The Fire on the Oracle. It’s a Bob Clearmountain co-production (with Bryan Adams). Although he’s responsible for popularizing the Yamaha NS 10M as a nearfield studio monitor (thereby earning him a place in my Hi-fi Villains’ Hall of Shame [along with Dr. Amar Bose]), Clearmountain also co-engineered (along with Rhett Davies) and mixed Roxy Music’s Avalon, a musical classic and one of the finest recordings in the modern rock ear. So I was hopeful.

A few bars into the first cut, it became obvious that the recording of Adams’s new album is “state of the art” awful. It’s ridiculously bright and harsh, wit thin, pinched, spitty sounding vocals fro a singer whose pipes produce a much warmer, fuller sound. The drums sound synthetic and pathetic. No bite to the cymbals. No kick to the bass drum. No snap to the snare.

The whole thing is smeared across a dimensionless, washed-out something or other. I won’t dignify it with the word “soundstage.” It must have taken a lot of hard work to produce a recording that could reduce my stereo to sounding like a rental-car radio.

What does this have to do with Bill Porter? Fortunately, very little. Porter, whose engineering career covers over 7000 recording sessions, has a sonic track record that puts him pretty much at the head of the popular-music recording field.

Those 7000-plus dates yielded an incredible 300 chart records, 49 top 10, 11 Number Ones, and 37 gold records. In one month of 1960, Porter-engineered recordings accounted for 15 of Billboard’s top 100 singles.

Porter’s odds of achieving such pre-eminence were not hurt by the artists he recorded, who include Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison, Chet Atkins, Floyd Cramer, Homer and Jethro, Ann-Margaret, and Buddy Rich. But only those of you who have never heard, or seriously considered, his work could deny his importance in their recording career successes.

The “Porter Sound” (if something so utterly neutral could be described as a “sound”) is ultra-dynamic and extremely wide-band. Bass is of the intestine-shaking variety. The top end seems to sail on into infinity, without a trace of the pinched, sandy glare found on many of today’s productions. The resulting “see-through,” natural presentation of vocal and instrumental timbre occurs on a soundstage that is cinemascopic and deep, with individual instruments and voices exhibiting holograph-like solidity.

While Porter went for natural sound, he was not against pulling a sonic sleight of hand: As he pointed out, the big soundstage, was, in fact, a grand illusion. RCA’s Nashville Studio B, where Porter did most of his great work, was a smallish, problematic room. In addition, equipment in the studio was primitive by today’s standards, making the results that much more astonishing. Regardless of where or what he was recording, Porter got that natural, open sound. He got it out of RCA’s studio, Monument’s, and his own. You can hear it on tumultuous rock and roll recordings (Elvis), on easy-listening instrumental country music often referred to as “countrypolitan” (Chet Atkins), and on vocal fluff (the Browns).

The sound Porter achieves is so pleasing, you find yourself listening to music you otherwise might dismiss. Like the Browns. Their sentiment is one big, sappy Hallmark card, yet I listened through both sides of The Browns Sing Their Hits (RCA LSP 2260), mesmerized by the natural, “chest and heady” tone and three-dimensionality of each voice and the clearly delineated space in which the group sang.

The calendar may be moving forward, but comparing any of the Porter recordings I’m fortunate enough to own with the new Bryan Adams album (or most contemporary pop recordings) makes clear that the state of the art has regressed back to the sonic cave-painting days.

How did Porter do it? I thought it would be worth the trip to the University of Colorado, Denver (where the 55 year old St. Louis native teaches recording engineering), to ask him in person.