"They were shooting in high def and they had these huge computer servers on the floor. The fan noise was so loud that they couldn’t use the ambient mics. It was all close‐miked. It’s a very cool record unto itself. Geographically, it’s a revisiting of the process but sonically it’s not.”
The passing of time has found The Trinity Session become revered by audiophiles due to its purist recording approach and remarkable sound. “I go in an audiophile shop in Benghazi,” says Moore, “and guess what they’re playing? I’m down at the CES [in Las Vegas] and guess what they’re playing to show off speakers or amps and stuff? The Trinity Session. I mean, it’s a ubiquitous record amongst the audiophile industry.”
Nearly three decades on from the release of The Trinity Session, Moore has remastered the album for an upcoming vinyl release on audiophile label Acoustic Sounds. “I had to go through hoops,” he admits. “I had to find a professional duplicating Betamax machine because they’re the only machines out there that allow you to access word clock and
video blacking. One thing I did was actually get the levels proper between songs.”
For the remaster, Moore employed
his AudioCube system. “They’re really advanced,” he points out. “The plug‐ins I’m using are almost 10 years old, but they’re still better than anything out there ’cause they’re 128‐bit. There’s lots of EQ on the remaster. There was a lot of sibilance on the original recording, a lot of low‐frequency thumping — not musical, but feet hitting the mic stands and causing a lot of low‐frequency distortion. So a lot of that was... not removed totally, but addressed. A lot of the sibilance was addressed ’cause one of the best de‐essers in the world is the AudioCube de‐esser. It actually doesn’t try to remove all the ‘s’, it tries to comb filter it out, leaving some of the ‘s’ in there. The sound quality of the new master is amazing. There are plans for it to come out on SACD as well. People who’ve heard it have been blown away.”
Ultimately, Peter J Moore has a simple theory why ‘Sweet Jane’ and The Trinity Session have endured
down the years.
“We were trying to reach back into the ’50s,” he concludes. “Them, musically. Me, recording technically. So we both had the same aesthetic. We wanted to return to a previous time, and I think that’s what makes it magical.”
the end
October 2015 / www.soundonsound.com