Were vinyl constraints considered during the mixing stage?

Well I know for a fact that FZ always kept vinyl restraints in consideration! A great example being the Apostrophe album. There are so many edits and dubs in that thing that he knew for the BEST fidelity on vinyl he had to keep the times low. Hence, each side is only 15-16 minutes making for one very short CD.....BUT the sounds he acheived are amazing! I use this album for testing equipment. SO many little nuances going on.....FRANK!!

 

There's the story about Paperback Writer and how they had to keep an eye on the bass levels so "the needle wouldn't skip" !

 

Up until the 80's Every responsible engineer thought of( and was required to)the eventual cutting when they were recording and mixing. Very often because they would be the one walking down the hall at the same studio the next day to cut the lacquers.

 

I thought that's why bass instruments were usually mixed to center.

 

IMO there was one consideration I remember. Effects that had a lot of out of phase content could not be cut well on vinyl so that had to be a consideration of sorts. I don't remember ever worrying about frequency limitations. Sure bass could be hard to track, but it had to be really loud and quick to really be a big issue. There were not too many cannon shots in pop music. Loud bass was often more or a problem with underpowered playback systems than with phono tracking. Plus if the bass was that loud, the mix would sound out of proportion. And of course the mastering engineer could easily tailor frequency response.

Now there was a fair amount of consideration during mixing to insure good mono compatibility, but that's another issue.

 

I thought that it was always the actual final mix-down master that was (preferably) used. Preferably, because sometimes a dupe might be used instead. Steve corrected us some time back that the RIAA curve is never applied to a tape before getting sent to the mastering house. So there is no "LP RIAA pre-equalized" tape that is used to make the lacquers. The RIAA curve is applied at the cutting stage while the master tape is being played by the equipment doing the cutting.

Also, as I thought I understood it now, the "bass summing" is also done at the mastering stage by the mastering engineer - not the recording or mixing engineer, unless that's just how they wanted to mix it ahead of time.