Sound Affair Mastering
Precision Mastering for Vinyl, Digital, Streaming & CD
Completing the Circle: Sound Affair Mastering Back Home, Back to Vinyl
By STEVE HARVEY Santa Ana, CA - After more than three decades in the industry, Ron Leeper has come full circle, once again mastering to vinyl, and in the facility that he first established in 1978. Located 30 miles south of Los Angeles, Leeper opened Sound Affair in 1978 as a multitrack recording studio after working as a mastering engineer at Hank Waring’s DCT Recorders in Hollywood and Quad Teck studios in Los Angeles, where he cut disks on Neumann and Scully lathes. He previously studied audio recording and mastering at the Institute of Audio Research in New York City. “I’m very thankful that I was trained and mentored by Hank; he used to be a cutter at Capitol in the ’60s, mastering all the hits,” he says.
Mastering Engineer Ron Leeper in between Sound Affair's Ampex ATR-102 tape deck and Scully lathe.
Sound Affair went through some changes as the years progressed, according to Leeper. “In keeping with the changing tides in the industry, I opened it as a small 16-track room in the mid-’70s, then in 1980-81, I moved everything out and turned it into 24-track room, because that was getting more and more popular. I ran that for quite a while, doing all kinds of projects. “In the early ’90s, I could see the dawn of home recording coming with ADAT. The calls were getting fewer and fewer, so I had to do something. You go full circle sometimes in this business; I got back into mastering, which is where I started years ago when I worked in Hollywood, with CD tape, and now vinyl.” In its annual report on the record business, published in March, the Re¬ cording Industry Association of America (RIAA) noted that physical format sales declined from 2013 to 2014. But drill down deeper and you will find that vinyl singles essentially doubled in revenue share during the period, from S3 million to 85. 9 million. LPs and