Boppin' Bob (bob Jones) (mastering Engineer)

[Guest Paul]

Mastering engineer Bob Jones died, age 65, on April 12th. This obituary is from TimesOnline...

BOB JONES.

Look closely at the centre circle of many vinyl albums and you will find the personal mark of the mastering engineer. Some are a "Porky Prime Cut", other bear the name of "Herbie Jr", while some of the highest quality releases have the tag "Boppin' Bob".

The man responsible for those was Bob Jones, an engineer whose remarkable mastering abilities earned him praise from record companies in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. He was also a devoted fan of popular and classical music who, for a short time, ran his own record label.

Born in Gloucester in 1944, Jones started work as an engineer for Decca records. He had been there a few years when he was offered a similar job by a Spanish recording company. While in Spain he married his wife, Norma.

Returning to London with his wife and two young boys in the 1970s he worked for Pye record company studios, where his habit of wiggling his legs along to the music he was mastering earned him the nickname "Boppin'Bob". Soon this name would appear on the release he was mastering for reissue labels such as Charly.

He then moved to the De Lane Lea studios in Wembley, North London, later known as CTS, where he began to work for Ace Records, the reissue company renowned for securing the best sources for its reissue material.

Ted Carroll, the co-founder of Ace, was aware that Jones shared his tastes and standards: "Bob was a big fan of authentic Fifties rock'n'roll. This made him the ideal person to cut records from that era. He understood how the records were meant to sound and he took the greatest care in

EQ-ing each master to achieve the best possible results. Bob was a perfectionist and impressed upon us the importance of working from the best possible tape sources, something that we were already very much aware of."

Jones did similar work for RCA (including some Elvis Presley releases) and Bear Family Records, the award-winning German reissue label. He had met Richard Weize, the label's owner, at a Soho caf where a group of rock'n'roll experts got together every Monday evening to discuss matrix numbers and other esoteric record facts.

One Bear Family project, a box-set of the complete recorded work of Lonnie Donegan, obliged Jones to scour London in an effort to find rare master tapes and acetates.

He also found time to start his own reissue label, Detour Records, which issued several albums of material by artists such as Champion Jack Dupree, all of them expertly re-mastered.

In 1991 Jones helped to set up Sound Mastering, Ace's own mastering studio at Harlesden, North London, where he continued to work for Ace and Bear Family plus other reissue labels such as Rockstar and Magnum Force. He left Sound Mastering to go freelance, but continued to pursue his musical passions.

He was a lifelong record collector and his tastes ran from classical music to rock'n'roll. So big was his record collection that it took over every room in his flat, including the kitchen and the bathroom, and visitors often found it impossible to find anywhere to sit. He was also an avid fan of the US guitarist Duane Eddy, attending every one of the yearly fan club meetings for Duane Eddy fans for the past 21 years as well as re-mastering reissues of the artist's work.

Jones leaves a wife and two sons.

Bob Jones, mastering engineer, was born on February 18, 1944. He died of cancer on April 12, 2009, aged 65.

Edited May 19, 2009 by Paul