The following article is from the US audiophile magazine Stereophile. It majors on some of the sound issues, but I hope will be of general interest.
The Compact Disc needed a big win—and fast. During its first few years in the marketplace (footnote 1), the format wasn't living up to lofty expectations. Part of the problem maybe was that most of the CDs released up to that time came from analog sources.
But then on May 17, 1985, the CD's savior arrived: Brothers in Arms, the fifth studio album release by British rock stalwarts Dire Straits. Trumpeted as one of the first "full digital recordings" in the pop/rock oeuvre, Brothers in Arms was an undeniable smash international hit from a band that had struck it big already. Exactly 40 years later, it remains a benchmark recording and a top seller.
Is there anyone out there who doesn't know this album, with that rowdy introduction leading into the huge, cynical No.1 single, the oft-misinterpreted "Money for Nothing"? That of course was followed by the lovelorn travelog "So Far Away," "Walk of Life," a jaunty rockabilly shuffle, then the eerily foreboding title track. Brothers in Arms was the first album to sell a million CDs, and it has since sold at least 29 million more worldwide, nine million RIAA-certified copies in the US alone. Seizing their platinum opportunity, Philips sponsored the band's hugely successful 200-date 1985–'86 world tour (footnote 2). The album spent nine weeks at #1 on the US Billboard 200 chart and 14 weeks in the UK. On the enduring strength of Brothers in Arms, Dire Straits strode the boards as international renowned superstars until they called it quits in 1992.
"Brothers in Arms has certain sonic qualities and qualifications that helped it reach critical mass," Mark Knopfler, the Straits' chief songwriter, lead guitarist, and lead vocalist, told me for this Stereophile feature (footnote 3). "Phonogram was our record label parent (footnote 4). Philips owned them and made CD players, and they put those two eventualities together. I think what happened was, people would walk into a hi-fi shop to hear a CD player, and they would hear Brothers in Arms on those CD players. That sold a lot of CD players—and we sold a lot of CDs (footnote 5). Marry that with how people were feeling about the new CD technology, the Steve Barron video for 'Money for Nothing' with those new computer graphics, and a couple of hit singles, and you got an album that turned into a big snowball going down a very long hill."
Sounds good—but even downhill on a shiny low-friction CD, it wasn't the easiest sledding.
Brothers in SPARS
The consumer-electronics industry took immediate notice of the just-in-time arrival of Brothers in Arms. "There was an issue back in the early days of CD," observed Marc Finer, who served as Sony's director of product communications during the CD's gestation and the ensuing launch period. "To most critical listeners, many of the initial releases just didn't sound that good. ... Going back to October 1, 1982, when the first 25 CD titles went on sale in Japan, they were, for the most part, analog remasters. The question about the source material, and the provenance of the recordings, was so critical in the pro-audio community."
Brothers in Arms delivered what many golden-eared pros and music fans were waiting for. "The recording itself was phenomenal," Finer told me. "It was a great recording by a great band, and it was Mark Knopfler's vision that drove it. ... This was the proof piece. Brothers in Arms was the first all-digital recording that delivered on the promise of digital, and it totally turned around some of the greatest skeptics about CD from a sound-quality or an audiophile standpoint. It was a night-and-day difference in terms of how those previous CDs had been perceived in the marketplace, particularly in the pop and rock genres."
Not everyone was sold. "For analog-philes, DDD was the mark of the Antichrist. More than a few true believers would rather have root canal than be subjected to the horrors of an all-digital recording—I'm not kidding," noted Ken C. Pohlmann, author of The Compact Disc Handbook, in an interview (footnote 6). Pohlmann told me that Brothers in Arms was one of the first albums to be multitracked digitally on Sony digital tape and mixed to DAT—digital audio tape. Hence, the original 1985 CD garnered the "full digital" DDD designation, according to the SPARS code requirements at the time." (footnote 7)
Why did Brothers in Arms do so well on CD? "For starters, the LP version wasn't helped by the fact that it was abridged, running about 10 minutes less than the CD," Pohlmann continued, "but I think the bigger reason is that Brothers in Arms dispelled the early notion that CDs were 'cold' and 'harsh'; Brothers in Arms is anything but. Any listener—even with those imperfect, first-generation CD players—could hear the sound was warm and smooth, and it was clean. This was unprecedented. LPs had warm and smooth figured out, but 'clean' was very much a relative quality. Brothers in Arms on CD emphatically had all three. The CD allowed listeners to relish every detail of Mark Knopfler's heartfelt vocals and precise fingerwork on his guitar. It's a cliché, but the Brothers in Arms CD was like you were there. One could argue that it lifted the analog veil and revealed Knopfler's true talent for the first time—and his career has benefited ever since." (footnote
In interviews, Knopfler's bandmates needed to step back to appreciate the album's impact. "When we were making it, we had no idea it would be heralded in the way that it has been," said keyboardist Guy Fletcher, who still frequently works with Knopfler (footnote 9). "It was quite a difficult process recording it because we were using new technology. We were using one of the very early digital ½" tapes, and we did have some problems with FM synthesis and other things not playing back properly, so it was fraught with issues and trepidation. But I do have to say that Neil Dorfsman did the most tremendous job making it sound the way it does, because Brothers in Arms is a completely unique album in terms of the way it sounds."
Alan Clark, Fletcher's partner on keys, observed, "A big difference between digital and analog is, what makes analog sound the way it does is distortion—even the slightest amount of distortion—and digital lacks that distortion. Digital can be a bit clinical, but the trick is to add distortion to the digital. That's where a good engineer comes in, and Neil Dorfsman did it right for Brothers in Arms."
Ride across the studio
Recording sessions commenced in November 1984 at AIR Studios in Montserrat, a British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean. Neil Dorfsman, the engineer for the band's 1982 hit, Love Over Gold, repeated that role for Brothers in Arms and was now also Knopfler's coproducer (footnote 10).
It was Knopfler's idea to go digital. At the time, AIR boasted a Neve 8078 console. The two coproducers were also eager to deploy Sony's highly touted PCM-3324 Digital DASH 24-track recorder, which used ½" tape and made 16/44.1/48 recording and playback possible.
Recording Brothers in Arms was an intimate affair. The tightly quartered 20' × 25' recording space at AIR Montserrat was sparse, with limited isolation options. Guitarist/vocalist Knopfler set up shop with original bassist John Illsley, drummer Terry Williams, and Clark on piano and Hammond B-3, along with then-newest band addition Fletcher, who sported a rig comprising a Yamaha DX1 synthesizer, some Roland keyboards, and a Synclavier. Follow-up sessions took place later at Power Station in New York City, partially because three tracks were lost to defective digital tape. At Power Station, an SSL E Series desk joined in with that all-important Sony PCM-3324 24-track recorder, mainly for choice overdubs like Michael Brecker's expressive sax solo on the jazzified "Your Latest Trick"—itself briefly lost in the digital ether but thankfully retrieved—along with brother Randy Brecker's trumpet on "Trick" and Mike Mainieri's vibes on "Why Worry."
Longtime King Crimson/Peter Gabriel bassist Tony Levin was enlisted to add Chapman Stick—and possibly bass (footnote 11)—to "Why Worry." Levin told Stereophile, "I came in for a few hours, for just the one song. I'd worked before with Mark and Neil on the film score for Local Hero (footnote 12), and I knew how talented Mark was with his distinctive guitar approach and great writing. It was nice to be involved with such a special album."
Jack Sonni had met Knopfler while working at Rudy's Music Stop on 48th Street in New York City, and the two became fast friends. Knopfler asked Sonni to play the blistering guitar synth heard on "The Man's Too Strong," and he also joined the band on guitar for the entire 1985–'86 tour. "Brothers in Arms is a sonic delight, no doubt," Sonni told me in a phone conversation we had back in July 2013. "I'm so honored to be a part of that album. It's a real artistic achievement." (footnote 13)
Footnote 1: The world's first CD made its debut on August 17, 1982. It was manufactured at a Philips factory in Langenhagen, just outside Hanover, Germany.
Footnote 2: I saw the Brothers in Arms tour at Poplar Creek in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, on August 3, 1985. The face value of my pavilion-level ticket for that show was $15.
Footnote 3: Knopfler and I conducted a lengthy interview in 2024 about his 10th solo studio album, One Deep River (British Grove/Blue Note). We also discussed Brothers in Arms in anticipation of this article.
Footnote 4: In Europe and other international territories, Brothers in Arms was released on the Phonogram label Vertigo, but it was released on Warner Bros. in the United States.
Footnote 5: I bought my first CD the night I bought my first CD player. That CD was Brothers in Arms. Until now, I didn't know I was a Brothers in Arms cliché.—Jim Austin
Footnote 6: Pohlmann is professor emeritus of the music engineering department at the University of Miami. He also wrote the monthly Signals column for Stereo Review starting in 1982 and continuing long after 2000, when Stereo Review became Sound & Vision. Signals ran all the way to S&V's final print edition, October/November 2024.
Footnote 7: Strictly speaking, there was an analog step. Mastering was credited to John Dent at The Sound Clinic in London and Bob Ludwig at Masterdisk in NYC. Ludwig mastered Brothers in Arms for CD; the mastering was done in the analog domain.
Footnote 8: A mildly contrarian perspective: My memory of my first evening with my new CD player (Magnavox, maybe?) and Brothers in Arms is surprisingly vivid. This would have been several months after the album's release. I had owned the LP for a while and knew it front to back. The absence of hiss and groove noise was something completely new, and I was enthralled. But in my memory today there's a glaze to the sound, which I don't hear now when I listen today to exactly the same CD. It must have been that cheap CD player.—Jim Austin
Footnote 9: Fletcher served as Knopfler's coproducer on One Deep River.
Footnote 10: Dorfsman also engineered Knopfler's 1983 Local Hero soundtrack.
Footnote 11: It's likely true, as widely reported, that Illsley broke both elbows in a fall while jogging near the Central Park reservoir and had to be replaced, by Levin and also Neil Jason of the Saturday Night Live house band. Levin and Jason are both acknowledged in the liner notes with "special thanks." The band, though, has never officially acknowledged Illsley's injury.
Footnote 12: Levin played bass on two Local Hero tracks: "Smooching" and "Going Home: Theme of the Local Hero."
Footnote 13: Sonni passed away in August 2023, at 68. He had been playing in DSL: Dire Straits Legacy alongside fellow former Straits bandmembers Alan Clark, Phil Palmer, Mel Collins, and Danny Cummings. DSL resumed touring earlier this year.
