Wojciech Pacuła: What is the status of vinyl right now?
Dirk Sommer: It is the only “hardware” music format with increasing sales figures. This makes vinyl interesting even for larger record companies. I guess vinyl will be even more important in near future. Younger people that don't care too much about Hi-Fi or High-End equipment are attracted more and more by this format. And they are not DJs, just music lovers.

Wojciech Pacuła: Please tell me about your own sommelier du son company.
Dirk Sommer: Some years ago, I was in a mastering studio and the sound of a master tape played back on a Studer A80 impressed me so much that I bought one of these tape recorders less than a month later. The sound of a good tape is much better than that of any CD and even any LP. As usual with things that I like, I started to collect Studers and Nagras. By the way, at the moment there are six analog tape recorders ready to be used. But for me it didn't make sense to collect them only, so I tried to use them for recordings. And it was much easier than we thought to make recordings of well known (jazz) musicians. Because double bass is my favorite instrument in jazz – I own one, but I do not dare to say I play it – sommelier du son first LP is a recording of a solo bass concert by Dieter Ilg, one of Europe's best bass players. To give our record producing activities a legal form, Birgit, my wife and I founded sommelier du son in late 2008 – mainly for fun. Our idea was to record and produce music we both like, doing this throughout in an all analog way and selling the LPs without any pressure. Nothing against reissues – if it's not the 100th edition of Kind of Blue –, but sommelier du son releases new recordings only. The first album simply entitled Bass was followed by LPs with Charlie Mariano and Dieter Ilg (Goodbye Pork Pie Hat) and with a Quintet around Michel Godard and Steve Swallow (Soyeusement – Live At Noirlac). In 2011 our analog activities had surprising consequences: I received a call from one of the managers of Edel. This company on the stock exchange, has several hundred employees, owns the Optimal pressing plant that manufactured all the Eterna and Amiga records in the days of the former GDR, and produces, distributes and sells books and records. I was asked to produce a series of audiophile records, later named the Triple A Series. Of course I agreed: We recorded the German trumpet player Joo Kraus & The Tales In Tones Trio performing Michael-Jackson-songs (Captured For Good), the blues/rock-singer Inga Rumpf (White Horses) and in Cooperation with Nagra Audio Leon Russell at the Montreux Jazz Festival (The Montreux Session). And now we are working on several other recording and producing projects for sommelier du son, Edel and hifistatement.

Wojciech Pacuła: How should a good vinyl record be made?
Dirk Sommer: Sommelier du son controls its vinyl releases from the all analog recording to the pressing. And the tasks we can't do on our own, we give to people we trust. Whenever possible, I take part in the process: I'm in the cutting studio when the transfer from the tape to lacquer is done. I bring the lacquer to the pressing plant myself because the time between cutting and silvering it should be as short as possible. I firmly believe that if you have good personal contact with the people who work on your project, this will add some extra percentage of quality. On the recording side, we try to use a few channels only, choose a simple but good microphone set up, avoid the use of sound controls, filters and effects if possible and mix to two tracks on location. So every mistake of the musician or the sound engineer is burned on the tape without the chance to correct it afterwards. That leads to a special concentrated atmosphere. There is no “we fix it in the mix”. You either make it right on the spot or the moment is gone. If we do a good job we can cut directly from the session tapes, without any mastering, like adding a little – analog–reverb or making subtle tonal corrections.