Reference Tracks: Warner Music’s Billy Fields Tests His Stereo With A Rare Lee Morgan Record

“We Are Analog Creatures”

Welcome to Reference Tracks, a series from KLH where we talk to people in the music and audio business about what songs, albums and artists they listen to when testing out a stereo or speakers.

Billy Fields, VP and Vinyl Strategist at Warner Music (dream job, anyone?), has been in the vinyl game longer than just about anyone in the major label space. He was an advocate for vinyl as far back as the early 2000’s, encouraging Warner Music Group (WMG) to continue making vinyl at a time when the industry was focused on CDs—and eventually, streaming. He’s one of the premier vinyl evangelists out there today; hyping up plants, engineers and labels he believes are doing vinyl the right way. 

As a founding member of the Vinyl Alliance, he’s working to ensure the vinyl boom continues.

 “The hope with the Alliance is to continue the growth of the format and to deliver music to new ears every generation, so that we can keep the continuity of experiencing, discovering and adopting music as a primary source of identity, mental health or overall wellness,” Fields told us. “You put any record on, and it brings all kinds of people together around that record. It's a universal language.”

We spoke with Fields about This Mortal Coil CD being his first foray into audiophile sounds, a rare Lee Morgan record and why everyone should have one of those audiophile laboratory testing records. As always, some answers were lightly edited for length and clarity.

KLH: Do you remember the first time you listened to a record and thought, “This sounds incredible?”

Billy Fields: Well, the first recording I remember feeling that way about—actually there's two of them that come to mind: when the 4AD ‘This Mortal Coil’ records came out on CD for the first time and playing It'll End in Tears. I think the first track is “Kangaroo” and I played it on a stereo with a CD player and real speakers in a room. I was like holy moly. I remember being struck, like this is an astounding sound experience.

The second record that gave me that experience was when I was working in the business for a while, and I had an office in my house in Sacramento. I had just purchased a real stereo for the first time. This was still a CD and probably around 2000. We played Jeff Buckley's “Hallelujah,” and I remember sitting in front of it and thinking: this is crazy. This is, this is… holy shit. This sounds amazing, right?

And do you remember the first time you heard a record like that?

Five or six years after I moved to New York City in 2003, me and the sales rep I was working with at the time took a road trip to visit a few audiophile websites. We flew into Kansas City and drove out to Salinas, KS to hang out with Chad [Kassem] for a whole evening. This was before he moved out of his old storefront and started QRP [Quality Record Pressings]. Anyway, I bought this Lee Morgan record from him. It’s an album that was never released in the US, and was only released in Japan. But Music Matters did it on LP45 with a classic Blue Note type of cover. And I put that on and immediately could hear all the horns line up so perfectly.

So I use this all when people are like, what sounds good? I say, “Let me put this on for you,” because this is one of those records where the more time you spend with it, you get pulled deeper into how tight it is and all the different sounds you can still hear.

I also think that everyone who wants to test their stereo should have something like the laboratory audiophile test records. The main reason to have one is to know that your stereo is set up the right way, that the right channel sounds are actually coming into the right channel, etc.

Yeah, so that you can tell if the stereo is actually working the way it’s supposed to.

Because that's the thing. Like you get a table, you set it up. You might know a little bit about having good balance. You might know to go through the steps properly, know how to actually tune yourself. So you've got something like, “OK, this is going to operate well, right?”

You might have enough of that knowledge. You might be able to pull it from YouTube, but sometimes you accidentally put cables in the wrong place and your right is in your left and your left's in your right.

And that’s ultimately the benefit of having a reference track that you go to in a situation like that. You’re testing your stereo based on this song. And no one is going to say the same thing. The same way everyone has their own stereo they’ll have their own songs. I definitely didn’t expect you to mention a rare Lee Morgan record here…

Next question: You’ve been advocating for vinyl for a huge chunk of your career, and longer than the vinyl revival itself, really. What makes you as excited about vinyl today as you were when you were at the beginning of the revival?

I mean, for me it's because honestly, it's like you can ask people all sorts of questions as to why they do what they do, what they like about it. It's just that records are cool. They are like me. They're an analog. I mean, even something mastered digitally. Once you put it into a groove and play it back on a record, that's an analog process. And that analog process is like us. We are analog creatures. But for me, when I put a record on, it’s like a slipstream, like you are right there. It is aligned with your blood pressure and your heartbeat and the way you breathe. It's intentional in a way that hardly anything else is today.

I try to keep that magic in listening to records, too. I don’t want to know the technical specs, I want to know that it's cool when I put it on. That's all I care about.

The other thing I would say is that one of the reasons that keeps me doing it—and this goes all the way back to like when I worked in record stores—I love turning people on to music. I love turning people on to music in a way that they have never experienced.

One of the things I try to do with people that are younger, especially—but even people in their 30s and 40s (because that's still younger than me)—when they talk about their favorite record, I'm like, “Well, have you heard it on LP?” And they'll say no, like, well, come in, sit down… let's hope I have it. I usually do, which is helpful, but you know, let's put this on and let you hear this in a way you've never heard of before. Every single time that happens, they're just like, oh my God, it is a palpable experience that you can share. It's like magic. So yeah, why wouldn't you want to be involved in doing magic?