## The Engineers and the Equipment
The technical details of the Folsom recording are worth examining because they shaped the album’s sound in ways that were not incidental.
Bob Breault and Bill Britain were the recording engineers. Johnston had brought two four-track recorders — the standard professional recording format of the period, one step above the two-track stereo machines used for simpler recordings and one step below the eight-track and larger configurations that would become standard in studios by the early 1970s. Having two machines running simultaneously gave Johnston insurance against equipment failure and provided more recorded channels to work with in post-production.
The microphones were Shure models, the same brand that Cash’s touring organization typically used for live performance. The choice of Shure microphones was partly practical — they were reliable, familiar to the engineers, and appropriate for the acoustic challenges of a large concrete room — and partly consistent with Johnston’s overall approach of minimizing the gap between what happened in the room and what ended up on tape.
The concrete cafeteria walls created the acoustic challenge that Johnston described as his primary technical problem. Studio recordings of the period typically used acoustic treatment — absorptive panels, strategic placement of reflective and absorptive surfaces — to control the relationship between direct sound (what comes directly from the instrument or voice to the microphone) and reflected sound (what bounces off surfaces before reaching the microphone). In a studio, engineers could control these variables. In a prison cafeteria, they could not.
Johnston’s response was to place the microphones very close to the musicians — close-miking, in production terminology — so that the direct signal from the instrument or voice was much louder at the microphone than the reflected signal from the walls. The resulting recordings have the slight dryness that close-miking produces, without the warmth of a room that has been acoustically prepared. This contributed to the album’s documentary character: it sounds like a recording of a live event, not a recording designed to sound like a studio production.