Inside Impex Records: How Abey Fawn Builds the World's Most Painstaking Vinyl Reissues
Read Time: Approx. 9 min.
Inside Impex Records: How Abey Fawn Builds the World's Most Painstaking Vinyl Reissues
TL;DR:
- 25+ Years in Audiophile Reissues: Abey Fawn, founder of Impex Records, got her start at the legendary Cisco Music before launching Impex with her father in the mid-2000s.
- Analog-First Philosophy: Impex prioritizes original master tapes, in-person mastering sessions, and multiple rounds of test pressings, sometimes six or seven per title, before a record ships.
- Artist Collaboration Is the New Direction: Recent and upcoming releases (Al Di Meola's Saturday Night in San Francisco, John McLaughlin, and the forthcoming Doug Webb jazz-rock project Variation) involve the living artists directly in mixing, mastering, and packaging decisions.
- "Costly, Not Expensive": Fawn draws a sharp distinction between paying for genuine production value and simply overpaying, a philosophy that will sound familiar to anyone who's agonized over a system upgrade.
- A Shared Belief in the Weakest Link: Fawn and Moon Audio founder Drew Baird lands on the same core idea from opposite ends of the signal chain — the source has to be as uncompromising as everything downstream of it.
The Interview
On this episode of The Fidelity Exchange, Moon Audio founder Drew Baird sat down with Abey Fawn, founder of Impex Records, one of the most respected audiophile reissue labels in the world. If you've ever put on a record and felt like you were sitting in the room with the musicians, there's a good chance Impex had something to do with it.
Fawn's path into the record business started almost by accident. Immigrating to the U.S. at age nine, her first exposure to music came from a small 78 RPM record player her parents bought to help her learn English. Music, she says, has been "a happy place" for her ever since — she still spends weekends dancing to a friend's '80s cover band.
Her real education came at Cisco Music, one of the original audiophile reissue labels, where she started in accounts receivable and eventually touched nearly every department: sales, marketing, and ultimately the reissue process itself. A 1994 trip to CES for an accounting gig turned into her first real exposure to high-end audio and what separates a true audiophile reissue from a standard one.
When Cisco closed in 2008, Fawn spent two years back in finance before realizing, as she put it, "my heart wasn't there." With encouragement from industry friends and family, she launched Impex Records with her father, built around a simple idea: don't just reissue the music, elevate the entire experience around it, from mastering to liner notes to packaging.
The Process: From Master Tape to Test Pressing
The conversation goes deep into just how much has changed in sourcing original masters. Major labels like Sony no longer let tapes leave their vaults; instead, safety copies are made at approved facilities like Battery Studios and sent to Impex's mastering engineers, a roster that has included Bernie Grundman, Chris Bellman, Kevin Gray, and Scott Hall.
From there, it's a painstaking back-and-forth: comparing new transfers against prior pressings, adjusting EQ, and running multiple rounds of test pressings, sometimes six or seven per title, until QC director Bob Donnelly signs off. Every test pressing costs the engineer time and money, and one track's fix can introduce a new problem on the next.
Fawn is candid about the titles that got away. A Sony-sourced two-track master of Harry Belafonte's Belafonte at Carnegie Hall never matched the quality of a competing label's three-track source, so Impex walked away entirely rather than release something that couldn't compete. She's also unsuccessfully chased parts of the Santana catalog and Stevie Wonder's old Motown catalog.
Artist Collaboration: The New Direction
Several of the interview's best stories come from projects where the living artist was directly involved:
- Al Di Meola's Saturday Night in San Francisco a follow-up to Impex's successful Friday Night in San Francisco reissue. The first mix Di Meola delivered felt too much like a studio recording; Fawn pushed for a full remix at Skywalker Sound, which was then finished with engineer Roy Hendrickson in New York and mastered by Bernie Grundman. Bandmate John McLaughlin also weighed in with his own EQ requests before signing off.
- John McLaughlin is described by Fawn as an "old world charm" gentleman who keeps a serious turntable setup at home and is deeply engaged in how his albums look and sound.
- Doug Webb's Variation (announced for the first time in this interview) a jazz-funk-rock fusion album featuring Danny Carey of Tool on drums alongside Doug Webb on saxophone, plus Mitch Forman, Jimmy Earl, and Jimmy Kim. Impex rejected the artist's first mix as not meeting label standards, which pushed the release back seven months for a full remix again with Roy Hendrickson, this time with Bob Donnelly directly involved.
Analog vs. Digital
Impex is known as an analog-first label, but Fawn is clear that the goal isn't dogma — it's quality. Analog remains the default choice when a usable master exists, but both the John McLaughlin release and the upcoming Doug Webb project were recorded digitally, and Fawn says a well-executed digital recording can sound every bit as good. "It's a personal preference," she notes — echoing Drew's own long-standing view that there's no universally "right" format, only different ones.
"Costly, Not Expensive"
One of the interview's sharpest moments is Fawn's distinction between something being costly, reflecting the real cost of doing the job right, with the right team, materials, and licensing, versus expensive, which she defines as paying for something and not getting what you paid for. It's a framing that will land immediately with anyone who's ever had to justify the price of a hand-built cable or a reference-level source component.
Songs, Albums & Artists Referenced
The conversation ranges across decades of music. Notable titles and artists mentioned include:
Raincoat, The Hunter, The Well
Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin & Paco de Lucía
Friday Night in San Francisco and Saturday Night in San Francisco
Frank Sinatra
Sing and Dance with Frank Sinatra
(One Step reissue)
Getz/Gilberto
One Step reissue
Jennifer Warnes
Famous Blue
Doug Webb / Danny Carey (Tool)
Variation (upcoming)
Ft. Mitch Forman, Jimmy Earl, and Jimmy Kim
Michel Legrand
Legrand Jazz (45 RPM reissue),
Ft. John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Herbie Mann, Ben Webster, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk
Bud Shank
Holiday in Brazil and Barefoot Adventure
Bud Shank
Barefoot Adventure
Hephzibah Menuhin
Hifi Fiedler / "Hi-Fi's the Lark"
(violin and organ classical recording)
Harry Belafonte
Belafonte at Carnegie Hall
Genres Referenced
Across the conversation, Fawn and Baird touch on a wide range of genres and styles that define Impex's catalog and this episode's discussion: jazz (straight-ahead, West Coast, and jazz-fusion), classical, live concert / fusion guitar, jazz-funk-rock fusion, vocal jazz and torch/ballad standards, folk/singer-songwriter (Jennifer Warnes), and classic pop vocal / big band (Sinatra).
Verdict
This isn't a gear review, but it's a conversation that gear lovers should hear because Abey Fawn is doing, from the mastering chair, exactly what Moon Audio tries to do from the cable bench: refusing to let any single link in the chain be the weak one. Whether it's insisting on a second tape transfer, sending an artist back to remix a project that isn't ready, or spending eight to twelve weeks getting a jacket printed correctly, the throughline is the same: the source has to be right before anything downstream matters.
For anyone building a vinyl collection, Impex's catalog is a strong place to start, and Fawn's own picks for a first-listen lineup are worth noting: Getz/Gilberto (One Step), Famous Blue Raincoat, Saturday Night in San Francisco, Sing and Dance with Frank Sinatra (One Step), and Legrand Jazz.
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