The first Q&A show got a great reaction, so we decided it was time for another one ! Questions this time:
- Re-mastering - opinions about the 2009 Stone Roses re-issues
- Do young people find clipping and other distortion more acceptable ?
- Should a clipper ever be used after a limiter ?
- Should bass sounds always be in mono ? How do you treat them ?
- Does speaker or headphone calibration software really work ?
Links
TMS 14 – Distortion (The good, the bad and the ugly)
TMS 26 – Clipping: What is it, and is it ever acceptable ?
TMS 3 – Limiting – and why you’re probably doing it wrong
TMS 5 – Mastering EQ is about balance, not matching
TMS 13 – Vinyl (This may ruffle a few feathers !)
Ian’s favourite VU Meter - The Klanghelm VUMT
REAPER Blog review of VUMT Deluxe
TMShow 25 – Stereo: width, depth and image – how to measure, monitor and master them
Greetings Ian & Jon,
As I sit here listening to "Tommy" by The Who as it streams from Amazon Prime Music, I 'm slowly rising to a boil as I wonder just what the heck did they do to this amazing work.
What has my feathers ruffled is the "Added" breaks between songs that were not originally mastered as separate tracks.
Is this a function of re-mastering? Did someone attack this, and other works, with a razor blade and chop it into pieces? Is this a requirement of the streaming service?
I find this infinitely more destructive than the Loudness Wars? What's to stop these "people" from just arbitrarily cutting songs at the 3:00 minute mark and say insert a commercial, or maybe their short attention span syndrome kicks in and they just change songs altogether?
Can you imagine Dark Side of the Moon being chopped up with silence inserted between each song?
OK, long rant over ... so to bring this back to a mastering focus, is there a fix for this at the mastering level?
Thank you so much for such a great series! You two are very informative and pretty funny. Well, you know, for tech geeks...
🙂
~john~
PS. This remaster of "Tommy" has obviously been kicked up several dB. The drums are even more distorted than the original. 🙁
Thanks for answering my enquiry re order of clipper & limiter. I guess its a matter of experimentation with the source material and listen for what works.
Here's a question for a future "your Questions Answered" episode, maybe! 😉
You can find tutorials out there that present the "sweeping frequencies" technique (moving a narrow band-EQ across the whole bandwidth to detect annoying frequencies and then to cancel them with a notch filter) as a fundamental step in mastering, is it something you use on a regular basis? I bet that it can help to spot precisely a frequency that you already found with your ears, but I think it's pretty rare that such offending frequencies are not dealt with at the mixing stage, ain't it? Especially with poorly recorded material with resonances from a bad recording room (it happened to me on a voice track, some time ago — quite funny, actually, because only one of the two singers of the band was making that frequency ring!)
What do you think?
Thanks.