Re: [linux-audio-user] Distortion -- bad speakers or cheap soundcard?

Hi, JAMin! your own recording won't be anywhere It will be unless the recorded tracks and mix suck. You can either worry about it or It really isn't difficult. You would be in competition with Well one of those "real pros" is me and in all seriousness I believe your proposals are more myth than fact. I base my position on personal experience. Mastering has enjoyed a mystique that ultimately implies that it is a difficult art. Snake oil! I began studying audio mastering a year or two before JAMin appeared. The first step was to design and construct an acoustically tuned room and run Mac OS 9 with T-Racks. The process was to record and mix in the control room and then master in the new room. Each room has it's own brand of playback monitors. In the beginning I was obsessed with details like exact amplitude and comparing results between different rooms and playback systems. These days I record, mix and master in my control room. A couple weeks back a talented engineer asked me to master a couple of his songs--recorded in my studio using Ardour. I was done with the job within 10 minutes. His mixes are always good so there is no repair work to do. He appeared doubtful and asked, "is it as loud as a commercial CD?" I replied, "I don't know. Let's compare to something." We did an A to B of our work with Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer. Our master is louder than Sledgehammer and there is no squared off wave phenomena from slamming the brickwall limiter. The objective of mastering is to achieve the maximum amount of loudness for each song on an album and to make the loudness of each song relative to the others. Contrary to what I read, mastering is not an artform or the last opportunity for creativity. It's a task. Of course my position assumes the mixes are good which depends upon the quality of recorded tracks, performance, instrumentation, arrangement, etc. IOW what happens before mastering is the qualifier to my proposal that mastering is simple. Anyway, I jumped all over David's proposal. The topic is a pet peve of mine and I'm on a personal mission. ron ____________________________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs