17 Jan
2011
17 Jan
'11
11:11 p.m.
On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 10:31:41PM +0100, fons(a)kokkinizita.net wrote:
On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 03:38:48PM +0100, J?rn
Nettingsmeier wrote:
For the record, I hate mastering and compressed loudness-war mixes. I enjoy making use of
the dynamic range of 16-bit (or more) audio. And, I also put the mastering (multiband
compression, really) stuff in the chain while mixing, one of the wonderful things about
JACK. It's just an insert on the master bus in Ardour for me, and my exported mixes
are mastered.
However, today's popular music must contend with limitations of the listener's
equipment, just as it did in the days of turntables and
six-peices-of-particle-board-and-an-8-inch-speaker turntable/stereo combinations. The
limitations are different and so therefore are the solutions and workarounds.
Today, people listen to music on iPods and truly wretched laptop speakers in noisy
environments. And everything else they listen to is compressed out the wazoo. So when my
lightly-compressed mixes come up on shuffle, they are inaudible, not just in comparison to
other professionally-mastered mixes, but against the background noise they're
competing with.
So, next time around, I'm putting my mixes thorugh NAMA and squashing the holy hell
out of them, until they sound like whatever the major labels are pooting out these days.
-ken
don't forget the most important aspect of
mastering: a second pair
of ears, in a very good listening room.
Correct.
take that out of the equation, and all that's
left of mastering is
some parametric eq and (if you must) multiband compression.
And I wonder why these shouldn't be done when mixing instead.
In the 'old days' EQ and compression was required to adapt a
mix to the limits of the distribution medium (vinyl in most
cases). No such problem exists today. Why on earth should you
re-EQ a mix ? If the mixing engineer did a good job (by carefully
EQ-ing individual tracks), what chance do you have to improve this
by acting on the mixed signal ? If he didn't, the way to correct
for this is to redo the mix. Same for compression, it's much more
effective and less intrusive when done on single tracks.