Mastering For Laptops?

dave, you should get some powered monitors.

Is SACD any better?

On laptop "Microphone" sockets, is it standard for them to be mono?

Microphones are almost always mono.

Pssh.

Like this one, say.

Then run the outs into the aux input in your stereo and mix through speakers.

Does anyone know if vinyl is, so to speak, pressed from the same master that is used for writing CDs)?

To make you buy a $150 m-audio external input!

I'd be interested to know if "compression creep" has affected techno and house at all? my guess is no.

christoff not sure what you mean by that, but no, recordings that will be put on vinyl need to be mastered for vinyl.

...does this help explain why the Mobile Fidelity (LP) edition of R.E.M.'s Murmer is so friggin' soft?

Yes, but you can brick-wall the overall mix so that it's LOUD with no dynamic contrast. The compressed nature of the individual elements is kinda irrelevant (practically everything recorded outside of jazz and classical runs through a compressor of some description when tracking).

Mastering for vinyl is a completely different activity which has to accommodate the physical limitations of the medium as well as pander to the whims of the artist/engineer. Vinyl mastering is generally a case of "let's make this sound as good as we can on 12-inch and still fit x minutes per side", much CD mastering is unfortunately a case of "let's make this sound louder than anything else on the radio".

I've always meant to start a thread about modern production and mastering, because this kind of treatment has spread out beyond radio fare and swamped everything, right down to scrappy indie records; it's to the point now where I'm consciously aware of how much it's diminishing my enjoyment of music. This always winds up hitting me most with any "punchy" rock/dance group with some synths and some guitar scrape -- the things invariably sound hideous.

For the record, electronic music isn't in the least exempt from this. Sometimes it's the point -- some people know what they're doing as far as mastering for club systems, where there are body responses to think through w/r/t loudness. But CD mastering can still blurt this way, and overcompressing electronic stuff into a singular blob can often be a lot worse than doing it with instruments. And you can definitely compress the hell out of electronics, so long as they have dynamic variations (they do) -- and if you can't compress so much from one line, you can certainly compress the whole track. Every time you hear a house beat where the kick seems to create some weird ducking squish in the sonic profile (and then the tail end of the snare burst too-loud too-bright back up out of it) -- that's this over-maximizing stuff going on.

To make you buy a $150 m-audio external input!

Actually (and this is coming from someone who sold digital audio interfaces & software for a living for years), the 1/8th-inch jack input on most stock soundcards, whether Mac or PC, is ass in a basket as far as sound quality goes. It's not even a cash grab, it's just that it's put on the computer as almost an afterthought. The conventional thinking in computer design is that most people who are doing even halfway serious recording are going to buy a dedicated external soundcard.

Oh, and don't buy that M-Audio Audiophile USB. It's the worst thing they make. Get an Edirol or Tascam unit, they are some comparably priced models that work & sound a lot better.

Oh, and some links:

http://www.tascam.com/Products/US-122.html

http://www.rolandus.com/products/productdetails.aspx?ObjectId=758&ParentId=114

I make electronic music and as far as mastering goes I stopped putting a limiter on my master buss when doing my final mixes long ago. I likened that moment to when I stopped pouring sugar on my corn flakes. Yes, the mixes ended up "quieter" but that's what the volume knob is for. And when I have had stuff professionally mastered in the past I've been really specific as to what I do/don't want. Making everything SUPER LOUD AND BASSY is the first no-no.

BTW, anyone have a recommendation for a mastering engineer that specializes in electronic/dance (not necessarily for vinyl, though) who charges reasonable, "indie" type rates?

Actually, yeah, if you have the cash, these are miles better than anything made by M-Audio, Tascam, or Edirol. I personally use the MOTU 2408 Mk2 system, as my Mac is a little older.

This Wired mag article has some nice graphs showing Celine Dion blowing away AC/DC.

And this article shows exactly why the mastering on Rush's Vapor Trails is so screwed up.

Surfer Rosa/Come On Pilgrim is mastered to aobut -6dB, with no limiting, and I always liked this record as an example of great mastering–I can crank it up really loud without it becoming fatiguing to listen to, and you can tell the difference in the way Lovering's kick drum really cuts through the mix and hits you (it also does wonders for Deal's bass).

Try out Rob Acid for cheapish mastering/pre-mastering. He's got good ears and a lot of nice kit. I've not used him myself, but I've heard good things.

like, almost all of them?

"It's no wonder that music sales have tumbled. Today's loud CDs sound absolutely terrible!"
roflz

the same goes for mastering; when A/Bing the original with the processed signal, a client will simply hear the +5 dB jump and say 'sounds better'. if you ever get your records mastered, make sure you ask the guy to balance out the levels when comparing them, so you can actually hear the way your music has been flavored by the compression & limiting -- subtleties in the mix may be getting lost, it's a tradeoff for volume.

I'm not 100% against Extreme Mastering -- even though the history of recording has basically been a long fight against eliminating distortion, the strange thing is that distortion is usually your friend. 'unwanted' artifacts are always the things musicians hone right in on and learn to exploit, & distortion and feedback are at the center of pop music. so with this in mind, I can name many albums where the scorched sound is not just in the mastering, but was intentionally introduced to the mixes very purposefully, L2's with absurd threshholds on almost every instrument are all over hip hop (it's the whole sound of crunk), techno, experimental rock. it can be an aesthetic -- there's not much room to move within it, but when done right, it's a definite new sound, blowing dad's music out of the water.

and that's the problem, when people selling the older music compete by applying the same limiting to music that isn't suited for it, like country, classical, 'normal' classic rock, ambient -- that's where the damage comes in. I'm glad Nick's doing an article on this, as long as this stays on Pro Mastering Forums nothing's going to happen, even though this affects everyone who listens.

i may be alone on this, but it's just that the 'volume wars' or whatever are closing in on strawman territory. people putting 4 minute waveforms side by side is dramatic, but not that useful.

ps i like that white castle analogy. there is a great reason people prefer to eat at white castle even though it may not be 'healthy'--it tastes damn good.

I think for me this relates to the thread about the prevalence of music to the point of saturation. I've recently taken complete breaks from listening to any music at all for days at a time. I can picture becoming audiophiles merely because after being exposed to prerecorded music 24/7, the sounds of the natural world sound so clean and clear. When your standard for hearing is prerecorded then anything you hear live will sound good by contrast.

* Audioslave - Audioslave
* Johnny Cash - American IV: The Man Comes Around
* Depeche Mode - Playing the Angel
* Foo Fighters - One by One
* Iron Maiden - Dance of Death
* Oasis - (What's the Story) Morning Glory?
* Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf
* Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication
* Rush - Vapor Trails
* SlipKnot - Vol. 3 (The Subliminal Verses)
* The Stooges - Raw Power (Remaster)
* Zwan - Mary Star of the Sea

I'm a bit surprised by the Johnny Cash, since I always thought that one sounded pretty good (and it's listed at least once in our "best production ever" thread, so I'm not alone on that).

But yes, evidence that "extreme mastering" can totally work: my first copy of the Exploding Hearts album was a set of mp3s ripped from vinyl, and ripped way hotter than it was probably meant to be. It made the whole thing sound terrific -- the clipping and distortion and saturated sound fit the music perfectly, and when I finally threw on a CD copy in a store, I was disappointed with how much cleaner and tamer it sounded. Thing is, all the really offensive loudness we get is coming from bands with huge budgets, whose music has been given expensive hi-fi treatment right up to the point of squishing it! Exploding Hearts sound like kids in a garage -- the distortion works fine. Depeche Mode are a big-budget electronic act who made a fussy, hi-tech, detailed, and largely mellow album -- we should be able to hear it! That Exploding Hearts rip was blurring together four instruments and voices, already roughly recorded; the Depeche Mode record is fucking up what may well have been hundreds of tracks per song of detailed, balanced production!

It occurs to me that another thing possible at issue = competition with hip-hop, which for stylistic reasons could always get away with a lot more loudness. There's more open space in it to begin with, which is helpful; there's less dynamic range; the samples are easier to separate and balance, and usually already well-compressed (in different ways, so they stay separate) ...

phrases like "preserve natural dynamics" hopefully are setting off alarms in all readers. the proletarian is too stupid to know what he likes!

i guess my overall view is that the human ear/brain/heart will gladly trade a lot of whatever we currently call "fidelity" for an increase in perceived volume. it was only during those golden 80s that we were blinded(deafened?) by the new digital abilities of the CD (no noise floor!) and forgot this.

and i use earbuds bc i look like a tool wearing grados on the subway. ;)

And I can't swallow the "people know what they like" argument, not because I think people are stupid, but because that kind of logic suggests that everyone holds infinite power and information, that markets are perfect and never ever distorted, and that therefore nothing bad can ever happen in the world. An arms race becomes a wonderful, wonderful thing -- don't we want it? If advertising sells products, then it stands to reason that everyone love advertising ... right? I mean, there are a lot of instances in which I think your market thinking is straight on (e.g. the way people complain about Hollywood movies but clearly love them), but in this case I don't think there's really any evidence that this is the will of the consumer.

I mean, in this case it even presumes that people know they're making a "tradeoff," which is not the case -- not because they're stupid, but because new music arrives with this problem built in! Without specialized knowledge about the process, you'd have no way of knowing that the crappy Depeche Mode master didn't just sound that way from the get-go -- no way of knowing there was detail being lost, and no way of knowing that the loudness you craved was the reason for it. You can't make a trade-off if you don't even know that the things you're trading have anything to do with one another. And you especially can't make that tradeoff if there's no competing product. Add to that the fact that part of what people want from their mastering is a "modern" sound; and if the modern style is "crap," then which are people voting-with-dollars for -- modernity or crapness? People buy records for lots of reasons, among which "loudness" is a fairly minor one -- and so I don't think there's enough of a real market on this issue to pretend that increasing loudness is necessarily the will of the consumer.

Besides, it's not like anyone's saying we need consumer-protection laws limiting mastering levels! Just that this particular race is churning out crappier sounds, whether anyone else cares or not. I dunno. I just put on some Kraftwerk, an early CD issue. It sounds softer and older than everything else on the playlist. But then I turn it up, and I get to hear things like delay echoes actually fading off in volume. There are three dimensions to the sound, where certain things sit loud in the foreground, while other things -- echoes, bleeps, reveb, detail -- sit in the background behind it. And that's nice.

seems like it'd be possible to make similar points against the "people know what they like" argument re: the top 40 ------

i.e. bad mastering might not be the only crapification trend inherent to the music biz arms race -----

I try not to make false distinctions between (post-)production and content when it comes to music --- (it all comes out of speakers in the end) -- but loudness over dynamic range seems like a pretty good metaphor for what can happen to music ON EVERY LEVEL when the marketplace becomes the overriding concern ---

And of course on a basic level I'm not interested in the will of consumers here -- I'm worried about me as a consumer, and the fact that music in general is increasingly more annoying and difficult for me to listen to, all because of a mastering trend that's making music (in my personal opinion which is mine) sound worse and worse.

But I do declare: DAMN are people dizzy with subjectivity around these parts!

I mean a personal opinion is the best anyone can do, ever, case closed! there's no need to keep repeating that over and over as if it explained something ---

I hope LOTS of people read it.

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/imperfect-sound-forever.htm

It's going to be a contentious issue, though, because like I said upthread I think a lot of these records really are utilizing this distortion as an aesthetic choice -- I've since heard the Flaming Lips and the Liars records, and in those cases I definitely get the feeling that the clipping was deliberately introduced, from recording through mixing to mastering. I find the aesthetic numbing, but that's an aesthetic call, as a critic I think it'd be an error to criticize the 'industry' for the sound (though sure, go ahead and criticize the aesthetic). And there are cases where people are actually pioneering, the first Tokyo Jihen record is without a doubt the loudest record I've ever heard / seen, mastered at Bernie Grundman's Tokyo studio -- it's a tough listen, I've never been able to keep it on all the way through, and the waveforms look like errors, but what a sound. They got what they were going for.

I was on the phone with my dad last week, and he spontaneously brought up how he can't listen to the Beatles anymore, because all their records have no dynamic range. He was talking about 'Abbey Road' on vinyl. It's a relative thing, at some point we all just sound like complaining dads. Still, I think your article is the first one I've read that nails the problem from the standpoint of the listener and not the engineer.

i know a bit about compressors and eq - less about mastering hit rekkids to sound *awesome* on diddy speakers the world over. my take is that used well, delicately and musically, compression can actually increase the perceived dynamic range of a piece of music.

you're really onto something here - it's a huge issue in an industry where the mix engineers are getting phonecalls from the a&r guys asking for another 2db. look at the waveform of 'Juicebox' by the Strokes. It's flatlined.

this is what you have to do to get your shit heard - write a big, hooky, sectional number that kicks from the off and ram the fucker through a multiband compressor that tweaks it up to the elevens on all freqs, evens out the peaks and troughs then maybe, just maybe if the breaks fall right you might get a radio hit. then someone might bankroll your indulgence on the rest of the album. or not.

then again you could just go off and make the most beautiful record possible and no cunt will buy it and you'll end your days in penury - embittered, moi?

Nick's article was good in that it started me thinking about the album I'm working on right now and how I wanted it mastered. For a moment, I thought, yeah, let's keep it a bit quieter. And then I thought, but what if keeping it quieter is the thing that keeps it from being successful? The problem with the volume wars is that you don't know, and since everything's digital anyway, theoretically you could always go back and redo it without all the compression, so why not have the first release, the one you'll be pushing to radio and compilations and like that, be as loud as possible?

From scouring prorec forums I got the impression that A&R weren't begging for superloud mastering - it was more artists and managers. It was a topic I considering covering, and may touch on in an SLSK column in the future.

I'm about to start working on a project and am deliberately mastering for dynamics because I know there's no radio station on earth that's gonna get a copy of the thing, let alone play it on the air, so why not make a record that sounds the way I want it to sound?

also, I'm not buying JessGraves' theories about "digital sheen" vs "analog nostalgia" - besides being fundamentally off the mark, they sound terribly demagogic as well. and I certainly wouldn't have her master my own record, oops, cd, oops, mp3whatever.

and yes, I too adore late Talk Talk. :-)

That said, I really can't listen to the Gwen Stefani album anymore, it just hurts my ears so much, so I definitely agree that it's a problem.

TAO - some do, some don't, as far as I can tell. A lot of modern remasters are designed "for the market", meaning LOUD.

> It’s like the oft-quoted fact that humans use only 10% of their brain

... except, of course, that this is not a fact at all. It's completely untrue. The human brain is, in the parlance of computer design, a resource hog, demanding a disproportionately huge share of the body's energy reserves and nutritional intake. Evolutionary pressures would not have allowed the brain to grow to such a level of complexity if 90% of its abilities were habitually unused; such inefficiency is anathema to the principles of natural selection.
Sorry to digress from the thread's (very worthy) subject, but this really is one myth that needs to be laid to rest.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Bob Dylan says the quality of modern recordings is "atrocious," and even the songs on his new album sounded much better in the studio than on disc.

"I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past 20 years, really," the 65-year-old rocker said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

Dylan, who released eight studio albums in the past two decades, returns with his first recording in five years, "Modern Times," next Tuesday.

Noting the music industry's complaints that illegal downloading means people are getting their music for free, he said, "Well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway."

"You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them," he added. "There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like ... static."

Dylan said he does his best to fight technology, but it's a losing battle.

"Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded 'em. CDs are small. There's no stature to it."