CD Mastering
25/07/07 19:51 Filed in: Audio
Tweaks
I recently had the opportunity to sit in on a CD
Mastering session with Australia's mastering guru,
Don Bartley. There are few artist's he has not
worked with, and has even applied his amazing
skills to an Audiophile release of The Beatles 'Sgt
Peppers', so the man has the credentials.
A good friend of mine Karl Taylor has been working for the past three years with a brilliant young engineer Richard Hundy, and an Apple laptop to produce a brilliant album called 'Voodoo Town' which has just been released on iTunes around the world and CD Baby.
It was then mixed at Rocking Horse Studios in Byron Bay on and old Neve console, before ending up at Don Bartley's 'Benchmark Mastering' to have the finishing touches applied prior to release. I have always known roughly what a mastering engineer did, but seeing a master at work was a real eye opener in many ways, particularly in how we 'Audiophiles' look at the final CD we buy.
So let me start by telling you the equipment the audio goes through to get mastered, as this in itself is quite amazing. We brought the final mixes in on DVD which was inserted into a Mac, with the digital audio sent from there into a Prism Sound ADA-8XR multi-channel modular AD/DA converter which is a very high end AD/DA converter used to get a high quality analog signal from the digital audio tracks we supplied.
From there the sound goes into an 8 channel 'Tube' Mixing console and then out to a number of racks with some of the very best compressors and equalisers that money can buy, including the Manley Massive Passive tube equaliser and the stunning Avalon Design AD2077, a Dual Mono, Pure Class A Mastering Equaliser.
There were a few other devices in the racks, but almost everything was a compressor or an equaliser. So let's step back to the very start for a minute....The recording process involved capturing the sound through a quality mic, then applying EQ and recording it. The mixing process then ran every track through a very old Neve console to add some warmth to the sound, and every track was EQ'ed again to make every instrument sit within the mix without crowding any particular frequency range etc. Now at the mastering stage, we are yet again applying EQ.
As well as EQ, compression is applied not to the overall sound, but only to certain sections of the sound, they are what are known as frequency band limiters or compressors. They allow you to pick a range of frequencies and apply compression only to the selected frequency range. This is very useful when you want to make the vocal stand out a little more or to even pull it back in the mix a little. This is where the skills of Don really blew me away. He can hear in an instant a vocal that is a little peaky in places and is able to pull it back in line, amazing.
But anyway the point of all of this is to realise just what our precious CD has gone through before we get it. There is so much EQ applied in every step of the way, by many different people involved with it's creation, and all of it is done in an 'ideal' environment. In other words, the room that the mixing and mastering are done in are acoustically right, and EQ can be applied knowing they are hearing 'just' the music and not the room.
What happens when we get that CD home and play it on our high end audio systems in a less than ideal room? We arrogantly sit back and say 'That is how it is recorded so that is how it is meant to sound, and I will not do anything to the sound to change it'. Well the reality is, that is NOT how it was meant to sound, and the ONLY place that CD will sound how it was meant to sound is in Don Bartley's mastering suite, and none of us have an acoustically treated listening room to match Don's mastering suite.
So, why shouldn't we try to get our listening room to sound a little better by EQ'ing out the room resonances and other 'peaks' in the frequency bands that exist in every listening room? Many of us probably have an open space on one side and double glass doors on the other side, so the sound we are getting is different from each speaker and neither is correct. A quality equaliser can certainly assist in getting more out of our audio systems, it is a matter of choosing a high quality EQ and knowing how to adjust it correctly.
I will have another article for you to read soon, with some suggestions on which gear to add to our systems to do this and more. Stay tuned. In the mean time, I would like to publicly say a huge 'Thank You' to Don, for allowing me to sit in on what was an experience of a lifetime. Cheers Don!
A good friend of mine Karl Taylor has been working for the past three years with a brilliant young engineer Richard Hundy, and an Apple laptop to produce a brilliant album called 'Voodoo Town' which has just been released on iTunes around the world and CD Baby.
It was then mixed at Rocking Horse Studios in Byron Bay on and old Neve console, before ending up at Don Bartley's 'Benchmark Mastering' to have the finishing touches applied prior to release. I have always known roughly what a mastering engineer did, but seeing a master at work was a real eye opener in many ways, particularly in how we 'Audiophiles' look at the final CD we buy.
So let me start by telling you the equipment the audio goes through to get mastered, as this in itself is quite amazing. We brought the final mixes in on DVD which was inserted into a Mac, with the digital audio sent from there into a Prism Sound ADA-8XR multi-channel modular AD/DA converter which is a very high end AD/DA converter used to get a high quality analog signal from the digital audio tracks we supplied.
From there the sound goes into an 8 channel 'Tube' Mixing console and then out to a number of racks with some of the very best compressors and equalisers that money can buy, including the Manley Massive Passive tube equaliser and the stunning Avalon Design AD2077, a Dual Mono, Pure Class A Mastering Equaliser.
There were a few other devices in the racks, but almost everything was a compressor or an equaliser. So let's step back to the very start for a minute....The recording process involved capturing the sound through a quality mic, then applying EQ and recording it. The mixing process then ran every track through a very old Neve console to add some warmth to the sound, and every track was EQ'ed again to make every instrument sit within the mix without crowding any particular frequency range etc. Now at the mastering stage, we are yet again applying EQ.
As well as EQ, compression is applied not to the overall sound, but only to certain sections of the sound, they are what are known as frequency band limiters or compressors. They allow you to pick a range of frequencies and apply compression only to the selected frequency range. This is very useful when you want to make the vocal stand out a little more or to even pull it back in the mix a little. This is where the skills of Don really blew me away. He can hear in an instant a vocal that is a little peaky in places and is able to pull it back in line, amazing.
But anyway the point of all of this is to realise just what our precious CD has gone through before we get it. There is so much EQ applied in every step of the way, by many different people involved with it's creation, and all of it is done in an 'ideal' environment. In other words, the room that the mixing and mastering are done in are acoustically right, and EQ can be applied knowing they are hearing 'just' the music and not the room.
What happens when we get that CD home and play it on our high end audio systems in a less than ideal room? We arrogantly sit back and say 'That is how it is recorded so that is how it is meant to sound, and I will not do anything to the sound to change it'. Well the reality is, that is NOT how it was meant to sound, and the ONLY place that CD will sound how it was meant to sound is in Don Bartley's mastering suite, and none of us have an acoustically treated listening room to match Don's mastering suite.
So, why shouldn't we try to get our listening room to sound a little better by EQ'ing out the room resonances and other 'peaks' in the frequency bands that exist in every listening room? Many of us probably have an open space on one side and double glass doors on the other side, so the sound we are getting is different from each speaker and neither is correct. A quality equaliser can certainly assist in getting more out of our audio systems, it is a matter of choosing a high quality EQ and knowing how to adjust it correctly.
I will have another article for you to read soon, with some suggestions on which gear to add to our systems to do this and more. Stay tuned. In the mean time, I would like to publicly say a huge 'Thank You' to Don, for allowing me to sit in on what was an experience of a lifetime. Cheers Don!
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