Re: [LAU] LV2, DSSI and the future of plugins

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 10:31:41PM +0100, fons@email-addr-hidden wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 03:38:48PM +0100, J?rn Nettingsmeier wrote:
>
> > 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.
>

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
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Received on Tue Jan 18 00:15:08 2011