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Professional sound production Start‑class

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16 bit/44.1khz

I think a little bit on the role of mastering in sample rate and bit reduction/dithering to CD quality would be good information in this article now that 24 bit recording is a big deal. Any thoughts? Gamiar 23:37, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

I think it is critical to suggest that bouncing or recording mixes to as high a sample rate as possible and a minimum of 24 bit word size is critical for allowing mastering algorthyms the additional samples and bits for rounding and processing. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Pbr (talk • contribs) .

There's legitimate doubt that high sample rates are as important. Some processing, such as compression or EQ, can benefit from a somewhat higher sample rate like 96K, but 'as high as possible', probably 192K, is very likely unnecessary. I've seen people saying 192K converters sounded worse than lower sample rates. Besides, among professional MEs you are more likely to find them using analog chains and certain popular converters like Lavry or Prism, particularly those who make a practice of driving the D/A converters hard to produce apparent loudness- in other words, distorting them. Also note that fancy methods of wordlength reduction are not invariably chosen by professionals- simple TPDF dither remains popular due to a percieved lack of coloration. -Chris Johnson —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 207.136.232.46 (talk • contribs) .

Especially EQ and filtering tend to misbehave when approaching the nyquist frequency. This often happens gradually, which is why i think it does in fact make sense to go all the way up to 192 khz. Notice that this will only take the problem two octaves out of the hearable range. A typical example of the algorithm problem can be seen in the Sonic Timeworks equalizer, which actually reveals this issue on it's visualizer. I think the increased processing power in the future will raise the interest in having some headroom in the time domain. This will most likely be an important step in overcoming some of the differences between analog and digital sound processing in general. JoaCHIP 10:18, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Well, I went ahead and wrote something. Feel free to hack it up in any way you see fit! Gamiar 15:23, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Loudness War

Any issues with merging Loudness war into this article? It's not really it's own topic and is really a mastering issue. --Jgritz 22:18, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

It should be linked (and it is), but it's a big enough topic to have its own article. Merging is normally done when two articles contain the same information, not when one article is a subtopic of the other. Mirror Vax 22:50, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

I disagree with the above posting. Loudness war should be merged with audio mastering, however, it is not a dire issue. I do urge whoever has power to merge two articles to do so as soon as possible.--68.194.238.91 00:44, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Please keep seperate. Loudness war is a bad enough issue that it deserves it's own article. That article needs some work, eg examples and a couple of helpful waveform images, not reducing to part of an article on a much larger issue. --Spod mandel 02:58, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Spod, the loudness war is notable enough to deserve its own article by the same logic that car and car accidents are seperate articles. -- Dept of Alchemy 21:50, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Dept of Alchemy and Spod too. Merging the rather large loudness war article into this article might confuse the reader more than benefit. Linking to an external article seems more appropriate. -- JoaCHIP 10:23, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

In theory, were there no loudness war there would still be an Audio Mastering article. The topic can have much more to it than simple loudness, for instance the need to produce audio that translates to many types of playback systems pleasingly, and the practice of sequencing (in some cases) album tracks or producing suitable timing for the pauses between songs, not to mention inserting ISRC codes, which is not a form of watermarking but a method of putting a unique ID on a CD track which can be read by some playback equipment to help in assigning royalties for airplay. -Chris Johnson —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 207.136.232.46 (talk • contribs) .

Bass punch, kick drum, bass drum, frequencies, waveform

Add pictures. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 80.238.233.138 (talk • contribs) .

The other loudness war is on FM radio!

The other loudness war is happening in FM broadcasting. There are dedicated FM processors that would be of little use for CD production. See for example http://www.omniaaudio.com .

Therefore, I do not think that merging loudness war into audio mastering would be appropriate. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 80.238.233.138 (talk • contribs) .

Jeffason's comments:

You gotta be kidding. Who created the movement to merge the two. They are totally different. PLEASE REMOVE THIS REQUEST TO MERGE THE TWO. It is blasphemy! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jeffason (talk • contribs) .

External links

Please refer to Misplaced Pages:External links before adding external links. I don't doubt that Artmastering and audioplexus are legitimate companies, but I'm sure there are 100s or 1000s of legitimate audio mastering companies and Misplaced Pages is not the place to list them all. Moreover, the links do not add useful information that cannot be covered in the article. I will give the article on MusicBizAcademy the benefit of the doubt - for now - but I think it is more helpful to use the information in MBA article to improve this Misplaced Pages article rather than merely linking to it. The MBA link could serve as a legitimate reference to facts in the Misplaced Pages article rather than just sitting there as a bare link. Han-Kwang 18:31, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

References

From Misplaced Pages:Articles_for_deletion/Art_Mastering:

Additionally, in the entire article about Audio_Mastering, this is the only section that actually has some support in the press as well as publically accessible pictures and references. Everything else has been contributed by various members based on their opinion rather than on notable facts or evidence and is placed there without any supporting evidence or references. If we follow your reasoning, then the entire Audio Mastering section should be deleted as "not notable", which would be a terrible waste! R. Watts

This is a valid point. This article could use some references. Han-Kwang 21:29, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

I suspect it would be considered generally valid to provide some links to Bob Katz's 'Digido' site. Bob is a mastering engineer who has written a largely well-recieved book and has some decent online material which I believe would be generally considered acceptable. The danger here is from the number of MEs who would like to present themselves as innovators. I myself have stuff up on the web, but I don't think my content is anywhere near as mainstream and doesn't belong on Misplaced Pages as written. It is at airwindows.com and if I see stuff from there up here as if it is authoritative I'll edit it out myself, or at least pull it back to commonly accepted information without any inferences or propagandizing. -Chris Johnson —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 207.136.232.46 (talk • contribs) .

Is this spam for vestman mastering?

I recently reverted this edit. The editor claims this is spam for the vestman mastering method. I don't have the specialist knowledge to decide, so I raise the issue here. Mr Stephen 12:01, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

It is indeed. The technique is both less important than claimed, and normally known by a different term, 'stems'. There's some contentiousness over whether stems are desirable in mastering at all. The claim that the technique is necessary for extremely loud CD mastering is incorrect, as potential loudness is more a factor of limiting and clipping methods than compressing or limiting partial mixes. With stems you can have a harshly limited 'band' distinct from a vocal track at the expense of having the 'loud' content obviously quieter than digital full scale- arguably a poor trade-off. -Chris Johnson (I need to put some effort into developing this article, as I hang out with a community of mastering engineers on a music website who have criticised this article before but don't fix it) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 207.136.232.46 (talk • contribs) .

This method is sometimes used, it is just not so common. It is mentioned in Bob Katz's book, "Mastering Audio: The Art and the Science". The book recommends it when the vocal levels are critical, so instead of submitting half a dozen mixes with slightly different vocal settings an instrumental stereo mix synced with a separate vocal mix are used. (There's also talk about how instead using a cheap reverb unit in mixing, the mastering engineer can apply a higher quality reverb at a later stage—this is obviously useful when applied only to the separate vocal mix as well.) However, I tend to think that while all this can be done by a mastering engineer, it is in fact not mastering, but mixing, and the mastering only starts when there is a two track stereo mix to work on. I've mastered dozens of records where I've had to add sounds—once I added a snare sample on top of a mix with a too soft snare drum that couldn't be redone! Editing—like cutting parts off a song and such—is a different story. Erkki10000 06:31, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Why does this page single out Bob Ludwig and give a bio of him? Seems out of place in this article.Oxfordia 23:27, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

As someone who is in the trenches working with lots of aspiring musicians/producers, and asked to master mediocre mixes all the time, I need to stress that, great mixing is the foundation of that great master an engineer can render at the mastering stage. Period. End of the story. If you are a mastering engineer who likes stems and the client wants that technique, then the more power to you. But going back to the subject of "loudness", I don't know what Mr. Katz said on his book, but, I know what I go through everyday of my life, and losing dynamic range over loudness is not justified.

Loudness can be achieved from the mixing stage first, not by peak limiting and compression of the main output, but by enhancing some of the main tonal characteristic of the record. It may require spending lots of hours on the mix, tweaking and fine tuning certain individual tracks with a parametric equalizer and even a multi-band compressor. So, in essence, is not very different from what us, (Mastering engineers) have to do for a record to sound great.

The mastering should should focus in optimizing all the recording frequency bands for the achievement of a maximum delivery potential (MDP). Edward Vinatea - Evinatea 19:12, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm not an 'A' list mastering guy, but I'm afraid 'optimizing all the frequency bands' and 'maximum delivery potential', acronym or not, is marketing talk. Other places you might hear talk of 'optimizing the frequency bands' is among users of the software 'Har-Bal' which adjusts equalization blindly to match a recording's EQ to other recordings- without reference to whether the EQ is in fact useful. This stuff is not considered serious... one reason for that is, mastering (like mixing) requires the conveying of musical ideas through sound. It is entirely possible, and not uncommon, for the most musically effective combination of 'frequencies' to not be the same as the widest-range, most technically correct combination of 'frequencies'. For instance, bass frequencies can go down to below 20 hz on a CD, but a great deal of program content is well served by restricting the bass frequencies to those that propel the song at its apparent tempo- leaning on lower frequency stuff can make things feel slower.

Mixing is very different from what (us, mastering engineers ;) ) do, because it's more art and less craft than mastering is, and especially in a context of a later mastering phase, mixing has a much wider range of what is permissible. Mixers routinely throw in effects processing, reverb, echo etc. It is considered most unprofessional for mastering engineers to be adding any of these things. The most common actions for a mastering guy to take are to make things louder, brighter, or more upfront. That's for pop- specialty mastering like for classical music might well be more concerned with keeping the recording from seeming too upfront, or with maintaining unbroken 'room tone' between tracks rather than fading to digital black.

But I digress :)

As for Bob Ludwig, he's among the very top 'name' mastering engineers, everything about his long talented career is true. Doesn't mean he has to get a bio, though. Two other noted MEs are Ted Jensen (known for getting very well balanced and loud yet dynamic results at Sterling) and Vlado Meller (known for pushing the limits of possible loudness with 'Californication' by the RHCP, and also getting very well balanced results).

I don't tend to write entries in the Misplaced Pages. I'm more background. I could bring five other mastering engineers with far better industry credits than I have, all of whom would confirm: treat Edward Vinatea's additions to the page with healthy skepticism. There really is no need for entries on MDP (Maximum Delivery Potential), and you would be surprised how few working MEs talk of optimizing frequency bands. Among other things, if you do mastering right the sound is pretty seamless and you don't HEAR things in 'frequency bands', you just hear musical events... -Chris Johnson 207.136.232.164 06:03, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi Chris, Thanks for the debate, however you left out an important part of the definition: "determined by the style of music". This means that a frequency curve would be more ideal to apply (Or, shape if you will) on a particular style of music and as long as the elements of such mix is similar to the tried and tested successful recordings that preceded and created a sound quality benchmark.

Obviously, you need to use precision instrumentation like frequency spectrum analyzers to achieve what I am talking about. But, the point is frequency alignment and optimization which you confuse with something else.

If you were to analyze with an analyzer, every record that was considered a great musical achievement, say in rock music, you will start to see a pattern or frequency curve that is very peculiar to that specific style of music. I am telling you because I've seen it (Using the same spectrum analyzer with the same settings) in thousands of records time after time.

Certain elements might vary for example, the size of the bass drum, or how up-front the tom-toms were mixed. But if you are an experienced mastering guy, you simply leave it alone or you may opt in for a multi-band compressor with mild settings to control excessive transients.

As you approach my understanding of maximum delivery potential, you will have to agree that if a mix came out containing excessive vocal sibilance which may even arise out of the mastering engineer's need to increase the high frequencies for mix clarity, that you would be better off by knowing the exact frequency that is creating the sibilance (To filter it out). So, the result is a track with good clarity and no excessive sibilance that might upset the listening experience. Unguided filtering (No analyzer) may hinder good frequencies or remove a perfectly fine group of frequencies.

Maximum delivery potential is not a marketing tool. It's more like a relative measurement based on past benchmarks. Everybody knows that the louder the master, the less its dynamic range, therefore MDP is the loudest you can get with a minimum or an acceptable compromise of the music's dynamic range. Period.

Controlling transients on all the frequencies of all bands it's the secret of mastering excellence. That's what the word optimization strives to achieve. Another day I will explain to you why "harmonic balance" is relevant.

I agree on one point with you and it falls in the definition of music mastering (Mine). you don't want to make a classical record as loud as a metal one. So, once again, by knowing the frequency curves (with the omission of those casual or intermittent transients that occur on a record due to its musical accents or emphasis, special effects and orchestra hits, you can pretty much predict what frequencies within the wide spectrum or frequency bands need "alignment", so it's not about just boosting all frequency bands to the top of headroom.

Let me know if you understood all these concepts and/or ask me questions on the areas you are not clear yet.Evinatea 07:20, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Music mastering Merge

The article Music mastering was brought to my attention, and I put tags suggesting it be merged into this article, because it doesn't seem to be suggesting anything different. I've never heard the term before, and think of mastering music as a skill instead of audio mastering when I think of it. If the term isn't widely accepted, perhaps the article should be just deleted instead of merged. That's where I need other editors' opinions and some sources on the matter. --Davidkazuhiro 04:50, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

helpme

First, the page was deleted on February 4th for by user 71.108.230.46. His argument : Spam. I move to request blocking this IP address (71.108.230.46), since the topic was still open at the time of his action and he unilaterally made decision to delete this page.

Second, the proper term in the industry is "Music mastering". It's more widely applied, so either the page "Audio mastering" should be renamed and expanded with my definition or the page I created be undeleted.

Third, I joined The WikiProject Professional sound production with the intention to contribute, edit, and expand as well as help with the to-do list, but so far, all I get so far is resistance to my contributions. This discourages experts like me to spend anytime doing this type of work for nothing. Evinatea 20:08, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Audio is a more general term than music, so I'm not sure it'd be merged that way. Have you read WP:N and WP:V? Xiner (talk, email) 20:21, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your input, however, the term "Music" over "Audio" is more accurate. Let me elaborate, If I was to describe the art of creating and shaping sound, the proper term would be "Sound design". If I used the term "Audio design" although not incorrect, is too general in terms of description, to the specific works of "sound designers" and not "audio designers", which could also sound, or be perceived as "audio engineers". Thus, the use of "Music mastering" is more specific to the works of mastering engineers.

I will also like to add that the bulk of the mastering is applied to music in general for the purposes of CD/DVD manufacturing, radio promotion, and digital distribution (Like IPods) Evinatea 23:25, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

It seems to me you can master more than music, so "audio mastering" is better. Please also note that the {{helpme}} tag should be used on your user talk page only. Xiner (talk, email) 23:26, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

If so, what needs mastering besides music material? Example: All Hollywood music come to the Studios with pre-mastered soundtracks, because a Video editor is not qualified for that task. Furthermore, can you master live sound? No, not live or while is being performed. So, the main program and application is recorded music.Evinatea 23:29, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

In my opinion, the 'Music Mastering' page doesn't contain anything that needs to be rolled into the Audio Mastering page. You will find that some of the language used by Edward, if you Google search on the phrases, returns only other pages written by Edward. I consider this a fairly serious objection to rolling in the content. Deleting the 'Music Mastering' page would not be unreasonable, under the circumstances. -Chris Johnson 207.136.232.164 06:28, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Chris Johnson wrote: "if you Google search on the phrases, returns only other pages written by Edward"

If you are referring to my theory of maximum delivery potential, that's not on debate. An I don't think you should mislead and misguide the direction of this debate with cynical insinuations.

When it's all said and done Chris, whether is music or audio mastering, the present contents of the page describing audio mastering will be revised and all the links promoting other businesses and web sites removed. This is not a threat, it's a promise. There is a fundamental conflict of interest and a double standard going on that page way too long. That should put to rest any theory that my intention is to spam. Evinatea 08:36, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

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