Part 1: The Mechanics of Mastering

Introduction

1. The Essence of Mastering

Why Master Anyway?

From Vinyl, to CDs, to MP3s, and Beyond

The Difference Between You and a Pro

There’s Always Room for DIY

Takeaways

2. Digital Audio Basics

Sample Rate

Bit Depth

Standard Audio File Formats

Data Compression

Takeaways

3. Prepping for Mastering

Mixing For mastering

Mastering Session Documentation

Why Alternative Mixes Can Be Essential During Mastering

Takeaways

4. Monitoring for Mastering

The Acoustic Environment

Let’s Fix Your Listening Area

The Monitors

Basic Monitor Setup

On the Bottom

Listening Techniques for Mastering

Monitors versus Headphones

Takeaways

5. Mastering Tools

The Compressor

Compressor Overview

Using the Compressor in Mastering

Multiband Compression

The Dynamic Equalizer

The Limiter

Limiter Overview

Using the Limiter in Mastering

Multiband Limiting

The Equalizer

Using the EQ in Mastering

The De-Esser

Saturation

Types of Saturation

Soft Clipping

Saturation Uses

Saturation Plugins

Convertors

Consoles/Monitor Control

The Digital Audio Workstation

Mastering DAWs

Other Tools

Stereo Enhancement

M-S Processing

Mono

Takeaways

6. Metering

The Peak Meter

Inter-Sample Distortion

The RMS Meter

K-System Metering

The Perceived Loudness Meter

The Phase Scope

Using The Phase Scope

The Phase Correlation Meter

The Spectrum Analyzer

The Spectrogram

The Dynamic Range Meter

Dynamic Ranges For Different Genres Of Music

The LUFS Meter

Typical LUFS Metering

Standard LUFS Levels

LUFS In Music

Takeaways

7. Mastering Techniques

The Basic Mastering Technique

Creating a loud master

Competitive Level

Level Technique #1: The Compressor-Limiter Tandem

Level Technique #2: Multi-Compressor Packages

Advanced Level Techniques

The Effects of Hypercompression

Setting the Compressor

Setting the Limiter

Using Multiband Compressors and Limiters

Reducing Sibilance with a De-esser

Frequency Balance Techniques

The Mastering Signal Path

The Basic Mastering Signal Chain

An Advanced Signal Chain

Parallel Processing

Adding Effects

Editing Techniques For Mastering

Inserting fades

Eliminating Intro Noise and Count-Offs

Making a “Clean” Master

Parts Production

Multiple Masters

Mastering Music for Film

The Soundtrack Album

Mastering Music for Television

Takeaways

8. Dedicated Mastering Plugins

Dedicated Mastering Plugins

Maximizers

Comprehensive Processors

Dedicated Workflows

AI-Assisted Mastering Plugins

Where To Insert A Mastering Plugin

Takeaways

9. Online Mastering Services

Pro Studio e-Mastering

Automated Online Mastering

Using A Reference Track

Limitations To Be Aware Of

How To Use Online Mastering

List Of Online Mastering Platforms

Summing It Up

Takeaways

10. Mastering for Online Content

Data Compression Explained

Lossy Codecs

Lossless Codecs

File Compression Encoder Parameters Explained

It’s All About the Source File

The Ins and Outs of Metadata

Creating Great Sounding Online Files

Creating Files for Streaming Services

Checking The Sound Of Streaming Platforms

Be Aware Of Sound Check

Submitting to Online Streaming Services

Streaming Audio Requirements

Creating a FLAC file

Apple Digital Masters

A Look at AAC, the Apple Music File Format

The Apple Digital Masters format

The Apple Digital Masters Tool Package

Submitting to Apple Music

Other High-Resolution Platforms

Direct Stream Digital

Takeaways

11. Mastering for Vinyl

A Brief History of Vinyl

How a Vinyl Record Works

The Vinyl Signal Chain

The Master Lacquer

The Cutting Stylus and Cutter Head

The Lathe

The Mastering Console

How Records Are Pressed

New Advances In Vinyl Technology

New Record Presses

Ecology-Minded Pressing

Tips For Order Vinyl

Takeaways

12. Mastering for CD

CD Basics

How CDs Work

Scanning the Disc

Mastering For CD

Editing PQ Subcodes

Inserting ISRC Codes

Inserting UPC Codes

Inserting CD-Text

Song Order

Adjusting the Spreads

Using dither

Delivery Formats

The DDP Master

Obsolete Formats

How CDs Are Made

Takeaways

13. Immersive Mastering

The Immersive Audio Backstory

The LFE Channel

1st Generation Immersive Audio Formats

2nd Generation Immersive Audio Formats

3rd Generation Immersive Audio Formats

An Introduction To Dolby Atmos

Beds And Objects

Rendering

The Loudness Limit

Atmos Files

Mastering For Atmos

Loudness Analysis

Sony 360 Reality Audio

Atmos – 360RA Differences

Takeaways

Part 2: The Interviews

14. Maor Appelbaum – Maor Appelbaum Mastering

15. Eric Boulanger – The Bakery Mastering

16. Pete Lyman – Infrasonics Mastering

18. Ryan Schwabe – Ryan Schwabe Mastering

19. Ian Shepherd – Ian Shepherd Mastering

20. Howie Weinberg – Howie Weinberg Mastering

21. Legendary Mastering Engineer Bob Ludwig

22. Legendary Mastering Engineer Doug Sax

Basic Mastering Technique

Mastering Engineer Greg Calbi Legacy Interview

Greg Calbi started his career as a mastering engineer at the Record Plant in New York in 1973 before moving over to Sterling Sound in 1976. After a brief stint at Masterdisk from 1994 to 1998, Greg returned to Sterling as an owner, where he remains today. Greg’s credits are numerous, ranging from Bob Dylan and John Lennon to David Bowie, Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, Norah Jones, Branford Marsalis, and Bon Iver, among many, many others.

Do you have a philosophy on mastering?

I do. My philosophy in general is to try to figure out how to improve what the person brings me and then try to figure out what his intent was. In other words, I don’t just plug in my own idea without first really communicating with the client. It’s a little tricky because it really is different for every project. You have to get a good communication flow going, which sometimes is actually one of the most difficult parts of the job.

One time somebody said something to me that I thought was the best compliment I ever got in mastering. He said, “The reason I like your work is because it sounds like what I did, only better.” That’s what I’ve always tried to do. I try not to change the mix; I just try to enhance it. I go with the spirit of what was given to me, unless I really feel that it’s totally missing the mark.

Is there a difference between mastering from coast to coast or city to city? 

There’s really more of a difference from person to person. I’ve listened many years to all the different sounds that different guys have, and they really all do something different, and I respect every one of them for it. I could be blown away by something that any of 10 guys do, it’s so recognizable. 

We once hosted a great symposium that NARAS ran for their members. They had about 90 people come up, and the four of us from Sterling—George Marino, Tom Coyne, Ted Jensen, and I—had the same mix to work on. We had 10 people in the room at a time, and we had a make-believe producer who asked producer-type questions so people could see how a session went. We all EQ’d the same song, and after it was over, we all went out to the main room and listened to it with everybody there. All four sounded like four different mixes, and they all had their own thing about them. None of them sounded bad, but it was amazing how different they all were. 

Can you hear the final product in your head as you’re running something down?

Yeah, I can hear where I want it to go. I use kind of an A/B method most of the time, so I’m always referring to other mixes on the album. What I try to do is get a listen to everything on the album before I start to work on it. I really want to know what the producer and the engineer are capable of doing at their best before I start to force it in a direction. 

In other words, if the first song goes a certain way, all of a sudden you’re trying things and going back and forth and just going crazy. Then all of a sudden, about an hour or two later, you find that you might not have done your best work because you were moving a mix in a certain direction. Whereas if I go to the stuff that I really like hearing in the beginning, it gives me more of a realistic expectation of what I’m going to be able to get from this stuff later on. It’s just a good way to give your ears something to compare to. 

Do you listen to the whole album before you start?

I’ll listen to snatches of everything, with maybe a minute or two of a few songs. I’ll ask the client, “What’s your favorite mix on the album? What’s the one that everybody seems to really like?” because that’ll give me an indication of their expectations. If they point me to something that I think is horrible and that they think is great, then I know I have to use a combination of engineering and psychology because I need to bring them to where I know it might have to be. The funny thing is that as the years have gone on, they now seem to throw it into my hands almost totally, and I have to drag them back into it. I find I work better when the client gets involved because when they take some responsibility for the project in the room, they’ll also take that same responsibility when they’re listening out of the room. A lot of mastering guys kick the people out and are really secretive about what they’re doing, but I’m completely the opposite. The black-magic thing is really totally overrated. It’s kind of a fallback for a certain amount of not taking responsibility. 

What do you think makes the difference between a really great mastering engineer and someone who’s just competent?

A great set of ears, but communication skills is another thing that makes somebody great, as well as a willingness to try different things. It’s kind of a combination of creativity and tenaciousness. 

What do you think is the hardest thing for you to do?

Hard rock and metal have always been the hardest thing for me to make sound good because the density of the music requires a lot of aggressiveness. If the aggressiveness goes just that one step too far, it diminishes the music. You reach a point where all of a sudden it starts to reverse itself, where big becomes small and exciting becomes overbearing, and it works against the rhythms of the music. If it’s just one step past the point, it loses impact. 

Another thing that’s hard is when the low end is thin and light, because it’s really hard to create low end when there is none. If you have a really muddy project, you can always clear stuff away, but it’s really tough when the bottom end isn’t there. Most of the problem projects have to do with the bass being recorded poorly. If you made book of excuses, the chapter on bass would be eight times bigger than the chapter on everything else. 

The fact of the matter is that you never have a great-sounding mix and master if you don’t have a great bass sound. It can’t be great unless the bass is great. It could be good, but bass is what takes it to the level where it’s really something special. It’s the thing that engineers are the most frustrated about.

What would you tell someone who’s trying to learn how to master?

The main thing is that all you need is one experience of hearing somebody else master something where it sounds so incredibly different that it makes you then realize just how intricate mastering can be, and just how much you could add to or subtract from a final mix.

Also realize that there’s a hidden element where the more flexibility and patience you have, the more likely you are to come up with something that’s going to be better. There’s no shortcut to it. You just have to keep A/Bing back and forth and back and forth. It’s pretty amazing how far off you can be sometimes even when you think you’re doing everything right.

The satisfaction of knowing that you’ve really got something great is just an amazing feeling. I really don’t want to give something back and have them say, “What the heck did you do?” I just want them to listen to it and go, “Wow, it sounds better.”

Do you think cutting vinyl helped you in the way you work now?

There’s nothing like cutting vinyl because of the attention that you have to pay to dynamics, because it’s so critical to whether you’re actually going to have a successful cut or not. You train yourself to see the VU meters and the music in one continuum.

I think that it probably helped to focus me on how to concentrate on listening to music. Somebody today could say to me, “Did you like the way the song took off in the second bridge?” and I’d say, “I wasn’t even listening to the structure of the song at that point. I was listening to the whole.” There’s a whole other thing that’s going on.

There are guys that know how to make things sound really loud and big, but over-compression will keep the rhythm from working right. Once you take away the beat, then you just don’t have the same intensity anymore. Maybe from cutting lacquer all those years, I started listening to drums a lot. 

What’s your signal path?

My console [designed by Chris Muth, former chief tech and now with Dangerous Audio] is set up with a patchbay so that any piece of analog gear can be placed in any position and in any order. That’s a great luxury, and it gives me a little more creative control.

Generally, I keep everything pretty standard, and if there’s an exception, I’ll repatch. For instance, I have some producers who don’t like the sound of certain pieces of gear, so I’ll patch around those. Some producers are so fastidious that they want the signal path as short as possible, so I make a shorter signal path. To many of my clients, getting that sort of sonic purity is not as important as it once was. More often than not, it’s more getting it somewhere that it didn’t get rather than preserving what’s there. That was always the case, but now far more projects are in that direction.

Are you doing all of your processing in the analog domain?

I do 90 percent of my processing in the analog domain. I have only one digital equalizer and a digital limiter for making loud CDs. I have three different analog compressors, including one I just got from Dangerous Music that complements my Pendulum OCL-2 very well. I have a Z Sys digital limiter that I’ve had forever that I use for shaping on the low end and corrective work when I have to do a revision of something that I might have already mastered.

Are you using any plugins?

I don’t use many plugins. I’m in the process of evaluating the multi-band and maximizer Cube-Tec plugins that the other guys here use. The only time I use a plugin is when I get an instruction that the client wants something really loud.

What are you playing out of?

I’m playing out of Pro Tools and recording into Pyramix 8, where we do all the editing. We’re clocking with the Antelope Atomic Clock and coming out of a D/A convertor to the amplifiers and speakers that one of the guys here built. I also use the AudioGate for a sample-rate convertor, which is fabulous.

I have two A/D convertors: an Ayre and a Burl B2. They’re completely different, but I really like to have choices between warmth as opposed to clarity and combine the two of them in any direction. Almost all of my gear balances between those two elements.

My equalizers are the same thing. I have a Prism, which is really clear, and a Buzz Audio, which is really warm, plus a Focusrite Blue, which is super precise.

What I do is approach a mix with what I think is the best combination of gear for it, then I immediately switch to the other gear to see whether there’s something in the electronics that might bring out something musical that I missed.

Once I figure out what kind of EQ and compression I need, then it’s a matter of figuring out which of these boxes are going to give me the best image. I used to listen to a song top to bottom and try to dial in an EQ, but now I try to get a quick impression and dial something in. I’ll listen for it for like 30 seconds and get another quick impression. With a sound file, you can look at the peaks and find where the dynamics are going to be in the song and save a tremendous amount of time. If you have an analog tape, all that rewinding is a much different process and a lot more time-consuming.

What are you using for monitors?

I’m using the same ProAc Response 4’s that I’ve had since 1993 with Pass Labs mono-block amplifiers. I have a couple of different interconnect cables. One of them is from Harmonic Technology, and the other is WireWorld. Again, it’s like two different sounds. The WireWorld has a little more midrange and is a bit more meaty, while the Harmonic Technology one is very wide and a little splashy on the top end, and the bottom goes really low. That’s the starting point.

The beginning of any project is listening to the mix through the different interconnects and convertors before even getting into processing. You do it for a couple of songs and see if there’s a pattern to be had, although sometimes you have to do it for every song. It sounds time-consuming, but it really doesn’t add that much to the overall mastering time. Clients really enjoy it when they’re here. They’re always astounded that there are such big differences in the wires. Once you get the hang of it, you really can see how you can add a 3D quality to the mixes independent of the EQ.

You’re getting a lot more indie work and more from out of the country, I assume.

Yes. Almost everything is indie. The jobs that come from major labels are few and far between anymore. It’s a byproduct of the fact that it’s so difficult to make a living in this business, so the careers are a shorter and everybody with a band can scrape together some money to record an album without having a major label. It’s all been fantastic for us, as it’s increased business tremendously because this is the one entry point into the business that they can afford.

How much are you doing for vinyl?

Most people don’t have the money for a separate master for vinyl today, but because I don’t cut things massively loud, most of my stuff can be cut from the CD master. A separate master also opens up a creative can of worms because once you get away from the CD level approved by the client, it changes the relationship between the instruments.

I’ve attempted to do non-compressed files intended just for vinyl, but it requires another approval process, which no one has the time or money for after the project is over. I’m not talking about an artist like Coldplay or a high-budget major label album, where that’s not a problem.

I take into account during mastering if someone is also going to vinyl, but the real thing is to make the mixes substantially more pleasing than where the mixes started. That’s the way it’s always been from when I started in 1973. The goal is for the client to walk out of our place with something that was better than when they walked in. If they get a feeling that they’ve got something that’s substantially better, then you’ve got a happy client.

Mastering Engineer David Cheppa Legacy Interview

David Cheppa began cutting vinyl in 1974 and since that time has cut almost 22, 000 sides.  He.is the founder of Better Quality Sound which is currently one of the few remaining mastering houses dedicated strictly to mastering vinyl.  Thanks to his intense interest and design engineering background, David has brought a medium once given up for dead to new, unsurpassed heights of quality. 

Not too long ago, everyone thought that vinyl was dead, yet you’re really, really busy.

DAVID CHEPPA: I don’t think anybody else does as much vinyl cutting as we do.  We do about 500 masters a month here, but only because that’s the niche that it worked out to be.  When things were waning back in the 80s, I was still acting like nothing had changed insofar as I was still looking for ways to develop and improve the medium.

You never think about vinyl being “improved”.

DAVID CHEPPA: We’ve actually developed it quite a lot.  In the old days, way, way back in the 50’s, the first cutting systems weren’t very powerful.  They only had maybe 10 or 12 watts of power.  Then in the 60’s Neumann developed a system that brought it up to about 75 watts per channel, which was considered pretty cool.  Then in the 70’s, the high powered cutting systems came into being, which was about 500 watts.  That was pretty much it for a while.  I mean, it made no sense beyond that because the cutter heads really weren’t designed to handle that kind of power anyway.  Even the last cutting system that came off the line in about 1990 at Neumann in Berlin hadn’t really had changed other than it had newer panels and prettier electronics.  It wasn’t really a big difference. 

One of the things that I did was look for a way to keep the signal path as simple and clean and free of anything that would affect the signal.  I figure that a mastering engineer spent a lot of time and money to get it to where he wanted, so I didn’t want to alter the program when I finally got it.  All I wanted to do was give them as faithful a reproduction as possible.  What I went for was to keep the warmth of the vinyl, but have the power of the CD.  But because we had CDs by then, nobody even cared about vinyl anymore.  I mean, everyone in the cutting end was old school in their thinking in a lot of ways and didn’t care much about improving the medium other than just trying to do what was always done.  So using my background as a design engineer, I improved the cutting system, mainly the amplifiers.  I pushed the power levels way beyond anything that we ever had. 

In doing that, I sacrificed a number of cutter heads, and these cutter heads are about twenty grand apiece, if you can find one.  In fact, Neuman doesn’t really make them any more, but if you want them to build you one from scratch, they’ll charge you $35,000 for it.  If you can find one, you can pick it up somewhere between 10 and $15,000 right now, and maybe a burned out one for about 5 or $6,000.  It costs about $10,000 to repair it, just the way it is.  Last year alone, I burned out four cutter heads to get everybody’s product out the way I wanted.  Nobody knows what we go through to get a really good faithful recording on the disk because when you master for CD, you don’t usually master with vinyl ears.  You master with an ear to whatever it is that you want and as a result you don’t consider anything else. 

When you get stuff in that doesn’t use vinyl ears, what are the problems that occur?

DAVID CHEPPA:  This is what I notice and it’s really the secret.  The balance of the sound is the most important thing.  You get a good mix where the elements are balanced well and it cuts well as a result.

Frequency balanced?

DAVID CHEPPA:  Yeah, in the sense of equalization, every aspect of it is balanced so that you don’t have these anomalies poking out that you don’t really want.  It seems obvious that this is what you would strive for, but that’s not what mastering guys generally do.  They’ll tweak things in all different directions. 

I used to voice rooms to flatten out monitors so that they sounded good, and the way you get rid of all the problems is to feather any EQ that you used.  The same with limiting and compressing.  The best mastering I see is where people have feathered their work.  It’s almost like you’re just fine-tuning.  It’s so subtle that you almost don’t notice it.  If it’s a good mix, you can make a great master because the best masters have the best balance.  It seems obvious, but it just bears out, especially in cutting.

Do you have to do a lot of mastering in the sense of having to do a lot of EQ and compression, or do you just do a lot of straight transfers?

DAVID CHEPPA:  My goal is to take someone’s work and keep it faithful and not touch it, but there are very few engineers that I don’t have to do anything with their program.  But my first approach is a subtle one.  I’ll do things where nobody even notices it because I don’t want them to hear that I did anything. 

The problem is taking something what’s now in the digital domain and putting it in the physical realm.  You’re basically making that little stylus accelerate sometimes as much as 5000 times the force of gravity at times, especially when you have program with a lot of percussive brilliance or sibilance sounds created by S’s.  The demands are so great. 

And by the way, that’s where all the power is required in cutting.  In the physical world with sound systems, all the energy is in the low end.  But in cutting, it’s the exact opposite.  All of the energy is in the upper spectrum, so everything from about 5,000 cycles up begins to require a great amount of energy.  This is why our cutting systems are so powerful.  One lathe has 3,600 watts of power and our least powerful one is about 2,200 watts.  It’s devastating if something goes wrong at that power.  If I get a master that’s raw and hasn’t been handled at all and there is something that just tweaks out of nowhere, it can take the cutter head out.  So that’s always a big concern. 

If I’m not familiar with the material or the mastering engineer, then the first thing I’ll do is dump it into our system here and look at what the sound spectrum is like to find out what kind of energy distribution exits.  I can overview the entire project just at a glance and determine if there’s anything that looks like it’s going to be a problem.  Unfortunately it does take time and it’s not something I usually charge for. 

We do everybody’s work here, including all the major labels, but I treat every project as though I’m doing Babyface’s album.  Even when it’s somebody’s garage band, I’ll give it the same care and interest because to me, every project is important.  But that project may be a mess.  If it’s beyond anything I think I should be messing with, I’ll call them and say, “Listen, this hasn’t been premastered for vinyl.”  “What do you mean by that?”   “Well, there’s percussive brilliance that’s out of control.”  This is the problem in almost every case because sibilant distortion can occur on vinyl that doesn’t occur anywhere else.  It’s because the velocities are so high and so quick that the person’s playback stylus will literally chatter in the groove.  That chattering sound seems to be a distortion, when in truth, the record might not have any distortion, but nobody can track it.  I can actually cut records that nobody can track, which is useless. 

The other problem with having the high power levels that we have today is that I have to figure out what kind of client this is going to and what kind of turntable and cartridge he’ll be using.  My lab turntable uses a high compliance cartridge but that isn’t what they’re using in a club.  If they’re going to use a DJ setup, let’s make it so they can play it.  So that’s another consideration.

Where does most of the vinyl go?

DAVID CHEPPA: Today there’s so many markets.  The DJ market, or the Dance/Rap/Hip Hop market, is probably the greatest number.  I think 80 percent of it goes there.  The other percentage is really only a few percent, like Classical music.  We’re having a resurgence of Swing music and Big Band that’s incredible, and a lot of music that we’re remastering was done in the 60’s and 70’s.  Everything that Polygram ever did and everything that Motown ever did, they’re being remastered and we’re recutting them. 

We’re actually getting a better record now than they had back then because you’re hearing things that they couldn’t hear on the original masters.  Also the cutting systems weren’t that evolved back then either.  Everything’s been improved so much.

What else has improved?

DAVID CHEPPA:  One of the things that people used to do is compress and limit and EQ to try to make it go to vinyl.  My goal is to take whatever the person had and make it go to vinyl without going through anything.  That’s a real feat at times because again, with a master that was prepared digitally, people don’t think there’s any limits.  They do whatever they do to make it good for CD.  I try to keep a straight path from whatever master machine I’m working from, whether it’s an analog or a digital source.

That’s a big task for me because some things are not physically possible.  I’ll get masters that I can’t cut, and the reason is they’re so rich in harmonics in the upper spectrum, which you can’t even hear.

Because it’s so distorted or squashed?

DAVID CHEPPA:  What’s happened is it’s almost limitless in the way you can control the sound now, where the equipment in the earlier days wouldn’t handle the frequency or transient response or the power levels.  Most of the gear today is much more responsive.  When people EQ, they don’t realize that they may be adding harmonics that they’re not hearing.  Where something like a flute’s highest fundamental frequency may be just under 5,000 cycles, its harmonics go out to 15, 18,000 cycles and beyond. 

My biggest challenge is that they’re EQing this top end so that it sounds crisp and nice, but they don’t realize that things like bells and cymbals are adding harmonics that they’re not hearing, and may make it impossible to cut.  I’ll try to tame that portion of the sound spectrum that they can’t hear in the first place because it won’t go to vinyl otherwise.

A lot of guys who are cutting today can’t figure out why they’re having trouble so they just back off on the level or they smash it or just EQ it all out.  The only problem with that is you then affect the brilliance and the air and the transparency.  So sometimes I’ll go in and I’ll just tailor those harmonics. 

What is the master format that you usually get in?

DAVID CHEPPA:  I get everything but most of the stuff comes on optical, like a CD-R.  The reason I prefer that is, and I don’t care what anyone says, it’s the most stable format we have right now.  I would always prefer it if someone can give me an optical format because I know, no matter where it was burnt, unless their burners are bad or they have a defective CD, it will always work.

Do you load it into a Sonics?

DAVID CHEPPA:  We’re using several systems here.  Some of my cutting is done off a hard drive so I can assemble something quickly if you send it to me out of order.  That happens a lot.  I may actually do some EQing in there if I notice something.  I’ll maybe taper the high end a little bit, or if there’s sibilant problems, I’ll do some de-essing.  Again, I don’t like doing any of this stuff because it affects the program as far as I’m concerned, but I’ll try to be so subtle and feather it. 

A lot of times I will cut a little test on the outer diameter of the record.  Not the area that we’re sending for processing, but an area that I can play with.  I will do that until I make sure that whatever is done is faithful to the original master, because there’s so many variables in cutting that the response can change drastically by the stylus temperature, the stylus being dull, even the temperature in the room if the room is very cold and the lacquer is cold.  I might turn up the temperature on the styli.  The higher the temperature of the styli, by the way, the more resolution you can get.  If you increase the temperature a little bit, it will cut more easily and maintain the response.  But I only run styli for a few sides or a couple of hours total and then I discard them, because I try to maintain a certain standard.  As soon as they get dull, then the response goes way down and that’s not good.

With a lot of Rap and Hip Hop, do you have problems with the low end?

DAVID CHEPPA: The answer is yes and no.  It’s almost always no good if they haven’t really mastered it because the kick may be boosted so severely that there’s no way that you can get any apparent volume,

That’s the other thing that I try to do; get the most apparent volume I can get on the medium.  I had a Sublime record that I was cutting last year and the sides were 28 minutes, which is just too long (the longest side I ever cut was somewhere around 35 minutes and that was a spoken word record).  But what I did was alter the EQ just a little bit to give them a sense of volume where there really wasn’t one.  Again, I think I did it in a way where nobody knew but the result was okay.  It was kind of a compromise, but there are so many compromises you have to make sometimes, you just don’t want them to be noticeable.

So what’s your signal path then?

DAVID CHEPPA:  The signal path is direct.  I mean once I go out of the converters, I’m going right into the cutting system.  Sometimes I’ll cut off the converters; sometimes I’ll cut right off the analog source, but I try to avoid anything that’s going to alter that signal path at all. That’s where I have the danger of destruction on the cut because of the power levels, because if there’s a high frequency that’s not controlled, the cutter head can’t dissipate the heat fast enough and it’s going to blow.

Normally you’d go through a limiter/compressor, maybe some kind of EQ, all kinds of amplifiers and transformers.  I’ve eliminated everything.  In fact, I even went through and pulled all the transformers out of all the equipment because I didn’t want the changes that occur from the transformers.  Most guys that cut around the country still have older systems, and because they’ve accepted the way things have been for so long, nobody thinks about it.  But the signal path is so blocked with things that actually kind of blur the original source a little bit and they don’t even know it.

Another thing that I do and no one else does is run my helium pressure (used to cool the cutter head) 7 or 8 times of what is normally used because of the power that I now have.  Because if I don’t cool that cutter head down, I know I’m going to lose it.  I found that I was able to cut higher levels with more high frequency that way.  The factory settings work but they never intended their cutting systems to be pushed as hard as we push them.

It really must take a lot of experience to cut a good record.

DAVID CHEPPA: If you just want to cut a mediocre record, you don’t need to know a lot of anything.  If you want to cut a better record, it’s good to know something.  If you want to cut an incredible record, you need to have an understanding of the physical world and the physical laws that govern it.  You have to know what the limits really are, physically and electronically.  So I think it’s a balance of art, science and technology.

How many sides do you cut a day?

DAVID CHEPPA: Some days I’ll do maybe 25 or 30 masters.  That’s pushing it and about the most that I can do.  Now if they’re short I can do more.  I have some that are 25 minute sides, so they take a half hour to cut, but sometimes the preparations are pretty hard.  Like when I was doing those Sublime masters, because I wanted to get it loud I spent hours preparing for something that was only going to take a half-hour to cut on each side.  But on the short side, on Dance records like the 7” singles, I may be able to do four an hour, or sometimes even more. 

That’s assuming that you don’t have to do any fixes.

DAVID CHEPPA: Yeah, like I said, we can do premastering here, but I usually reserve that for fixing problems.  I figure I’m going to stick with what we do best.  We cut here and we’ll do premastering when we need to, but I don’t want to compete with the people that supply us with masters.  My goal is to give them something beyond anything they expected on vinyl.  In other words, whatever it takes to get this guy’s record to sound incredible, that’s what I want to do.

Mastering Engineer Dave Collings Legacy Interview

A mainstay at Hollywood’s A&M Mastering for many years, Dave Collins has brought his unique approach to a host of clients, such as Sting, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, and Soundgarden. He now operates out of his own Dave Collins Mastering studios in Hollywood. While Dave has an extremely deep technical knowledge base, it’s the creative part of mastering that lights him up, as you’ll see in the following interview.

What is your philosophy on mastering?

The first philosophy is like the Hippocratic oath to “do no harm.” The client is investing a tremendous amount of trust in the mastering engineer when he gives you the mix and expects it to sound better than it did when he brought it to you. I personally think experience is as valuable as equipment in a large sense, because after you’ve done it for 10 or 20 years, you’ve heard almost everything that can possibly go wrong and go right on a mix, so you can, in one respect, quickly address people’s problems. 

When I listen to a record I’ve never heard before, I don’t know that the guitar player was fighting with the singer through the whole session or any politics that entered into the equation. I just listen to the sound that comes out of the speakers and take it from there.

One of the hardest things—and it took me forever to get this—is knowing when to not do anything and leave the mix alone. As I have gained more experience, I am more likely to not EQ a mix or to just do tiny, tiny amounts of equalization. I think some people feel like they really have to get in there and do something, and put their stamp on the mix somehow. 

I don’t really care about that. I only care that the client is happy and he comes back. I don’t really feel that I need to put any particular personality on it. And hey, if the mix sounds good, let it sound good.

What distinguishes a great mastering engineer from someone who is just merely good or competent?

It’s probably two things. I think the best mastering engineers understand a wide range of music. Believe me, I buy tons of music and listen to everything so I can stay current with what is going on, because I have got to get what the fans are hearing and understand that, so having aesthetics for a wide range of music is probably a fundamental skill.

Secondly, I would say that having a technical background, especially these days, certainly doesn’t hurt, because both recording and mastering now are far more complicated than ever before. The palette of signal processing that you have today is enormous, both in analog and digital, and it is growing all the time.

How important is mono to you, and do you listen that way often?

One thing that happens after you’ve listened for a long time, I can tell by how phase-y it sounds to me in stereo if it’s going to sum to mono. Once I get a certain amount of that crossed-eyed feeling, I can pretty much tell that it’s not going to sum to mono, so yes, I always check for compatibility. I’ve certainly had mixers come in with stuff and I’d say, “Man, that is some wide stereo you’ve got going there. How does it sound in mono?”

And the guy goes, “I don’t know. How does it sound in mono?” Of course, you put it in mono and now one of the guitars has disappeared, so it’s an issue, but perhaps less important as time goes on.

Can you hear the final product in your head when you first run through a song?

No, not always, and in fact I frequently go down a dead end EQ or processing wise. There are some styles of music that I will intrinsically hear faster because the sonic presentation is pretty standardized in a lot of ways, but there are times when I can hear 90 percent of what it’s ultimately going to sound like immediately when I put it up. There are other times when you go around in a big circle. 

What is the hardest thing that you have to do? Is there one type of operation or music that is particularly difficult for you?

The hardest thing to do is a compilation album where you have 13 songs with 13 producers and 13 engineers and in some cases 10 different mix formats. Those are the hardest to try to get any consistency to it, just from a strictly sonic point of view. 

Second to that is working on projects that have a “too many cooks and not enough chefs” condition, where you’ve got a lot of people kind of breathing down your neck and a lot of people with different, usually contradictory, opinions. Some of those projects—and usually they are your major-name artists—can be a little problematic because you have so much input and everyone is trying to pull you in a different direction at once, so that can be a little nerve-wracking, but it’s all in a day’s work.

What do you enjoy the most?

The day after the session, when the client calls and tells you everything sounds great and “I can’t believe how good it sounds. I had no idea my mixes sounded that good.”

That’s the best, when I have someone who really got what I was doing and really got what my room is able to produce. It’s not every project, of course, but those are a good call to get.

How has mastering changed?

I think in a broad sense mastering hasn’t changed at all and the concept of a specialist engineer and a room built for the purpose will never change. The tools change, and to some degree the client requirements change, but the general job description hasn’t changed, and I don’t think it will ever change.

Now from the business point of view, what’s changed is the fact that there’s an enormous amount of international business right now. I would say about a third of my business is from outside the U.S. With the Internet, it’s now a completely electronic world. The downside to that is that you never meet the client. You communicate via email, he sends the files and I send the mastered tracks back, you get paid by PayPal or whatever, and you never even talk to anyone on the phone. At least in my world, that’s one thing that’s been a major change.

Do you find that a lot of indie projects bring a pro in at mastering to finish it off?

It’s interesting that this is the one area where they bring in someone with a lot of experience. Sometimes that’s misguided because a lot of people have been led to believe that mastering can fix everything. Of course this is nonsense. I can do a lot of things, and I can process the music in ways that were unavailable 10 years ago, but it’s no substitute for taking care every step of the way of production.

For some reason mastering has been considered this black art, which is something that I don’t like and don’t subscribe to and try to explain to anyone who will listen, because I really don’t like the idea of some mysterious “man behind the curtain” thing. I don’t think that helps anyone.

It may sound cynical, but there are more people doing mastering than ever, and there are more people doing bad mastering than ever. The guys who have done it for a long time stay in business by keeping their customers happy for a long time. It’s that simple.

A lot of engineers have added mastering to their repertoire, so you end up with strange results because a mixer starting to master is not hearing it like a mastering engineer. A mastering engineer hears in a very strange way, because I only listen to everything at once. I don’t care what the snare drum sound is, or that there was a U 67 used on the guitar cabinet. I have no interest in that. The mixer has agonized over those details, which can be counterproductive to doing a good mastering job because they’re hearing it in a different way.

I know of some very successful mix engineers that try to do their own mastering for budgetary reasons, and they call you sometimes on the verge of tears saying, “I cannot figure this out. How come when you send me the master back it sounds like my mix, only better? When I do it, I’m making it worse.” Sometimes I’ll say, “How about you don’t do anything and turn it up a couple of dB and see how that sounds?” They’ll say, “You know, I think you’re on to something,” because they’re approaching it from a different aesthetic than I would.

What gear are you using?

I’m using mostly custom gear right now. I’m using the Davelizer, which is a low-Q broad-peaking EQ, a custom parametric EQ designed by Barry Porter [who was a seminal audio circuit designer from the UK], a custom VCA compressor, a Pendulum OCL-2 with some minor modifications, a Pendulum ES-8 compressor, and a TC Electronic System 6000. The A/D and D/A conversion is custom-designed along with the clock. I have a pair of K&H 0300D small monitors and a pair of Quested 2108 large monitors powered by Douglas Self Blameless amplifiers, which were built from a kit. Then, for workstations, I’m using WaveLab for playback and a Sonic Studio to record. My monitor controller is a Manley.

For tape I have a highly customized Ampex ATR-100 tape machine for 1/2- and 1/4-inch playback that has vacuum-tube electronics as well as something similar to Ampex electronics that I can use with it. I’ve also got a Korg MR-2000 DSD recorder, and I get some masters in on that format. It has an analog output only, so I treat it just like any other analog source.

Do you do all of your processing in the analog domain?

Not always. I probably do 80 percent in analog. There are some projects that sound so good there’s no benefit bringing them back to analog. While I pride myself in having an extremely transparent and euphonic signal path, some projects come in so “done” that there’s really no benefit to it.

I was a little late to the game with plugins. I played with them for years and never really thought they were better than what I was already doing with outboard gear until I found a company from the UK called DMG that I really like a lot. I think their EQ plug sounds great, and I prefer it to any of the other digital EQs that I’ve used.

When I need an all-digital signal path, I come out of WaveLab into the TC 6000 into the DMG equalizer, and then maybe into their Compassion compressor, which I really love.

I can take any analog compressor and make it do what I want in 8 seconds, and I can decide if it’s right for the song in 9 seconds, but I could never get a digital compressor to do the thing that analog just did automatically. The DMG Compassion actually works very much like analog does. I also use a peak limiter called the FabFilter Pro-L, and I have an iZotope package for click and noise removal. That said, I’m really at heart an analog guy, so that’s what I run that most of the time.

Do you ever have to add any effects?

Oh, sure. We used to do a lot of soundtrack mastering at A&M, and it was very common to add a touch of reverb at the final stage. Generally, you won’t want to add reverb to a whole pop mix because it gets too washy. Sometimes you’ll have to add a little reverb at the end just to give you something to fade over if the tail has been cut off. I generally try to caution people, don’t trim it too tight because it’s a lot easier to take it off than it is to put it back.

I’ve done things like overdubbed vocals in the mastering room before, and guitar solos, too. Live, right to the master. I remember the last time we were doing vocals, the guy was like, “So, what kind of cue mix are you gonna send me?” I said, “I’m gonna turn the level down low on these speakers, and you can listen to it and you’re gonna sing. How’s that?” It does happen, but fortunately not often.

Do you get a lot of projects that are already crushed?

Sure, but I’d have to say a lot less than five years ago. One thing I have noticed is that people are not operating their workstations at the same high levels that they used to. In fact, I get a lot of mixes where the peak level might be –6 to –10 or so, and that’s a really great trend. I think a lot of people have realized that the gain structure in a workstation has to be paid attention to in the same way as analog. Running everything in the red all the time has negative side effects. Also, I’d have to say that the things that are crushed are crushed better than they were five years ago, because the stereo buss processing is better than it once was.

I can make it loud if that’s what the client wants. In fact, anyone who’s done mastering for any length of time has most likely come into the studio on a Saturday and monkeyed around with their system to find out what’s the best way to get it loud. Personally, I think that the whole loudness thing might have peaked, and maybe we’re on the downward side of it.

How much MFiT do you do?

I do everything at 96k, so I have a 96k version in the computer for every project. I’d say it’s more common than not to do MFiT, and if it’s a label project, then it’s 100 percent. If people are doing vinyl, I will always make a 96/24 version with much less or no peak limiting, because the lacquer cutter is going to set the appropriate level when he cuts it.

Also, things that are flat-topped provide a very unsatisfying sound on vinyl, which is sad because good vinyl is normally extremely satisfying.

You have such an in-depth technical knowledge of audio and great ears, but it seems like your clients always come first.

I’m not there to preach and wag fingers at the client; I’m there to make the record that the customer wants. I will enable that in any way they want. People come to me for my tastes, but it’s their record.

Mastering Engineer David Glasser Legacy Interview

David Glasser is the founder and chief engineer of Airshow Mastering in Boulder, Colorado, and Takoma Park, Maryland. With two Grammy awards for his work, he has mastered thousands of records over the course of his 35 years in the business, including those for some 80 Grammy nominees. An expert in catalog restoration, David has worked on culturally significant releases by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and the Grateful Dead, among many others.

How did you get started in the business?

I started in college radio; then I worked for a classical music station in Boston that had the contract along with WGBH to record and syndicate the Boston Symphony and Boston Pops. Syndication in those days consisted of high-speed reel-to-reel duplicates that were sent out in the mail to the various stations, which is what I did. After a while I started doing the recordings as well. From there I worked at NPR in Washington, DC for eight years as a staff engineer doing all the news stuff as well as location jazz and classical recordings and post-production.

How did you get from there to Boulder?

After 18 years in DC, it was time to make a change. We’d really outgrown the small mastering room that I had there and looked around for some alternatives, only to realize that if we did that, we’d be stuck in the DC area for at least another 10 years. We made a shortlist of cities to check out and got as far as Boulder and decided this was it.

Why didn’t you go to any of the bigger media centers where there was more work?

I’m not really a big-city guy, and since our clientele had always been small boutique record labels and independent artists, we figured that we could almost be anywhere. That part worked out really well. It turns out that Boulder is a great music town, although we didn’t know that at the time.

How did you get into mastering?

I was doing a lot of location recording and jumped on the Sony F1 [the first inexpensive digital recorder], and like a lot of people got blinded to the fact that it didn’t sound that good but was so convenient. You didn’t have to haul tape machines and a rack of Dolbys [noise-reduction units to quiet the tape hiss] to every gig, but you couldn’t edit any of the tapes.

I got one of the first Sound Tools systems [the precursor to Pro Tools], and I was suddenly able to edit the things, and it grew from there, from doing simple editing to preparing CD masters. All of a sudden, I was in the mastering business. From there, I bought a used 1610 and just started acquiring all the tools for mastering around 1990 or so, which happened to be when a lot of the small boutique labels were just starting to repurpose their catalogs for CD.

What’s your philosophy on mastering, and how did you come to it?

A lot of it was by studying records that other mastering engineers were doing. A lot of it came out of my NPR experience, where pretty much all the work we did was direct to two-track, so we were dealing with making stereo recordings sound good on air, mostly because we didn’t have the budget for anything else. That made me develop the mastering mindset.

How do you approach a project?

I think anybody that’s decent at this can hear what the producer’s going for and where it works when you hear a mix. Your job then is to get it to where you think the producer was headed. After a while that becomes intuitive and almost a little automatic. You know what’s going to work and what won’t.

How have things changed in mastering?

Most budgets have gotten way smaller, even for independent artists who didn’t have much of a budget in the really good times. More and more people are doing EPs and singles today.

Are you doing separate masters for online?

Usually not. It’s easy enough to check to see what’s going to work. Most people don’t have the budget for two versions, but often I’ll do a CD version and then a less limited version for the downloads.

At NPR, one of our mentors always said that if you can make it sound good in your studio, then it’s going to sound good on a TV, AM radio, or anything else. I think that’s true, so I don’t really see a reason to do separate versions except for overall level and limiting.

Are you asked to make loud masters?

It depends. Some people want it to sound good but don’t want it to get lost. Other people will compare it to other records, including ones that aren’t very appropriate for comparison, and ask for a louder record. I’ve found out that my version of really loud is not like other people’s idea of loud. I pull my hair out trying to make it sound really good and really loud. That’s a challenge.

What are you using for a workstation?

soundBlade. I also have Pro Tools and a Sonoma workstation for DSD. I use Pro Tools for surround and video stuff because it just works so well for that. I also use it for capturing at a different sample rate than the source files are at.

Do you have any favorite plugins?

You know, I don’t use that many plugins. I’ve got the Fraunhofer Pro-Codec, which is really more of a useful tool than a plugin. All the processing that I do is with outboard gear.

On the digital side, I’ve got a Z Systems EQ and compressor and a Weiss EQ and compressor, a TC Electronic TC 6000, and a Waves L2 limiter. In analog, I have some of the new Pultecs, a Prism EQ, an API EQ, a Fairman compressor, an SSL compressor, and a Maselec console.

For convertors, we have a choice between Pacific Microsonics or Prisms. For monitors, I’m using Dunlavy SC-Vs for left and right and SC-IVs for the center and surrounds, with Paradigm subs and Ayre amplifiers.

We’ve also got Ampex ATR and Studer 820 tape machines with headblocks for pretty much anything, if we get a project in on tape.

What’s your signal chain like?

I usually go out into the analog domain. With good enough convertors it’s not totally transparent, but it’s a compromise worth making. Usually it’s analog EQ, analog compressor, A/D convertor, and then maybe some digital EQ and a final limiter. It’s pretty basic and standard.

Is your L2 always at the end of the sign chain?

When I use it, yeah, before dithering. Occasionally I’ll use the limiter in the TC 6000. If it’s something that doesn’t need a lot of limiting, then I’ll stick with the Maselec analog limiter. I’ve just started using the Sonnox Oxford Limiter, and I’m pretty impressed. Very occasionally it will be the limiter in the HDCD model 2. I’ve been starting to use one of the LUFS loudness meters, and I’m going hotter than default Apple setting [–16 LUFS] but only by about 3dB LUFS, so it’s around –13 LUFS. Some of the louder mastering jobs done by other engineers come out at about –9 LUFS.

How about your room?

The room’s great and was designed by Sam Berkow. It’s about 350 square feet, with lots of bass trapping and large diffusors in the back.

I see you do a lot of restoration. How did that come about?

That started when I was back in DC. One of our clients was Smithsonian Folkways, who had tons of great old recordings. We bought one of the first Sonic Solutions NoNOISE systems, and we’ve been doing that sort of stuff ever since.

I love doing oddball things like that. We’ve always jumped on esoteric things like SACD. We don’t do SACDs much anymore, but we do get DSD mixes in, so we have the tools for that. We’ve also invested in the Plangent Processes replay electronics for one of our tape machines. The process removes wow and flutter from analog tapes by extracting the bias signal that’s still on the tape and using it as a reference for the software to eliminate all the speed problems. We used it on all the Grateful Dead studio records, and the results are amazing.

Do you do much MFiT?

Not a lot. Not that many people ask for it specifically. It’s a big extra expense for indie artists, because they have to go through CD Baby, which charges extra for that. Most of the labels usually ask for high-res masters, though.

Are you delivering the project back to the client or directly to the distributor or replicator?

We like to send it directly to the factory. When someone asks for the CD master direct, we explain to them that it may or may not be a good idea, and they usually agree. We charge a premium for a master, and that includes a QC check by my assistant. It’s time-consuming, but it’s necessary. We send mostly DDPs these days. Now QC includes spell-checking of the metadata as well.

Is your mastering approach different when you’re doing catalog?

Maybe slightly. If it’s a well-known album, then you can’t stray far from what everybody already knows and loves, so you have to check back with the original a lot. If it’s an archival thing that wasn’t widely known, then probably not. The goal then is to just make it sound as good as you can.

Mastering Engineer Gene Grimaldi Legacy Interview

Gene Grimaldi, Oasis Mastering

Gene Grimaldi started his career in mastering at the CBS Records/Sony Music CD manufacturing facility in Pitman, New Jersey, in 1986, learning about the business from a much different perspective than most mastering engineers. Wanting to know more about how masters were created, Gene eventually made his way to Future Disc Systems in Hollywood, where he worked as a production engineer, soaking up all the aspects of mastering and cutting vinyl. When Oasis founder Eddy Schreyer opened up the new studio in 1996, he invited Gene on as a full-time staff engineer. Today, Gene is Oasis’s chief engineer, with a list of blockbuster clients that include Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, Ellie Goulding, Carly Rae Jepsen, Lana Del Ray, Nicki Minaj, and many more.

How has mastering changed for you in the last few years?

The process is basically the same. You get your files or tapes in, and you still have to balance out the mix and make it sound good. As far as the way the industry has changed, at times it seems a lot more amateur than it used to be because so much of the mixing is done in home studios. It’s harder to get it to sound good, and you’re dealing with the client more to help them get their mix in a better place before I can work on it. They appreciate the help, too.

Are you getting more unattended sessions?

I have more unattended than attended, but a lot of that has to do with the number of foreign projects that come in from Asia and Europe.

Can you describe your signal path?

On the analog side, the source gets patched into a custom Manley console, then into my Avalon 2055 and GML 8200 EQs, Tube-Tech SMC 2A multiband compressor, and a Manley Vari-Mu. I can interchange anything by physically moving the patches on my patchbay, but I usually go through the EQs first and then the compressors. From there it’s into the Lavry Blue A/D into the Lynx interface board and then WaveLab 7.

The output is through a Lavry convertor into a set of Hot House amps, to a pair of Tannoy System 215 DMT with an external Tannoy supertweeter. I also use Tannoy System 600s for the a small speaker reference.

The Tannoys are a little light from, say, 30Hz down, so to fill in the extreme lows more accurately, we use a pair of dual 15-inch subwoofers from Aria. You’re pretty much locked down positionally if you use just one, but with the two you actually have a little more flexibility.

In the digital domain, I use a handful of plugins from Universal Audio, like the Cambridge EQ and UAD multiband compressor, and AudioCube EQ and De-esser VPI. For a limiter where I have to fix something and cut it in, I’ll use the Limiter VPI in the AudioCube. If I need to use a limiter all the way through a song, I’ll use the Sonnox Oxford limiter.

You don’t use a limiter so much anymore, do you?

I have always tried not to use a limiter if I’m not hearing any distortion. When I run into situations when I need to use a limiter, I’ll just use it on the portions of the song that need it. Perhaps one day we’ll get back to normal levels.

What I do is go in and slice up a song and just smooth out only the rough edges. If it’s an open track that has to be loud, I’ll just cut all the tiny pieces that need limiting and limit only those. Those sections go by so fast that your ear can’t hear the slight audio differences between the fixed limited sections as they fly by. It gets rid of any overload crackles and keeps the kick hitting hard. It’s time-consuming, but I don’t mind doing it if it comes out better. It actually goes a lot faster than you think once you have an ear for what to listen for.

I notice that you use a lot of processing plugins, but just a very little of each.

I just tickle them, because I look at it like it’s all cumulative, especially when adding EQ. I get most of the impact from when I set up the gain structure, because once I get the loudness to where I want it, the mix starts getting into that window where I know what balance adjustments to make. If it’s way off from the get-go, I have to get in there right from the beginning and start balancing the bottom or the top end right away, and then I will increase the gain.

What’s your typical plugin signal chain?

I would probably go multiband compressor, EQ, limiter, and sometimes I put the de-esser at the very end, because the limiter can add a brightness to it that the de-esser can catch. If I’m not using the limiter, then I’ll put another compressor after the EQs. That said, there are some times where I’ll put the de-esser at the front of the chain; it all depends on the song and how much it all needs.

I flip-flop between the different EQs and compressors and drive them all just a little to increase the gain. Sometimes one will color more than another, but that’s how I give the client different choices. I’ll take the gain away from one and add it to another, and it will sound different—either more transparent or smoother.

Are most of the songs that you get crushed level-wise?

It’s really all over the place. If it is crushed, I try to talk to the mixer and ask him to take any mastering plugins off before he sends it back to me. You can put your compressors and EQs on the two buss to get your sound, but give me some headroom to work with.

Some of my clients really insist on having the maximum level possible, though. In that case I give them multiple choices. I give them one that I think is loud but sounds good, another that’s pushed a little more, and one where you’re getting to where you don’t want to go any further. It helps them see the light. When you compare them in real time, you can really hear the difference. I do have a limit to how much I push it, though. My name’s on it in the end, so it has to sound good. It can be loud yet still have some dynamic range and sound good.

That’s kind of what you get when you don’t use a limiter. As soon as you put that limiter in, a lot of it starts sounding really soft and smoothes out. I’d rather have it hit you. It does depend on how you set the limiter and how hard you hit it, but it does soften it up.

Then again, the artists trying to do it at home don’t have the advantages of hearing it like I do. The studio here is really like a giant microphone, and you can hear every little thing. There’s a big difference between an artist’s or a producer’s home listening enviroment and listening in our designed and tuned rooms.

How long does the average mastering job take per song?

About half an hour. If I feel like I’m not getting it, then maybe 45 minutes at the most. Once that’s approved, then I’ll just drop in any alternate versions, which are usually the TV mix for a single and maybe a 48k version for any video that goes along with it.

How much MFiT or high-res do you do?

The major labels ask for MFiT with every mastering job. The indies aren’t quite there yet. If a project comes in at a high-res rate, I’ll do it that way for them if they want it. For vinyl, I try to deliver a 96k/24-bit file and drop the level much lower from the CD version.

Do you do any different processing for MFiT?

I try not to deviate too much from my original CD master. The level will get dropped a little, but that’s about it. It’s pretty much the same as MP3. I drop it through Apple’s MFiT droplets to listen to the way it’s going to sound after it’s encoded, just to be sure it’ll sound good.

What kind of masters are you delivering?

We hardly make CD-Rs anymore. It’s all DDP that’s FTP’d directly to the client, although we do WAM!NET delivery for certain record labels, like Universal. It’s a lot easier than it was, although we used to get paid for all the extra work we had to do. Those old 1630s worked, but they were a mess, so I’m glad we’ve moved on since then.

Bernie Grundman, Grundman Mastering

One of the most widely respected names in the recording industry, Bernie Grundman has mastered hundreds of platinum and gold albums, including some of the most successful landmark recordings of all time, such as Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Steely Dan’s Aja, and Carole King’s Tapestry. A mainstay at A&M records for 15 years before starting his own Grundman Mastering in 1984, Bernie is certainly one of the most celebrated mastering engineers of our time.

Do you have a philosophy on mastering?

I think that mastering is a way of maximizing music to make it more effective for the listener, as well as maybe maximizing it in a competitive way for the industry. It’s the final creative step and the last chance to do any modifications that might take the song to the next level.

There are a couple of factors that come into play when we’re trying to determine how to master a recording. Most people need a mastering engineer to bring a certain amount of objectivity to their mix, plus a certain amount of experience. If you [the mastering engineer] have been in the business a while, you’ve listened to a lot of material, and you’ve probably heard what really great recordings of any type of music sound like, so in your mind you immediately compare what you’re hearing to the best ones you’ve ever heard. If what you’re hearing doesn’t meet that ideal, you try to manipulate the sound in such a way as to make it as exciting and effective a musical experience as you’ve ever had with that kind of music. 

You have to interface with the producer or the artist, too, because they might have a vision that may be slightly different than where you intuitively want to take it. They might want to emphasize some aspect of the music that you may not have noticed. A lot of it is definitely trial and error on your part, but it’s also give and take between the producer and the artist because you can’t sit there and arrogantly think that you know where this recording ought to go and that they don’t.

Can you hear the final product in your head when you first run something down?

Well, you do get ideas. If you’ve been in it a while and you’ve heard a lot of things, then you know where to go. Like if you put on a hip-hop record, you know that it’s very rhythm-oriented and it has to be really snappy and punchy on the bottom end. You know that some of the elements are really important and that this kind of music seems to feel better if it has them.

Maybe the client had a monitoring system that had a lot of bottom end and the mix comes out bottom-light as a result. That’s why probably the single most important piece of equipment that a mastering engineer can have is his monitors. If you know the monitors and you’ve lived with them for a long time, then you’re probably going to be able to make good decisions. The only problem with that is, if the monitor is something that is a little bit esoteric and only you understand it, the producer or artist can become very insecure with the result. That happened to me when I first worked at A&M and I had a monitor system where I knew what it should sound like, but it was really kind of wrong for everyone else. They had to trust me, and they did, but I could see them get really concerned about what they were hearing, so in my studio I’ve gone to great lengths to make it a very neutral system that everyone can relate to.

What monitors are you using?

We put them together ourselves. We build our own boxes and crossovers using all Tannoy components. It’s not that we’re going for the biggest or the most powerful sound, we’re going for neutral because we really want to hear how one tune compares to the other in an album. We want to hear what we’re doing when we add just a half dB at 5k or 10k. A lot of speakers nowadays have a lot of coloration and they’re kind of fun to listen to, but it’s hard to hear those subtle differences. We just use a two-way speaker system with just one woofer and one tweeter so it really puts us somewhere between nearfields and big soffited monitors.

Do you use nearfields as well?

We have some NS10s and some little RadioShack cubes that a lot of people around town like to hear what it’s going to sound like on. Usually if you can get it sounding good on our main system, it’s just that much better on the other ones.

Do you still cut lacquer?

Oh yes, we sure do. We have one room with two lathes where we cut all of our lacquers now that’s going all day long. We can’t do it fast enough. I don’t know if this is going to last, because it’s gotten into this area where people think that vinyl is “happening,” but the expense that you have to go through to make a vinyl album and the cost of manufacturing is way more than CDs. I don’t know how many clients actually make their money back.

I have a love/hate relationship with vinyl because there are so many things that can go wrong and there are so many limitations. It can sound incredible if everything is right and you’re careful not to exceed any of those limitations. The problem is that it’s analog. Any little thing that goes wrong, you’re going to hear it.

Are you doing a separate master for vinyl?

Ideally, but not necessarily. Some of the clients want us to cut from the CD file, but you’re using a signal that’s been modified to be very aggressive. That’s right where you’re going to start having trouble with vinyl, because those grooves get radical when they have that much energy in them.

How do you think that having experience cutting vinyl has helped you in the CD age?

It takes a lot more knowledge to cut a good vinyl disc than it does to do a CD. With CDs, except for artifacts and various changes that occur in the digital domain, what you get on the monitors is very close to what you get on the disc, and you don’t have all the various distortions that vinyl can come up with. Vinyl has inner groove distortion and tracking distortion because of too much energy in the high frequencies, but this doesn’t happen on CDs or digital files. With CDs, of course, the quality is the same from the beginning to the end of the disc, which isn’t the case with vinyl. High frequencies might get a little brittle, but they don’t distort on a CD, whereas they will on vinyl, so there’s this whole grab-bag of problems with vinyl that you have to consider. Part of being a good vinyl cutter is knowing how to compromise the least.

Can you talk about the level wars for a minute?

That’s one of the unfortunate things about the industry, and it was that way even way back in the days of vinyl. Everybody was always trying to cut the loudest disc, and then if you got into a new generation of playback cartridges that could track cleaner, they would push it again until those were on the edge of distortion. It didn’t matter if you had better cartridges because that just meant that you could go that much louder and get right up to the same amount of distortion you were at before.

Usually anything that sounds louder gets at least some attention. It might not hold up on the long haul, but the main thing that a lot of promotion guys want is to at least attract attention so that the song gets a chance. What happens is everybody is right at that ceiling where the level is as high as it can go, so now guys without a lot of experience try to make things loud and the stuff starts to sound awful. It’s smashed and smeared and distorted and pumping. You can hear some pretty bad projects out there.

I try to give the client a number of options. I give them one at full level, with a small amount of clipping because of the compression and limiting, then one a couple of dB down. They usually like that one a lot better, but they’ll also take the loud one anyway. As idealistic as we all would like to be, it’s the last chance anyone has before it goes out to the public and will be put up against everything else. When a client realizes that, it’s really hard for them to be a purist and reduce the level and make it more dynamic and natural.

As much as I hate to say it, I always tell them that you don’t want to go too much lower, because you still have to be close, or the public will think there’s something wrong with the record. People tend to gravitate to loud because there’s a certain excitement in that.

Would you have any words of advice for somebody that’s trying to master something themselves to keep them out of trouble?

I don’t think that you should do anything that draws attention to itself. Like if you’re going to use a compressor or limiter on the bus, you have to realize that you’re going to degrade the sound, because compressors and limiters will do that. It’s just another process that you’re going through no matter if it is in the digital domain or analog. 

Analog and digital are very, very much alike when it comes to signal processing. If you put an equalizer in the circuit, even if it’s all in the digital domain, you will hear a difference. If you put a compressor in the circuit, not even compressing, you will hear a difference and it will sound worse. 

What is the hardest thing that you have to do? 

One of the things that is really hard is when the recording isn’t uniform. In others words, a whole bunch of elements are dull and then just a couple of elements are bright. That’s the hardest thing to EQ because sometimes you’ll have just one element, like a hi-hat, that’s nice and bright and crisp and clean, and everything else is muffled. That’s a terrible situation because it’s very hard to do anything with the rest of the recording without affecting the hi-hat. You find yourself dipping and boosting and trying to simulate air and openness and clarity and all the things that high end can give you, so you have to start modifying the bottom a lot. You do the best you can in that situation, but it’s usually a pretty big compromise.

If the client just had a bright monitor system and everything in the mix was just a little bit dull, that’s easy. It’s almost like a tone control because you bring the high end up and everything comes up, but when you have inconsistencies in the mix like that, it’s tough.

Then there’s something that’s been overly processed digitally, where it gets so hard and brittle that you can’t do much with it because once you’ve lost the quality, you can’t get it back. If I am starting out with something that is really slammed and distorted and grainy and smeary, I can maybe make it a little better, but the fact that a lot of that quality is already gone is going to handicap that recording. It’s never going to be as present as the way something that is really clean can be. 

That’s part of what gives you presence—when it’s clean. The cleaner it is, the more it almost sounds like it is in front of the speakers because it’s got good transients, where if it has poor transients, it just stays in the speakers and sounds like it’s just coming out of those little holes. It doesn’t ever fill up the space between the speakers.

What makes a great mastering engineer as opposed to someone who is just competent?

I think it would be trying to get a certain kind of intimacy with the music. It doesn’t even have to be music that you like. The real test is if you can stop yourself from having all kinds of preconceived ideas and just open yourself up to see how the song is affecting you emotionally and try to enhance that. I think that a lot of it is this willingness to enter into another person’s world, and get to know it and actually help that person express what he is trying to express, only better.

How long do you think it takes to get to that point?

I think it varies. It depends on the emotional issues that people have, their personal defenses and their sense of self-esteem. Some people have such low self-esteem that it’s really hard for them to even admit that there’s a better way to do something. If a client suggests something, they’re very defensive because they feel that they have to have the answers. A lot of engineers are that way, but mastering is more than just knowing how to manipulate the sound to get it to where somebody wants it to go.

What’s your signal flow?

Most of what we do is converted to analog for processing, so we don’t much care what format we’re sent. Not all of it is done in the analog domain, though, especially if you’re trying to get competitive level for something like EDM, which is slammed so hard that it’s shocking. That’s the thing with mastering; you just have to take what comes. If the client wants it, we’re here to help him realize his dream. I’m there to show him different ways that I see it being better, but they have to make the final decision. It’s their project.

What are you using for a workstation?

An AudioCube, which we chose because it was the best-sounding. We use Pro Tools 10 for playback because it’s such a standard. We actually get full sessions in that are put together with the song spacing they want. In our surround room, we have an AudioCube that goes up to eight channels.

We used to get stems in, but not so much anymore. Even then, I only used them to vary the vocal level, because that’s where mixes tend to err. One of the most common problems I find is that the vocal is too buried. That’s because the client gets so used to the song and the lyrics that they think they’re hearing it when they’re really not hearing it well at all. They’ve been working on getting the maximum support from the track, but you need to do that just to the point where it starts distracting you from the central figure, or the vocal. You want to get maximum support but never distract your listener from the vocal. I hear the vocal, but it’s not carved out enough, it’s not detailed enough, it’s not out front enough. What are we listening to, a track accompanied by the vocal or a vocal accompanied by a track?

Do you use any plugins?

I use some of the AudioCube VPIs, and I’m getting pretty good results with the PSP maximizer. I only use them on certain types of programs, because most of my stuff is outboard. I use a really good compressor/limiter that we built here that uses some special parts that you can’t even buy anymore. You almost can’t hear it in the circuit, but the problem is that analog just doesn’t have a fast enough attack time. Maybe on a signal that’s not that complex, but you try to do some rock thing that’s really dense, and you don’t get good results from it. I don’t think you can get great results if you only use analog compressors and limiters to get the kind of level that people want. You have to use digital.

What console are you using?

One that we built. We build most of our own equipment mostly to avoid a lot of extra electronics and isolation devices and so forth. When you buy most pieces of audio equipment, each one has its own isolation transformer or electronically balanced outputs, or however they arrive at a balanced output. When we buy outboard equipment, we completely rebuild it and put all of our own line amps in and take out the transformers or the active transformers. You’d be amazed at how much better they sound as a result. We also use Lavry convertors that are completely hot-rodded with our line amps and power supplies.

We have all separate power to each one of our rooms and a very elaborate grounding setup, and we’ve proven to ourselves that it helps time and time again. We have all custom wire in the console. We build our own power supplies, as well as the equalizers and compressors and everything else.

There are so many tools now for manipulating the sound that there are so many more possibilities to help you get whatever it is you’re looking for. With that number of possibilities, you need some kind of vision, or else you can easily go way out on a limb and be really wrong. That said, you can really do some minute changes on something and get the most out of it, which is the goal. Again, it’s the same old thing—it comes down to experience. It’s one of those things where it has to come together in your mind first.

Co-owner of Orlando-based Digital Domain, Bob Katz specializes in mastering audiophile recordings of acoustic music, from Folk music to Classical.  The former technical director of the widely acclaimed Chesky Records, Bob’s recordings have received disc of the month in Stereophile and other magazines numerous times, and his recording of “Portraits of Cuba” by Paquito D’Rivera, won the 1997 Grammy for Best Latin-Jazz Recording.   Bob’s mastering clients include major labels EMI, WEA-Latina, BMG, and Sony Classical, as well as numerous independent labels.

What’s your approach to mastering?

BOB KATZ:  I started very differently from many recording engineers that I know.  Number one, I was an audiophile, and number two, I did a lot of recording direct to two track.  That’s my orientation.  I am a very naturalistic person.  I work well with Rock & Roll and Heavy Metal, but the sound and tonal balance of a naturally recorded vocal or naturally recorded instrument is always where my head turns back to.  I find that my clients, while they don’t necessarily recognize naturalistic reproduction as much as I do, love it when I finally EQ a project and make it sound what I think to be more natural.

Now, there are exceptions.  A Rock & Roll group that wants to have a really big heavy bass, well, I’ll go for that.  But, at the same time, I’m more inclined towards projects that sound good when the EQ is natural.

Do you think there’s a difference from the way people master from geographic area to geographic area?  Do people master differently from New York to Nashville to LA for instance?

BOB KATZ:  Well, there used to be a West Coast sound.

Do you think there is now?

BOB KATZ:  I think that I can identify the product of Doug Sax and Bernie Grundman a lot. But if you compare a lot of Ludwig against Doug Sax or Bernie Grundman, I think you’ll find more similarities than differences even though they’re on different coasts.

I think that as the years have gone on, without mentioning names, some mastering engineers have succumbed more to the “crush it” campaign while others are still holding their ground, and when that happens you hear a big distinction between engineers.  But I see that same phenomenon on the West Coast as on the East Coast as well as elsewhere.  I think it’s more of an individual mastering engineer in the fact that some of them happen to be located in the same location, rather than a city by city thing.

What do you think makes a great mastering engineer?  What differentiates somebody that’s great as opposed to somebody that’s merely competent?

BOB KATZ:  Great attention to detail and extreme persnicketyness, stick to it-iveness, and discipline.  The desire to just keep working at it until it’s as good as the sound that you have in your mind, and to keep trying different things if you’re not satisfied.  I will bend over backwards to get something right, even if I have to do it off the clock.  Not to say that I don’t charge for my time, but if I make a mistake or I feel that I could’ve done it better, the client will always get my best results.

As good as you have in your mind.  Does that mean that before you start a project, you have an idea where you’re going with it?

BOB KATZ:  I think that another thing that distinguishes a good mastering engineer from an okay mastering engineer is that the more experienced you are, the more you have an idea of how far you can take something when you hear it and pretty much where you’d like to go with it, as opposed to experimenting with ten different pieces of gear until it seems to sound good to you.  That distinguishes a great mastering engineer from an okay mastering engineer in the sense that you’ll work more efficiently that way.   That’s not to say that there aren’t surprises.  We’re always surprised to find that “Gee, this sounds better than I thought it would” or, “Gee, that box that I didn’t think would work proved to be pretty good.”  And sometimes we will often experiment and say, “Let’s see what that box does.”  So it’s a combination of not being so closed minded that you won’t try new things, but having enough experience to know that this set of tools that you have at your command will probably be good tools to do the job before even trying it.  Also, a real good sense of pitch and where the frequencies of music are allows you to zero in on frequency based problems much faster than if you have a tin ear.

It’s hard to be in this business if you have a tin ear…

BOB KATZ:  True, but I know a lot of medium level people who get away without that degree of precision.  There is another area and that is the ability to be a chameleon and get along incredibly well with all different kinds of people from all walks of life.  If someone brings in a type of music toward which I’m not necessarily inclined, I’ll psyche myself up and do pretty well with it, but I think that there are other people out there who perhaps do that even better than I do.  So, being a chameleon and being adaptable and versatile is what distinguishes a great mastering engineer from an okay one.

What’s the hardest thing that you have to do?

BOB KATZ:  Make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.  It’s a lot easier to take something that comes in at an A minus and turn it into an A plus, than to take something that comes in as a B minus and turn that into an A.  That is the hardest thing I have to do.

The next hardest thing is to teach my clients that less is more.  When they’re preparing their work to send to me, and also when I’m working on it, we’ll often go in a big circle.  I may know in my head that putting three different compressors in a row isn’t going to make it better, but when they suggest it, I’ll never refuse their suggestions.  When it’s all done though, they usually realize that passing it through less is more.  The exception being that Phil Spector kind of approach where you think that more is more, but in that case the purity of the sound is less important than the bigness and the fuzziness and all the other things that it does.  That’s not necessarily my kind of sound anyway.  I’d rather make something sound really good and clean than good and dirty if I can.

What kind of project do you enjoy the most?

BOB KATZ: Music that is acoustic based.  That doesn’t mean that they don’t have electric instruments, but there are musicians playing together and the music’s been performed all at the same time with few overdubs.  I love those kinds of projects because I can really make them shine.  Fortunately, people seek me out for that stuff so I tend to attract that.  It keeps me off the charts though, darn it.

What makes your job easier? 

BOB KATZ:  This is almost becoming a ubiquitous answer but I have to say that if I get the highest resolution, highest sample rate, earliest generation, uncut, unedited by anyone (or if they do cut it, leave the heads and tails alone) version, then things are easier.  Unfortunately I get more and more chopped up material these days.

For instance, I did a children’s record and Meryl Streep did the voice over in a number of places.  Now they left her dry so if I needed to add reverb to put in-between sections, I could do pretty much anything I wanted.  But there were three cuts where they mixed the voice-over with the music, and when I finally put the CD in, three of the four worked fine in context with the songs they came in front of and after.  But on the fourth one, the original mix engineer chose to mix the music fairly low against the voice and after she finished talking, brought the music up to a certain level.  When it was put in context in the mastering against the song before and the song after, the music was too low but the voice sounded at the right level when placed at the proper level to fit to the cut before. 

I was stuck with a problem of the music being too low.  So in my first revision I sent to them, I cheated the music up gradually after Meryl stops speaking, but not enough, because the cheat doesn’t sound as good as if I had gotten separate elements and had been able to cheat the music up underneath without raising the voice.

So, what am I leading to is that you run into certain situations that are special or different.  The problem is that many mix engineers don’t know what is special or different.  It’s good to consult with the mastering engineer ahead of time, and in this case I would have said, “Send me the elements.  Don’t mix it, because when you finally put an album together in context is when you’ll discover that you may need the separate elements.” I think that the future of mastering increasingly will involve some mixing.

So you’d be getting stems essentially.

BOB KATZ:  More often, and as we move to surround, we’re going to be getting stems.  I think that even two track mastering will start moving into stems if we can ever standardize on a multi track format.

If you get program material in that’s already been edited (and of course a lot of times what they do is they chop the fades), does that mean that you have to use outboard effects sometimes in order to help that along?  And if so, how often do you have to do that?

BOB KATZ: More often than I’d like to.  But sometimes the fixes are so good that the guys never realize how much they screwed it up when they brought it to me.  I’ve always been a great editor and that always helps.  If you’re good at editing, you can supply artificial decays at the end of songs with a little reverb and a careful crossfade that’s indistinguishable from real life. 

At the head of things, it’s not as easy.   The biggest problem with the headfades is that people just cut it off.  The breath at the beginning of a vocal is sometimes very important.  I think part of it is that number one, they don’t have the experience with actual editing over the years and don’t recognize it as being an important part of the engineer’s art.  And number two, if you have a system such as Sonic or Sadie, you have great flexibility with cross fades.  You realize that you can do things that other people can’t, which is to carefully massage a breath at the beginning of a piece so that it sounds natural.  But if you cut something, and not just the breath but something which I guess we would call the air around the instruments prior to the downbeat, it doesn’t sound natural. 

And how to fix that?   Well, I’m not sure I can give a general answer.  It’s a lot easier to talk about how to fix fadeouts and end fades than it is to fix beginnings.  The bottom line is, send us the loose material.  If a client has a real good idea on the fade out that they want to do, fine. Then send us both versions; the faded and the nonfaded.  That way, if it proves to be a problem in context, we can still use the unfaded version.

What piece of gear are you using to help the fadeouts? 

BOB KATZ:  Being a naturalistic engineer over the years, the first digital reverb that I really felt sounded natural was the EMT 250 and its variations.  Anyway, they got smaller and smaller and finally made a 32 bit unit that is only two U high that had the same sounds in it (EMT 252).   That was the first digital reverb that I felt sounded very natural, but I couldn’t afford it at the time.  So I was always searching for a poor man’s EMT and renting them whenever I needed one. 

A reverb chamber is used surprisingly a lot in mastering to help unify the sound between things.  I might use it on five percent of all my jobs.  So, I still needed a pretty good unit.  Then I discovered the Sony V77, which is obsolete.  After you spend a couple of hours fine tuning it, it can sound just like an EMT.

I’ve heard that from other people as well.

BOB KATZ:  It is really good.  Now we’re not talking about things that immediately attract people to a Lexicon, like smoothness and lack of flutter echo.  Those are basic things that anybody can put into a reverb.  What distinguishes the EMT and the V77 from the rest of the pack is the ability to simulate a space and depth.  I’ve gotten it down so quickly that I can supply tails with a combination of Sonic and a few keystrokes in the verb and it’s all patched in in a matter of a minute or less for any tail.

What is your signal path like?  Do you have an analog and a digital signal path?

BOB KATZ:  Yes, but I’m a purist and I try to avoid doing an additional conversion whenever possible.  The logical place to do analog EQ is when an analog source comes in.  My analog path starts with a custom-built set of Ampex MR70 Electronics, which in my opinion is the best playback electronics that Ampex ever invented.  They were designed to be mastering EQs and there were only a thousand built.  It has four bands of EQ itself; a high shelf, a high peak and dip, low shelf and a low peak and dip for the playback at 15 or 30 ips.  I have that connected to a Studer C37 classic 1964 vintage transport with the extended low frequency heads that John French put in made by Flux Magnetics.  It’s just real transparent and not tubey sounding at all, just open and clean.  And nothing ever goes through a patch bay.  It’s all custom patched.

Usually I try to avoid any analog compression at that stage and I try to make the tape sound as great as possible with either its own EQ, or through the Millennia Media (NSEQ-2), so it’s just real transparent.  That goes directly, with a pair of short Mogami cables, into my A to D converter. So that’s my analog chain.  I don’t have any other analog processing.  I built a compressor once, but after playing around with the Waves Renaissance compressor and a few other digital compressors, I’m convinced that I’m just as happy staying in the digital domain once I’m already there.  So at that point I convert with the best analog EQ possible and the rest of the processing is done digitally after it’s in Sonic.

Is most of your processing done prior to the workstation?

BOB KATZ: I think that there are two different types of engineers.  I’d like to think the old fashioned and the new fashioned, but that’s my slant on it.  There are the engineers who like to process during load-in, and there are the engineers who like to process on load-out.   Many engineers will set up an entire chain, either analog or digital or a hybrid of both, and process on load-in, and then if it doesn’t work in context, they’ll go back and reprocess and then load it in again.

I find that to be a very inefficient way of working so I’m really puzzled why they put themselves through this.  The most I will do with the analog tape, as I said, is go through this great EQ on load-in only because I don’t want to go through another conversion again.  After that, I favor having as many processors automated as possible. It just shocks me that there aren’t that many mastering engineers who work that way. 

I think that as the years go on, more and more mastering engineers will be working my way.  I think they’ll have to.  When you start getting into surround I think it’s just going to become the norm.  It’s very much like the way you work with an automated mixing console.

How important is mono to you?

BOB KATZ:  I forget to listen in mono more often than I intend to.  I have good enough ears to detect when something is out of phase; it just sounds weird in the middle.  In fact, I’m usually the first person walking into a stereo demo saying, “Hey, your speakers are out of phase.”  So I usually don’t have that much of a problem with mono, but I’m always using a phase correlation meter and an oscilloscope to make sure things are cool.  If I see something that looks funny, then I’ll switch to mono.  But, half the time I just look at the scope and listen and won’t switch these days.

Do you ever normalize?

BOB KATZ:  “Normalize” is very dangerous term.  I think it should be destroyed as a word because it’s so ambiguous.  If you mean do I ever use the Sonic normalize functions so that all the tracks get set to the highest peak level?   The answer is no, I never do that.  Do I use my ears and adjust the levels from track to track so that they fit from one to the other, then use compressors and limiters and expanders and equalizers and other devices to make sure that the highest peak on the album hits 0 dB FS?   Yes, I do.  I don’t call that normalizing, though.

Tell me why you don’t do it.

BOB KATZ:  I’ll give you two reasons.  I advise my clients not to do it and I’ve written about it extensively on my Website “Seven Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Normalize”.   The first one has to do with just good old-fashioned signal deterioration.  Every DSP operation costs something in terms of sound quality.  It gets grainier, colder, narrower, and harsher.  Adding a generation of normalization is just taking it down one generation.

The second reason is that normalization doesn’t accomplish anything. The ear responds to average level and not peak levels and there is no machine that can read peak levels and judge when something is equally loud.

Tell me how you came about choosing your monitors.  And then, how you would suggest someone else go about it.

BOB KATZ:  Let’s start with the first question, which is a lot easier to answer.  A great monitor in a bad room does absolutely nothing for you, so if you don’t start with a terrific room and a plan for how it will integrate with the monitors, you can forget about it.  No matter what you do, they will still suck and you will still have problems so let’s just say that I first started out by designing a great room.   

The first test that anyone should do for a system is called the LEDR test.  It stands for Listening Environment Diagnostic Recording and was invented by Doug Jones of Northeastern University.  Basically he determined the frequency response of the ear from different angles and heights.  Then he simulated the frequency response of a cabasa if it’s over your head, to your left, behind you, beside you, in the middle and also beyond the speakers.  In other words, from at least a foot to the left of the left speaker, over to at least a foot to the right speaker, all done with comb filtering that simulates the response of what the ears would hear. 

The LEDR test is a substitute for about 30 to 40,000 dollars worth of test equipment.  If the sound for the up image doesn’t go straight up from your loudspeaker, six feet in the air as you sit there in your position, then you’ve got a problem with your crossover or with reflections above the loudspeaker.  If the sound doesn’t travel from left to right evenly and smoothly with the left to right test, then you’ve got problems with objects between your loudspeakers.  And the same with the beyond signal which is supposed to go from about one foot to the left of the left speaker, gradually over to one foot to the right of the right speaker, which detects reflections from the side wall. 

So the first thing you should ever do as an engineer is to familiarize yourself with the LEDR test, which is available on Chesky Test CD, JD-37 and also on the ProSonus Test CD which is about fifty dollars more.  Just test your speakers and room with the LEDR test.  And believe me, if you ever want to know how bad it can sound, just take a pair of cheap bookshelf loudspeakers and play the LEDR test through it and see what happens.  It also shows how bad the lateral image is if you take a pair of monitors and put them on their sides with the tweeter and the woofer to the left and right of each other as opposed to vertically. 

So my room passes the LEDR test impeccably, so then it comes to the choice of loudspeakers. The speakers I chose are made in Switzerland by a man named Daniel Dehay.  They’re called Reference 3A’s (www.reference3a.com) and they are your classic two-way high quality audiophile loudspeakers.  I’m sure that there are about half a dozen high quality audiophile equivalents from other manufacturers that can do just as well, but the whole thing is that these do not have a crossover per se; the woofer is directly connected to a pair of terminals in back of the speaker and the tweeter goes through a simple RC crossover.  They’re wired to my Hafler amplifier.  The woofer is an eight-inch speaker and it’s ported in the back and the speaker has a really tight clean response down to about 50 Hz.

With an 8 inch?

BOB KATZ:  Yeah, the guy did a really nice job.  It’s really an excellent speaker, the Reference 3A’s. But like I say, you can find some things that are reasonably equivalent.  Right now, if somebody would ask me for a recommendation, I’d say PMC or the Dynaudio and so on.  Anyway, these speakers play loudly and cleanly without a problem since they have a 93dB sensitivity.  To top it off then, I have a pair of Genesis Servo subwoofers and they have their own crossover amplifier.  There is no separate high pass or bass management type of device on these speakers. I let the main speakers roll off with their own natural roll off and then I carefully adjust the subs to meet seamlessly with them.  I could go on but I think that covers it.

You’re running stereo subwoofers.

BOB KATZ:  Right. That’s absolutely essential.

What are you using for a console?

BOB KATZ:  Aha!  Mostly, you mean, for EQing and leveling and stuff?

Are you using a console at all?

BOB KATZ:  No.  I’ve never been impressed with the whole console concept.  Most of the time I take the signal through the DAW desk at 24 bits with it set for unity gain so that it doesn’t do any calculations.

The first thing that it feeds, 9 times out of 10, is the Z-Systems equalizer.  Then I patch various forms of external outboard digital gear using the Z-Systems digital patch bay and eventually bring it right back into DAW and cut the CD master. 

How do you adjust the control room level?

BOB KATZ: I have an audiophile Counterpoint D to A converter with Ultra Analog Module and it sounds as good as the Mark Levinson or one of those similar quality D to A’s.  I went into the Counterpoint and installed a stepped attenuator with metal film resistors at an interstage point.  That is my volume control.  It’s calibrated in 1 dB steps and the output of the DAC feeds my power amp directly.  It is the cleanest, purest signal path that you’ve ever heard.  So I have no preamp or no console and I’m using absolute minimalist circuitry.

Well I think the whole console concept is really a throwback to the lacquer days anyway.

BOB KATZ:  Yeah, where you need a preview and all that stuff.  Well, as we get into surround, we’re going to need some console features.  Mastering engineers are getting away from the console concept, although people like Bernie (Grundman) and Dave Collins will build a purist high quality console because they want to do analog processing.  I’ll simulate that by patching gear one into the other into the other with short cable.

There’s definitely two schools of thought on this…

BOB KATZ:  Yeah, they are real purists.  But it just reminded me of something.  I’ve been in many mastering studios and almost every mastering engineer that I know of sits in front of some kind of a table, which sits at some height, with maybe a monitor in front of him.   And then 6 or 8 or 9 feet in front of him are his stereo loudspeakers.  As far as I’m concerned, there is some compromise there.  Now anything that breaks into the listening triangle between my ears and my monitors is verboten in my studio.

My solution is that I have a listening couch where I and/or my clients sit, which is exactly like a high quality audiophile living room listening environment.  We have the perfect 60 degree triangle there, with nothing in-between except the floor and the side walls which are far away from interference from the monitors.  It’s a reflection free zone.  Then behind the couch is the back of the display of my workstation.  When I want to edit or do some preliminary setup or segues, I go back there and do my primary work.  It keeps my heart working.  I get up, walk to the couch, sit down, listen and go back.  I don’t EQ from back there though, which prevents me from making those awful immediate judgments that are so often problems.  Too many highs, well listen for a few minutes.  “Oh, wait a minute.  That was just the big climax with the cymbal crash.”

I have a Mac PowerBook sitting on the arm of the couch connected by Ethernet to the rest of the system.  I can remote control the Z-Systems equalizer from the arm of the couch, start and stop Sonic, or switch the Sonic desk between its record and playback desks which allows me to monitor two different digital paths.  So I can effectively insert or remove any set of equipment from my chain at the critical listening point without having any interfering tables or consoles in the way.  Just a pair of function keys on the PowerBook, over there sitting on my right.  Can you picture it?   You’re sitting there on the couch, your right arm is off to your right, and you just push a little button on a little portable computer sitting on the arm of the couch.  And that’s it.

Glen Meadows – Mayfield Mastering

Glenn Meadows of Mayfield Mastering is a two-time Grammy winner and a multi–TEC award nominee. He has worked on scores of gold and platinum records for a diverse array of artists, including Shania Twain, LeAnn Rimes, Randy Travis, Vince Gill, and Steely Dan, as well as for producers and engineers such as Tony Brown, Jimmy Bowen, and Mutt Lange.

What’s your philosophy on mastering?

I think that mastering is, and always has been, the real bridge between the pro audio industry and the hi-fi industry. We’re the ones that have to take this stuff that sounds hopefully good or great on a big professional monitor system and make sure it also translates well to the home systems. We’re the last link to get it right or the last chance to really screw it up and make it bad, and I think we’re all guilty at times of doing both.

What makes a great mastering engineer?

The ability to use discretion. The ability to listen to a piece of product and say, “You know, this really doesn’t need much of anything.” At this point in my career—I’ve been doing this for more than 30 years now—if I put a client’s mix up and I don’t have a pretty good clue by the time I’m at the end of the first run of the first song as to what that song needs, they ought to go back and remix.

It has to do with the experience of the engineer working in his environment. He’s in the same room every day for years. I can walk into this room in the morning and know if my monitors are right or wrong just by listening to a track from yesterday. To me, that’s the value of a mastering engineer. What they bring to the table is the cross-section of their experience and their ability to say, “No, you really don’t want to do that.”

When you use your compression technique, are you using the typical radio attack and release settings? Long attack, long release?

No, it varies. It depends on what the tempo of the music is doing. I’ll adjust it track by track. Most everything I do is tailored to what the music dictates that it needs. There’s no preset standard that I’m aware of that I use, although I have had a producer come in, and he had me master a record, and then he went back and matched it and stored the setting: “Ah, there’s the Glenn Meadows setting.” He told me he did the same thing for Bob Ludwig, too. He had a couple of things mastered up there and then found a common setting, and now he’s got it as his Gateway preset. He does his own mastering now. “Ah, make it sound like Gateway. There it is.” I told Bob [Ludwig] that, because he and I have been friends for probably 20 years, he just died laughing. He said, “If you can find out what that setting is, send it to me. I’d love to have it, because I don’t know what I do.”

My typical approach is to use like a 1.5:1 compression ratio and stick it down at –20 or –25dB so you get into the compressor real early and don’t notice it going from linear to compressed, and basically just pack it a little bit tighter over that range. I’ll get maybe 3dB of compression, but I’ve brought the average level up 3 or 4dB, and it just makes it bigger and fatter. People think that they have to be heavily compressed to sound loud on the radio, and they don’t.

What has changed from the last time we talked for the book?

For me, 98 percent of what I do now is working all in the box. I know there are people that work 100 percent outside the box, and their workstation is nothing more than a storage medium and an assembly point for making their masters. For me, it’s the other way around.

I’ve found that the quality of in-the-box processing has really improved, to the point where I find the same color of analog in the box if that’s what I want. I find that I can keep the finished product truer to what they originally had by keeping it all in the box.

I’m getting 24-bit files and mixes that actually have dynamic range and headroom, which allows for the ability to do high-fidelity mastering if that’s what we need to do, or a more in-your-face processed master. We can do an expanded and open mastering if they want to take it to vinyl, because a lot of people are learning that vinyl really can’t take that squeezed, squashed master that you’re doing for CD and online. It doesn’t make the mixes sound like those great vinyl records from years ago, because the mixes aren’t the way they were 15 or 20 years ago. If you want it to sound like that, you’ve got to mix it with dynamic range and lots of transient response. A lot of guys doing it today haven’t heard that style of mixing before. There’s a whole generation of people who’ve only mixed on workstations and approved mixes on iPods and earbuds. They’ve never really heard high-res, high-definition audio.

That said, the hardware that’s now coming out to play high-res audio will play every possible format, so we won’t be caught in another format war again. The new decoder chips support everything from MP3 all the way up to DSD, all on one chip, and some of the new consumer hardware will connect directly to the Internet via Wi-Fi so you won’t have to connect to a computer to get files in and out.

Do you get a lot at 192k?

We get about 10 to 15 percent. The interesting thing is that a lot of it has still been compressed and destroyed, which defeats the purpose.

How often are you called upon to crush something?

Probably more than half the time, and we get into some discussions about it. The one good thing I’m seeing is more people are backing away from that and understanding what happens when you take this crushed stuff and convert it to MP3s. We use Apple’s MFiT apps to show the person what happens when you do that. If we pull the level back a little, you can really hear the difference.

I did a panel at the Nashville Recording Workshop, where I took some stuff that was pretty heavily compressed and was able to run it at different levels into the Mastered for iTunes software to A/B things. I had a DAC that I could vary the level in 1dB steps so that I could lower the level into the encoder and then raise it by the same amount during playback so the reference level was the same. As I pulled it down, the crowd was amazed at how much better it sounded the lower the level to the encoder was, to the point that you could even hear it over the sound system in this big room. When we got down 4dB in level, they could hear that it was virtually identical to the original 192kHz/24-bit master, so it does make a difference, and people are starting to realize that.

The other thing that we’re doing is showing people the difference in sound quality when Apple’s Sound Check is employed. I took some of the old Steely Dan stuff that I mastered that had a lot of dynamic range and some current product, and we listened to both with Sound Check turned on and off. Everyone is blown away how great the Steely Dan stuff sounds when Sound Check is turned on, versus the more modern stuff that initially they thought sounded louder and better. It appears that Spotify is targeting a –20LUFS reference point, so something that had a –8LUFS reading would be turned down 12dB, which means the peaks only go 6 to 8dB above that. This means that the song at the lower LUFS level now has more peak level, which means it’s going to sound louder. iTunes Radio appears to be set at –16LUFS, and you can’t turn it off. Spotify does something similar as well.

The next question for mastering engineers is, When will Sound Check permanently default to On in iTunes, rather than just On in iTunes Radio? Once they do that, all of a sudden the levels will be different from what they were on many tracks, with what was loudest before now sounding quieter, and they won’t be able to change it.

I hope that this is the beginning of the end of the “dark ages” of mastering, so we can go back to making music again, because that’s what ultimately connects to the consumer.

What gear are you using?

My mastering workstation is still SADiE. I’ve been using it since it came out in 1991, and for me it’s still one of the cleanest and fastest systems on the market. The monitors are PMC IB1’s powered by Bryston 7B amps. My room is incredibly accurate and easy to work in. One of the downsides is that I work too fast. If I work on an hourly rate, I get done too quickly [laughs], so I switched to a flat rate.

I listen to either the Benchmark DAC2 or the DA convertors that are in my Crookwood C4 monitor controller, which allows me to do both stereo and 5.1. It’s one of the cleanest things going.

I’ve got a bunch of plugins, from iZotope Ozone to some of the Slate stuff, a package called the Dynamic Spectrum Mapper, and some various Waves stuff. It’s plugin du jour.

Are there any that you come back to all the time?

I tend to come back to the Ozone 5. It’s so amazingly flexible and clean, and built by guys who literally are rocket scientists! I also have the RX3 restoration package and several Cedar plugins built into SADiE for declicking and retouch.

Do you do much restoration?

It varies. There are some months where there’s a lot to do, but then it goes away for a while. Sometimes I’ll do some forensics for the police, where they need some voices pulled out of some bad surveillance tapes.

Do you make a comparison of what you’re doing on a typical home hi-fi system?

No, what I think is really difficult is that if you put up two or three different monitors to get a cross-section, then you don’t really know when anything is right because they all sound so different. I used to run little B&W 100s, and I’d also have the requisite NS10s in the room; and during that time when I was switching back and forth, I found my mastering suffered radically because I didn’t have an anchor anymore. I didn’t have a point where I knew what was right, because the character of the speakers was so different from each other. Once you listened to one for a couple of minutes, you lost your reference point on the others. 

The reason people come to a mastering engineer is to gain that mastering engineer’s anchor into what they hear and how they hear it, and the ability to get that stuff sounding right to the outside world. If you start putting all this stuff up on small speakers and try this and try that, you’ve basically created a big, confused image for the mastering engineer.

So you never listen to a smaller pair?

I do at home. I do in the car. I do outside of the mastering room, but in the room itself when I’m working? No, it’s the one set of monitors.

If I get a producer that says, “Well, I’ve gotta listen on…fill in the blank,” then we get a pair, and it’s like, “Okay, here’s the button that turns them on. Here’s how you start. Here’s how you put the EQ in and out if you want to listen that way. Call me when you’re finished listening.” Then I leave the room and let them listen, because it literally rips me away from my anchor. If I start listening on different-sounding monitors, then I’m completely lost; but on the monitors that I’ve worked on in the same room, I know how they sound. I know what they need to sound like, and the repeat clients go, “Yep, that sounds right. Yep, that sounds good.” What you find is typically within a song or two of working with somebody who has been in here, they settle into it and say, “Okay, yeah. I really can hear all that detail. I understand exactly what you are doing.” We put other things up for them to listen to that they’re familiar with to get a cross-check on what I’m used to hearing.

How have your clients changed?

The clients are a lot of the kids coming up the line that realize the advantage of having an outside set of ears rather than just making it loud themselves. The reality is that they end up with a better product by letting somebody else do it. They realize that if they get their mixes in pretty good shape, they can take it to a mastering facility to get it where it really needs to be.

We get a lot of stuff early on in mixing, and we give them feedback. I’ve found over the years that corrections are pretty broad curves where you’re correcting for room and speaker anomalies. Once you find what that is, you’re now pretty much on track, and the rest of the album will fall in place pretty quickly.

How many sessions are attended?

Thirty-five to forty percent. It’s a lot less than it used to be. A lot of time we’re getting work from people all over the country. It’s so convenient to just pop a file up into the cloud, but we also host our own FTP site here in the building. If the client is close to computer literate, they can use an FTP program instead of two-stepping it through a cloud service. We just put a DDP file and a DDP player back in their folder, they log in, and they’re done. It cuts out sending CD references by FedEx back and forth like we used to.

How much are you doing that’s for vinyl?

Maybe 5 percent. It’s not a lot. In most cases we do a second master where it fits more in line with what works for vinyl. I cut vinyl for 30 years, so I know what’s going to work and what doesn’t.

After cutting his first number one record (Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight”) at age 18, Bob Olhsson worked on an amazing 80 top ten records while working for Motown in Detroit.  Now located in Nashville, Bob’s unique view of the technology world and his insightful account of the history of the industry makes for a truly fascinating read.

How do you think mastering has changed from the vinyl days to the way it is now?

BOB OLHSSON:  Well, I was thinking about that.  In the vinyl days we were very concerned with mechanics, meaning the playability of a record and whether it could be manufactured.  A mastering error in those areas would mean thousands of returned pressings.  It was a big financial factor.  Tapes, for the most part, came from larger studios with more experienced people, so you didn’t really have that much to do in a lot of cases.  You might use little EQ, a little level correction, filter some low frequency and de-ess some highs so you wouldn’t run into skipping problems, but other than that you pretty much tried to go with the sound on the master tape.  It was a lot more nuts and bolts.  You’d always think, “How do I get it off from the tape onto the disk and still have something resembling the same thing come back?”  So it started out very much as that kind of consideration.

Then as the recording industry moved to the use of independent studios, we began to get a new generation of independent mastering studios.  They got more involved with working on the audio itself, partly because the studios either had less experience, or had less feedback than say you would get in a record company studio.  In a record company studio you hear about it in a big hurry if something doesn’t sound good whereas in an independent studio you may or may not hear about it because by the time the sales people are involved, the studio is completely out of the loop.  So Sterling Sound and the Mastering Lab and so forth were kind of the first generation of mastering studios that were not part of record companies. 

At the same time, the record company studios became more involved in what we called “creative mastering”.  This was where Bernie Grundman at A&M, for example, made a very large impact from a record company studio.  On the East Coast I guess Sterling was probably the first.  There was a studio, Bell Sound, which was both a recording studio and a mastering facility and they were a very big deal.  Motown used to send their stuff to Bell. 

In 1948 the majors decided they were going to stop doing anything other than middle-of-the-road Pop music, and so a whole bunch of people left the majors and started the independent record companies; the Atlantic’s, the VJ’s, the Chess’s and so forth.  Later on, Motown was actually part of the second generation of that evolution.  This was a whole parallel thing that was created by the advent of tape recording.  The idea that you didn’t have to record to disk and go through all that stuff that required this specialized expertise was a revelation.  You could now go into a studio that had done broadcast advertising or you could go into a radio station.  Atlantic used to use radio stations all over the country.  They would find an artist they wanted to record and sign them to a contract on the spot.  Then they’d find a local radio station, make a tape and send it back to New York.  A lot of their early records were done that way.  They eventually built their own studio and the rest is history.  A friend of mine, Joe Atkinson, was their mastering engineer from 1959 until he came to Motown around 1969.

When you were at Motown, were you in Detroit or LA?

BOB OLHSSON:  I was in Detroit, the real one.

You did the mastering?

BOB OLHSSON:  Well, it was a complicated thing.  Basically Berry Gordy is a man who tried to never make the same mistake twice, so he had his own system that was integrated into RCA’s manufacturing.  If at all possible, he wanted the mixes to be able to be mastered flat.  So in many cases, if it didn’t work well flat, it got sent back to mixing rather than attempting to fix it in mastering.  He also had a policy that he wouldn’t evaluate anything other than off a disk since he wouldn’t have a tape recorder in his office.  He wanted to hear how it stacked up against other records on the market, and he wanted that perspective on everything he listened to.  So we basically did an acetate of every mix that was done.  We would occasionally suggest a change, but for the most part they wouldn’t approve anything at all radical.  Anything beyond a couple of dB at 4,000 was sent back for another mix.

So what I was doing was basically cutting these acetates.  We would cut a 33 1/3 of all the mixes and then they would pick which ones they wanted to go to the next step.  If there was some marketing reason why it had to happen fast, we would do the mastering.  But if there was time, we would send the acetate and the master tape to RCA and tell them to match it.  They were willing to absolutely guarantee pressings and turn around any mistakes in 24 hours.  We went that route because Berry’s first business was a record store and he knew all about defective pressings.

What was the reason for them doing the mastering?  Did he think that there would be fewer rejects if it happened there?

BOB OLHSSON:  He had a guarantee.  Basically the way it was set up is we would hardly even know about a problem because they would deal with it all internally at RCA.  So they were actually matching an acetate that we had sent, and we would check their acetate to make sure that it matched what we had done before letting it go.  That was the process.

That’s far different from what you would think.

BOB OLHSSON:  Yes, it was pretty unique.  Basically the secret of the success of Motown was being able to coordinate appearances of the artists with records in the stores at the right time.

You saw first hand something that may not ever happen again.  That was probably a wonderful experience to live through.

BOB OLHSSON:  Oh yes.  I’m convinced Berry Gordy is absolutely the smartest person I’ve ever heard of in the record business.  All my experience since then has been looking at how people are doing things and scratching my head and wondering why on earth they are taking the long way around.  I’ve watched various labels go through their changes and my perspective is sort of an odd cynicism because I haven’t seen much new.  I would love to see somebody put together a book about how he actually ran the company.  They have done all these books that have been basically written for the fans of the artists, but they haven’t really gotten into how the company worked and what they did. 

The neat thing about doing mastering there was that we saw everything.  We had to relate to virtually every part of the company and we were among the only people that ever saw the whole thing.  It was really brilliant.  Of course I am also not sure that he realizes how brilliant it was.  He was just a very bright and very, very, very logical man.  He was always thinking, “How can I make this simpler?  How can I make this better?”   And it meant that we did everything in a somewhat different way than the rest of the industry, but often it was a much smarter way. 

Like, for example, the Motown artists never paid for any studio time.  They never paid for promotion.  They didn’t pay a manager’s fee out of the record royalties.  They didn’t pay for a lot of stuff, and they got a lower royalty rate as a result.  But you have all these people running around believing they really got ripped off because they don’t realize that the higher rates that the other companies paid would then get whittled down to next to nothing.  So, it’s an apples and oranges thing.

I was doing mastering there until about 1968 and then I got moved into the studio because I had a background in music.  So from that point on I was doing vocals, strings, horns, rhythm dates, the whole bit.  I was one of the two people that held every engineering job there.  The other one is Larry Miles.

The musicians were all jazz players.  Berry is a big Jazz fan.  His record store was a Jazz record store and it completely failed, but he learned his lesson.  Just because he loved something didn’t mean that it was commercial, so after that he began doing the most universally commercial stuff he could.  His goal for the company was for it to be another RCA or Columbia.

And he almost got there.

BOB OLHSSON:  I think what finally brought it down was the whole MTV thing, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on videos and that kind of thing.  Of course Motown was much more oriented around the music than the video.

I think the one effect of the Internet may be to completely turn that back around again.  I think in a lot of ways it is like ‘48 all over again, the numbers aren’t going to work for these big new conglomerates and a new complete independent scene will develop. I look at on-line to play the same role that radio did in the ’50s.

The thing people don’t understand is that music is a social thing.  People do music with other people.  They want to hang out with people that are into a given kind of music.  It’s something they have on in the background of their life.  It’s like a piece of architecture almost.  It’s not something where they put their life on hold to concentrate on like a film.  It’s a very, very different product and Motown was really aware of that.  That and the dancing.

In retrospect another thing is blatantly obvious but I don’t think anybody really realized it back then.  What we called the R&B chart was really the women’s chart. (LAUGHS) I think the thing we didn’t realize was that beginning with The Beatles, men had become an important component in buying records, and the records we were making largely appealed to women.  We weren’t all that successful at making records that men were into.  That just kind of came crashing home to me recently.  It’s like our own racism limited us because we thought it was a racial thing and it probably wasn’t.  That may be true of the whole industry.  Now it’s swung back that way again.  This last year, women just started buying more records than men for the first time since The Beatles.

I read somewhere that the demographic that buys the most CDs nowadays is a white woman over 30.

BOB OLHSSON:  It’s the fastest growing group, I know that.  I’ve actually been trying to research that some myself.  In our Web mastering project, one of the things that I have been doing is trying to come up with statistics about signal processing and demographics.  Unfortunately, most of the research has been done by broadcasters and is extremely proprietary.  They paid for it and they’re damned if they’re going to have other people knowing what they learned. 

I had an exchange with Bob Orban (whose Optimod compressor/limiter is at the heart of most radio and TV stations signal chain) and found out a couple of real interesting things.  Apparently too much high frequency absolutely kills you with women, but a lot of bass is very important to women.  Too much compression kills you with women because it becomes what he calls “intrusive.”  You want it to be able to be on and in the background all the time.  You don’t want it pulling your attention away.   You still don’t want it to be boring and dynamics actually help with that, so it’s a fine balance from a station’s viewpoint.  In order to appeal to women, they have to be less in your face, and the more in your face thing has to do with maybe the first ten seconds that somebody listens to a station before they adjust the volume control.

How do you think we’re going to get back to the use of dynamics, because now we’re squeezing the life out of everything everywhere along the line.

BOB OLHSSON:  The usual theory is that nobody will question it as long as it is selling, but of course, new recordings are not selling.  I found out that the average new release is selling something like 800 copies.  The few titles selling very well, the recordings that are selling millions of copies are not paying for the ones that aren’t.  Apparently this came up in Soundscan and Billboard printed the thing and a bunch of the majors tried to actually get them to pull that issue off the stands because they didn’t want their stockholders seeing that statistic.  So there is certainly something going on there. 

I have heard that there are some major meetings going on in an attempt to more or less reel production back into the record companies.  They are rethinking a lot of stuff because of the dropping percentage of titles that are paying for themselves.  It may all come out in the wash because while stuff certainly is going to get squeezed, if people can come up with figures that indicate that over-compression can harm sales, that is definitely the message that can turn it around.

Returns would scare people away from going too far.

BOB OLHSSON:  You had that same economic with vinyl.  But in this case, we can do things beyond anything we were ever able to do before, like turn the signal into a square wave even.  The other thing is that people are commonly going too far with compression during mixing so much that an awful lot of mixes can’t be helped.  I average a couple of mastering jobs a year where I can’t do anything to it.  If you switch anything in at all, it just absolutely turns to dust.  All you can do is hope that the stations that play it won’t destroy it too much more. 

Do you have a philosophy about mastering?

BOB OLHSSON:  Well, first, do no harm.  To me it’s a matter of trying to figure out what people were trying to do, and then do what they would do if they had the listening situation and experience that I have.  I sort of try to be them because I see the whole process as a matter of trying to clear the technology out of the way between the artist and the audience.  You’ve got this person on this end who is doing a performance, and you have these people on the other end who are listening to it, so I think it’s largely about keeping the technical aspects from distracting from the performance.  That’s the most basic thing.  Then to a certain degree you can enhance things, of course.  You can get it so that you can hear more of what they were doing on a wider range of playback systems or playback circumstances.

What I’m doing is mostly turning parts up, turning parts down, putting different EQ on different parts and trying to get the dynamics so that there are some.  I’m really trying to make something that somebody got working on a pair of Genelecs work on big systems and little ones but yet somebody at a listening station in a record store won’t need to switch the volume control.  So it has to be up at the current accepted level and yet I have to try to figure out how to do the least harm to it and still have it be an experience that people want to hear repeatedly.  I can’t understand the idea of somebody buying something that they aren’t going to want to listen to over and over.  To me that is kind of the whole point.

But the big thing is communication.  It’s about somebody working some magic in front of a microphone and people having the effect of that magic coming out of a loudspeaker.  To me, that is the key to the whole thing.  Do everything you can to get the music to happen in front of the mics and everything you can to protect it after it is an electrical signal.

The whole thing is to try to maximize the amount of expertise that you can afford because you don’t really want to master your own recordings.  For my own recordings, if I can push the budget, I go to Bob Ludwig.  I’m frankly more impressed with his work than almost anybody I have heard, and I have taken projects to just about everybody in the business.  I think the man deserves his reputation.  The unfortunate part of it is that at this point I suspect he gets mostly save jobs.  Stuff where you’ll never know how bad it really was.  And so a lot of the stuff that has his name on it is fairly mediocre and often was probably sent to somebody else, and the label bounced it back and said, “Well, okay.  Let’s throw the big bucks at this and see if he can save it.”

What makes a great mastering engineer as opposed to someone who is just competent?

BOB OLHSSON:  A willingness to go the extra mile and really dig in and try and make something better.  It’s a willingness to fix the intro of something that is a little off as opposed to just letting it go.

How long does your typical mastering job take?

BOB OLHSSON:  For independent clients, typically at least six hours.

Do you have to add effects at all?

BOB OLHSSON:  Like reverb?   Yes, we do that on some things.  We do a lot of compilations where we’re starting with wildly different sources and trying to get them to lay together.  It can be pretty challenging.  We just did a compilation of some Russian choral music where some new recordings had been done in a pretty dry church and it just didn’t mix with the stuff that had been done in a cathedral, so I had to add a ton of reverb to that. 

What did you use?

BOB OLHSSON:  Well we have a NuVerb sitting in a spare machine and that appealed to me because you can save the settings.  Of course in mastering, a whole lot of what it’s about is how do you reproduce it five years later.  So I’m very, very anal about archiving source files and settings and even software in some cases so that I can pull it back later.  Because as things have progressed, I’ve found that I can go back and take something I mastered five years ago and do a heck of a lot better job today.  So if I can go back to the sources and even just see what my settings were, I can just use newer software.  The software that’s made most of this happen is the Waves stuff.

Are you using just one set of monitors or do you go back and forth?

BOB OLHSSON:  I don’t like multiple monitors in a studio although I’ll use the little speaker on a Studer two track.  I also check things out in my car. I find mid-level alternate monitors just confuse things.

Do you listen in mono much?

BOB OLHSSON:  Yes, because too many decisions are made in mono down the line.  We have had occasional problems.  We had one artist that decided they liked the effect of the lead vocal 180 degrees out of phase on each side, so when you mixed it to mono it went away.  We had to explain to them that you don’t really want to know what the limiter at a radio station is going to do on that, because the stations have these correlation switchers that try to switch everything in phase.  I understand there are also things that will somewhat monoize a signal because it will reduce the distortion in stereo.  So there is a lot of manipulation going on there.  They assume a clean, coherent signal going in, so if you give them something that isn’t, heaven only knows what will happen.

How do you see mastering changing in the future?  What will the mastering facility of the future look like?

BOB OLHSSON: I think there is going to be a lot more involvement by the producers and mixers than there has been because if any of the new formats fly, things are going to be a lot more complex.  Having three different mixes of voice up, voice down and voice in the middle in a six channel surround is going to be pretty unwieldy to keep straight.  I mean, there are just so many more things that can go wrong that I think a lot of it is very likely to go the way of the film business, because that was how they worked out how to deal with all the different theatrical formats. Film mixes are done to stems and then those are “mastered” to the various surround formats.

What are you listening to at home?

BOB OLHSSON: Duntechs with a pair of Hafler 9505s.  It’s real good for digital because it’s a very bright, clean system, so it really shows up any artifacts.  That’s basically what we want it to do.  We just want to come up with digital stuff that doesn’t bite.

Noted veteran engineer Eddy Schreyer opened Oasis Mastering in 1996 after mastering stints at Capital, MCA and Future Disc.  With a list of chart topping clients that span the various musical genres such as Babyface, Eric Clapton, Christina Aguilera, Fiona Apple, Hootie and the Blowfish, Offspring, Korn, Dave Hollister, Pennywise, and Exhibit, Eddy’s work is heard and respected world-wide.

Do you have a  philosophy about mastering? 

EDDY SCHREYER:  Yes, I do.  I would say the philosophy is to create a sonic product that gives the song balance and competes with the current market in terms of sonic quality and level.

What do you mean by balance?

EDDY SCHREYER:  Frequency balance; not too much bottom, not too many mids, and not too much top.  Balance is making adjustments with compression, EQ and such so that it maintains the integrity of the mix, yet achieves balance in the highs, mids and low frequencies. I go for a balance that it is pleasing in any playback medium that the program may be heard in.  And obviously I try to make the program as loud as I can.  That still always applies. 

But all mixes can’t be cut as loud as others so there’s many limiting factors as to how loud something can go, and there is also limiting factors on what balance can be achieved.  Some mixes just cannot be forced at the mastering stage because of certain ingredients in a mix.  If something is a little bottom light, you may not be able to get the bottom to where you would really like it.  You have to leave it alone so it remains thinner because it distorts too easily.

There are a lot of people that are complaining that things are so squashed these days and it’s because of everyone trying to get their competitive level up.

EDDY SCHREYER:  What I am hearing is that various houses are really over-compressing trying to get more apparent level.  The trade off with excessive compression to me is the blurring of not only the stereo image, but blurring the highs too.  An over-compressed program sounds pretty muddy to me.  In the quest to get the level, they end up EQing the heck out of these tracks, which of course induces even more distortion between the EQ and the compression.  I am hearing things that are very, very loud, but in my opinion not a very good sound.  I am hearing a program that is just way over EQed because they’re trying to get back what the compressor has taken away.

How do you determine what’s going to work and what isn’t?

EDDY SCHREYER:  By listening. You go as loud as you can and you begin listening for digital clipping, analog grittiness and things that begin to happen as you start to exceed the thresholds of what that mix will allow you to do, in terms of level.  Again, just spanking as much gain as you can, be it in the analog or digital world, doesn’t matter.  You go for the level and properly control it with compression, then you start to EQ to achieve this balance.  Of course it all depends on the type of mix, how it was mixed, the kind of equipment that was used, how many tracks, the number of instruments, and the arrangement.  Just the number of instruments can be a very limiting factor on level also.  For example, a 96 track mix may not go as loud as a 24 track mix because there is too much signal to be processed.

You don’t seem to compress things a lot; a dB and a half at the most.  Is that typical?

EDDY SCHREYER:  It’s very typical of what I do with all my stuff; but I compress more than people are aware.  I can compress in different stages so hopefully you are not even really hearing it.  You are not actually seeing the compression, either analog or digital, that I’m doing.  But I do go a little lighter than a lot of other mastering houses.

Do you use multiple stages of compression then?

EDDY SCHREYER:  Yes. I do use analog and digital compression and sometimes digital limiting.  Sometimes I digitally limit, I digitally compress, and I analog compress.  Very rarely do I use analog limiting though.  I use whatever is needed to control the program.  In other words, when a program is mixed a little heavy on the snare for example, I can use a digital limiter that will sort of clip the peak off that so that I can back off the dynamics of that particular instrument in the mix without EQing it out.  Because if I go for the snare with EQ, I’m going to be pulling down the vocals and possibly the guitars as well.  Likewise with the bass.  If I go for a kick that’s mixed too hot, adjusting 80, 60, 40 cycles or something to pull a kick down, it will really sacrifice the bottom quite a bit, so I’ll tend to use digital limiting to peak limit excessive dynamics in those particular cases.  And then there’s de-essing for sibilance on vocals and cymbals.  That’s all in trying to achieve balance again.

Do you think there is a difference in the way people master from city to city or coast to coast?

EDDY SCHREYER:  Maybe slightly.  And that only comes into play on the East Coast for example.  Certainly I think there is competition on both coasts, but the East Coast might be a little more aggressive because of the competition between the mastering houses to be the king of the hill, so to speak.

So the sound is more aggressive.

EDDY SCHREYER:  Absolutely. Whereas I think West Coast houses might be spread out a little more so they are a little less aggressive with the style and type of mastering that’s done.  Which gets back primarily to level.  It seems to me that the East Coast has gone a little overboard in the level game.

What do you think makes a great mastering engineer as opposed to somebody that’s just good?

EDDY SCHREYER:  Probably the ability to hand pick various pieces of equipment that maintain a sound.  When I say maintain a sound, I mean keep the stereo separation strong.  Also, the ability to use taste and know how far mastering can and can’t go.  Put it this way; a lot of times less is better. 

Then you have the environmental issue.  You can’t make a move or create a fix if you can’t hear it so obviously the mastering environment is extremely important.  Then the ability to know just how far to push the creative envelope is important. 

For example, I enjoy the creative editing possibilities when using the workstation in helping an album maintain some continuity and flow.  If I hear something that will make a good crossfade, I’ll mention it to the client.  It may or may not fly, but we’ll always try it.  So I definitely like the creative part of the workstation as it has created a great situation for mastering engineers to step forward and have a little more say in terms of the flow of the album with edits, spread times and things like that.  It’s all part of the big picture, if you will, to keep the flow of an album happening.

What do you think makes for a great facility?  And is it possible to have a great mastering engineer and a mediocre facility?

EDDY SCHREYER:  A great facility to me means both client services and a comfortable place that’s able to facilitate both large and small sessions.  I am assuming my studio is somewhat the norm.  I can seat about five to six people in my room very comfortably and I believe that is probably somewhat common.  I think a mastering room that’s too small is not a good thing.  At times there are more than two or three people who want to show up at a mastering session, so that part of the client relationship is very important to me.  So the facility sort of dictates what your goal is in terms of the client/engineer relationship and just how comfortable you want these people to be.  The client distractions are also one of the most important, yet simplest things; be it games, or a nice kitchen where people can sit down and relax.  Obviously staff is very important as well in terms of helping clients, whether it be receiving a phone call or setting them up in a lounge to hear playback of various material.  All of that, to me, represents a good facility.

Regarding the back end of that question, I’ve always felt, as a pretty good mastering engineer, that I’ve worked in some pretty lousy places.  I’m one of those guys that might have been in lesser facilities until I got the chance to build my own.  To some degree you can certainly have the ability and be hampered by budgetary concerns where equipment that you need is not being purchased.  Or it could be just the physical limitations of the room, the size of the room, the type of monitors, or the sound of the room, which is certainly the most important thing.  If the room is not there, I really believe you are in trouble.  So some of the best guys have been locked down, I think, in lesser rooms.

Can you hear the final product in your head when you first do a run through?

EDDY SCHREYER:  Usually, yes I do.  Typically when I first put up a mix, the first thing I do is just go for the level without touching EQ’s unless there is something blatantly wrong.  So I pretty much do get a picture in my head.  The extreme is that a good mix is sometimes even more difficult to master in some respects than something that has a blatant problem, so I have got to be very careful because sometimes less is better.

Sometimes you throw up a mix and it’s so kick heavy with an 808, for example, that it is absolutely distorting from the get go, so then you’re tweaking right from the beginning.  You immediately start to drop the bottom and try to get that balance going so you can dial out some of the kick, then the level starts increasing.  I’ve mastered records where I pulled 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 dB out of the bottom and all of a sudden I’m able to get four dB more overall program level.  So when something is not balanced, it can really create big problems.

I do love the fact that vinyl is still hanging around because ultimately, when a lot of these projects are cut to vinyl, that’s what really susses engineers out.   If they’re distorting and mastered to the improper side of loud, it certainly doesn’t go to vinyl well.  Just the process of cutting vinyl is probably adding 15 percent distortion or more.  The good news here at Oasis is that we’re hearing that our vinyl sounds better than anybody in the world at this point and I’m very proud of that.

I know you cut vinyl for a long time, but you don’t now.  Do you miss it?

EDDY SCHREYER:  Not terribly, no.  It is a tedious process.  I’m glad that I did cut vinyl, because again, that gets back to that big word “balance”.  The best sonic and the most properly mastered products always cut real well.  The worst mastering jobs and the worst mixes mastered really badly.  So I’m referring to this smoke and mirrors black art of balance, if you will, that’s the toughest game and cutting vinyl has probably been the biggest help in my entire career. Trying to get the audio balanced so that it would cut well was a huge help because a bad mastering job would cut just horribly.  As you started balancing projects out properly, they would cut that much better.

Unfortunately you can probably count the lacquer houses on one hand now in this country, so the new generation of mastering engineers have not had that training.  As a result it’s a little tougher to get to that final stage of mastering something well.  Just like anything else, you can’t have too much experience.  I’m still learning every day because mastering is a constant learning experience.  That’s the good news, frustratingly so.  The vinyl is just totally unforgiving whereas the digital medium allows you to slam anything into it that you want, clipped or not, because it’s not going to skip.  In other words, you can almost do anything to a CD and get away with it.  Left-Right balance can be totally wrong, image can be totally wrong; it just doesn’t matter because that CD will not skip.  So basically the taste factor becomes the limiting issue.

What’s the hardest thing that you have to do? Do you get projects that are more difficult because of the way they’re prepared or treated?

EDDY SCHREYER:  I’d say one of the most difficult types of project is the one with source mismatches where some of it’s on a file and some is on 1/2”.  I still find 1/2”, properly aligned on good tape and a good machine, to be a deeper, wider sound.  And I still enjoy listening to analog more than I do a lot of the files.  But cutting an album with source mismatches is quite difficult because some of the digital formats sonically shrink to me.  No matter what I do that file is just going to sound a little thinner and a little less deep than the 1/2”, so trying to create and maintain an album with flow and continuity in terms of sonics becomes difficult.

Soundtrack albums are probably the singly most difficult type of project for me to do, especially if a score is involved.  Sequencing is terribly important if score is coming behind a big rockin’ song.  It’s very difficult because the score is dynamically wide with levels from maybe -20 to +3. The low level score is never loud enough.  I think it’s always best to help maintain good continuity and flow with good song sequencing.  So maintaining some sort of sonic equality, if you will, on a soundtrack album is very difficult, especially if you’re sequencing material that’s maybe 10 or 15 years old and then current stuff.  So probably the most difficult stuff outside of mismatching of sources would be the soundtrack album, but I enjoy doing them and I think I do them pretty well.

What makes your job easier?  Is there something that a client can do to make everything go faster or smoother?

EDDY SCHREYER:  Having some common sense like being organized and obviously having a sequence in mind helps.  In general I’d always prefer to have the best mixes first.  But if several studios were used for mixdown, I rather keep all the mixes from each studio together.  So, if four or five different studios were used, I would start with all the tracks from studio number one.  I don’t care if it’s song number 1, 3, 10 or 12; I would rather master those as a unit, and then move on to the next studio to keep some sort of continuity.

What’s the thing that you enjoy most about mastering?

EDDY SCHREYER:  The thing I enjoy most is taking a project to another level.  And obviously, it’s the greatest feeling in the world when Fiona Apple or Christina Aguilara, or Offspring ends up being really outstanding sonically and then also achieves the sales that they do.  It makes everybody involved with the project pretty happy.

Do you do all of your equalization and compression and limiting before you hit the workstation?

EDDY SCHREYER: If the source is analog, it’s the best of all worlds because then you’re making just one digital conversion into the workstation, so that’s the ultimate.  I think it’s silly to make an A to D conversion, process digitally and then go back into the workstation.  The less signal jacking, the better in my opinion. 

I’ve noticed that you use a lot of little bits of EQ.  Is that typical of most mastering guys?

EDDY SCHREYER:  To tell you the truth, I don’t really know how a lot of guys master their projects.  I would suspect that I’m somewhat similar to a lot of guys though.  I tend to build sound versus stabbing things pretty strongly in one spot.  That’s about the easiest way as I can say it.  I have digital and analog EQ and upon listening the decision is made which should receive the bulk of the work.   

How did you come by that method?

EDDY SCHREYER:  Probably from tuning rooms using third octave EQs.  I tend to shape the sound, rather than stab it pretty strongly in spots.

How often do you have to add effects?

EDDY SCHREYER:  Very rarely.  I mean, it might happen twice a year in this room.  We don’t tend to get those sorts of problems.

Do you get people who premaster things where they’ll maybe cut intros off or cut fades off or something like that?

EDDY SCHREYER:  Yes, sometimes for the worse.  Usually they think they are saving time, but they might create more problems than if they left it alone in the first place.  I’ve had some projects where they clipped intros and I’ve had to grab beats from other places and put them on the top, so I prefer it if you don’t cut the program too tight.   If there is a lot of very deliberate editing to be done and you want to save time and money offsite, then I understand it.  But it better be right.

How important is mono to you?  Do you listen in mono a lot?

EDDY SCHREYER:  No, but I believe MTV uses a fold-in process so there is certainly a consideration to be made for that.  Depending on the mix, it’s possible that certain instruments will disappear on the fold-in.  So pure mono is really not a consideration at all, but if you’re thinking of MTV at all, it is definitely a good idea to maybe narrow the spread just to maintain a little better match between a slight fold-in and pure stereo.

How did you go about choosing your monitors?

EDDY SCHREYER: I’ve been using Tannoys since about 1984 or ’85.  I’m just a big fan of the dual-concentrics.  I think the phase coherency is just unsurpassed.  Once you get used to listening to these boxes, it’s very difficult to listen to spread drivers again.  In this particular case, my Dual 15’s have been custom modified for the room to some degree and using them is just a great treat.  I think they are one of the easier speakers to listen to since they certainly don’t sound like the big brash monitor that they possibly might look to be.  A typical comment made about the monitors here at Oasis is that they sound like the best big stereo system they’ve ever heard, which is a terrifically flattering compliment.  I also have some little Tannoy System 600’s for near fields, and now I’ve added some dual 15 subs to the mains.  Sonically speaking, I have been in quite a few rooms and I have yet to hear a system that rivals this, so I am very happy with it.

Tell me about the subwoofers.  What was the reason for getting them and why did you get two as opposed to one?

EDDY SCHREYER:  My mains, the Dual 15’s, are definitely light from say, 30 Hz down, so I wanted to fill in the extreme lows more accurately because of the amount of R&B that I do.  Darren Cavanaugh and Aria came up with a design that I just absolutely love.  I feel I have a little bit better control with the pair than with a single sub in terms of where they sit.  Whereas with one, you are pretty much locked down positionally but with the two you actually have a little more flexibility.

Now that you had some experience with surround sound, how do you feel about that as opposed to stereo?

EDDY SCHREYER:  Oh, I am loving it but it’s a difficult medium to work in.  It’s not something you just throw up and do.  To some degree you’d think it would be easier because you have five speakers to fill up instead of cramming all this information in two speakers, but it is not.  The balance of the monitor system is extremely important and the adjustment of levels of the drivers and then interfacing the sub is extremely critical on the mix.  I find that the stereo image between the left and right, left and left surround, right and right surround in the crisscross from the left to the right surround is very, very tricky.   I do hear some unusual low frequency phase characteristics that I’m not real happy with, depending on the mix.  I’ve also heard some very, very good mixes so it can definitely work.  But it is a difficult medium at best to really make sound good, but so is a really great stereo mix.  5.1 is just so new to all of us that it’s much more difficult at this point, but when something is nailed, it’s just awesome.

What’s your favorite piece of gear?

EDDY SCHREYER: That is tough because the digital Weiss desk that I have certainly is still unsurpassed at this point. The Manley LimCom (Vari-mu compressor) is definitely one of the best units I have in terms of analog.  I really don’t have a piece of gear in here that I dislike, so between Tube Tech and Manley and Avalon, Waves L-2 and Junger, it is all my favorite stuff, to be honest with you.  Sonically, it just doesn’t let me down.

When you get handed a project, what are the steps?  What do you actually go through on a whole project?  Describe a whole project like Christina Aguilara, for example.

EDDY SCHREYER: Christina is an extreme example because of the complexity of the album.  In other words, that particular album was mastered over the course of six to eight weeks, maybe longer.  Songs were being remixed and getting swapped, so it was a little longer process than normal.  Not that it was bad because, if anything, I didn’t have to deal with the typical 12 or 13 songs in one day and nail them all with one mastering session.  An average album rolls in where I am doing that in five to six hours though.

Basically a project starts out whereby a client comes in, hands me tapes and gives me a song sequence.  I just take it song by song and dump it into the workstation (an AudioCube) and then offload refs.  The procedure can be relatively simple, outside of interludes and any special little musical pieces that may interface with the album in terms of spreads in between songs.

But Christina was unusual, as I say, because it was done over quite a period of time.  That was actually great because as the sequence changed and songs came and went, my perspective on the sound of the album remained consistent because I was always given the time I needed. 

Is it harder for you to do something like that over the course of a week or two than it is to do all at once?

EDDY SCHREYER:  It really depends. Sometimes I would say yes, but sometimes it gets crushingly difficult when a project just strings on and on and on because you can lose a bit of your objectivity. 

I truly find that the R&B type pop records are a little easier than Rock records.  Rock records get a little trickier because the balances are so critical.  It just seems that a well arranged R&B pop track is pretty simple for me to hear whereas Rock seems to need more sonic continuity than R&B tracks.  It just feels better when they are seemingly coming from a similar place.  Whereas R&B pop records can have much more extremes involved and it just plays out fine.

How does Latin stack up?

EDDY SCHREYER:  It’s similar. The only catch becomes, just as in my Japanese projects, it’s a little trickier to dissect vocal balances if they are not sung in English. I’ll often turn to a client and ask about a word in Spanish or Japanese. “Was that okay?  Was that discernable?”  Because the Japanese market tends to go for a little higher vocal level because it is tough to hear the lyrics in the language.  Ultimately, though, balance is still the key.