EQ Magazine - April 2009 - (Page 58) work, and the Crookwood Mastering Bricks to tie together every piece of gear, from tape decks to DAWs to outboard gear and converters. Sonic Studio and Metric Halo interfaces get audio in and out of my computers. The majority of my work is done with outboard equipment, but if I need to make some adjustments in the box, the Metric Halo +DSP Transient Designer, EQ and Compressor are the best-sounding tools for me. I sometimes use TC Electronic’s TC6000 for adding a touch of space. Or, if the client faded their mix a little sooner than intended, I capture a reverb trail and edit it back together at the end of the file to create the illusion of a longer tail. But I don’t use multiband compression; I don’t like how it changes the mix and sacrifices one segment of an instrument’s audio component for another. As to monitoring, I use only one pair of speakers. For mixing, multiple monitors can help the engineer but for mastering, I need to know my room and playback system deeply and unequivocally. My job is to make the audio as translatable as possible to as many different types of playback environments. The only way to do that is to know precisely what the sound is when I listen in my studio. When it’s time to make the CD reference and ultimately the master, I prefer the sound of the HDCD dithering scheme to go to 16 bits from 24. —Michael Romanowski’s clients include Pete Ham, Paul Jackson, Norton Buffalo, Jacqui Naylor, the Radiators, and Runaways UK. THE DANGEROUS WORLD OF MASTERING What matters most to me, doing this crazy and exciting task every day: 1. A true “Mastering Transfer Console.” By using a Dangerous Master console, I get clean analog gain before the input stage. Many times I’ve solved 80% of my EQ work by simply adjusting the gain stage on the console before I ever have to reach for an EQ. It’s clean and accurate. 2. An adjustable insert path, with sum and difference integration. Being able to do a touch of pre-limiting, spacialization, correctional EQ, and final limiting/color can all be achieved simply and phase-accurately with the Dangerous Master. I can’t imagine needing more than the three inserts that are provided; along with my patch bay, it’s perfect. The second insert point can do a sum and difference matrix decoder/encoder on the send/return (analog!), which allows for discreet control of the center and stereo channels. 3. Synchronous D/A converter for pre-vs-post mastering analysis. The Dangerous Monitor lets me compare the source mix against a full-round-trip mastered track—with the gains matched—using the same D/A converter (built into the Dangerous Master). The converters, system calibration, gain stages, and A/D input stage manipulation all affect the results just as much as signal processing, so you want to judge those along with the rest. 4. Reliable visual cues. The two meters on the MQ show the analog and digital status. While I’m mainly an “ear guy,” I also want to know “where things are at” as concrete supplemental information. 5. A dedicated room for mastering with known acoustics. Every room is different, every speaker and speaker design is different. Your room and speakers should work for you, not against you. 6. Top end and dither. Hard truncation to 16-bits and avoiding dither has become more popular on big records, and on certain genres, it can sound really good. Try it! If you’re working on “softer” music, see how dither affects your top end. My current dithering favorites are: None at all, the Weiss POW-R series, David Hill’s “Analog Dither,” and iZotope’s MBit+. —Mike Wells Mastering hosts the San Francisco Bay Area’s only Aria-equipped ATR Services 1" 2-Track recorder for use as a layback processor during mastering. A sampling of his mastering clients include Jello Biafra, Jackie Greene, John Vanderslice, WHY?, The Mother Hips, and Sound Tribe Sector 9. Photo credit: Chuck Revell (www.revellray.com/). DIGITAL MEETS ANALOG I use BIAS Peak Pro XT 6 for digital processing and assembling the final master and production parts for the Redbook PMCD and DDP File Set. And 58 EQ APRIL 2009 www.eqmag.com http://www.revellray.com/ http://www.eqmag.com http://www.eqmag.com
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