Recording - December 2017 - 72

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MASTERING WITHOUT HUMANITY
Guest editorial by Scott Dorsey

"Mastering isn't about making
things louder." - David Lan
Way back when, everybody knew what mastering was.
You handed the mastering engineer a tape, and he cut it onto
a lacquer disc and handed you the disc. Sometimes he did
some tinkering with the sound in order to make it possible
to get a good signal on the disc, since there are a lot of
limitations to what you can put on a vinyl record that aren't
there with tape.
Then, with CDs, mastering became more than that. It
became the last point at which changes could be made to
your recording. Mastering houses, which already were outfitted
with very high-grade playback systems, became the place
where the last bit of work was done to your music.
You'd take your record into the mastering room, and someone with good ears and good listening skills would listen to
it over high-end monitors, and he might add some processing
or he might not. But it was always a very enlightening
experience to go in, because you'd hear your own work on
very good monitors, with an expert trained listener telling
you about what he was hearing and what to listen for. You
might do some processing, you might not, but either way you
learned about your recordings.
Then the Internet came along.
The first hint I ever saw of Internet mastering was in 1995,
when an outfit called Pellicore Visionz offered to master tracks
by mail. They didn't seem to have anything I'd consider a
real mastering room, nor did they have an expert staff... they
were just honest folks trying to break into a hard business. At
the time, a lot of people jumped on them about it, saying that
they couldn't really do real mastering remotely, not without
having the customer there and without the ability to cleanly
monitor signal. That didn't stop the other people who decided
to become mail-in mastering studios.
From my perspective, what I am hiring in a mastering
facility is a person, his ears, and his monitoring system. If
the person is someone I have never met in a studio I've never
seen, how do I know they're any good?
Soon, everyone and his brother was running an Internet
mastering operation. In 2010, a website turned up for a really
nice-looking mastering facility, complete with very impressive
pictures. Unfortunately, they were pictures stolen off of John
Scrips' website for his mastering studio. Someone started a
mastering service based on stolen pictures and a DAW.
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RECORDING December 2017

I thought this was as bad as things could get. There could
be nothing worse than unskilled engineers fiddling with tracks
without being able to tell what was really going on. Then...

"A just machine
To make big decisions
Programmed by fellows
With compassion and vision"
- Donald Fagen
This summer at AES Berlin, I heard Magdalena Piotrowska,
Szymon Piotrowski, and Bozena Kostek present a paper entitled, "A Study on Audio Signal Processed by "Instant Mastering" Services." They'd found a number of websites that offer to
automatically master your audio under computer control-you
just upload a file and they process it. They tested eight of these
services out with ten songs each, attempted to reverse-engineer
the automatic mastering systems, and wrote about what they
learned in AES Convention Paper 9719.
All the services made music louder and brighter, in slightly
different ways... but in every case, resubmitting files already
processed by the service caused them to be changed again in
a second pass. This implies that the algorithms in use are not
trying to match the audio to a particular sonic signature and
processing it appropriately to hit that target. All they're doing
is applying standardized processes to everything. I am horrified at this, and if you understand what mastering is supposed
to be, you should be, too.
I view mastering as the last opportunity to have a human
being listen to my audio with a fresh and different set of ears
and tell me if something is wrong. To my mind, just talking
with the mastering engineer is more useful than any processing they might or might not do. Someone halfway across the
world might be able to do this, but no computer ever could.
It's certainly more expensive, but far better in every other
way, to be able to sit down with the mastering engineer in
the mastering studio and listen while he points out what he
is hearing. I learned more about mixing from having Don
Grossinger point out things in my mixes than I ever did listening
to them alone.
Scott Dorsey (dorsey@recordingmag.com) is a recording
engineer, educator, and audio gear enthusiast, living and
working in Williamsburg, VA.

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