Recently, I was mastering a track for mp3 encoding (or pre-mastering as purists would call it). To get the music up to competitive perceived loudness and RMS level, I was squashing the life out of it – taking a mix I had so carefully crafted, and hitting it with a sledge hammer until it sounded all brown.
I thought, how has mastering gone from taking a sweet mix and making it sound amazing, to trying to find the least harmful and distasteful dynamic distortion to apply?! Being rusty at this, I really wanted to find some better way. From scouring, I found this relatively good thread:
Limiter comparisons (with sound)
It's a good read and the tests are useful. But it did not really help with the track I was working on, which, in comparison to the test, had much longer periods of sustained audio energy.
So, I picked some limiters to work on in tests of my own material:
- Sony Oxford Limiter
- Waves L3
- PSP Xenon
- iZotope Ozone
- Sony Oxford Inflator (not really a limiter, but wanted to see what it sounded like in front of one)
Again, for my material, all I could really coax out was various shades of brown.
Then I had what felt like a revelation, though this may be obvious to anybody who has been mixing up-to-date: instead of mastering a mix that sounded good, I was going to mix into the dynamic distortion of the mastering chain; tossing transparency, and leveraging the color and distortion of the chain. I’m not really sure I'm into this, but may be doing so when I cannot find a better way.
If you’ve read this far and are an audio geek, you might be interested in the chain I finally settled on for my situation:
Mix Buss -> Nomad Factory Program EQP4 (for gentle contouring) -> PSP VintageWarmer 2 (for light multi-band compression, about 3 dB) -> Waves L3 (cozy and warm, about 3 dB)
This chain worked for the dynamics of the material I was mixing. I’m sure it will be different for the next mix; though the approach may stay the same.
Some geek resources:
Friday, February 1, 2008 at 10:59PM 