What's the difference? CD 'mastering' vs. 'remastering'
The Master at the controls.
(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)If you read CD or LP credits you've probably seen "Mastered by Greg Calbi" a bunch of times, but don't have a clue exactly what Calbi and other mastering engineers do. I don't blame you--it's a mystery to most music lovers. When I heard that Calbi was going to cut some LP masters I made arrangements to drop by Sterling Sound and watch the master masterer at work. He's mastered thousands of records--everybody from Bob Dylan to Talking Heads to The Roots, to the High School Musical soundtrack, and one of my favorite records from last year, Yo La Tengo's I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass. As a matter of fact, he's mastered all of Yo La Tengo's CDs and LPs of the past 10 years. He must be doing something right.
In the early days CDs were typically mastered from the LP master, Calbi explained. "It wasn't until the mid-'80s that we starting mastering for CD. Vinyl was still No. 1; CD and cassette masters were taken from the LP master."
Nowadays, remastering can refer to a redo of a CD master, going back to the original tapes/files and giving them another listen and eking out better sound. Calbi remastered Bob Dylan's Oh Mercy CD a few years ago, but he also mastered it the first time in 1989. The first mastering was digital all the way, but for the remaster Calbi introduced analog tools (equalization, analog tape machines, etc.), and that resulted in a much better sounding Oh Mercy CD and SACD.
In any case, Calbi works from the final mix and fine-tunes the sound with equalization, dynamic range compression, and volume level adjustments. The mastering engineer's entire signal path--playback machines, equalizers, black boxes, etc.--all influence the finished product's sound.
Still, you might wonder why the engineers don't just transfer the final mix and master CDs or LPs from that. But the sound benefits from a fresh set of ears. The mastering engineer perfects and completes the mixes, or as Calbi put it, "Mastering is finishing for a specific format, CD or LP." What about MP3? "That's very different, and not just from a sound quality point of view," he said. "It's assumed that MP3s will be heard in shuffle mode, competing against unknown music." Right, and that leads to extreme dynamic range compression; so all of the music's natural soft-to-loud dynamics are squashed flat; MP3s have to be loud all the time because with MP3s everyone is screaming for attention in a crowded market.
CDs and LPs are also different in that they're conceived as complete works, and their mastering balances are affected by the songs' sequence--how the songs sound next to each other, the key changes, the rhythm--all sorts of things are compensated for by the mastering engineers. They have to see, correction, hear the big picture.
The mastering engineer is the final critic of the mix, and uses his or her knowledge to try to improve it. And now that so many projects are recorded in home studios by inexperienced engineers there's even more of a need for a fresh set of ears to tweak recordings.
Cutting the Michael Powers' record at Sterling Sound.
(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)What about iTunes? I asked Calbi about the rumors about the Beatles catalog being remastered for iTunes. He was ahead of me, "They're not being remastered just for iTunes; they're being remastered because they got a deal with iTunes. I was partially involved in the discussions leading up to the remastering sessions; most of the Beatles catalog hasn't been remastered in 20 years." It's likely the new remasters are destined for CD release.
Watching Calbi at work, mastering this killer blues rock LP, Onyx Root, by Michael Powers, there's no doubt the man enjoys his work. Calbi's grooving to the music, swaying back and forth in his chair. His playback system is very audiophile--with massive Energy speakers and an Audio Research vacuum tube amplifier the sound is so good I feel like I'm listening to a live performance.
The Sterling Sound LPs will be available from selected online vinyl retailers, and on Sterling's site in a few months. I can't wait.
Steve Guttenberg is a frequent contributor to magazines and Web sites including Home Entertainment, Playback, and Ultimate AV. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
Why don't the engineers/producers band together and agree on a "reference" SPL? That way mp3s would still be uniform but not nearly as dynamically squished, making them and their artists sound much better (ideally making them more money).
There was a technical article recently that showed, through double blind testsing, that a user could identify a recording with audio data above 20Kz, even though the actual audio frequencies could not be heard. Sort of changed my opinions of wide bandwidth recordings.
All that being said, the very best in tube and solid state gear will sound more like one another than lesser gear. This is because the better gear, approaching the state of the art in sound reproduction, will sound more alike as they sound more natural/real, i.e., as their sound reproduction becomes truer to real life or live performances (especially if those were miked).
The use of a tube amp seems strange to me, also. Any chance of getting a response from Calbi?
I'm fine with people using tube amps at home, but for professional use it seems unusual.
I'm in television, where we use Genelec speakers. Great for work, but to revealing for home.
I've always been a "liner notes" geek. Another of the multitude of reasons I hate the whole "music download" industry. But I digress....
Back in the early days of CD's, of which I am old enough to have fully participated.... I was always impressed with the work of Bob Ludwig. Some may not believe it, but 9 out of 10 times I could identify a CD as being mastered by Mr. Ludwig. For my money I think he is the best there is.
If I were to pick out 100 of what I consider some of the best "sounding" CD's I own, I'm willing to bet that Bob Ludwig mastered most of them, with Greg Calbi, and another bloke by the name of Steve Marcussen mastering the rest. And my CD collection is somwhere over 1000, I stopped counting a few years ago at 800.
I've always felt that the digital mastering process was a critical step in the production of a CD. Just my 2 cents worth...
Also, never be fooled into thinking that a tube amp is less revealing, mushy or wooly sounding when compared to solid state, quite the opposite is true most of the time. Reason? It's true that a typical single ended tube amp does produce much more THD than a typical modern solid state design but what that doesn't tell you is what harmonics tend to make up that total. Most of the time the tube design tends to have more 2nd order harmonics and much less odd order or high order harmonics. What this tends to do is make the tube amp seem CLEANER than the solid state design. Reason? Due to the way our hearing works our ears tend to produce 2nd order harmonic distortion(fluid on one side air on the other) and thus we tend to ignore these artifacts. Quite interesting.
One of the reasons high bitrate audio tends to sound more "open" than regular 44.1K digital PCM is not because it contains more high frequency information(way beyond our hearing anyway) but because the filtering needed at the nyquist frequency can have a much more gradual slope and this makes it sound better with fewer audible artifacts.
Digital audio is not perfect but if done correctly it can sound amazingly good. As good as 1/2 inch 2 track at 30ips? Most probably...
- by jungleland2 September 9, 2009 12:36 PM PDT
- As a novice studio owner (I have a small Cubase home studio with a single soundproof room and a control room - Lexicon Omega is my only outboard gear) I can appreciate mastering more than ever. I recorded an 8-song CD for a band in two days and spend about 10 days mixing and could never get the fullness I was looking for. I found a mastering engineer who (a) took my 24-bit mixed file and copied it to 2" tape,(2) used analog compressors and exciters to get new life out of the recording and (3) copied this back to his pro-tools studio to eq and clean up my virgin mixing performance. In my opinion, the mastering was what made the recording sound great.
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(12 Comments)From ZZ Top, Rolling Stones, Born To Run, Replacements the remastered CDs that have come out in the last few years are amazing. So far I am loving Sgt. Pepper and hope the rest of the Beatles stuff sounds as great