Comments on: What's the difference? CD 'mastering' vs. 'remastering'

The Audiophiliac went to New York's top mastering house, Sterling Sound, to watch mastering engineer Greg Calbi at work.

[BarkerDigital]

No, MP3s do not have to be loud all the time. Ignorant people insist they be loud. I am perfectly capable of using the volume control on my iPod, and really don't listen to any music that is overcompressed - it just stresses my ears. See www.turnmeup.org for details...

[acardes]

Thanks for this Steve, it is really cool stuff.

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).

[msd1107]

Boy, I don't know. After finding out he uses a tube amp for critical listening, I would shy away from buying anything he masters. But maybe his ears have been pre-distorted by listening to the sonics of his amp so that the music actually has the correct response recorded.

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.

[TSW1]

The best tubes amps will generally rival or beat the finest solid state gear. Indeed, I would wager that a majority of audiophiles prefer tube amps. It is not for reasons of nostalgia, but rather because the tube amps will sound more natural while still maintaining the wide bandwidth sound, etc. of solid state. While tube amp specs may sometimes appear better than tube amps, this can be deceiving as most distortion, etc. on a tube amp takes place in the third order harmonics that are outside of the range of human hearing.

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).

[Dango517]

Leave well enough alone but if you must, then do the remasters to sound as close to the original as possible. I realize in many instances it is not possible to conference with this the original artist about there tunes but this should be done when possible, even this might screw a good track. Wonder if Paul McCartney's ears are as good as they used to be? Too many cuts are loosing there original sound. Soon there will remasters, of remasters, of remaster, to bad!

[Mr_Sasquatch]

"After finding out he uses a tube amp for critical listening, I would shy away from buying anything he masters."

The use of a tube amp seems strange to me, also. Any chance of getting a response from Calbi?

[biggestinsect]

I find tube amps to be more natural, warm sounding then solid state. I use Magnepan Tympanis bi-amped with a large solid state SAE on the low end and an Audio Research tube handling the highs. This stuff was all made in the 1970s but still blows away most of the current products available.

[Mr_Sasquatch]

Sure tube amps are warmer, but they are not as neutral or as revealing as solid state.

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.

[mp3artists]

i'll second that comment on loud mastering for mp3s. I have had to re-engineer countless "label" mp3s for radio broadcasts, because of this stupid philosophy

[research1st]

Greg Calbi is one of the Masters of Digital Mastering, no doubt about it.

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...

[DaveMcLain]

This article on mastering is quite interesting and if you've ever done any recording you quickly come to appreciate what mastering is all about. For what it's worth I read Geoff Emerick's excellent book a while back and in there he states that the Beatles catalog was never really mastered correctly for CD, it doesn't sound "right". The state of mastering today with this loudness war is really senseless, listen to how awful some of the records sound. Check out the most recent U2 album to get some idea of how compressed, loud and fatiguing a modern CD can be, simple awful, what a shame.... At the same time pick up a copy of Bob Katz excellent book, "Mastering Audio". In there he goes to great lengths to explain dynamic range reductions we've seen over the last 10 or 15 years and how badly the audio has deteriorated. Much of this makes MP3 sound WORSE in my opinion, very gritty with a lot of nasty artifacts.

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...

[jungleland2]

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.

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