Mastering Vinyl, Myths, questions, discussion Options

[Axon]

This is a split of a discussion Hancoque and I had, which desperately needs to be elaborated on.

First of all, I've dumped my thoughts on the matter into the Wiki: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...Vinyl_Mastering. Please comment on it.

A couple of the points there are explicitly worth starting this topic off:

• There is no consistent, unambiguous way to identify the provenance of a vinyl master. Most methods - but most of all, the zoomed-out waveform plot - are inaccurate in one way or another. Visual examination of clipped samples is fairly telling, but not applicable or effective in all cases. How can a vinyl master be accurately observed as being the same or different as a CD master?
• Even if a difference exists, whether or not it is audible is another question entirely. IIRC, brickwall limiting of 3-4db, correctly applied, may not be audible. If so, Hancoque's Slayer waveforms might not mean anything, because his peaks are all within 4db of the CD peaks. What audibility thresholds exist for clipped signals?

That said, I may be eating a hearty dinner of crow tonight, as I just examined one of the records I thought was of the same master as the CD (Battles - Mirrored), and I was able to observe pretty strong differences in clipping between the vinyl and CD versions. I'll reply later with some visual examples.

[botface]

Nice idea usernaim but trying to generalise like that is pretty meaningless. At any given point in time the equipment used in pressing plants was not standard. So a wide variety of equipment of varying levels of quality and sophistication were in use across the industry. I'm talking about up to the end of the 80's when I left the industry, maybe it's more straight-forward now - and say, since the 90's - with volumes being lower and pressing plants fewer.
Also, while cutting a lacquer is a bit of a black art a cutting engineer would never "sum bass to mono", apply eq, compression or anything else without the OK from the artist or producer. The last thing you want is for your test pressings to be rejected and have to re-cut. Any "preparation for production" like that would usually have been done by the mastering engineer who produced the tape from which the lacquer was cut. That would invariably be a different person, probably working in a recording studio or simlar rather than a record manufacturing plant, though it was not unheard of for last minute adjustments to be requested by the artist or producer at the cutting stage.

Edit : for clarity (hopefully)

This post has been edited by botface: Jul 7 2010, 15:22