Big-label mastering engineers don’t understand lossy formats, Article about Mastered for iTunes Options

[Kohlrabi]

Just found this article via twitter, circled among mastering "engineers" (in fact Heba Kadry reposted it, the girl who mastered the latest Mars Volta album, which reaches -12.79 dB on my RG scans, and is generally mastered in a horrible fashion).

This further backs my impression that most of them don't have a single clue of what they are doing. The section about the mastering practices of Rubin and Meller are especially eye-opening to me. Masterdisk "engineers" also apparently are now out to rape the Rush back catalogue. Further down they cite phase-reverse tests to prove AAC files are different from the original (wow, REALLY?).

The good thing is, I can use this article to decide which releases to avoid in the future. But I'm really at a loss what we can do beside that. I'm really fed up with mastering "engineers" destroying music releases.

This post has been edited by Kohlrabi: Mar 27 2012, 09:17

[2Bdecided]

I think you're being a little harsh on the article.

One thing amazed me though...

Bob Ludwig of Gateway Mastering, who is known for his objectivity and diligence, said "…[Another] important addition is the realization that the act of AAC encoding can cause clipping where there was none on the original PCM .wav or .aiff file"

This is news to a diligent mastering engineer? Has he just stepped out of a time machine from 1996?!


I haven't looked into "mastered for iTunes" - it seems strange to "need" to EQ a track to compensate for the effects of an AAC encoder running at 256kbps.

Cheers,
David.

[Kohlrabi]

I think you're being a little harsh on the article.

I'm a little anxious right now, because I tried to listen to "Noctourniquet" by The Mars Volta and got all angry.

I haven't looked into "mastered for iTunes" - it seems strange to "need" to EQ a track to compensate for the effects of an AAC encoder running at 256kbps.

Please understand how these people roll. They don't understand perceptual encoding. They don't understand that AAC encodes merely are intended to sound like the original. I guess they sit in front of their mastering software and see that the waveforms differ, and then start to fiddle with the stream they send into the encoder until the waveforms match better. I have no definitive proof of that, but the phase-inversion comparison gives me the strong impression that this is the case.

Just to make it clear, I don't intend to give disrespect to mastering engineers or engineers in general, just to the breed which completely abandoned, or never acquired, understanding of digital audio, and still sprout their bullshit all over the internet, and keep destroying legit good music. They are a disgrace to the engineering community.

This post has been edited by Kohlrabi: Mar 27 2012, 09:50

[dhromed]

I'm a little anxious right now, because I tried to listen to "Noctourniquet" by The Mars Volta and got all angry.

I don't consider the new album (and the one previous to that) to be as harsh as the earlier ones, but subjectively I find it less interesting. It's just a shame that the earlier albums break one's ear drums, because on purely musical terms, I think they're very good. That is what saddens me. It's like putting on a light show but you shine all the spotlights directly in people's faces.