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

[greynol]

When I am in a position to improve something of mine I think is important and it is fairly easy, I generally take action and improve it. Maybe it's too late for Justin Colletti to amend or pull his article, if not then that's unfortunate, IMHO.

I wouldn't present information about the effects of the process of psychoacoustic coding primarily from mastering specialists any more than I would present information about the effects of food on the human body primarily from chefs (if at all!), no matter how reputable they are.

Also, how does reporting that someone has won Grammy awards or has a very successful career have anything to do with their ability to understand the intricate details of something when this knowledge is not necessary to do their job well, let alone at all?

This post has been edited by greynol: Mar 30 2012, 17:00