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

[saratoga]

At least from my point of view (and as I mentioned i my first post), the real story is just how poorly Apple has managed to communicate the goals of the "Mastered For iTunes" program. Before I mocked their description for its almost condescending tone to the reader, but really I think even much of what they have tried to explain has been lost. For example, in the original quote from Muller he attempts to determine what the frequency response of an AAC encoder is:

“I can tell you what doesn’t work,” he said. “One of my initial trial-and-error methods was to take digital fingerprints of both versions of the song, and then try to apply a [compensating EQ] to the CD version and pump that back through the AAC encoder.”

Now this is a perfectly logical thing to do to a speaker or a tube amplifier. But its just plain insane to expect that to work on a perceptual audio encoder. No one with the slightest clue of whats going on would expect that to work. But to someone still living in the pre-digital era, its all they would have to go on. Now to Muller's credit, he does correctly deduce that a perceptual audio encoder is very, very different from an amplifier through experimental means:

"Well, the problem with that is that input does not equal output. It’s highly program dependent, and you rarely get the same thing twice in a row."

Unfortunately, while he has (thankfully!) given up trying to compensate for perceptual encoding with EQ, he has no idea why AAC encoding works differently then an amplifier. The notion that its actually analyzing a signal and converting it to a new form in a nonlinear, adaptive manner without actually altering the intensity per frequency is lost on him. Thus while Apple has given him tools, they have failed to explain to him adequately what it is those tools are meant to do or why he should be using them. And so he (and most of the people quoted) seem to be grasping the dark trying to relate an ill-explained set of objective handed to them by Apple to (irrelevant) experience using more conventional audio equipment like microphones and amplifiers.

I suppose that while we have criticized Rubin, Muller, Shepherd and company for not understanding their trade, in some sense this isn't really their fault. They've been handed a complicated goal by Apple with very little explanation or guidance. And while yes we would hope they would take the time to learn their tools even without guidance, perhaps given their time constraints. their age, and their other responsibilities this is unrealistic.

[db1989]

And while yes we would hope they would take the time to learn their tools even without guidance, perhaps given their time constraints. their age, and their other responsibilities this is unrealistic.

their age

What does that have to do with it?

Actually, maybe it’s best just to pretend that bit isn’t there. A mud-fest will solve nothing, and I certainly don’t want to be the one to have started it.