Welcome to my first blog entry for quite some time. I have now been solely mastering audio for a living for 10 years, a full decade. It has been fantastic to be able to work with 1,000's of bands, musicians, mix engineers, record labels and producers.
There have been many updates to equipment over these years, I have a hardware Manley Massive Passive equalizer in the rack and feel the need to write about the sonic attributes of this legendary mastering equalizer. The eq quality is sublime, it is a passive equalizer filled with high quality caps, inductors and PCB's, it has a Class A all tube output stage (3 valves per channel) with transformer balanced output stages.
When you pass a stereo signal through the Massive Passive you get a very subtle clarifying tone imparted to the audio, this is before any signal manipulation occurs, in fact there are times I pass a mix through just to provide this euphonic tone to the audio. The stereo image very subtly widens which is a probably a side effect from the output transformers and the very, very gentle opening up of the top end comes from the gentle valve harmonics driving the output amplifier.
Passive EQ works without electrical energy being applied to the filter circuits, thus the reason there is the tube amplifier in the output stage, it has to be high gain and operates at high voltages. The eq is fairly broad and umatched by any equalizer I have heard when you need a wide eq stroke to bring the mid range into focus. The top end is also very sweet and not something that is mentioned very much. It was one of the first aspects that I noticed personally along with the articulate mid range. It has the capability to bring all the important instrument fundamentals forward to enhance the musicality of the mastered end result.
The analogue rack at SafeandSound Online Mastering is filled with great gear, a Summit Audio DCL-200 which I have nicknamed the "golden enveloper" just a small amount of gain reduction controls the mix and glues, it is fairly transparent but has a slight warmth which thickens and enriches the mixes that pass through it. It is fairly rare to compress heavily during mastering and so a light tough is all it takes.
A Sontec clone equalizer is great for clean eq boosts and cuts and it excels through the frequency ranges from lows through mids to the highs. A smooth sounding articulate equalizer capable of adding a "Je ne sais quoi." to mastering music.
One of the biggest upgrades recently is to use the Crane Song Solaris Quantum DAC which has the lowest published DAC jitter spec of any DAC in production. The sound is superb, the first thing of note was extra low mid clarity and definition. It is unusual to hear people speaking of clear lower mids but the definition of sound here is great. The soundstage is 3D yet accurate, not over done, or overly wide. It really helps me understand what is warmth and what is mud and allows very targetted equalization to be applied. This improves the translation of music on multiple sound systems.
I now have a Hypex amplifier running the PMC monitors (and the smaller Dynaudio speakers which I still enjoy using as I have become very accustomed to their presentation - they are useful in hearing the effect of compression as they are very punchy/fast speakers which reproduce transients very well. A perfect companion set of speakers to the PMC's) The Hypex amplifier is a technically perfect power house of an amplifier. No mercy is shown to problematic issues in a mix, the pure clarity of the amplifier informs me of what to do in order to improve your mastered audio. This model is a 500 wpc amplifier which runs very cool and efficient. (Which reminds me the studio is run on renewable electricity for the last 6 years since having changed to a wind based electric utility company.)
The amplifier has lots of headroom, I suspect I rarely use 100watts of energy in daily monitoring task so there is a complete absence of distortion.
The studio also has had a major update in terms of acoustics, there are now almost 30 bass traps in use with one of the traps almost 2 meters deep. In order to absorb the very deep low end in the studio and keep it flat down to 25Hz. I have a variety of 3 different types of broadband bass traps of various sizes. The vast majority of them are 1.2m x 100mm x 400mm deep. I use different densities of absorber (60kgs/45kgs and 28kgs/m3) to ensure that the correct gas flow resistivity is used to absorb the bass most effectively depending on the size of the bass trap. The stands have also been infilled with Rockwool RW3 so they further act as invisible bass traps. They are finished with a variety of cloths to keep the fibres intact and stop them from entering the air in the studio.
The level of detail I can hear from the sound system now is truly informative in the context of mastering and is helping me do my best ever work. In addition the newer digital software tools released in the last few years are also empowering mastering engineers by extending remedial possibilities allowing to correct problematic sonic issues ever more transparently, allowing even greater music masters to be produced.
Fortunately for all clients my pricing has largely remained the same. I like to provide affordable and consistent service all round and price point is no exception. In total I have 20 years of professional audio engineering experience ready to be deployed on music tracks from all and every genre. This is a work that I love and continue to enjoy and be satisifed with.
Mix appraisal is still inclusive for any client that asks for it, I appreciate not all will and will want me to just master their music without any further advice but it does remain a popular added value to the service. This is especially useful for people who are not sure about how their low frequency instrumental balances (kick and bass line) is sounding in their mixes as it is notoriously difficult to judge in a room that does not have good acoustic treatment.
So if you are looking to improve your music before its release whether on streaming services or for download, I am here ready to assist just get in contact. Bring on the next decade of mastering audio !
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