Listening to Mixes and Masters

Todd, a friend of ours is producing an album and he brought up several versions of each of the songs on the album to hear what they sounded like in high fidelity.

We played them mostly upstairs on the Emm Labs XDS1 CD player [the Audio Note CDT Five and Fifth Element digital are currently being enjoyed in the Bay Area for a week or two], the Audio Note M9 preamp, the Audio Note Ongaku integrated amp and finally into the Marten Coltrane Supreme speakers.

The way I understand it, 16 tracks went into the mix, where their equalization and relative volume etc were played with and condensed into 2-channels and saved onto a 1/2 inch tape and at the same time onto a ‘mix CD’. The mastering engineer then mastered the 1/2 inch tape in several different ways, each time, apparently, in response to feedback from the musicians and our friend the producer. This particular producer, Todd, goes to great lengths to try and use the right technologies to try and preserve the original performance, live in this case, and not rely ONLY on tape and tubes and not ONLY on DSP software and hard disks.

So, today, what we heard was, song by song, the original Mix version of the song and two to three masterings of the song.

The Mix version was always cleaner with better separation and containing more delicate nuances – revealing more inherent emotion and musician technique than the masterings of the song did.

The masters… the mastering process is more brute force than the mixing process; there being only 2-channels instead of 16 – equalization and compression affects more than just one instrument, for example. So some mastered songs were digital sounding [too much treble?], hard sounding or dull sounding [too much compression? top rolled off too much] but some masters really were better.

Sometimes the bass would be diminished somewhat, bringing the vocals and harmony forward making it more accessible to the listener. Some masterings seemed to increase the air a bit, capturing the emotion and suspense at the very end of various phrases song by the vocalist [cool that this is how many people put emotion into their voice, at the very end of words and sentences]. Some mastered songs seemed to have much more PRaT than their pure Mix versions [which I suspect was do to slight compression of the frequencies of the main melody line – but I liked it!]

So what I learned here was that slightly different masterings have a big affect and can take what I would consider a good song and make it very engaging and involving or make it boring and brash. Just shows how much trust we put into not only the musicians, not just the studio and mastering technologies, but in the mixer, the masterer, and the producer of these albums – that they will deliver to us audiophiles something decent that we can now try and reproduce to the best of our abilities.

I also learned that, personally, although I prefer the clean Mix version [it is much more real], it took less time, and was easier, to ‘get into’ and enjoy some of the mastered versions. The music was first rate, IMHO, and I would call it a blend of bluegrass and… honky-tonk? folk?

Anyway, this was a great way to spend an afternoon.