[Dean G]

Marc,

The alternative to the Finalizer is what I use now, and would use again in the future. I burn my demos or what ever you call them to an external burner( using rewritables) and move to my office to my windows rig and rip them into Sound Forge. Now I like the Sound Forge mastering concept because it is another step on a different platform so you are not using up CPU on the mac that you need for your mix. Also the audio is rendered in Sound Forge, not real time so there are no compromises in the processing.

However, depending on the plugin you use (one at a time) the sonic quality varies wildly. The impression I get is like the movie "The Fly". At the beginnig the Jeff Goldblum caracter teleports a steak but the teleported steak looks and smells like a steak but dosent taste "right". Depending on the company that makes the plug in, sometimes your music just sounds too differrent after'transforming" the audio files. Mostly I use the brickwall limiter and this seems not to color the sound at all but makes the mix loud. Multiband compression seems to color the music much more.

I'm just looking into another way to "master' and think the finalizer is the thing. Just checked the TC electronics website and the express looks good. Same 24 bit A/D and D/A. I think the previous generation of Finalizer was 20 bit. Maybe why some poeple are pushing me a little. I mean both A/D and D/A from Lucid will cost over a grand, but I know the Lucid is superior (but by how much??) And you can use the Finalizer to soft clip the vocals on the way in.. not bad! The plus just has more feature, but honestly I don't think I'm going to sample rate convert from 33.1 to 96 anytime soon.

And I'm really sorry if this is trivial and off topic, but polishing the raw digital output from the box IS the big issue. I just don't want to do it by mixing on an analog board. I want to be one of the people who do it all "in the box" and not have you guys know it by hearing it.

Old Timer [img]images/icons/shocked.gif[/img]