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Old 10-30-2010, 12:22 AM
KNM KNM is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2010
Location: Australia
Posts: 16
Default No Need to Master?

After months of working hard, I can now put together a pretty solid mix. I use Sonnox plugins - which I am happy with.

I put a few plug in over the mix bus. My levels were nice and hot and the mix sounded strong. I decided to master and things went bad..

Here is what I did...

* Removed all plugs off the mix bus and bounced everything to a stereo wav file.

* Imported the wav into a new 'master' session. But, no matter what processing I added (and I racked my brains!) I couldn't match the level of the final mix without it distoring and sounding 'mushy'.

* I downloaded a trial version of Izotope 4 and things started sounding better - but still not as good as the final mix I did previously....

I am questioning myself now, did I really need to master ? Things sounded better before..Maybe I was so careful with my mix and pushed all the signals so hard that mastering was unecessary?

Some suggestions from all you folks would be graciously appreciated.

KNM.
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Old 10-30-2010, 12:49 AM
mindnoise mindnoise is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Germany and Tokyo
Posts: 3,094
Default Re: No Need to Master?

Essentially, there is not need to master for -1dBFS or commercial sounds.
Like compression is an OPTION, not a must.

Mastering is usually a process to keep multiple songs on an album on equal level, so you don´t have to turn the volume after every song on CD.

The topic of the "loudness war" is all bout that and about professional audio engineers don´t want to cater for the industries `louder is better`premises.

here is a nice dynamic meter TT Dynamic Range Meter
http://www.brainworx-music.de/en/download

to check how much ´life´is left in your recording.

These days I mostly use just Sonnox Inflator and a successive multi compression stage that is very gentle to the overall dynamic and just takes care of the real bad spikes. You unfortuantely still need some of this if you are going 16bit in the end product. But you still can get away with really intact dynamics.

The more compression you have the less impact certain instruments or passages can make in a song.

The best Limiter is the Volume knob on your stereo, anyway!

best :)
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