The Voodoo of CD Mastering
Update history: March 29, 1998 –
made the first update in over a year, just
cleaned out dead links and got rid of some of the icons (they looked
cool, but made the page slow to load.) I’ve been
busy writing a doctoral dissertation in electrical engineering
which I hope to defend in May.
I have a huge directory of e-mails of links to add to this page which
people have sent me over the past year. I hope to do a major update
after my defense is out of the way.
*.txt files are discussions I’ve been archiving
from the the sonic,
ddesign, and daw-mac mailing lists and rec.audio.pro
newsgroup and a few other places. I’ve generally edited out the bulky
headers and sigs. I used to update these every once in a while.
(Alas, I don’t have time to do so anymore.)
The latest update is shown in parens. (Sorry the articles aren’t always
in any particular
order…)
Some of these threads contain posts that are at times
critical of
some products… please remember these are just one person’s opinion, and
that many folks swear by the products discussed here, so when reading these
remember there is a larger context…
Read this article by Bob Katz, which warns of the dangers of overcompression. Read it now. Read it before you read anything else. The decreasing dynamic range of CD’s is something that’s concerned me for a while now, and I’m glad that mastering engineers are talking about it and educating their clients about the problem. |
Mastering Houses | |
---|---|
recommendations.txt – every once in a while, somebody asks for names and numbers of good mastering engineers… here’s the nets collected two cents (10-7-95) | |
MUST VISITS (highly informative) | DRT Digital Domain |
Mastering Houses | Hotdish Frankford/Wayne Rocket Lab Ultimate One (Hong Kong) Trevor Sadler Final Edit Mastering |
Restoration and Mastering | Quintessential Sound Omega |
Mastering & More | HotWax Nilson Creative Media Corp. The iNTERLAB Overtom |
Digital Audio Workstations | |
---|---|
digid-vs-sonic.txt – Digidesign vs. Sonic Solutions, what’s right for you? (12-26-95) | |
![]() Sonic Solutions | usp-dangers.txt – Dangers lurking in the Sonic Solutions USP (12-26-95) sonic-digid-fusion.txt – Integrating Digidesign stuff with Sonic Solutions stuff (12-26-95) ABG (dealer page)
|
![]() | digi-init-dae.txt – Problems with Digidesign INIT’s and the DAE (12-26-95) audiomedia-issues.txt – issues concerning the Audiomedia card (12-26-95) audiomedia-noise.txt – getting the SCSI chatter out of your Audiomedia audio (12-26-95) |
PC-Based | ![]() ![]() ![]() |
Audio Hardware and Software | |
---|---|
D-A, A-D, sample rate converters, digital meters, etc. | ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() analog2digital.txt – thoughts on A-D converters (12-26-95) connections.txt – interfacing digital audio equipment (9-6-95) jitter.txt – with some general DAC issues (12-26-95) overs-and-metering.txt – and clipping and distortion etc. (12-26-95) |
![]() T.C. Electronics | m5000.txt – tidbits on the T.C. Electronics M5000 (12-26-95) l1_vs_m5000.txt – which is better? (a moot point since they’re totally different animals, but still interesting discussion) (12-26-95) |
DSP Plug-ins, editing software, etc. | ![]() Peak, way cool editing software) | ![]() ![]() |
Analog Domain | ![]() ![]() |
Misc. Processing | valley.txt – Tidbits on Valley DSP’s (12-26-95) |
Other cool stuff |
CD-Recording Hardware, Software, and Media | |
---|---|
cdr-drives.txt – CD-R hardware and software (12-26-95) | |
CD-Prep Software | ![]() ![]() |
CD Writers | Yamaha | cd-9xx.txt on Sony’s writer (also known as cd-2xx by Sonicians) (1-3-96) |
Media | cdr-media.txt – CD-R media (including the yellow vs. green controversy) (12-26-95) cd-art.txt – printing and silkscreening on CD-R’s (9-6-95) |
Don’t forget… | hard-drives.txt – trials and tribulations of hard drives for digital audio (9-6-95) backup.txt – backing up large soundfiles (10-7-95) audio-from-cd.txt – converting audio on CD to soundfiles (10-7-95) |
The Art (?) and Science (???) of Mastering | |
---|---|
Artistic Choices | bass.txt – how to stop bass which sounds cool on great monitors from going blech on cheesy boom boxes (9-6-95) compression.txt – use of compression in mastering (10-7-95) dithering.txt – techniques for reducing quantization distortion (12-26-95) equalization.txt – use of equalization in mastering (12-26-95) mastering-adv.txt – advice on “problem solving” in mastering (9-6-95) mastering-importance.txt – colorful exchanges on the importance and role of the mastering engineer (9-6-95) noise-be-gone.txt – tools and tips for dehissing, declicking, decrackling, etc. (12-26-95) normalization.txt – to normalize or not to normalize (and issues related to matching apparent volumes) (10-7-95) pitch-shift.txt pitch shifting and time stretching/squishing (12-26-95) stereo-image.txt – improving the stereo image during mastering (9-6-95) |
Technicalities | 1630-vs-exabyte.txt – (and vs. CD-R) What’s the best mastering format? (12-26-95) error-correction.txt – (in CD’s, DAT’s, etc.) (12-26-95) filter-formulas.txt – conversion formulas for filters specified with differing units (12-26-95) golden-ears.txt – do these lessons in listening work? (12-26-95) redbook.txt – CD format standards (12-26-95) hidden-track.txt (12-26-95) |
General philosophy
-
canonical-jokes.txt – including Gabe Wiener’s list of engineering jokes
(9-6-95) -
copy-protection.txt – the bane of much music software (12-26-95) -
costs.txt – articles with specific price info (12-26-95) -
crippling.txt – on the annoying habit
many companies have ofreleasing crippled versions of programs
as marketing gimmicks (12-26-95) -
mailing-lists.txt – info on mastering-related (sometimes vaguely)
mailing lists (9-6-95)
Monitors
-
monitors.txt – general thoughts on studio monitors (12-26-95)-
genelec.txt (12-26-95) -
jbl.txt (12-26-95) -
krk.txt (12-26-95) -
ns10.txt – the nearfields you love to hate (12-26-95) -
tannoy.txt (12-26-95)
-
Duplication facilities/brokers (including one-offs)
-
duplication.txt – replication plants and procedures (9-6-95) -
Disc Makers - Global CD
- Maxi CD
and Cassette Productions, Inc. - BrightStar Services –
Media duplication services - Oasis – much
useful info. Another MUST VISIT…
Sales
- MacBeat – hardware and software
- CD Archive sells CD-R recorders,
software, and media, and does mass replication and one-offs
The Cassette House also
sells CD-R media and DATs and other such things
More info
- Jay rose has some
useful docs on computer audio formats and such
Misc.
- Thorough site on the
Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) -
A Fundamental Introduction to the Compact Disc Player -
Ambisonics and related 3-D audio topics
(courtesy the
Music Technology Group at the
Univ. of York) -
Dolby Laboratories Inc. - A paper on
ASPECTS OF SAMPLING, OVERSAMPLING, QUANTISATION, DITHER
AND NOISE-SHAPING, AS APPLIED TO DIGITAL AUDIO, by Christopher
Hicks - A paper on
THE APPLICATION OF DITHERING AND NOISE-SHAPING TO DIGITAL AUDIO,
also by Christopher Hicks
Click
here
to learn about the ever expanding, ever improving St. Louis
area local music scene.
Last modified 29 March 1997
Maintained by
Aaron Lanterman
adl@essrl.wustl.edu