[MLA] ***SPAM*** Re: Not either or

[Bob Katz]

On 12/14/17 1:33 AM, Thomas Lund wrote:
> Hi Ian,
>
> You don’t know the per-track normalisation factor before an album is completed; and the factor changes if the same track, without remastering, becomes part of a new album.


Here I have to disagree. On the basis of center-of-gravity over here as 
a mastering engineer, I can cite and even give examples of why it is 
possible to know with a great deal of certainty, how a given track will 
work, within 1 or 2 dB I wager, in a new album. I've been working with a 
fairly fixed monitor gain in the same room for many years now, and it 
works, it works real well. I'm not saying that is a solution to 
mastering a given album in its own context, I'm simply pointing out that 
center-of gravity works and it is very possible to predict an 
approximate gain for any track or production you are working on BEFORE 
THE ALBUM OR PRODUCTION IS COMPLETED.

Use your ears, and calibrated monitoring. 24-bit and especially 32-bit 
float allows this to be done without penalty. If you are working on a 
section of a radio production and it is the dialogue and you know it is 
going to be integrated with music later, then turn it down to what 
sounds natural to you in a calibrated room. Don't send it to the next 
stage of production at full level, it's going to be turned down.

As a mastering engineer I encounter this problem all the time. Mix 
engineers work on a ballad, peaked to full scale. They work on a rock 
number of the same album, peaked to full scale. In 10 seconds of 
audition, as an experienced mastering engineer, I know I have to turn 
down the ballad. There's a lot to be learned from this concept, and it 
can be passed on to broadcast and other production institutions. In the 
old days, often there were guidelines in radio production environments, 
to set the announcer to a certain VU level and the music to a certain 
higher level. It was a primitive attempt to help pre-process the 
material, and to be honest, even that is far more effective than sending 
the dialogue along at ridiculous full scale to the next stage in the 
production prodcess.

This concept has nothing to do with genre, guys. It has to do with a 
better and more holistic approach to production practices.


Let's look at an interesting issue: A two album set, one with mostly 
ballads and one with mostly rock numbers by the same singer. The 
mastering engineer mastered them in context, and thus users can shuffle 
the two albums interchangeably. If disc #2 contains all ballads, 
however, it will come out too loud in an album-normalized stream. 
However, if disc #2 contains even one rocker and the rest ballads, then 
the two albums can be ingested and sound perfectly together in an album 
normalized stream. AND, come out well against all the other albums in 
the stream. It is only singles releases of ballads that will sound wrong 
in that stream.

And again, I'm not talking about genre. This has nothing to do with 
genre, it has to do with human perception. We tend to listen to material 
at its performance loudness. Has nothing to do with genre.


BK


> “Hard-fought” was in relation to keeping a genre-neutral metrik at the center of all loudness measurement. Dolby wanted speech normalisation, and one-eyed Album is almost equally bad.
>
> Satisfy Program Loudness normalisation first, then consider custom tunings such as Speech or Album.
>
> cheers,
> Thomas
>
>
>
>> On 14 Dec 2017, at 02.14, Ian Shepherd <ian at mastering-media.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Hi Thomas,
>>
>> Thanks for the extra details. Just to clarify:
>>
>>> b) Album reduces production transparency, a hard-fought feature of BS.1770
>>
>> Do you mean you’re concerned people won’t be able to predict the final playback loudness because it depends on the context within an album ? I’m not sure why this would be the case, since surely people will always know which other songs will be grouped together in an “album”, and so can calculate the offset themselves ?
>>
>> Sorry if I’m missing something,
>>
>> Ian
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>
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-- 

If you want good sound on your album, come to Bob Katz 407-831-0233 
DIGITAL DOMAIN MASTERING STUDIO Author: *Mastering Audio *Digital Domain 
Website <http://www.digido.com/> No trees were killed in the sending of 
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