@amalgam510 and I have been working on mixes/masters for his upcoming release in the last few days at @haciendamastering . Iāve introduced a new practice of patching artistsā DAW digitally into the source channel of my mastering DAW so that I can build a mastering chain on the couch while the artist refines their mixes in the mix position. It has been a very effective, organic, and linear system for completing mixes/masters so far.
On Dillonās second day at Hacienda @slackshane and @gekkobass developed a new classification of maximizer never seen before in audio which operates on alternate mechanics to traditional dynamic processing and is capable of raising perceptual detail/fullness without impacting dynamic range/peak level/distortion/harshness. We used this processor on its first ever master with one of Dillonās tunes.
Our forthcoming plugin got some use on this album not only for mastering, but also for sound design purposes on basses in the mix stage and it proved more than capable for this application as well.āØāØ
This plugin has received praise from multiple grammy winning engineers, industry leaders in electronic music, and purist/audiophile engineers in the last week alone, and we are working tirelessly to finalize it so you can all try it out.
Great couple of days at the studio, both Dillon and I both picked up some great new tricks.
Hereās a topic I donāt hear people talking about nearly enough in mastering/mixing/production: image collapse. Depending on who you talk to their description of what defines a stereo image may be very different. Some people who maybe work exclusively on headphones or on compromised monitoring care only about how far from left to right the image extends and how far beyond the speakers/sides of your head the image extends since that is what they primarily perceive in listening on their playback systems and subsequently value. Others may be particularly interested in fostering a holographic center image with a vocal or a snare or kick that is focal and resolved in the mid channel, which can jump in front of the speakers and articulate nearer to the listener. Some of us with full range WMT (woofer midrange tweeter) layouts on our monitors also are drawn to particularly tall images, I would think quite a few far field PMC users in particular are drawn to this quality. Bill Weird expressed it best of all to me once when he referred to the image as a big bubble that grows from between the front baffles of the speakers and extends towards the mix position, our job is to make that bubble as big as possible and make the least concessions which shrink or deform that bubble. All of these conditions partially describe what we hear as a āstereo imageā and they are all at risk of degradation from the combination of processing decisions that comprise the mixing and mastering process.
cont. below ā¬ļø ā¬ļø ā¬ļø
Iām currently on day four of aligning my newly activated PMC MB2s-XBDs. Iāve bypassed the passive crossover backpacks of the speakers and am now running the output of one Purifi 1ET-6525SA 480w amp to each of the four drivers in each speaker, and those amps are each receiving input from my new Trinnov MC Pro which is acting as an active crossover to recreate the passive 4th order filters with linear phase 4th order Linkwitz-Riley filters. In doing this the amplifiers become more efficient as none of their wattage is being burned up by the crossover components, and the drivers are now individually time aligned to the mix position resulting in a far more ideal impulse response than the passive crossovers are capable of.
I will be sharing some of my thoughts on the difference between the passive and active experience, but bear in mind that performing A/B comparisons in anything approaching a blinded/timely procedure would have been unreasonably difficult to accomplish. So these impressions are only as accurate as my recollection of the performance of the passive system allows. That said, I have noticed new qualities in some of my reference material and masters that I believe is evidence enough that my impressions are resultant from a distinction between the passive/active configuration. To complicate things Iāve made the classic blunder of changing several things at the same time (crossover, D/As, and amps) and as a result your guess is as good as mine regarding which new components in particular are yielding these improvements exactly or whether it is a combination of several. But for anyone curious about the benefits of activating their speakers (and especially MB2s-XBD passive owners) this should be useful to you. (cont. below) ā¬ļøā¬ļøā¬ļø
