From Ohm to Om — The ZenMastering Blog

A few years back I interviewed Kavi Alexander for a magazine article. The interview never got picked up, but it was (IMO) really interesting, so I published it on my Audio Recording Advice Web site. Here’s one of the things he said in the interview:

P.A.: A lot of people argue there is an intangible quality to tubes that can’t be replicated.
K.A.: There are people, and I myself have argued, that there is some intrinsic quality to tubes. I’ve always used the mystical analogy that a tube is like the microcosm of the universe, you know, electrons jumping through a vacuum…it’s like the Word of God…the Verb of God, the transcendental cosmic essence manifesting itself in the material realm. In the transistor it’s more like in the manifested material world…the electrons are flowing through solid matter.

Sound intriguing? Check out the full interview.

As convenience increases, quality decreases. Don’t think this is a universal truth? Well, consider a few examples:

You get the picture; something becomes more convenient at the expense of quality. Like it or not, it’s a universal truth. An axiom.

And so it goes with making audio recordings. It seems like a great idea to have your song, ep, or album tracked, mixed, and mastered in one place for a “package rate”. Hell, it’s convenient. But like every convenience in the world, it comes at a price.

I think a good analogy is getting your oil checked and car washed at the gas station. The oil is more expensive and the discount car wash isn’t nearly as good as a hand-washed and waxed car detailing service. But, hey, it’s convenient.

And don’t think that because I’m a mastering engineer (who, coincidentally, owns a mastering studio) I’m bashing on recording studios for offering mastering. It would be just as absurd if I offered tracking and mixing in my mastering studio. And that’s why i don’t do it.

But the difference is that people understand tracking and mixing, but mastering is a mystery. What is that mastering engineer doing, and is he as good as Bernie Grundman?

So — since it’s a mystery — it doesn’t seem strange that a recording studio would offer mastering.

Sometimes conveniences are worth the trade-off, and sometimes they’re not. You just need to decide whether your music is something that deserves the attention of dedicated, specialized professionals at each stage of the process…or whether one size fits all.

It’s become the trend to over-compress music. Gladly, it seems like the days of hyper-compression are behind us, but what’s become the norm is to just use compression very liberally.

Compression does just what it says it does: compresses. It takes the quietest sounds and makes them louder and the loud sounds and makes them quieter, sandwiching things together and reducing the space between them.

Sonically, this can be valuable…but there’s also a value to space. For one thing, it allows you to appreciate the moments of impact when they arrive. It gives you a sense of perspective.

ImeanwhatifIstartedremovingallthespacefrommytyping?Wouldn’titbedifficulttocomprehend?Sure,overtimeyourmindwouldadaptitselftofiguringoutwhatthehellIwasdoing,andbythenyouprobablywoudn’tmissthespaces.

Conversely,

if

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as well.

And that, my friends, is the point of mastering: to have a knowledgeable, objective person make the “sonic spacing” decisions for you so that it communicates your music’s message to the widest audience effectively.

So, keeping on with my DAC testing post, I’ll clarify a bit why I listened to what I did for testing. First, I don’t have a lot of free time (despite what you may think by seeing daily blog posts), so I wanted to compare the Devilsound DAC against my RME/Lavry DAC in an hour or so.

There are many people who take the technical route when testing, using tone generators and graphic analyzers. This stuff can be very helpful and revealing, but (IMO) is best as a backup to verify what you believe you’re hearing.

I think that using what you would consider to be a great recording can be as revealing and useful as any test. Simply because there are many things that test well but don’t sound so great. Conversely, there are a lot of things that sound good but don’t technically test well.

The middle ground is to use musical tests like what you’ll find on the Stereophile Test CD series, which include sounds organically generated but produce a sort of test-like result in their ability to show system’s flaws by exposing their limitations.

Yet while real-life tests can reveal what electronically generated test have a harder time at, real music in a real space is the only thing that has depth and dimension that can be compared from instrument to instrument: like how timpani and cellos play against each other, and how glockenspiel notes will decay after they’ve been struck. And our ears are much more sensitive to these things since we’ve heard them before.

So, for this reason, with a short amount of time to devote to comparitivie listening, I put on David Chesky’s Area 31. I’m sure there are other tests that can reveal different things, but an amazing recording of world-class musicians in a great concert hall gives one a sense of musical realism that, as a package, is hard to beat.

So, last post I mentioned the San Diego-based Devilsound DAC. Let me clarify that this is a USB converter meant to be the go between from your computer to a home theatre, stereo system or great pair of powered desktop computer sound monitors.

I’ve spent part of the evening listening to music on it, switching back-and-forth between my mastering room setup (RME 9652 soundcard into a Lavry Engineering DA10) and the Devilsound DAC. (For you audio geeks out there, my playback system is a pair of Vandersteen’s powered by a Creek amplifier, connected by DH Labs Silversonic interconnects and speaker cable. This, in a room setup by George Augspurger. So, a fairly critical listening environment!)

I was somewhat limited in listening selections, as I can’t go above 16/48 for the Devilsound, but still have lots to use for comparitive listening. But then I thought, “I’m going to cut to the chase and toss in what I consider to be the best recording I’ve ever heard: David Chesky’s Area 31.” It’s an amazing audiophile recording that really shows off the timbre of instruments and the spaceousness of a great recording space.

In listening to this recording using my RME/Lavry setup and the alternate Devilsound USB DAC, I think that the Devilsound has a bit “softer” (less defined) sound to it than my RME/Lavry setup, but this is mainly evident in transients. In addition, less prominent elements of a mix seem to be a bit more hidden with the Devilsound, and come to the front a bit more with the RME/Lavry. But, I think this difference in detail is to be expected given that I’m comparing a USB-based converter with a dedicated PCI digital card going to a $1,000 recognized world-class DAC.

It’s hard to say where sound differences may come from. The Devilsound is a different architecture than the Lavry, and their different animals altogether. Suffice to say, I’m just giving my sonic opinion here, not reverse engineering each converter!

I’m not ready to give up my RME/Lavry…for two reasons. First, the Devilsound can’t handle the bits/kHz I work with in mastering. Second, it’s a bit less accurate sounding than my current setup. However, the Devilsound DAC is a really good sounding converter, and a great bargain. There’s a 60-day return window, so I think it’s a no-brainer to at least try it out.

The other day i came across a Web site called Devilsound Labs. They are two guys from San Diego making a DAC, because they can’t figure out why good DACs cost so much.

Hey, I’m a guy from San Diego doing mastering because I can’t figure out why good mastering costs so much.

So I dropped them a note and a day later one of them came by to give me a Devilsound DAC loaner.

I’m going to write more later, but for now I can say that this is a product worth checking out for anyone who wants a professional-sounding DAC at an affordable price.

More later…

I was perusing the Web site of one of my favorite rock personalities, Paul Gilbert, the other day and saw a picture of him performing with very big headphones on…like the kind you’d see an airline runway technician wearing. I was curious if these were a stage prop, a monitoring system…or some combination of both.

After a bit of probing on Wikipedia, I found out that he suffers from tinnitus and now wears headphones when playing live to offset any further hearing damage.

It’s too bad, but not so surprising, for a musician who spends his time playing loud music to have hearing-related issues. After I saw this, I clicked on a Wikipedia link for tinnitus and found a list of well-known musicians that suffer (or suffered) from the same problem. A short list includes musicians like Beethoven, Moby, Sting, and Lars Ulrich (big shocker there…) to non-musicians (or non-professional musicians) like Garrison Keillor and David Letterman.

Our ears and hearing are quite mysterious compared with other senses, like our eyes, where various solutions for common problems are available. While there doesn’t seem to be any agreed-upon solution for hearing loss, I would encourage musicians to have their hearing tested. If you have insurance, go to your PCP and ask for a specialist recommendation. Places like Kaiser should have in-house audiologists that can handle the testing. You might also want to check out Web sites like H.E.A.R..

I’ve decided it’s time to take a break from the audio-blogging-high-road and jump the tracks for a short trip to trash town.

Saw this today, and I couldn’t help feeling some measure of justice had been served.

My only question is whether the fact that he created the Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync (not to mention probably the whole boy band genre) was considered when the sentence was handed down. If so, hopefully a few years were tacked on to reflect that…

He should find a lot of fans of his work in the “big house.”

Trivia: Who is his cousin?

I was just sitting at my desk thinking about whether or not compact discs were ultimately doomed. Whether, someday, everything would be vapor. No physical discs. No CD, SACD, DVD, BluRay, whatever. Nothing. What would musicians sell at shows? Vouchers for .MP3s?

And that made me wonder whether this is the first time in recording history that an inferior technology would replace a superior one.

To some degree, that’s been going on for a long time. Convenience is always a factor. Records were inferior to reel-to-reel, but offered an affordable (and somewhat portable) way for people to listen to music. 8-tracks and cassettes were just a portable turntable, so even though sonically inferior, they co-existed happily. The first CD had lower quality than really good vinyl, but it was — by comparison — almost indestructible and sort of married the best components of albums and cassettes: improved sound quality for portability (over tapes) with more consistency and durability over vinyl.

But what does .MP3 offer? Is this “upgrade” convenience-based only? Or, has every new technology iteration been based purely on convenience?

I think the biggest boon is that .mp3’s are easily transferrable over P2P networks. But as the bandwidth of the Internet increases, that becomes less important. And the size of the average movie trailer is about the same size as a 16/44.1 song, so if people are willing to wait for a movie trailer to download, why not a song?

I’m not against .mp3s (OK, well maybe I am a little), but IMO there has to be some reason besides convenience that drives art’s consumption. But maybe there doesn’t. Maybe there never has been, depending on how you look at the evolution of consumer playback formats. Is it solely based on ways of packaging audio that can maximize sales?

I guess if that’s the case, then this is the one time it backfired…

If I could have lunch with anyone in the world (that I haven’t already met and/or had lunch with) to pick their brain, it would be Jimmy Page. Actually, I think I’d like to time travel back to about 1974 (putting me at six-years-old) and have lunch with that Jimmy Page.

If you think that a mastering engineer would want to find someone more erudite to chat it up with over lunch, think again. To me, Jimmy Page embodies the perfect mix of raw musical talent, breakthrough utilization of technology, production chops, and overall mystique to make one person that I still wish I could meet.

I’ve had the chance to meet a lot of talented/smart/famous people in my day: Frank Zappa, Steve Vai, Nicolas Slonimsky, Herbert F. York, Doug Sax, and Joseph Heller. But, somehow, Jimmy Page seems like bits of all of them rolled up into one person.

I mean, who else was hip enough and smart enough to play Orange amps and a Theremin, produce some of the most groundbreaking rock albums ever, use a violin bow on a Les Paul, and kick ass on acoustic guitar? Not to mention writing some of the heaviest song riffs ever. I mean, The Immigrant Song…absoutely criminal.

So, that’s my lunch-with-anyone wish…just in case JP is reading.

(Oh, and the only regret I have on my list of famous people is not stopping Kurt Vonnegut to talk as we crossed paths in a Bridgehampton bar in 1995.)