From Ohm to Om — The ZenMastering Blog

As a mastering engineer there are a handful of albums that have influenced my work, as well as opened my ears to what really good sound — in specific genres — is. Here’s a short list…

Dr. Dre: The Chronic 2001
David Chesky: Area 31
Sheffield Records: Leinsdorf Sessions
Richard Leo Johnson: Fingertip Ship
Incubus: Morning View
Miles Davis: Kind of Blue
The Weavers: Reunion at Carnegie Hall - 1963
Pat Martino: All Sides Now

Some of these recordings are from analog souces, some are digital (AAD, ADD, DDD…as early CDs used to say “back in the day”). And some were digitally mastered and some were analog or analog/digital combination.

They’re proof, though, that great recordings transcend recording, mixing and mastering formats.

I’m going to go on record, here and now, and say that I was THE FIRST person I knew to watch Arrested Development. I remember seeing the advertising for the series and think I started watching it on the second or third episode of Season 1.

I turned every person I know that watches it onto it, and now a lot of them actually consider me their friend.

So, I was excited to hear about the rumors of a movie in the works. This interview with Jason Bateman makes me think it might be true.

If you haven’t seen the show, go online and buy the DVDs now.

If you don’t know squat about the show, get up to speed here.

I received this question via my Web site yesterday:

“If analog has better resolution than digital (and HD), then why is the U.S. going thru the DTV transition? Also, with analog having better resolution than digital in pictures from a camera, then why in the world are people purchasing digital cameras and taking digital pictures?”

Interesting question. Let’s consider the digital world. Its real benefits might be different than you think…

Most musicians in the world today record music on a computer. Unless you happen to be a niche specialist, a Luddite, or an analog hobbyist you fall into this category.

What computers have done to every corner of modern society is provide us with more options for storing, analyzing and editing information.

What? Did you think I was going to say “make our lives easier”? I think you know that’s not true.

The computer is a wonderful invention and it’s impossible to imagine life without it…especially for anyone born around 1970 or later. But it doesn’t necessarily improve the results of work rendered with it. It’s a tool of convenience. You need look no further than PowerPoint for proof.

Consider an analogy: Computers crunch numbers on the world financial markets around the clock. And you can go online and buy or sell investments to your heart’s content with the click of a mouse. But are financial markets more efficient or growing more effectively than they were 30 years ago? And are people realizing better returns their investment than they were back before the modern computer era? It can easily be argued that, actually, the opposite is true. And this is because while the means for executing opportunities has changed, the fundamentals of investing have not. And, in some ways, the shift has turned people from investors to traders, which is usually a detriment to building wealth.

Now let’s go back to audio. For musicians the computer has taken the place of the tape recorder, as well as the mixing board and processing rack in a lot of cases. And, in turn, the act of recording, editing, and mixing has been streamlined. But are recordings sonically superior to 30 years ago? In some sense yes…but in another sense they’re not.

The sound quality of amateur recordings has improved greatly because a computer with a USB or IEEE input is far superior to an analog cassette recorder in terms of noise floor and dynamic range; and secondary items like microphone preamps and processors bundled with these interfaces have progressed to meet the improved sonic specifications of digital interfaces. But high-end recording has actually sloped downward in the digital era. In fact, more than twenty years after digital recording was made available to the masses, people are now just saying it’s reaching the standard that analog set in the seventies. Listen to top-notch recordings like Pink Floyd or Miles Davis, and compare them to great recordings and bands in the same genre today…you’ll see what I mean. You may even think there’s still a ways to go.

Ironically, it’s not all about sound quality. After sound is captured, much work goes into editing and sound processing; and this is where digital really has it on analog because the amount of time in editing is minimal compared to editing in the analog world. Not to mention precision and flexibility: artists around the world ftp-ing files with hundreds of edit points to other artists for collaboration.

But this is different from capturing sound…and should be realized as such. This is the portion that’s equivalent to making the investment transaction. What you need to keep in perspective is that a marginal investment is still a marginal investment…just like an poor recording is still a poor recording. How easily you can manipulate it after the basic acquisition doesn’t change the fact that the fundamentals of economy and audio still need to be learned and respected to have a successful outcome.

Hearing is one of our most powerful — and sometimes overlooked — senses. Our ears are constantly picking up information for our brains to process. Even after our eyelids shut and we fall asleep, our ears are wide open…taking in sound.

People often have strong sensory experiences. The smell of a certain food being prepared can take you back decades, across continents. Unfortunately, a lot of auditory cues end up being negative. Fingernails on a chalkboard, the screech of car brakes in a crowded city street, the sound of glass shattering. But what about sounds that impact us positively?

When I began practicing yoga about seven years ago, I had no real knowledge of what it was about, nor had I ever knowingly heard or understood Sanskrit. One day a new yoga teacher came into class as began the practice with a Sanskrit invocation. Immediately something resonated in me and I felt as though I’d been told something important. Something I knew a long time ago but had forgotten. It was the audio equivalent to the family recipe you grew up with as a child and hadn’t had for a long time.

Pay attention to sounds the same way you’d pay attention to sights, smells, tastes, or touch…don’t just take things for granted. You may find that your ability to appreciate and understand things changes as well.

We’re proud to announce that ZenMastering recently upgraded its main studio monitors to Lipinski L-707s. Lipinski’s are widely regarded as the most accurate loudspeakers made (at any price) — garnering great reviews in Stereophile magazine as well as from pro audio engineers — and have quickly become the defacto standard for many of the world’s best-known mastering facilities.

We’re pleased to offer this new level of sonic excellence to all our clients!

These speakers, coupled with our George Augspurger-optimized room, make for an unparalleled sonic environment.

Yesterday I mastered a track for an eastern European musician. He was lamenting the fact that while mixing the track, he was working in several different studios…none of which had monitors he was familiar with.

This isn’t an uncommon situation, and even in studios with good playback systems a musician can be fairly disoriented as to how to gauge a mix.

My suggestion for this situation is to take a few recordings with you when you go to a new studio environment. First, recordings you can use as “test equipment” (like the Stereophile Test CDs series). Second, musical recordings that you know sound good (from listening in your own studio).

These two tools can help you get your bearings in an unfamiliar situation and walk out with a successful mix.

This simple idea will help your mastering session be a lot less surprising.

I own a BlackBerry Pearl. Believe it or not, it was my first-ever cell phone. I kind of hate talking on the phone, so it really took a smartphone to get me to buy one. The push e-mail, Web access, and applets are the thing I really wanted, not the phone.

So, I’ve had the BlackBerry about a year-and-a-half, and when the iPhone came out I was certainly intrigued. On a recent trip to England, I had time to go into an Apple store in London and got a chance to piddle around with the iPhone a bit.

It seems like the BlackBerry is a digital swiss army knife: does a lot of little things well and will really get you out of a tight spot. And definitely something you want to have on you when you’re out-and-about. The iPhone, however, seems like a real mobile computer. More of a computer than a phone.

I was really impressed with it’s capabilities, and now that the 3G version is coming out with enterprise capabilities, and a price drop, I think that when my BlackBerry contract comes due in February, I’ll be moving up to an iPhone.

I had a meeting with a San Diego-based studio owner the other night. Good studio that has a good reputation, and also offers mastering. Not so much a networking meeting as just finally getting to sit down and meet the owner/engineer (and his mastering guy) to talk shop and get acquainted.

The meeting covered various topics, but one was about how the engineer likes a “crunchy” sound from his preamps (i.e. things like the UA 610 channel strip and some Germanium and Neve pres, when pushed). The studio (and engineer’s) bailiwick is rock and alt-rock, and so they go for a more colored sound. I get the feeling their mastering is of that ilk as well.

So how does an audiophile (i.e. me) offer something relevant in a non-audiophile world?

Well, for the task of mastering, I think that having an audiophile setup and perspective is always relevant. If a studio/engineer/producer favors a crunchy sound and uses a lot of the things listed above — as well as other coloration tools, like distressors — one of the real keys is knowing how much you can push a colored/lightly distorted signal in mastering before it starts to bite back. And the only way you can decide that is with a playback system (speakers, amps, cables, converters, and room) of exquisite clairty.

There are a lot of very musical recordings that fall into this category. And they may sound as if they’re blindly slammed to the wall, but like a Jackson Pollock painting people learn that creating controlled chaos takes tools of exacting precision.

As a forty-year-old mastering engineer, I have enough perspective to appreciate the analog world (reel-to-reel and vinyl), the early digital world (CDs), and the current digital formats (compressed-format downloads and high-res. stereo and multi-channel). I also have enough professional drive to be involved in whatever the future of audio holds. This is one of the values of having been around for a while. Perspective and experience.

What you’ll notice if you look at the list of formats above is that they’re just that: formats. In all of them, the basic precepts of good audio never change. And, they never will. Regardless of genre, recording format, or storage medium music is all about sound particles that interact with air to create vibrations which our ears perceive.

There’s a philosophical saying: “Many Paths, One Truth.” This adage applies well to audio because though musicians may be proponents of various musical styles or recording formats, in the end it’s all music.

My main focus on the blog is audio, but I’ll veer away here and there when I feel the urge.

I’m going on record, here and now (in a time-dated, Internet posting), to say that our current president, George W. Bush, will be remembered as “the reactionary president.” His terms in office have largely been defined by lack of any overall planning, and reacting to circumstances.

Whether you’re in politics or business, this is a sure-fire plan for failure. And the adage “failing to plan is planning to fail” (or something to that effect) has proven itself true once again. In my estimation, in eight years “W” has set us back decades: in foreign policy, environmental policy (or lack thereof) and how the world perceives the United States.

I often wonder how GWB was elected to a second term. But it’s really pretty simple: he convinced people that changing horses mid-stream (in the middle of a major military conflict) was too dangerous, and that we had to stay focused on “defeating the enemy.”

Sadly, ignorance makes us our own worst enemy.

I’m not partisan, so this isn’t a Republican slam. It’s just an observation that we need leadership that is educated and proactive, not recalcitrant. I hope whoever succeeds him in the next election has those qualities.