Bob Katz - music mastering and loudness Part 1

Top mastering engineer Bob Katz talks about the consequences of the past decades' unnecessary war of loudness, and illustrates how today's extremely high mastering levels degrade the quality of popular data-reduced formats, such as mp3. The session took place at DR Denmarks Radio, fall 2009. Enjoy these two educational videos!

Category:

Education

Tags:

• TC
• Electronic
• Bob
• Katz
• mastering
• loudness
• DR
• mp3
• aes
• hd
• audio

[overdriveukuk]

anyone else think its ironic how bad the audio on this is ?

[BdogMusic]

Yes Sir, that is what is going on. Dynamics should be a way of musical life. Thank you for sharing this with us.

[Zeemanuk]

Nuff Love 2 Bob

[TRIAM1D]

Would the signal-to-noise ratio of the difference between the source and the .mp3 be altered if there was more headroom to begin with? I'm just trying to figure out if there exists a middle ground for producers who make electronic music, hip-hop etc. with today's mastering techniques so that there's enough headroom to eliminate noise on a conversion to another format but still that "perceived loudness" of modern hip-hop/electronic music records.

[TheDesertRoseRanch]

Artists need to demand quality over quantity.

[cursedlemon]

@YungStatik I couldn't say, I'm no math whiz. ;x

[cursedlemon]

@junglist32 Trying a null test with an MP3 vs. a wave file is ridiculous anyhow, because MP3s drift off-tempo ever so slightly.

[AgentHomer]

@cursedlemon Of course, you're right. I made a mistake. I should have said "no extra voltage than unity/operating level". then again, operating level in some cases is 1.24v, instead of 0.775v.

[cursedlemon]

@AgentHomer Ummm...0 dBu is .775 volts. 

[1991707312]

Nice clear explanation. IMHO The basic change in technology is that the low end noise floor is the enemy in analogue audio, so you try to keep levels high to keep the signal to noise ratio accetpable. Analogue overloads can be pleasurable. In digital the high end (full scale) limit is the enemy and the noise floor is around 20dB lower. Overloading sounds unpleasant. So it makes perfect sense to mix at -20dB FS to preserve your top end headroom, whilst keeping the S/N ration approx the same.

[junglist32]

Did he just phase invert the Wav file and add/mix it with the Mp3 in order to hear the difference? I've been researching this method if so and there seems to be mixed opinions on whether or not it is relevant to hear what the perceptual encoding has added or subtracted from the music because of the way it subtracts masked frequencies we can't hear anyway. I am very interested in finding out what sort of mastering techniques might be applicable to a mixing for MP3