Bob Katz - music mastering and loudness Part 2

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

[1978Allanc]

so many albums now are mastered with loudness at the forefront, it should always be the dynamics, if you want to hear a good record louder turn up your speakers, easy!!

[JCHandJobLover]

Music is rather like the human body, it needs to breathe, so dynamics is so important.

Teach them well Bob

[keogh02]

@Samwellah the power of christ compels you

[Samwellah]

I can master a song under 5 minutes. Crank up Nuendo, import my wav track, dump ozone into my master out, load up the master preset, tweak the limiter and squash the shit out of it. Vuahla! Modern music ;)

[sardhouse76]

@z33twinturbo and, what about the drum'n'bass, i love to listen to drum'n'bass songs from vinyl, the bass are too loud and deep and soo big and sometimes there are some "dynamic" surprise , expecially at high volume into the club. amazing!!!!

[sardhouse76]

vinyl RULE

[hedegaard8]

@1978Allanc Yep. Theres an old "rule of thumb", that when using EQ, you're supposed to lower the undesirable notes, not raise the desirable ones :)

[Pete75227]

wtf lol "thank you mary". awesome job :)

[z33twinturbo]

I love my banger music loud as shit (the kind that's supposed to be loud, dirty, nasty, and fucked up) but EVERYTHING else when it's over compressed sounds like DOG SHIT. Classical, Jazz, Hip Hop, Latino, Rock, Rap, Metal, Country, Blues, Folk, Indie... All of it is getting over compressed and sounds like shit. Pisses me off.

[1978Allanc]

@mcturdlemusic Yeah Turdle i would agree with you there, its all about the balance , and not to forget the sound , the key is that there are no real rules , if its the sound you want then its right. That being said your right the balance of loudness and dynamics is essential , good point man. Also when you have the Waves plug ins , its hard to go wrong yee ha!!!

[mcturdlemusic]

@1978Allanc I'm not defending the loudness camp by any means... But when you turn up your speakers or monitoring equipment you do bring the overall noise floor up, which results in accentuated high frequency noise playing back through your mix which is unpleasant as well. I think there is a balance that has to be reached between maximizing a nominal volume for the song yet also maintaining good musical dynamics.

[ShSwStudios]

@freezazoid You need to have a good compression so your second point doesn't happen. But thats happening while mixing. The Master comp. only brings the music together nicely. It's not for repairing mixin' mistakes! You need to find the middle. With nice dynamics but nice punch, too. Loudness is only for listeners so they think it has a better quality than a record thats not so loud. If you turn down a hard-limited song->AWFUL! Don't forget: too much compression is pretty dangerous for your ears!