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Old 12-30-2008, 01:54 PM   #112
yep
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Join Date: Aug 2006
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Quote:
Originally Posted by drybij View Post
yep - since the job of a recording engineer is to make a recording sound good on a wide range of speakers, and my impression is that the main difference between speaker enclosures is the frequency curve, I've pictured the mastering process as a a sort of "averaging" or "balancing" of the recording so that it's in the "sweet spot" of all these different frequency curves. Is that a somewhat accurate statement?

If so, then by disregarding commercial appeal is it possible to get a pristine, killer reproduction of a recording if we custom-master the recording for a specific set of speakers?

Not meaning to derail the thread, just curious.
Uh, sort of. "Custom-mastering for the speakers" is, in a sense, what happens when you mix on inaccurate speakers. But it's not just a question of frequency, it's also got a lot to do with things like the speaker gating or compressing certain frequencies.

Example 1: If the speaker is built with a tight woofer suspension, this can give a much thumpier, tighter low end, which sounds good for listening. But it also disguises any sloppyness or mud in the underlying mix, and it may lead you to crank up the low end just to excite that cool "thump" from the speakers.

Example 2: If the speakers are built with tweeters that are very sensitive but that limit excursion (volume) to avoid damage, then any highs might be "sexed up" and compressed on playback. So a pingy, clangy, uneven ride cymbal comes out of the speaker sounding like splashy sizzle and you don't know what's really going on behind there until you take the mix to a different set of speakers.

Example 3: Let's say your Sony system has a crossover at 1.5kHz (a very common place for it). This is an extremely sensitive range of human hearing, and any ugliness around it is going to sound bad. So the speaker designer bypasses the problem of crossover distortion by simply designing a crossover that depresses all frequencies around 1.5k, like an eq cut. The neat thing about this approach is that cutting the mids like that is like a "loudness" circuit, and not many customers are going to complain about too much highs and lows. Let's further imagine that Sony thoughtfully included a free stereo widener circuit to make this little bookshelf system sound bigger and more dramatic, so not only are frequencies around 1.5k depressed, but so is anything in the center of the stereo spread. Now, what might be panned center with important content at around 1.5k, hmm? Maybe vocals? Snare? Kick? Bass? Only the most important instruments in the whole mix. So you end up "mastering" the hell out of these critical instruments at critical frequencies, and then play it back on another system and the whole mix is totally out of whack.

The important thing to understand is that NONE of those effects are necessarily going to interfere with anyone's enjoyment of material that was well-mixed to begin with. Take any commercial record and play it back through a system that delivers thumpy lows and sizzly highs and a wide stereo spread with scooped mids, and almost nobody's going to complain. But it's like one-way glass-- good sound can still get OUT of the speakers, but you can't see IN to tell what's going on with the underlying audio.

It's perfectly okay to listen to music on a system that adds thump and sizzle and size, and the music you listen to does not have to be mastered specifically for that speaker-- the speaker is basically "re-mastering" everything that goes through it: gating the lows, compressing the highs, depressing the mids and center. Decision-making becomes a crapshoot on a system like this. You just can't tell what's going on.
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