New Music - Recording and Mastering

Hi,

Here's a quote of "pjpoes" from a diyaudio forum:

"While I don't have 20 years of musicianship, I think a distinction may be in order to clarify Xpert's comment and your experience. Typical monitoring during recording sessions seems to be done using a mixture of headphones and cheap basic monitors, such as the oh so famous Yamaha NS-10M. However, mastering, finalizing, etc. is often done separately and seem to use larger better, and often very expensive monitors which seem to often incorporate CD or quasi-CD designs. There are exceptions, even very famous ones (Abbey Road Studio's uses B&W for final mastering), which I suspect is because they realized that most home speakers aren't controlling directivity even remotely, and so mastering on speakers more akin to what people own is more valuable. I forget the name and type now, but I recall seeing a very expensive "radio speaker" monitor in a studio used to ensure that mixes sound decent on the types of speakers most music is listened to (i.e. TV speakers, radio speakers, and car speakers). It was basically a pair of cubes with very inexpensive full range speakers like you might find in a clock radio.

"During a tour of one of Sony's recording studio's in NYC almost ten years ago now, the only CD designs I saw were in the mastering rooms. I was told by the mastering engineer that he typically worked in isolation from the rest of the process, and that the artist typically only heard this final mastered version on a cd copy sent to him, not in the mastering room. Why this was done I can't say, I found it strange, but that was their protocol.

"With the quality of recordings coming out today, it wouldn't shock me one bit if all of this has fallen to the wayside. It just seems like nobody cares anymore. I keep hearing catch phrases like, aurilazation. I actually was told by an engineer that to save money and time, they stopped using mid and far field monitors for mastering in favor of headphones and aurlization techniques to mimic the effect. He told me that much of this mastering work that was, at one time, done by hand, is now done through software, almost completely hands off by the "engineer", and only a very short 1-2 hours of final mastering is done on the album. This was an engineer working for a major recording label, how had recently opened his own studio in NY because he was fed up with those sorts of cost cutting and thus quality cutting measures. Just sad in my opinion, and explains why I can count the number of recent recordings I have purchased on my fingers."

Any doubts as to why new music issues sound so bad! As for me, I haven't purchased much music recently either.

Viren