Mastering question

[The December Flower]

I'm using the T-Racks mastering plugin when i master my projects, and it sounds very good. the only thing i wonder is: at the final stage, I use the clipper to get the mix louder. it sounds very good, exept from when for example the guitars play a riff alone. then i get this nasty distortion that I of course don't want. I have noticed that on Dimmu Borgirs Puritanical... also has this distortion when the guitars play a riff alone (ex the start of Blessings..), but not at the same degree, and this album is mastered LOUD. is this just a question of quality on the equipment you use (I would assume that the Mastering Room that has mastered Puritanical.. has good equipment), or is this problem inevitable?

 

[Hellalpha]

It is pretty inevitable. The louder you get, because there is a cutoff, the more information you lose. This loudness is not so much a "loudness" thing, but it is a process of finding the most appropriate amplitude to cutoff without having any detectable loss. Thats where the "distortion" comes in. it is not a distortion that you can hear, it is a clipping - a loss of information. Have you heard Immortal's At the heart of Winter?...It is a pretty loud record, but records from the Abyss studio seem to be able to be mastered higher, but that one in particular clips like a motherf**ker. Compare it to Follow the Reaper by COB, you'll know what I mean. I think it does depend on the qualtiy of the equipment you are using, but it also depends on the particular patches you are using etc, but more importantly, how loud is loud enough?

On puritanical the guitar tone is very smooth, it has had me debating its extremity for a while now. All the drums are short and snappy - so they cut through the mix without being particularly loud, (I think that is the nicest snare on any p-BM reocrd, imo.). It is the combination of these things that allows a record to be mastered higher...Puritanical is a good example, because it is mastered very loudly, it almost gets annoying with the amount of guitar clip you can hear in places. Have you heard the devil's path re-recording? it is so loud that it completely fucks the clean intro up!!!! down with overly-loud mastering I say.

 

[FrostGiant]

I agree. Why put all that effort into creating dynamics when you just smush everything together just to make it loud. That's what the volume knob on my stereo is for.

But yeah, your clipping. Turn it down. I'd rather listen to a quieter cd than one that clips like that. That or I guess you could add more compression to raise the volume of everything which would allow you to turn it down a little and avoid that clipping some more. But I hate heavy compression myself.

 

[Kevin Kitchel]

You guys would fit right in on the Tape Op forum. I say that mastering shouldn't be for making stuff loud! Its just for making a recording sound consistant across multiple systems, from a tiny boombox to a big bryston rig. The big reason people want CDs to be loud is for them to stand out on the radio any damn way. When you squash a CD like that, it sounds okay quiet, but not loud to my ears!

 

[FrostGiant]

I'm a Tape OP subscriber, but I've never visted the forum.