Auto-mastering software for playback - an end to the circle of confusion, or just techno-philistinism?

[kemmler3D]

I was just listening to a pop recording from 1980 and the hi-hats are mixed just a couple smidges too high for modern equipment.

Then I remembered there are tools to fix tonal balance using EQ on a consistent and automatic basis. Anyone that's played around with DAWs or in the recording / mixing world knows about iZotope Ozone, which is a an all-in one mixing / mastering tool. IME it's pretty decent. One of the tools is to automatically adjust tonal balance and even dynamics to match a given reference track.

So, you can take XYZ song you think is mixed really well as a reference, and feed a poorly mixed album through Ozone to get it to sound similar. In theory, this can fix (to an extent) the biggest bottleneck in sound quality, which is the quality of the recording itself.

It is worth emphasizing that this operates on the fully mixed track, so you don't need access to stems, etc. for it to work. And it also works in realtime with moderate latency, it's not an offline process. You do need to feed the song through the software once to develop the set of filters / compressors / expanders / etc. But I would say you could keep the settings the same for an entire albumin most cases.

This software is not cheap, but it's cheaper than a lot of gear that does less to improve sound quality.

I think this approach would be pretty controversial for most audiophiles. But I'm wondering if anyone has tried this, or might consider trying it. It's good enough for the people who mix your records after all...

 

[tmtomh]

Isotope is great software IMHO, so I don't think there's any concern about the quality of the algorithms or the quality of the processing (although if memory serves many of their features have user-selectable quality settings so the best quality should be selected if that's the case with this feature).

As for the larger question raised by your thread title, I'd say this could be very effective for improving the sound - or making the sound more to one's liking, anyway - on an isolated, case-by-case basis. The problem with automating a certain mixing style and/or frequency profile is obvious - and I'm sure you're well aware of it so I don't mean to give the impression I'm saying anything you don't already know. Different music, even in the same genre or subgenre, isn't necessarily supposed to have the same sonic character. The Smiths are either going to sound a bit trebly, or they're going to sound wrong. Ditto for Big Star. What their contemporaries' albums sound like is kind of irrelevant, and so I not sure what one would use as reference material to give to Izotope for such things.

 

[kemmler3D]

The Smiths are either going to sound a bit trebly, or they're going to sound wrong. Ditto for Big Star. What their contemporaries' albums sound like is kind of irrelevant, and so I not sure what one would use as reference material to give to Izotope for such things.

I think that's fair. This would be for the instances where you have an album that simply sounds like it was mixed wrong, and you could correct it to sound like an album from a similar band that's mixed right.

The big controversy inherent there is who decides what's right or wrong, and whether it is proper for the consumer to do so.