Really Expensive Speakers: Overrated For Mixing And Mastering

[MaxwellsEq]

Most concerts were, and still are, broadcast on a delayed basis, not live, on the two French music stations (the public France Musique and the private Radio Classique).

Interesting, thanks. The ones I have experience with were live without delays.

 

[Ktacos]

If you pay for a speaker with the price of $100-200, then yes, sure, you're not gonna get something great or very ideal for reliable mixing or mastering.

You sure? I've owned neumann and genelec, but my main monitors last year were the c-note kit from PE, $140 at the time of purchase. Frankly, they are all lot closer to each other than they are apart. It's certainly a lot easier to get a neutral speaker with good DI for mixing if you spend more on various aspects of the speaker, but you can definitely get excellent performance at low cost, comparable to higher priced monitors.

I'm not going to claim this is the best mix in the world, but it's the results I got with the c-notes. Everything was recording a really small room, even the drums so it was a tough one. (FWIW I also wrote it)

https://soundcloud.com/melohq%2Fbreathe

 

[terryforsythe]

I am a music listener, and have never mastered a recording. But, I find this topic interesting. Today there are a plethura of re-masters, but they do not always sound better than the original recording. Case in point, Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits. I have the original CD. The first time I listened to it on Spotify it sounded different, worse, to the point that I thought there was a problem with my audio system. I put the CD in and the magic came back. After looking into it, Spotify was streaming a re-master. I don't know if the person who did the re-mastering had bad equipment, didn't know what he/she was doing, or what. I am curious as to what speakers were used for mixing the original master. The result speaks for itself.

 

[DVDdoug]

The first time I listened to it on Spotify it sounded different, worse, to the point that I thought there was a problem with my audio system. I put the CD in and the magic came back.

The Loudness War?

 

[AA63]

I am a music listener, and have never mastered a recording. But, I find this topic interesting. Today there are a plethura of re-masters, but they do not always sound better than the original recording. Case in point, Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits. I have the original CD. The first time I listened to it on Spotify it sounded different, worse, to the point that I thought there was a problem with my audio system. I put the CD in and the magic came back. After looking into it, Spotify was streaming a re-master. I don't know if the person who did the re-mastering had bad equipment, didn't know what he/she was doing, or what. I am curious as to what speakers were used for mixing the original master. The result speaks for itself.

Re-mastering vs. original is a different subject altogether. I too agree that many remasters "lose" something - but - this will not have anything to do with the speakers being used. If the re-mastering engineer used the exact same facility to re-master, they could still make different choices as to freq./eq, compression etc. and change the final result.

And to the point of this thread - Ludwig (who mastered that album) used to use custom speakers, often very bizarre ones that were made up of part electrostatics part traditional. His own facility I think used custom ATC's built for him/his room if memory serves.

 

[terryforsythe]

And to the point of this thread - Ludwig (who mastered that album) used to use custom speakers, often very bizarre ones that were made up of part electrostatics part traditional. His own facility I think used custom ATC's built for him/his room if memory serves.

Thank you for the information. Regardless of how bizarre were his speakers, clearly they worked very well for the intended purpose.

 

[pablolie]

Interesting, thanks. The ones I have experience with were live without delays.

Live events are always "delayed" by several seconds sometimes as much as a minute depending on the places. It's a requirement to make sure things run smoothly over a world-wide network. You have several degrees of buffering on the sending, caching and receiving sides... and you don't want buffer starvation anywhere.

 

[pablolie]

Re-mastering vs. original is a different subject altogether. I too agree that many remasters "lose" something - but - this will not have anything to do with the speakers being used. If the re-mastering engineer used the exact same facility to re-master, they could still make different choices as to freq./eq, compression etc. and change the final result.

And to the point of this thread - Ludwig (who mastered that album) used to use custom speakers, often very bizarre ones that were made up of part electrostatics part traditional. His own facility I think used custom ATC's built for him/his room if memory serves.

On that matter - in practice, the mixing engineers I have talked to (admittedly just a handful) seem to rely on headphones for the most part.

 

[pablolie]

I am a music listener, and have never mastered a recording. But, I find this topic interesting. Today there are a plethura of re-masters, but they do not always sound better than the original recording. Case in point, Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits. ...

So many more, too. Bill Evans' "Waltz for Debbie" from HDtracks at 24/192 sounds worse than the original CD I got many moons ago in Germany. Louder of course, but worse - it doesn't capture that album's magic... the clicking cocktail glasses and such sound canned. Same with the remaster of Grover Washington's "Winelight". Conversely, I can't think of a single time I heard a remaster and went "OMG all the detail I was missing!".

Hence I stopped buying any "remastered" album that I already own.

 

[Doodski]

So many more, too. Bill Evans' "Waltz for Debbie" from HDtracks at 24/192 sounds worse than the original CD I got many moons ago in Germany. Louder of course, but worse - it doesn't capture that album's magic... the clicking cocktail glasses and such sound canned. Same with the remaster of Grover Washington's "Winelight". Conversely, I can't think of a single time I heard a remaster and went "OMG all the detail I was missing!".

Hence I stopped buying any "remastered" album that I already own.

I have had near the identical experience. I acquired many remastered titles and all of them just as you described. Some of them actually terribly absurdly worse than the original version. The only one that I compared that actually did sound better and was not simply louder was a Led Zeppelin digital remix and remaster and it was noticeably better but that might have been the remix and not the remaster. I don't really understand remix and remaster but that was the claim. The Led Zeppelin remix/remaster is nice but I loved Led Zeppelin so much back in the day, was so impressed and amazed at the band that I listened to it over and over and over etc. Now after me aging out a few more years Led Zeppelin became a monotonous, constantly the same Robert Plant whining, croaking, squealing and dragging on voice plus the drums really lost it for me and I simply can't manage more than maybe 15 minutes and then I reflexively reach and shut it down. The same happened for first person shooter gaming. For decades I loved them, practiced and refined my skills and learned to use the terrain and structure in cities and to win the fight inside buildings and was amazed at every aspect and was so into them that I was a daily participant at the famous globally renowned ZZZnet game server. The ZZZnet FPS gaming server for Unreal Tournament had the very best of the very best global FPS gamers. It was a near instant death simply logging into the game if one was not a very excellent FPS gamer because the level of play was at the peak tip top level of the craft. I was there for years fragging and humiliating other gamers online. One day I saw a text comment flash in the chat field at the top left corner about the online server website had been logging the global web site frags/statistics rankings for years. I checked and to my total surprise I was rated 74th from #1 on Earth. I knew I had been spending a huge amount of time and energy FPS gaming but it never phased me that I was so invested in it. So for decades more I kept on refining my FPS run-and-guns style methods and got very into sniper-style and was simply wreaking havoc and then one day... I mean I was sitting there with a shooter game opened in front of me waiting for me to click the mouse and I was looking at the screen and I said to myself, "This looks so freaking stupidly phony." It simply appeared everything fake, absurdly stupid and I had the sudden idea that the entire everything looked like a fabrication and all that I was so impressed with for decades was now simply an annoying irritating fake fiction phony thing. Something changed in me and from that moment onward I never played a first person shooter game. I talked about this with a woman I know that has a deep education in this sort of psychology brain stuff and she said that at my age the mind chemistry and other major changes occurs and it is pretty regular that some people simply change their preferences in colors, clothes, shoes and all sorts of stuff. I sold my video card to recuperate what I could before it aged out to a tiny dollar value and now I have a nice gaming PC for web browsing.

 

[goat76]

I have had near the identical experience. I acquired many remastered titles and all of them just as you described. Some of them actually terribly absurdly worse than the original version. The only one that I compared that actually did sound better and was not simply louder was a Led Zeppelin digital remix and remaster and it was noticeably better but that might have been the remix and not the remaster. I don't really understand remix and remaster but that was the claim.

In an audio reproduction forum like this and similar sites, many people often think that it's in the mastering stage where the "magic" of a good audio production happens. But the truth is that if the recorded audio is well executed and the mix is made by a skilled mixing engineer, there is close to nothing left, sound-wise, that needs to be done in the mastering stage other than leveling the loudness balance between the tracks, making sure there are no small audible problems left that need to be edited out, and finding suitable time gaps between the tracks.

There are, of course, many skilled mastering engineers out there, the ones who quickly hear and understand what the artists and the mixing engineer intended, and with a light hand, enhance and bring that certain special thing forward without ruining anything in the process.

 

[DVDdoug]

The only one that I compared that actually did sound better and was not simply louder was a Led Zeppelin digital remix and remaster and it was noticeably better but that might have been the remix and not the remaster...

I think I read about that project. What I remember is that they restored the deep bass that was originally filtered out (presumably for vinyl). I don't remember what they said about compression.

I like a few of their songs but I'm not a big enough fan to seek-out the "correct" re-mix/remasters.

I don't know if it was the same project, but I read about a re-mix where they claimed that they weren't using compression but they also said they were saturating the preamps in the mixer, so that's just a different kind of compression.

 

[MaxwellsEq]

Live events are always "delayed" by several seconds sometimes as much as a minute depending on the places. It's a requirement to make sure things run smoothly over a world-wide network. You have several degrees of buffering on the sending, caching and receiving sides... and you don't want buffer starvation anywhere.

As I clearly stated above, the live-to-air content I've been involved with had zero delay (other than the speed of signals over copper or fibre).

 

[RexrothPigeon]

On that matter - in practice, the mixing engineers I have talked to (admittedly just a handful) seem to rely on headphones for the most part.

The ones you have talked to are a bit unorthodox, then. Most professional mix engineers use headphones for some purposes but primarily rely on monitors.

 

[pablolie]

As I clearly stated above, the live-to-air content I've been involved with had zero delay (other than the speed of signals over copper or fibre).

Who was receiving the live content? I don't doubt for a second you were there live and didn't have to think about it, but if it was transmitted over a network, there is no way it is really live for the destination. Signal propagation alone around the world is at least 120ms even using the biggest, best optical transmission line on planet earth. Every router on the path will add some to that. And then you have the content caching machines like Akamai that are always involved.

Interactive real live conversations and video meetings tolerate up to 0.5s of delay pretty easily, and we all live with that in every Zoom or Teams call. If it goes beyond that, our ability to communicate will suffer (we talk over each other and such, which is exactly why some meetings seem awkward). In live transmissions, the leeway is much higher and it still seems totally live. But if you are ever at a live event (like an NFL game) in a stadium and simultaneously check the TV transmission at the same tme, it's often surprising to see how big the delay is.

 

[pablolie]

The ones you have talked to are a bit unorthodox, then. Most professional mix engineers use headphones for some purposes but primarily rely on monitors.

And some use crappy and weirdly placed monitors, I have been in a dozen recording studios at least.

It's not for me to judge industry standards for success, but there's a huge amount of recorded sonically incompetent garbage that is mainstream successful. That's out realtity.

IMO a lot of remixes are just there to bring the purer, old sound up to garbage overdriven standards these days.

 

[RexrothPigeon]

And some use crappy and weirdly placed monitors, I have been in a dozen recording studios at least.

It's not for me to judge industry standards for success, but there's a huge amount of recorded sonically incompetent garbage that is mainstream successful. That's out realtity.

IMO a lot of remixes are just tere to bring the purer, old sound up to garbage overdriven standards these days.

I don't know what any of this axe-grinding has to do with my comment, but ok if you say so

 

[pablolie]

I don't know what any of this axe-grinding has to do with my comment, but ok if you say so

Which axe was I attempting to grind? OK then let's stop the supposed non sequitur. I was replying to your comment and included - like you did- my observations.

I have never claimed to be a widely recorded musician or very active in music studios. I was stating my opinion like anyone else in this thread.

 

[MaxwellsEq]

Who was receiving the live content? I don't doubt for a second you were there live and didn't have to think about it, but if it was transmitted over a network, there is no way it is really live for the destination. Signal propagation alone around the world is at least 120ms even using the biggest, best optical transmission line on planet earth. Every router on the path will add some to that. And then you have the content caching machines like Akamai that are always involved.

Interactive real live conversations and video meetings tolerate up to 0.5s of delay pretty easily, and we all live with that in every Zoom or Teams call. If it goes beyond that, our ability to communicate will suffer (we talk over each other and such, which is exactly why some meetings seem awkward). In live transmissions, the leeway is much higher and it still seems totally live. But if you are ever at a live event (like an NFL game) in a stadium and simultaneously check the TV transmission at the same tme, it's often surprising to see how big the delay is.

You don't understand the difference between end-to-end analogue and end-to-end digital with compression. Compression significantly adds to the delay.

When terrestrial TV and radio was analogue, producers could switch between the signal leaving the console and "check receivers" picking up a feed from the same transmitter as the audience - in order to detect issues. Satellite distribution, digital radio, digital TV and (even worse) Internet distribution make this impossible.

If you look at my sig, you might notice I have some expertise in these field. For example when designing very large fiber networks for media use, we assumed 1ms round-trip latency for a light pulse per 100km of fibre. If you assume a European country with 1000km the longest distance, the optical delay, one way, is approximately 5ms. You are unable to perceive this as a delay. Radio frequency transmission is even faster.

So, yet again let me state: the audience on terrestrial analogue broadcasting heard the sound of the glockenspiel a few milliseconds after it was struck (assuming close micing)

 

[goat76]

IMO a lot of remixes are just tere to bring the purer, old sound up to garbage overdriven standards these days.

You are talking about the mastering process here, as the remix was most likely delivered to the mastering engineer with most of the dynamics intact, and probably left a few dB of headroom as well leaving room for some equalization of the 2-channel track or the stems.

It may be seen as a little silly that I mentioned the above, but I think people should learn the rather big differences between what is done in mixing, and what is done in mastering in a music production.