watchnerd
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Jul 12, 2008
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Rick Rubin is a tard.
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No, that's not really the workflow. The band/producer does not send the mastering engineer a rough mix, they send a completed/final mix. The mastering engineer effectively optimises that mix for the target consumers. That (in theory) is the end of the processing, there should be no other processing once the mastering engineer has finished with it, no other "post production unit" which makes any changes at all. This isn't necessarily true with vinyl production though, where some processing (say the RIAA curve) may be applied after the mastering engineer has finished.
Just to drive home my point that dynamic compression is a sliding scale, which, somewhere on the extreme end becomes synonymous with clipping, I prepared a few more graphs.
Actually there was a (supposedly actually true) communication with the mastering engineer, who said in no uncertain terms that the mix was brickwalled before it got to him and that he would never have put something this bad out, so again we're really not blaming the mastering engineer.... But again this isn't a genre issue, because even metal-heads were complaining about this one, especially once Guitar Hero gave them a chance to compare to a different mastering. Listening to the rest of Metallica's oeuvre, I don't hear a precedent for "hey, lets have the album clip literally every time the drums are played."
I think you're missing the point that no one in their right mind would set a limiter's peak output to 0dB, they are always set to some point below 0dB, even if it is only -0.1dB. The output of a limiter may look very similar to a clipped signal but in most any DAW we are not looking at an audio signal we are looking at a graphical representation of digital data, which merely resembles an audio signal. In practice, a limiter obviously distorts an audio signal but does not induce digital overload distortion, unless the engineer is not using an oversampling limiter, in which case overload distortion is a possibility due to inter-sample peaking. In practice, limiters do not suddenly truncate from one sample to the next, as occurs with clipping, they compress more gradually towards the peak output setting, even though it can sometimes be hard to tell the difference on a graphical representation of digital data.
2. While you personally are "not blaming the mastering engineer", it seems clear that limpidglitch was. Even accepting that the waveform is clipped rather than brickwall-limited, it's still not certain that the mastering job was poorly executed. We don't know how badly the mix was clipped, maybe the mastering process reduced the clipping (relative to the mix) and what remains could not be fixed any better than he accomplished and therefore the mastering engineer actually did a very good job. Maybe a re-mix was done (with less/no clipping) which was not available at the time of the original mastering. There are various possibilities/scenarios which mean we cannot just blindly blame the mastering (or mastering engineer), regardless of the fact that poor mastering is a distinct possibility or even a probability.
G