Coldcut
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- Mar 21, 2008
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Interesting stuff. With veteran sound engineer Alan Silverman. Video starts around 3min 50s.
Future of mastering
Future of mastering
Yep, I agree with all of the above.It is interesting and thanks for posting it. Do bare in mind that it's somewhat of an over-simplification and it effectively represents "a desire" of "future mastering" rather than the actual reality of what's happening.
The reality is that different services have different loudness normalisation levels, so unless you're going to create a different master for each of the services, the mastering engineer is likely to be required to master to the highest (and most popular) of them, which is Youtube and it's roughly -13LUFS level. Achieving that level with acoustic music genre (classical and most jazz for example) would generally require very extreme compression/limiting, which would be a bad thing, as particularly classical music has never really been a victim of the loudness war anyway. While at the same time it potentially harms some popular genres where very extreme compression/limiting is not only "not a bad thing" but an entirely desirable and actually required thing! For most other genres though, loudness normalisation is certainly a step in the right direction and if we can get some of the issues ironed out, could hopefully be the "future of mastering".
G
Yep, I agree with all of the above.
[1] As I understand, Tidal is the only streaming service that actually uses LUFS for loudness normalisation. Spotify uses ReplayGain, Apple some proprietary software and the rest a mystery. All streaming services seems to be pretty consistent, with tidal at the top.
[2] Comparing recordings that are validated to have high or low DR across streaming services can yield interesting results. Things might have changed since I last checked though.
[3] Reminds me a bit of the computer industry before usb became a standard..