how did people originally master music

Transfer engineers mostly just transferred songs from the recording medium (hard wax disc) to a wax master which was used to produce (probably in several steps) a metal pressing master. Or something like that. I suspect they could adjust the volume and the start/stop points and not much else.
 
bouldersoundguy said:
Transfer engineers mostly just transferred songs from the recording medium (hard wax disc) to a wax master which was used to produce (probably in several steps) a metal pressing master. Or something like that. I suspect they could adjust the volume and the start/stop points and not much else.
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interesting thats what i suspected. so just normalize the volume to a certain standard ?
seems like nowadays for mastering they do a whole lot more maybe to glue it maybe because tape isnt used anymore?
 
Tape didn't exist. The performance was captured through a giant horn (later a single mic) and straight to a hard wax disc temporarily kept soft by the heat of an incandescent lamp. It was what it was, no gluing from tape saturation.
 
bouldersoundguy said:
Tape didn't exist. The performance was captured through a giant horn (later a single mic) and straight to a hard wax disc temporarily kept soft by the heat of an incandescent lamp. It was what it was, no gluing from tape saturation.
Click to expand...
oh wow ok thats pretty cool.. maybe i should been more clear haha more so 1950s 60s 70s ?
 
By the 50s it was pretty normal to record onto tape in the studio. It would have been a mono recording with one or several mics. To transfer that to disc would have required setting the level appropriately and passing the signal through an RIAA encode filter. A hotter transfer would put the sound more above the surface noise, but it also made the grooves wider which meant less play time per side. I imagine it was in this period when engineers started using filters (eq) to "sweeten" the sound. I suspect by then they were also using leveling amplifiers (compressors) to control dynamics due to the limitations of vinyl discs.

Stereo discs didn't really happen on a commercial basis until the very end of the 50s and early 60s. It added some complications to mastering. Bass had to be centered to keep the stylus from being knocked out of the groove, for example.
 
Maybe watching this will give you an idea of what went on during the stone age of audio recording, when there were no bits or bytes, "Plug-ins" were power cords 1/4" jacks, XLR or RCA connectors, and rercording consoles only had a couple of big knobs on them! They used tubes because transistors weren't invented, and people rehearsed until they knew the songs before hitting the big red button.





 
They stood on the shoulders of giants. Sorry, I took that wrong, didn't realize it was mastering
 
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