I'm a Newbie with a Simple Mastering Q

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paulybear

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I'm currently mastering a cd for my band and I have a possibly stupid question. Should the final mix going onto CD be at 0db or -3db? I've heard conflicting facts about this so i'm not sure. I read an article on this forum saying you should leave it at -3db for your record company in case more mastering is needed. It's an independant release though so not sure if it applies to me.

Any help is greatly appreciated
 
heres what i did when i mastered my bands cd with good results. find a bunch of commercial cd's that are similar to your style and find out where they peak at and then master to that.

Make sure you have the gain structure of you monitoring chain the same though other wise it throws of the whole process.

Dave
 
I would go ahead and normalize to about -0.2 dB, but a lot of people don't like using normalizers. My crude mastering involves going through and finding the peaks that stand way above everything else and knocking them down (recently discovered. And manually, there shouldn't be too many of them), normalizing, compressing about 2.5:1, and then renormalizing.

As far as remastering a CD by a pro, you'd probably send them an unprocessed version of your mixes anyway. If that opportunity came up for me, I'd wanna retrack the whole project.
 
If you're trying to make your album sound louder, you need a limiter with a very quick attack and release, a threshold somewhere around -.3 (negative point three) and enough gain to get from where you are to where you want to be. Most people use the L2 or something similar.

If you're interested in doing a full mastering job with eq, compression, limiting, stereo image, etc... you're probably in for quite a headache. Read a lot and give yourself a lot of time to do it right. Maybe buy a program like T-racks. It's not a professional program, but it'll probably give you the best bang for buck that you're looking for right now.
 
thanks for the info. that's a great load off my mind.
if i set my output to -.3 will that leave enough room for dithering?
 
paulybear said:
thanks for the info. that's a great load off my mind.
if i set my output to -.3 will that leave enough room for dithering?
Click to expand...

Dithering algorithms should be able to accomodate 0dB without issues.
 
paulybear said:
thanks for the info. that's a great load off my mind.
if i set my output to -.3 will that leave enough room for dithering?
Click to expand...

Actually an interesting question!

If dithering occurs after limiting to -.3 it would seem that there's a chance of getting an over by .2 dbFS. I would assume that the designer has taken this into consideration. Personally I've been setting peak at -.5 dbFS due to inter-sample peaks.

Have a look at the following paper:

http://www.tcelectronic.com/media/Level_paper_AES109.pdf

The recommendation is even lower.
 
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