Robert D said:
Wow, those MBCs must have fallen on a few toes! And I must not be communicating very well. Glen, I don't do hard rock/heavy metal, and I don't take part in the level wars. Most of the music I work and play with is more acoustic natured, with instruments ranging from guitars (acoustic and electric), piano, various drums and percussion, mandolin, violin, violla, cello...........you get the idea. I never said that an MBC should automatically be part of mastering, why are you putting words in my mouth? I also never claimed to be a mastering engineer.
One more time........I raised MBC not because it's THE mastering tool, but because any fool can buy an expensive EQ or a maximizer and think he's mastering. MBCs take a lot more thought than that.
Sorry to piss you guys off,
RD
Rob,
You didn't piss me off.
What pisses me off (an a lot of other folks too) is the whole volume wars/compress everything to DC foolishness that is so pervasive on this forum. It's got some sensibilities so raw that when someone brushes against those sensibilities, we might admittedly overreact on bad days.
I have just re-read your post and I see now how I may have misinterpreted your identification of the MBC as "the default mastering tool" and "once the exclusive realm of the mastering engineer." If you meant that it's actually NOT "the default mastering tool", then it was my mistake.
And yes, of course MBCs have only in the past six years or so trickled down to the project level, before which they were pretty much the realm of the big houses, your'e right about that. When that phrase was combined with the inverse interpretation of the "default" statement mentioned above, however, that caused me to misinterpret further. I read the two together as saying "MBCs are the default tool for mastering which until recently were used as such mostly by professional mastering engineers."
And for the record, I never meant to accuse you of being a headbanger with tunnel vision.
I was referring to one the root causes of the "compress to DC" phenomenon in general
The noise level with regard to the uses of compression is so damn high on this board that your signal had gotten distorted and buried. Sorry about that.
That said, however, if the trends on this board in any way accurately reflect what's going on the the home recording sphere in general, I'll maintain that there is WAY too much use of and dependance upon limiters and compressors (and any whizbang plugins in general, FTM) out there as crutches used in leiu of using good technique. And I'll continue to wax Quixotic about that.
And no, I'm not accusing you of that.
You just unfortunately became a victim of the noise.
G.