professional mastering from home sources

  • Thread starter Thread starter joedolan
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joedolan

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this question prob. wont push your expertise to the max, but i would appreciate the input if you have any wisdom whatsoever to share.

i mix onto cd from a zip disk at home, but this is obviously not a professional job. i use a cd burner.

can i master professionally in a studio from either zip disk or cd?
and is it worth the cost?
 
the question you ask is completely open ended. How professional do you mean?

This topic has been worn out. You might do a search on this topic.

What tools (hardware and software) to you have to master?

I would read the mastering topics by Bob Katz and go to intermusic.com and look up mastering. Then go to www.studiocovers.com and read everything on the topic of mastering.

Then if you still have questions perhaps a contributor might be able to help you.
 
Yes you can put you files on a data cd-r and take them to be mastered. (I'm not clear whether anything is lost if they are already in cd-a wav format.(?)

As to the cost vs value...? :)
Wayne
 
thanks guys.

mixsit:

that's really what i was wondering about? do i lose a lot of information by mastering from a cd-r?

as to how professional....
i presumed that if i forked out and had a studio do the job then i would nthave any of the problems regularly discussed here, almost all of which i have experienced.particularly the issue of my master sounding good on one stereo,but far too bassy or even unlistenable on another. by professional i mean without such problems as these.hopefully releasable, but i dont mind a kind of low-fi aesthetic,once it's clear and has a good overall volume and isn't going to sound mucky on every other stereo.(large systems in particular were worse).the better the system, it seems, the worse my master sounded. basically you could say i'm giving up on trying to do it myself.

thanks all.
 
if you are recording at 44.1/16bits then sending an audio CD to a mastering engineer is a reasonable option.

if you are recording at higher sampling rates and/or resolutions, then you are losing quality when you create an audio CD, unless you have a Masterlink. In this case, it is preferable to send a data CD, but you need to check with the specific engineer to see how the data should be formatted. (WAV, AIFF, SD II, interleaved, etc.)
 
Just to confirm, a cd-a file is just a 16/44.1 wav file with some extra tags on it for cd play-back? No difference quality wise for these purposes?
Wayne
 
mixsit said:
Just to confirm, a cd-a file is just a 16/44.1 wav file with some extra tags on it for cd play-back? No difference quality wise for these purposes?
Wayne
Click to expand...

Not exactly. The data starts out as a stereo 16 bit 44.1 kHz file nearly identical to a .wav, but it's not represented on the CD the same way it's represented on, say, your hard drive.

The .wav file first gets divided into six samples of each channel to form (12) 16-bit frames, which is then encoded into a total of (24) 8-bit words (half of each 16-bit sample forms a single 8-bit word, with an odd "first half" and an even "second half").

These words are interleaved by delaying all even words by two blocks, forming a new 24-byte word. 4 parity bytes are added to the 24-byte word, and the resulting 28-byte word is interleaved over a total of 112 bytes (several words occupy any one strip of data, being interleaved together). The bit stream is now divided into new 28-byte frames.

These 28-byte frames get another 4 parity bytes added at this step, resulting in a 32-byte word. Another interleaving is performed, this time just delaying by one block. At this point all parity bits are inverted.

An eight-bit subcode is added to the front of the 32-byte word, which is then modulated using EFM (eight to fourteen modulation); a modulation which actually inflates every eight bits to now occupy fourteen bits. This is an algorithm designed to minimize the number of 0 to 1 or 1 to 0 pit translations by using an NRZ scheme (non-return to zero), which represents a binary "zero" as "no change" (pit to land) and represents a digital one as "change from pit to land" (or land to pit).

A 24-bit synchronization word is added to the beginning of each frame, and every 14 bits are grouped using three merge bits to form the final 588-bit frame (containing the original 192 bits of data... well, actually containing 192 bits of total original information that came from several different "original" frames).

Pretty straightforward, isn't it?
 
Oh, but yeah... it contains the original data from the .wav file perfectly, so the quality should be the same.

;)
 
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