recording hiss

Amnesia Vivace

Amnesia Vivace

Clever Title
I just got our mastered cd back from the studio. We digitally recorded and edited, no analog. Problem is, there is a hiss throughout the whole disk. granted it is very minimal and can only be heard in the quietest passages, but my ears have been tuned to hear the bad parts of a mix and fix it. so I am left using noise reduction software to remove the hiss (time constraints keep me from going back to the studio and making them fix it, not to mention I don;t think they have the ability to fix it or else it wouldn;t be there in the first place)

SO, long story short... Am I being to nit-picky? is some amount of hiss acceptable for a professional recording? obviously it is not acceptable to me, and I am fixing it. But I just wanted to know if I am in the minority here :D
 
Amnesia Vivace said:
I just got our mastered cd back from the studio. We digitally recorded and edited, no analog. Problem is, there is a hiss throughout the whole disk. granted it is very minimal and can only be heard in the quietest passages, but my ears have been tuned to hear the bad parts of a mix and fix it. so I am left using noise reduction software to remove the hiss (time constraints keep me from going back to the studio and making them fix it, not to mention I don;t think they have the ability to fix it or else it wouldn;t be there in the first place)

SO, long story short... Am I being to nit-picky? is some amount of hiss acceptable for a professional recording? obviously it is not acceptable to me, and I am fixing it. But I just wanted to know if I am in the minority here :D
Click to expand...
If the hiss was not part of your raw 2mix and was purely introduced by the mastering, then no, you are not being nit-picky and you have an honest greivance with the ME, IMHO.

G.
 
It is also possible that it has been there the whole time and has gone unnoticed until levels were brought up enough and you have listened to it in a different manor. Personally, I would rather have some hiss than the lossy nasty side effects of noise reduction on the rest of my music. I guess in the end though, it does depend just how bad the hiss is.
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
If the hiss was not part of your raw 2mix and was purely introduced by the mastering, then no, you are not being nit-picky and you have an honest greivance with the ME, IMHO.

G.
Click to expand...

I agree, if the hiss was generated at the mastering stage make the ME fix it.

However, I'm curious. How much louder did you have it made in mastering? One of the downsides to raising the levels by insane amounts in mastering is that it can bring up noises that might be barely audible during the tracking and mixing phases. If the hiss was there to begin with and very quiet, it just may be something that has reared it's ugly head under compression.
 
we didn;t have the volume increased very much at all.... not to the levels of current "pop" standards :eek:

I can barely hear the hiss in the raw mix, and I have to crank it up to near insane levels to hear it ... but in the mastered mix its right there...

I won't even go into all the trouble we had with this guy, he did two extra mixes and two extra masters for free because we had soo many issue with it. hence the reason i am not going back to have him fix it :-) the first two masters we didn;t really listen to that closely because they were so bad.... no two tunes sounded like they should be in the same album, levels were all over the place. We have a cd release show this saturday, and kinda need a cd to sell :-)

(this studio is supposedly one of the best in town.... but unfortunatly I am not in LA or any other place known for its music scene)
 
Hiss is accentuated when hi end is added to the signal.
So if any hi end was added at mastering this will have brought out the hiss that was already there from the tracking. Bass guitar can be bad for hiss in my experience.

You coudl try using noise reduction only at the quiet parts where the hiss becomes more noticeable (if possible that is)

Eck.
 
Honestly, I would just do a little quick volume raising on your own and call it good for this Saturday. Personally, mess with some software limiters or something and see if you come up with is better than what you currently have. Then after this Saturday you can have it proffesionally mastered and never look back. Sounds to me like you took it to one of the thousands of places that claim to master but really have no inkling of what it takes to master something, much less master it properly.
 
xstatic said:
Sounds to me like you took it to one of the thousands of places that claim to master but really have no inkling of what it takes to master something, much less master it properly.
Click to expand...
I think they got it mastered in the studio it was recoreded and mixed in. Prob the same guy. :rolleyes:

Eck
 
ecktronic said:
I think they got it mastered in the studio it was recoreded and mixed in. Prob the same guy. :rolleyes:

Eck
Click to expand...


yeap :( I was a little worried about that , and when researching the studio I listened to a few albums that were recorded there. ( i aussumed mastered there also, but no credit for mastering was given on the discs)

Live and learn
 
Amnesia Vivace said:
I just got our mastered cd back from the studio. We digitally recorded and edited, no analog. Problem is, there is a hiss throughout the whole disk. granted it is very minimal and can only be heard in the quietest passages, but my ears have been tuned to hear the bad parts of a mix and fix it. so I am left using noise reduction software to remove the hiss (time constraints keep me from going back to the studio and making them fix it, not to mention I don;t think they have the ability to fix it or else it wouldn;t be there in the first place)
SO, long story short... Am I being to nit-picky? is some amount of hiss acceptable for a professional recording? obviously it is not acceptable to me, and I am fixing it. But I just wanted to know if I am in the minority here :D
Click to expand...

Completely removing background unwanted noise is not possible but can be removed to some extend. Play your recordings in any audio editing/ recording software. Try it withhttp://www.fleximusic.com/waveditor/overview.htm , from the menu, choose “Effect” command where in select “Noise Reduction” command from which opt either “pure noise or apply noise filter” so as to reduce the unwanted background noise.
 
try out COOLEDIT. They have a nice little hiss/noise reduction that lets you adjust the noise floor and has a nice graphic interpretation of it. You can also adjust the control in real time and hear how better it gets ( or how your audio diminishes due to an overuse ) as well as being able to visually see what is going on. Its not the cure to everything but it sure is a cheap and easy adjustment that should atleast help. Its also nice because it allows you to slowly find that perfect threshold where too much process starts to ruin your sound. you can add more and then back it off until you find an amount that you can live with. good luck.

(note: I am sure there are other methods/plug-ins/ME's that would be able to do this better or in a different way, but this is just something I have used in a bind before and it helped to get me by. )
 
I would go back and discuss this with the ME to determine a solution. I'd never try to fix this unless it was absolutely the last alternative, although you can can probably tame it some.
 
i can't really tell you whether or not this is the case without hearing your files but its very possible that the mastering engineer did add noise to the signal. usually mastering enginneers will add a bit of dither to a signal to help prevent quantization error. obviously if the noise is overpoweringly loud this isnt the case but i wouldn't be surprised if it was just a bit of dither added. the ear is tolerant of noise but not distortion
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top