"Peter Larsen" wrote in message ...
"David Morgan (MAMS)" wrote:
Being recently forced to mix a project in an all digi environment
with no house engineer and a number of stumbling blocks to overcome,
Allow me to put forth that the client should perhaps not pay for product
development and design, but rather for the service ordered and hopefully
rendered.
Agreed... We were credited for a full day, but the mix was done almost
700 miles away and one mile higher than where I now sit. After losing
the first day, that left us with just two 8-hour days to complete 13 songs.
No... the client should not have to pay again and I should have been more
prepared to fly the ship, but I do feel slighted that we had no 'support' in
getting the show on the road.
I am inclined to re-evaluate what was done there and I could
use some advice before making any recommendations to the client
- who has already blown the vast majority of his budget and needs
product in his hands for summer sales.
David, I don't know all about the exact wording of your deal with the
client, but redoing things may not be fairly billable.
This is part of my predicament. Our agreement has been fulfilled to
the letter, but I can't get into another local studio affordably - - plus, I
would want the client there to approve the mixes (as they were the
first time through). I feel like I've done a wee bit more than I agreed
to with respect to the lack of on-site help and spending the better
part of a day figuring out how to use and interface the gear as well
as internally routing an unfamiliar digital console. I'm serious when
I say the owner had -No- "default" templates set up for recording or
mixing, and had never run any of the gear at 44.1K.
Whatever it is, it is a "you're dead", as grave as when I was unable to
deliver a CD on time to catch the trumpet player prior to his plane
leaving because of a compatibility issue between my Sony 2000 and
my DiO 2448 leading to strange distortion.
That's another part of the dilemma. I want to deliver the best product
I can (given the source tracks) and I somehow feel as if it's me that's
letting the client down... even though he fully understood what sort of
difficulties we endured on day one. We almost let the studio keep the
50% deposit and walked out due to the lack of assistance. Unfortunately
the client had almost as much of a limitation on available time as he
did on available cashola.... we had to make the best of a tough situation.
The original source material was recorded at home by the client
on ADAT at 16bit, 44.1K.
When we arrived there, the tracks had been dumped at 16 / 48k.
Strange choice to go for two times sample rate conversion, assuming the
end product is 44.1 anyway. I occasionally record on 48-16 because the
treble is better at the cost of a loss of spatial detail in sample rate
conversion, but such a trade-off does not seem to apply here.
It was an error on the part of the engineer that the owner paid to come
and dump the tracks from the ADATs to the HD-24. Since nothing in
the studio was set up at 44.1, the robot made a dump to the Alesis
HD-24 set at 48k using the ADAT optical digi outs at 44.1. An entire
set of ADATs was dumped into the HD-24 as a single song on 'bank one'
and the seconds set of ADATs was sumped on 'bank 2' as a single song.
In other words, the robot pressed record, started the ADAT playback,
and left the room. It obviously was not checked at any point in time
because the played back audio was faster and pitched up since the
wrong sample rate was selected on the HD-24.
The tools used were a Sony DMX-r100 (clock source), the HD-24
controlled by an Alesis BRC, and an Alesis Masterlink.
In the path before the Masterlink was a TC Finalizer. These
were all digitally integrated.
I know the sound of a couple of Finalizer models, they dull the sound
ever so slightly, almost only audible as a loss of background spatial
detail, not really obvious on foreground audio, even in bypass mode.
This seems to be the concensus of opinion from anyone here locally or
anyone who's responded that has heard the tracks. This was a hard-
wired line from the 2-track outputs of the Sony desk, to the Finalizer,
and then to the Masterlink.... Which I also didn't discover until today,
has it's own share of DSP capabilities. I was told on site to simply
treat the Masterlink as I would a standard hard disc recorder.
After being handed the manuals and wished "good luck" by the
studio owner, at the end of the first day the machines were
finally talking to one another.
It would be incompetent to try to comment on this.
But your words might make me feel better. :-| Believe me, I could
have been better prepared, but I at least made certain in advance that
there would be a house 'tech' on hand before commiting... and there
wasn't. So what can you do after travelling 800 miles to get there
and find that you're on your own in a strange environment with a job
to finish? It was either dive in or lose the dates, the deposit and the
plane tickets.
The DMX-r100 had to be completely reconfigured from a rec/mix
session some two months earlier. The Finalizer could not be
removed from the chain by order of the owner, and the Masterlink
had no GUI peripherals. The Finalizer was supposedly set up
only for limiting to avoid clipping of the Masterlink and
nothing else...
Yeees, but what kind of limiting? - it is a very capable thingie, could
it have been set to produce something that fits say FM preemphasis no
matter how much treble is thrown at it?
This is highly probable. Most of the work done there is rock. My mistake
here for buying into the story that it was harmless limiting only. Lots of
folks keep limiters in front of the 2-mix just below saturation, so I didn't
really give it much more thought at the time.
I took his word for that and tried to stay out of soft limiting
while mixing.
Hmm ... you might have been better off doing what the setup was designed
to handle: pushing it mindlessly. But please Dave, I'm guessing.
I tend to agree... now... but while mixing western swing at 10:00 am in
the morning, that didn't cross my mind.
The BRC had to be pitched down to control the HD-24 at 44.1K.
? - I don't understand this, the studio took it to 48 kHz, surely you
would then stay there until the mastering stage, downsampling again
should in my religious belief be the very last stage.
They took it to 48 with a digital input running at 44.1. You don't have to
downsample (per se') in this case. The default record rate for any ADAT
running off of a BRC is 48K, but by pitching the BRC down to -147, the
playback sample rate changes to 44.1. Voila'... correct pitch again
with no SRC.
The desk was reset to send clock at that frequency as well,
and so *finally* after reconfiguring the routing as well,
the audio cleared up and was free of the
obvious timing errors and the mix ensued.
There is too much I don't know to grasp the details of the setup.
Me either. Want some manuals? g
Please note that monitoring through the desk during mixdown
and during playback from the Masterlink, did *NOT* reveal
the severe degradation of the audio that was actually
taking place.
Severe and irrecoverable.
A number of people have told me that if we are willing to live with
the pumping and phasey sounding results of the DSP that was
going on, that a decent mastering guy can band-aid the frequency
response problems. I'm taking one song to my local guy in the
next couple of days for some feedback.
I cannot explain the resulting loss of frequency content.
Low pass filtering, possibly dynamic.
I took my own monitors and phones and three of us were involved
in the mix. None of the resulting symptoms became noticeable
until we had left the building with the final mixes.
One does not hear what one
is not prepared for hearing. One does occasionally hear what one wants
to hear. Those who have fixed something by changing the settings on
device that is bypassed may raise their hands now.
No comment.... g
The degradation was not discernable, even on play-back while
on this equipment.
I trust you nevertheless.
I know that one is tough... but there are three of us who can and
will make that claim & stick by it.
We were able to leave with only a DAT backup of the unedited
Masterlink files and an audio CD created by the Masterlink.
(The Masterlink was not set up with a monitor and essentially
was just a box in the rack).
I'm not totally sure what a Masterlink is. One thing I am wondering
about is whether audio went analog into the Masterlink, vague
remembering it to be a recorder of some kind.
Digital, from the Finalizer which was fed digital from the Sony 2-mix outs.
Now that we are listening to the mixes and realizing how
dramatically different they are from the studio, I have to
make a recommendation of some sort to the client.
Redo. I can't see the cost of that being the clients problem, I'm sorry
to say it, but I really can't.
Me either... especially given the circumstances.
There are 13 songs which all suffer exactly the same symptoms.
The audio is broken beyond repair.
Don't say that !! There are some songs that exhibit more loss and
light, fast pumping... but we may have to try and live with it. I did
what it was that I went there to do, and we were 92% happy with
the results we heard in-house.
After requesting the original ADATs and re-mixing one song
here at home, I think there may have been serious problems
with the interfacing and likely my operation of the gear.
It is not really possible to know afterwards what went wrong.
I'm getting a grip on that. I had noidea that the Masterlink also had
powerful DSP functions, and I don't really believe it's owner did
either. One thing is pretty certain, both the Finalizer and the
Masterlink were set up as they were when the last professional
engineer familiar with the gear was in the building, some two
months earlier. This fellow, regardless of what he told me on
day one, would definitely not have made any changes to the
gear if it was working at all.... I know this because he ended up
putting me on the phone a Nashville cat who had been the last
real 'engineer' in the studio some sixty days prior, to help me
get the Digital desk configured. I never thought to ask about
what I was told was an ordinary hard disc recorder, or the TC.
Digital is not simple, not all boxes are alse "just a wire".
I've already been through clock hell recently (Rivers knows) and now
I have apparently been through Finalizer and Masterlink DSP hell.
An unproven and unprovable theory is that the Finalizer may have been
configured to do frequency dependent limiting, it think such
contraptions can do that too.
Yes, and what I am hearing now just might have fit a grungy, hard rock
mixdown.
Please keep in mind that in the re-mix, I made no attempt to add clarity in
any shape, form or fashion. I tried to use the same cut-only EQ schemes
and cut considerably more high end than I did in the all digi studio.
Which is to say that the problem was obvious over the monitors when you
mixed, but you just didn't hear it prior to the problem happening.
The only way I see that as possible, is if I was monitoring waaay to
loudly..... on western swing(?). Possibly.... but I don't think so.
The deterioration is on the order of
magnitude of not optimally good analog. You have not noticed it in the
studio because you did not compare the original tracks with the
converted tracks.
I had only heard a couple of the songs before I arrived for the gig, and
at that point the transfer was already made and I was greeted with a
hard drive that was playing back fast and pitched up as well as the
common pops and ticks from timing errors.
No matter what, no matter how, that sample rate
conversion had no good reason graspable to me to at all get done. It is
the first place things can have gone wrong, and if they went wrong there
then it is explained why you didn't notice it in the studio.
Remix at home at no cost to the client and apologize for the delay it
causes, you at least know what to aim for, just better.
Unfortunately I have to pay for studio time, or I would demand the
opportunity to re-mix in a familiar environment. I did make an honest
effort to get the client to come to me rather than me climbing a mile
in altitude to mix in a strange, untreated, very small room.
The disclaimer: I'm somewhat ignorant about these things, so I just
applied some common sense viewpoints, the main one being that the client
shouldn't pay twice to receive one mixdown.
I agree, but never the less, I may have to put this on the table as a
potential option. Thanks for the sounding board....
--
David Morgan (MAMS)
http://www.m-a-m-s DOT com
http://www.artisan-recordingstudio.com