bob wrote:
Stewart Pinkerton wrote:
On 11 Mar 2006 00:03:06 GMT, "Harry Lavo" wrote:

I hate to burst your bubble, Stewart, but many artists, producers,
engineers, and companies that care about sound quality REQUEST hearing one
of the CD production masters after the manufacturing facility has made them,
because in their experience things can go wrong (particularly jitter) and
they want to make sure the masters sound as good as they expect them to.
They will compare them to a copy of the source material they have sent for
the production mastering. Sometimes several rounds are required to "get it
right".

IOW, they want a competently produced CD which sounds just like the
master tape, and that's what they get. Thanks for that, Harry.

That's one possibility. Another is that the master that's sent to
whoever's making the CDs might not be "final"--there might be some
further processing of the sound at that point, which the
artists/producers need to check. I don't know how common that is, but I
get the sense that it happens. Perhaps people actually in the business
(which I think excludes everybody on this thread so far) could
enlighten us.

Another possibility is what we might call "artist-producer's remorse."
What sounded great last month on the master tape now isn't quite what
we want.


And, of course, it just *might* happen that the master tape and the CD production master
really do sound the same, but the artist/producer *thinks* they sound different. I bet guys
at the CD houses could tell some tales.


Oh yeah. Of the handful of stories I've read about CD production masters not being up to
snuff, I've don't recall any that involved blind comparison. So how can we know these
're-dos' were ever really necessary?

I've also read that savvy recording and mastering engineers often had at hand a control
or knob that led to nothing, but which they would 'adjust' if the artist or producer thought
there was 'something off' about the sound. Invariably it seemed to 'work'.