Gray Mastering
Neil wrote:
On 10/4/2015 10:22 AM, Frank Stearns wrote:
But this comes around to a part of my original thesis that I perhaps
did not state
as clearly as I should: do we now have a generation of people so
unaware of what
real instruments sound like, or what is possible to experience with
really good
reproduced sound, that "mediocre" is accepted as the norm?
Taking a step back, let's not overlook that there has *always* been a
huge range of audio quality in recordings,
+1
regardless of the genre,
regardless of the talent, regardless of the engineers and regardless of
the equipment used. The "best" recordings are often the result of many
factors, including being lucky enough to have a good performance, good
acoustics and environmental factors such as humidity and air pressure,
all of which can alter the sound of a recording even with all other
factors being equal. Listen to a number of recordings by any single
artist (or orchestra), any single recording engineer, any single room
and so on, and there will be audible differences. So what *is* the "norm"?
It's another matter to send a recording off to someone who will be
changing that recording in some way -- i.e. mastering -- and expect to
get back something that resembles what one imagined the end result would
be. There are just too many variables one needs to be intimately
familiar with.
--
Les Cargill
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