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I made my living as a mastering engineer for two years... To do good work in mixing and mastering, it's important to study the human perceptual mechanism and i

I made my living as a mastering engineer for two years... To do good work in mixing and mastering, it's important to study the human perceptual mechanism and its propensity for illusion, and it's also important to understand masking effects and how to amplify certain components long enough to tweak them before dialing them back to recede into the gestalt. It's also important to understand that in sound reproduction the vast majority of the distortion on the analog side comes from transducers (microphones and speakers), not amplifiers. (I'm not even going to bother with the article, because amplifiers aren't an important problem: buy something decently engineered and overpowered, and you're basically all set. Then worry about your speakers and your room, because they're the hard part.) But it's likewise crucial to grok that the distortion introduced by digital components is disproportionately disturbing because it is enharmonic. And that practically speaking a lot of the damage that gets done in practice happens because people don't handle gain staging right and often don't understand the fundamental principle of preserving high resolution throughout production and only exporting to lower resolution as a final step. In summary, there are a whole lot of interesting conversations to have on the subject of audio and how perception relates to production. But it's basically impossible to find a community to discuss these subjects with. Either it will be overrun by audiophiles and their pseudoscience, or well-meaning but undereducated skeptics will dominate the discussion with plausible but misguided debunking. So every once in a while I throw up a piece like this into the middle of a giant discussion, with about as much hope as tossing a message in a bottle into the ocean.

ericdykstra 8y ago
This is pretty fascinating. I can't add to a discussion, but I would certainly read more about this if you have produced it somewhere. I'm also curious, what made you leave your job as a mastering engineer?
- rectang 8y ago
  The profession of audio production is extremely competitive because there is a perpetual oversupply of labor. The total amount of money in the music industry is also deceptively small compared to its high public profile. I left the field (back in about 2003) because although I felt that I was good enough to compete and survive, I didn't love it enough to grind out a life as a workaholic and just get by. Most of my writings from that time were forum posts with the perspective of the well-meaning but undereducated skeptic and wouldn't be that interesting to read today. Also, what was probably my best writing happened in forums which don't have public archives which have survived 15-20 years later. (Which amuses me as a former mastering engineer because one of our primary objectives is long-term archival.) PS: not "enharmonic", "non-harmonic" dammit. The point is that while analog distortion is mostly harmonically related, digital distortion is not and therefore is much more poisonous in small quantities. Mixing especially (though mastering is similar) is all about making changes near or below the threshold of perception which sum to a cumulative perceptible effect.
beat 8y ago
I feel your pain. I produce and mix records - at an amateur level, but enough to get quite good at it. It makes me want to toss all this "objective", "measurable" bullshit from the skeptics right out the window - the subjective experience is all that matters. But it also makes me want to toss the audiophile voodoo out the same window. "Accurate" reproduction? I just want to show them how records are mixed. My pet example is that I put high-pass filters (12db slope) at 250-300hz on almost everything that isn't a drum or a bass instrument. I'm slaughtering the bottom two octaves of guitars! And if you solo a guitar track, you can hear it. But in the context of a mix, all those bottom two octaves do is make mud and confusion, distracting from the clarity that the kick and bass (guitar || synth) needs. And I need that clarity, because I'm not mixing for $500,000 audiophile systems. I'm mixing for car stereos, boom boxes, Alexas, cheap earbuds, and worse. So all that matters for me with audiophile systems - and I love audiophile systems - is that they sound good. That doesn't mean they sound accurate.
- rectang 8y ago
  I agree that your high-pass filters are an application of masking principles. It would be challenging, especially for an untrained person but even for someone who is trained, to perceive enabling/disabling of those filters in the context of the full mix. Instead we solo to isolate the track being adjusted so the change is easily audible -- i.e. no longer masked by the other tracks -- and adjust the filtering anticipating the counter-intuitive but artistically desirable effect when the filtered track is blended back into the mix. Despite that, your hostility to the skeptics illustrates that you and I still aren't really on the same page (though I don't doubt you produce compelling art, don't question your techniques, and agree 100% about ensuring that aesthetic gestures survive the transition to imperfect end-user environments). To me, "objective accuracy" is a worthy and desirable intermediate goal for sound artists, a tool which can be leveraged for creative ends the same as a baker understanding food chemistry or an animator understanding Newtonian physics or a modern origami folder understanding programming. However, chasing "objective accuracy" means understanding the wildly non-linear, even bizarre human perceptual mechanism -- which is more of a pattern recognition machine and definitely not a measurement device -- in addition to all the strangeness of acoustics. The problem with audiophiles is that their approach to "accuracy" is unscientific and doomed from the start. The skeptics on the other hand, have the right idea -- but those who have not done deep study often fail to appreciate just how difficult the problem is and how far off their intuitions are. I've had some wonderful conversations with individuals whose perspectives are similar to mine, but it still seems impossible to find a hospitable public forum.

ericdykstra 8y ago

This is pretty fascinating. I can't add to a discussion, but I would certainly read more about this if you have produced it somewhere. I'm also curious, what made you leave your job as a mastering engineer?

rectang 8y ago
The profession of audio production is extremely competitive because there is a perpetual oversupply of labor. The total amount of money in the music industry is also deceptively small compared to its high public profile. I left the field (back in about 2003) because although I felt that I was good enough to compete and survive, I didn't love it enough to grind out a life as a workaholic and just get by. Most of my writings from that time were forum posts with the perspective of the well-meaning but undereducated skeptic and wouldn't be that interesting to read today. Also, what was probably my best writing happened in forums which don't have public archives which have survived 15-20 years later. (Which amuses me as a former mastering engineer because one of our primary objectives is long-term archival.) PS: not "enharmonic", "non-harmonic" dammit. The point is that while analog distortion is mostly harmonically related, digital distortion is not and therefore is much more poisonous in small quantities. Mixing especially (though mastering is similar) is all about making changes near or below the threshold of perception which sum to a cumulative perceptible effect.

beat 8y ago

I feel your pain. I produce and mix records - at an amateur level, but enough to get quite good at it. It makes me want to toss all this "objective", "measurable" bullshit from the skeptics right out the window - the subjective experience is all that matters. But it also makes me want to toss the audiophile voodoo out the same window. "Accurate" reproduction? I just want to show them how records are mixed. My pet example is that I put high-pass filters (12db slope) at 250-300hz on almost everything that isn't a drum or a bass instrument. I'm slaughtering the bottom two octaves of guitars! And if you solo a guitar track, you can hear it. But in the context of a mix, all those bottom two octaves do is make mud and confusion, distracting from the clarity that the kick and bass (guitar || synth) needs. And I need that clarity, because I'm not mixing for $500,000 audiophile systems. I'm mixing for car stereos, boom boxes, Alexas, cheap earbuds, and worse. So all that matters for me with audiophile systems - and I love audiophile systems - is that they sound good. That doesn't mean they sound accurate.

rectang 8y ago
I agree that your high-pass filters are an application of masking principles. It would be challenging, especially for an untrained person but even for someone who is trained, to perceive enabling/disabling of those filters in the context of the full mix. Instead we solo to isolate the track being adjusted so the change is easily audible -- i.e. no longer masked by the other tracks -- and adjust the filtering anticipating the counter-intuitive but artistically desirable effect when the filtered track is blended back into the mix. Despite that, your hostility to the skeptics illustrates that you and I still aren't really on the same page (though I don't doubt you produce compelling art, don't question your techniques, and agree 100% about ensuring that aesthetic gestures survive the transition to imperfect end-user environments). To me, "objective accuracy" is a worthy and desirable intermediate goal for sound artists, a tool which can be leveraged for creative ends the same as a baker understanding food chemistry or an animator understanding Newtonian physics or a modern origami folder understanding programming. However, chasing "objective accuracy" means understanding the wildly non-linear, even bizarre human perceptual mechanism -- which is more of a pattern recognition machine and definitely not a measurement device -- in addition to all the strangeness of acoustics. The problem with audiophiles is that their approach to "accuracy" is unscientific and doomed from the start. The skeptics on the other hand, have the right idea -- but those who have not done deep study often fail to appreciate just how difficult the problem is and how far off their intuitions are. I've had some wonderful conversations with individuals whose perspectives are similar to mine, but it still seems impossible to find a hospitable public forum.