dub plates & mastering

[Tobes]

Heres some info about Dub plates and mastering, from my own experiance, sending your tunes down to be cut can teach you a lot about mastering techniques for vinyl, so its good to read as much about it from the pros as possible.

Making The Most Of Your 12" Vinyl For Club Play, A Producer's Primer
by Kris Solem
(First published in EQ Magazine, June, 2002)

Club play is a key vehicle for promoting your dance and hip hop tracks to the public, and one of the best ways to get your mixes played in the clubs is to put out a good 12" single. If you watch the Billboard dance charts for a couple of months, you will see a pattern: songs which spend much time on the club play chart (mostly vinyl, often promo's) tend to show up later on the maxi-singles sales chart (usually released on CD and vinyl). To make a great sounding 12" single, a record which the D.J.'s will really like to play, one needs to follow some guidelines which have to do with the limitations of the vinyl medium.

First and foremost, try not to exceed 12 minutes of music per side. If you want your mixes to sound fat in the club, you need to be sure your 12" can be cut at a good full level.(my experiance is to keep your track to around 6 minutes for optimal levels"Tobes") When you go over about 12 minutes, you start losing level at a rate of 1/2 dB for each extra minute (the exact rate depends on the music, but the more bangin' your mixes, the greater will be the loss.) Remember, squeezing in that extra track won't help your marketing plan when the D.J.'s don't want to play your record because the levels are wimpy. One trick which I recommend to clients who are having difficulty with timings is to edit the instrumentals. Editing a 4:30 instrumental down to 3:00 can mean a dB of level.

Another important consideration is the sequence of the tracks. The sound quality on a vinyl record degrades toward the inside of the disc, so put your biggest and most important tracks at the front of each side. If your single is going to include "acapella" mixes, sequence them last, at the inside of the disc. Since these mixes have no drums, bass, etc. they will play fine in this position.

A question I am asked frequently is whether the same mixes will be suitable for the 12" single and CD. In most cases the answer is yes, but problems can arise when the mixes are very bright, or if there is a lot of stereo information in the bass. To my ear, mixes which are too bright for vinyl are usually just too bright anyway and will make an unpleasant sounding CD as well. Just keep in mind that if your mixes are very bright, especially above the 8-10kHz range, your mastering engineer will need to roll the top off with eq and a high frequency limiter to make it work on vinyl. You may or may not like the CDs processed in the same way. Stereo information in the bass frequencies is very difficult on vinyl, but works easily on CD. In most cases, however, a club mix which sounds good on CD will work for the vinyl as well. At Future Disc, I frequently master singles with the commercial CD in mind, knowing that when it goes in the cutting room we'll de-ess it and mono the bass for the 12".

Mastering well for vinyl involves many trade-offs. For club play hot levels are good, but not if they come at the expense of distortion, skipping, or over compression. Some mixes transfer to vinyl easily and others can be very tricky. Therefore, it's a good idea to reference your 12" before you press a bunch of copies send them out. First, you should have your mastering engineer make you a "ref" copy. This is a lacquer disc directly off the cutting lathe. Sometimes referred to as "dub plates", these ref copies are only good for a few playings. Take it to the club. Most D.J.'s will give it a spin because, being a dub plate, it has special status. You'll find out how your 12" will stack up next to the competition. If you approve this "ref" copy, your mastering engineer will cut the actual lacquer master at the exact same settings. This "lacquer", as it is called in the trade, is not to be played and goes directly to the pressing plant without delay, since it has a limited shelf life. The final stage of approval comes when you get a "test pressing" from the plant. At this point, your pressing plant has made a mold from the lacquer master, and made the test pressing in the same manner as your copies will be made. If you're in doubt about the quality of your test pressing, take it back to your mastering engineer for a second opinion.

[Tobes]

IMPROVING THE WAY COMPACT DISCS SOUND
by Kris Solem
(First published in MediaLine April, 2001)

With all of the talk these days about surround sound, DVD-Audio, SACD, and so on, let's not forget about the good old Compact Disc. Don't get me wrong, I love surround sound, and get just as excited about all of what the future promises as anyone. But for most of us in the business today, it's the CD that's paying the bills.

The Recording Industry Association of America reports over 940 million album length CDs sold in the U.S. last year at a retail dollar value of over $13 billion. It is, I believe, in all our interest that we do our best to continue to make the CD a desirable, high quality product, and not abandon it as new formats emerge.

It is important to realize that CD sound quality has improved steadily as the product has matured. The underlying technologies such as analog to digital conversion, digital processing used in recording and mastering studios, and mastering and molding technologies at the manufacturing level have all improved dramatically over the last two decades.

At the same time, our understanding of how to make music sound good on CD has grown with experience. Just compare a few discs from the mid-'80s to a few of your favorites from the last year or two to hear what I mean. One advantage to a mature technology is that our skills in working with that technology are well developed.

Here, however, are several areas that concern me

The Role of Mastering
For many in the music business, "mastering" means making the loudest CD possible. If it doesn't play louder than every other disc they have, it's no good. Carried to the extreme, as it so often is, this kind of dynamic compression creates a recording, which is fatiguing and unpleasant to listen to for any length of time. An album of songs, which are all pushed to the absolute maximum level, is not an album at all, but a collection of singles, all on one disc.

In my experience, one of the most challenging aspects of mastering music for CD release is to find the ideal dynamic range and level for a given recording. Too low and you're not competitive (there definitely is a benefit to making certain recordings hot), but too hot, even just a little, and you can create a disc which is less satisfying to listen to than it could have been. Of course, the consumer has no way to compare the CD they buy with what could have been, so they vote with their pocketbooks, figuring that MP3 really sounds about as good as CD.

Mixdown Formats
Producers and engineers can help improve the quality of the finished product their work will become by giving some consideration to the format they choose for mixdown, and leaving their mastering engineer with some dynamics to work with.

I often see producers and engineers sabotage the quality of their projects. A common problem has developed with the use of CD-R as mixdown format. For the first time, producers can walk out of the studio with their mixes on a CD. Of course, they get in the car and put in the mixes and A/B them to their favorite new Madonna CD. This is comparing apples to oranges and the wrong thing to do is to go back in the studio and whip the mixing engineer into driving up the levels until they match. The nice thing about referencing mixes on DAT is the ability to see meters. They will let you know that all of your bits are being used, but without clipping. When referencing mixes on CD-R, producers and engineers should be aware of what they are listening to and use the volume control.

Taking mixes in for mastering using any 16-bit format (this includes Audio CD-R and DAT) really puts a project behind the sonic curve. If analog is not right for a project, using something like the Alesis Masterlink or TASCAM D45-HR should be considered. Keeping audio in 24-bit resolution, perhaps even using higher sample rates as well, will help improve sound quality. Keep in mind that most DAWs including ProTools, and most digital consoles, think in 24-bits. They can be set up to output this resolution to several kinds of devices, but not DAT or Audio CD-R. (It is also becoming increasingly popular to output 24-bit AIFF files to CD-R, but this is a CD-ROM and will not play in an audio player. Engineers and producers should check with the mastering house to see specifically what type of files they accept.)

At the Plant
One thing about many CD manufacturing plants that is very frustrating to the rest of us is their "closed-door" policy with respect to the replication process. Even for someone as close to and as interested in their operations as I am, it is almost impossible to find out what goes on in many plants. Allow me to relate a recent experience I had with a major replicator.

The client, a label that specializes in "World Music," asked me to master an album by a wonderful performer in the Afro-Cuban genre. When the project was finished, I gave them reference copies on CD-R. Everyone was very happy. My next step was to contact the replicator and ask the question: "What format do you master to glass from?" I was told that CD-R, Exabyte DDP and 1630 were all fine. This was not the information I wanted, since I was fairly certain that only one of these formats would go directly to glass, while the others would be transferred once again (such transfers--1630 to CD-R, etc.--can be made without degrading audio if done on properly set up and meticulously maintained systems, but I hoped to avoid this step.)

Finally I was able to badger my way into a conversation with someone in the know who told me they were set up to master from Exabyte DDP. Great, I thought, and made the Exabyte and sent it off for pressing.

A couple of weeks later, I got two calls the same morning, one from the artists, who was in Paris, and the other from the head of the label in New York. They had each just received advance copies of the CD pressing and were very disturbed. The artist described what he heard as lacking in bass, while the label executive characterized the sound as "thin and harsh." They sent me some copies and what I found was interesting. The pressed discs sounded thin, and lacked the depth and air so readily audible on the reference discs and master soundfile, yet the HDCD flag was still there, confirming that the bit structure was unaltered. Further, if I loaded back to Sonic Solutions from the pressed disc using a CD-ROM drive, the audio sounded fine. Yet the sound quality reproduced in CD audio players was seriously degraded.

I shared my findings with the chief engineer at the plant, who informed me that "we are in the business of copying ones and zeros and obviously you have your original ones and zeros." He suggested that if I wasn't satisfied with the CDs I should send him a new master. I took a long shot and asked him if the transfer from DDP to glass was done at 1:1. He said no, it was done at multispeed. At this point, if I were to send a new DDP, and the discs from it were right, then it would appear that somehow I or my equipment were at fault. With this in mind, I recommended the label insist that the glass master be redone at 1:1 from my original DDP. This step was taken and produced perfect results. I admit that I do not understand how multi-speed (I was never told what the actual ratio was) glass mastering could result in a bit for bit copy which produced degraded audio when played in a CD player, but I have spoken to a number of people who have had similar experiences.

Multi-speed mastering ought to work perfectly well. I understand that the economics of running a plant demand productive mastering solutions. But please don't tell me that if the copy contains the "right ones and zeros" that that is all there is to it. There are obviously other factors at work in CD audio playback, which can have a profound effect on how the discs sound. Building a better feedback loop between the plant and mastering engineers will help both of us keep our customers satisfied.

Investing in the quality of every CD project you or I work on makes good business and artistic sense. Let's try to insure that music buyers get the most faithful version of the artist's music possible and not relegate the CD format to the dustbin before its time.