Raynald Colon

For those who like Coltrane and Davis you may want to check out Raynald Colon's new lp 'Evocacion'.

From yesterday's 'EL Pais's ' review:

'El resultado no is ni jazz ni flamenco, sino todo lo contrario; una obra incuestionablemente hermosa y original' (The result is neither jazz nor flamenco, but the opposite; a work that is unquestionably beautiful and original')

Here and here are youtube clips of Raynald.

Louder Is Not Necessarily Better

Here concerning the 'loudness war' and the drift towards people recording too hot and compressed.

Even as a neophyte mastering engineer I've already been sent some mixes that are crushed, compressed and recorded too loud. Whatever happened to dynamics in music .

Anyway - I particularly enjoyed the link to Metallica's 'Death Magnetic'. I've seen a lot about how Rick Rubin, as the producer/engineer sent Sterling Mastering (Ted Jensen) a hyper-compressed hot recording to master that had already been put through a limiter...

Anyway - on the other link to 'Death Magnetic' some Metallica fans reckon that the Guitar Hero version sounds better then the actual album. That's because the game version didn't go through the master bus and that limiter...

Completing Our New Mastering And Recording Studio

I've already said thaqt we were in the throws of refitting a room at my home specifically for mastering plus some tracking and mixing. We're approaching completion - today we put in most of the extra audio insulation and started to run some tests on the set up.

Audio is good down to below 50Hz but we have some jitter on the DAC - ADC is fine (great so tracking is fine but mastering has an issue .) We're going to switch to a different master clock tomorrow and see what happens.
Everything else seems to be kicking with the only downside that we take our SADiE out on location for the next few weeks (we're doing a location record and broadcast of a poetry festival).

Current set up is mainly (mastering only ITB - there's other standard studio stuff for tracking/mixing):

Lavry AD/DA
Sonus Faber speakers on dedicated stands plus Cyrus pre/power amps
additional RME i/o but not for conversion
i7 dedicated pc
Flux Solera, E Pure and Pure Limiter, ProAudio DSM, Voxengo Elephant, plus a few others
SADiE 5.3 with some CEDAR restoration, Sequoia 11 (on trial)
K-monitoring with audio set at K14
Internal pc and external dedicated CDaudioR
R8Brain
...

Anyway I'll try to post some pics over the next few days - bit pushed for time as we're concentrating on the location work.




I'll post pics of before and after in the next few days.

Melodyne Dna

Just received my invite to the Beta test. For those interested and/or those who want to know more about what DNA is look here.

DNA looks like it's going to be awesome. I'll try to keep an update on the beta, doesn't seem to be any NDA. (Slightly rubbish timing for me as we're about to fit out our new mastering studio over the next month though .)

Sadie

Prism Sound have just announced that SADiE 6 is set for winter 2009. Part of the big news here is that it will also include a native version .

Not sure if I'm the only one who uses SADiE but this could represent a more cost effective way in for people.