Well presented and a great summary of the fundamentals. And those fundamentals are about all I use. It was cool to see the Tonal Balance and Ozone 8's maximizer as I use them both every time. If your ears are not as sharp as they used to be (and that is likely the case )the Tonal Balance is a wonderful tool.
I also use iZotope tonal balance but I use it at the mixing stage. I think it makes more sense to fix balance problems in the mix instead of trying to fix them while mastering.
The ability to visually see where the issue is, and then zoom in and actually hear exactly what part of the mix is causing the issue is very useful, it's one of the best tools iZotope has ever come up with IMHO.
Bob, I agree 100% about the Lurssen Mastering Console although it gets lots of negative comments from the purists. The mastered for iTunes feature alone is brilliant, some serious magic happening with that. It's not the only mastering tool I use, but it's always the last in the chain, other than a LUFS meter.
I use the tonal balance when mastering - but just for a check. I’m yet to have a final mix that doesn’t fit within the “modern” parameters unless (like our current song Tryin)’ I use no bass or drums.
I don’t get the luft thing. If I limit “loud” but < 0 and no clipping then the streaming platforms are still gonna compress my wav’s and engineer the volume to suit their protocols. I’ve listen to our album on 8 different platforms and it sounds fine to me. OK no more illustrating my ignorance
FWIW:
Tonal Balance check
- Ozone EQ with low end shelf 40 down - Waves LinMB to “open” up the mix - Ozone limiter
Will they leave it alone? They don’t leave it a wav file do they? Showing more ignorance I guess but I figure if they are going to change the file format a little volume reduction won’t matter in the overall.
BTW, I know the Ozone 8 Maximizer has a 14 L option. Have you used it?
Well worth the watch, I didn't understand what all the fuss was about until I watched that video.
I didn't know about that 14 L setting with Ozone, but I'll check into it later on this morning. Thanks!
EDIT: I should add by "leaving alone" I meant that they won't need to change the levels to bring it down to -14 LUFS because it's already there. I have no idea what format they use for streaming, I guess that depends on the platform.
and mastered it first using Ozone (I used the master assistant feature and selected "streaming" to setup the maximizer and also had the 14LUFS maximizer setting enabled), then using LMC.
I then converted both files to 128K MP3, because the streaming services will be doing something similar.
I tested the the two using a dynamic range meter and also the iZotope insight meter and the results were quite close:
LMC: DR 11, Peak L -.66 R -.66, LUFS -14.3
Ozone: DR 11, Peak L -1.11 R -1.00, LUFS -15
So I suppose if -14 LUFS is the goal, the streaming service would reduce the volume of the LMC file and increase the volume of the Ozone file until that target is achieved.
Not enough to make an audible difference?
I think the most important thing is making sure the mix is not too compressed and has good dynamic range before you start mastering. In the case of this particular song, when I check the mix before mastering the peaks are around -5.5 and the LUFS is -20.
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)the Tonal Balance is a wonderful tool.
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