Bob Katz Mastering Audio Pdf Free Download --
Micael Bourdette
At Digital Domain, we help musicians, independent artists and record labels take your albums to the sound of your dreams. Audio Mastering, Music Mastering, CD Mastering, Blu-Ray Mastering, Mixing, and more. By the way, Bob is also an avid photographer. You can check that out as well.
At Digital Domain, we help musicians, independent artists and record labels take your albums to the sound and look of your dreams. By the way, Bob is also an avid photographer. You can check that out as well.
This is the must-read book for the audio professional. Mastering Audio is for everyone who wants to increase their mastery of digital and analog audio: musicians, producers, A&R, mastering, recording and mixing engineers.
Salsa Talks is a celebration of this music, in the words of the artists, promoters, arrangers, bandleaders, and singers who have lived to the rhythm of the clave beat. These "insiders" talk about the music from their own unique perspective.
Bob Katz has written these articles on digital and analog audio since 1990. Much of Bob's book, Mastering Audio contains concepts from these articles. The book is a newly written, holistic work--an organized look at mastering from A to Z.
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Written by an award-winning, highly respected professional, Mastering Audio gives you a thorough introduction to the unique procedures and technical issues involved in mastering.
Suitable for all levels of students and professionals, it is ideal for anyone who wants to increase their mastery of digital and analog audio: musicians, producers, A&R, mastering, recording, and mixing engineers.
Fully updated to cover the latest technologies, Mastering Audio discusses audio philosophy and art: sequencing, levelling, processing; how to make a record album radio-ready; and mixing as it relates to mastering. Divided into five parts, the book begins with the basics--monitoring, mastering techniques, useful tutorials, and the fundamentals of dithering and decibels--then moves on to more advanced concepts, such as jitter and clocking, monitor calibration, and multi channel audio, miking, and acoustics. Leading-edge audio concepts are explained in an easy-to-grasp style.
Including practical tips and real-world experiences, Bob Katz explains the technical detail of the subject in his informative and humorous style.
"If you record, you need this book. Arguably the most clearly written single source of essential audio information available, Katz populates its 335 very readable pages with fascinating insights, expert testimony, myth-debunking facts, practical techniques, and strong opinions. Ostensibly about mastering, this book goes way beyond its primary subject and covers so much critical information that it should be required reading for anyone who presses 'Record.'"--GuitarPlayer.com
Katz taught at the Institute of Audio Research from 1978 to 1979. In 1988, Katz joined Chesky Records and began recording jazz and classical artists there, as well as producing oversampled commercial recordings. In 1990, he founded an audio-mastering company called Digital Domain Mastering, where he continues to work. In early 2015, Katz began a regular blog, Katz's Corner, on the headphone enthusiast site InnerFidelity.[4]
Bob Katz proposed the K-system to measure audio levels and standardize dynamic range in recorded audio. He has developed the proprietary systems K-stereo and K-surround. These processes are designed to "recover lost or amplify hidden ambience, space and imaging, and generate stereo from mono signals without adding artificial reverberation".[5]
Part of the mastering job is to relate the song levels to each other in the course of an album. This relationship would be destroyed if every song gets normalized on its own, and not within the context of its album. Does Apple's Sound Check use an overall album normalization value?
I figured out exactly how the Sound Check album algorithm works a few weeks ago by various tests. It is clear that Apple does not store an album normalization value anywhere as an explicit number or metadata. Instead, it calculates the album normalization based on its database of all the songs that are in that album that it knows about. If the whole album is already in the user's database, or if the loudest song from the album is already in its database, then Sound Check album mode will work correctly. What it does is use the same Sound Check normalization gain for the loudest song for all the songs in that album. Once you know the loudest song, then you can play all the songs from that album correctly.
Yes, vinyl helped that. But you'd be surprised how many vinyl records are made from super-compressed masters because of the cost factor to master two different versions. That might take a day and a half, instead of a day. That's expensive for the artist. If we want to do it right I could easily take my good master and smash it then, but it doesn't sound as good as if I started working from the beginning with the intent of making a hot master, because there are two different philosophies. As a general rule, the more compression you apply, the duller it sounds in the high-end. Of course, there are compressors which sound brighter, but usually the high-end tends to go down because the transients are softened. You can't get away without changing the EQ.
I'm advocating a monitoring calibration that's based on that. My system of calibrated monitoring is finally recognized enough so that more and more people are coming to it. It's even more important because of loudness-normalized media. The magic number in film is 85 dB. But measured how? RMS [Root-Mean-Square]? What kind of pink noise? It's a fudge, because if you measure it in a different way, you can get 83. You have to go with 85 if you use the SMPTE standard. You go with 83 if you use the RMS standard, which I'm advocating. Then you don't have to use proprietary Dolby equipment for audio monitoring.
The person who came up with 85 was Ioan Allen of Dolby. He actually pulled the number out of thin air. He said, "Well, it's about in the middle of the Fletcher-Muson Curve. This would be a good number to go for, because it would make the most linear masters." And it's proved the test of time.
The first thing to note is that K-System levels at forte will seem loud if the loudspeakers are not in the midfield and/or they do not have good headroom. I was in a friend's living room the other day with an ordinary 5.1 system with rather small speakers and amplifiers. He had to align his system to 77 dB per speaker with the calibration signal, or it would sound too loud. I agreed. K-System is very comfortable and not damaging in my room because the loudspeakers do not distort and they are far enough away to mitigate extreme transients. So the K-system calibration is designed for engineers with a "mastering quality" loudspeaker system located in the midfield. If your amplifier-speaker combination distorts at high levels. If your loudspeakers are too close, then it will not sound very good when played loud! And it might damage your ears over time, just because of the ear fatigue. Not to say that I play my system that loud all the time when I'm mastering highly-compressed material, because it sits at forte for too long a time and sounds fatiguing. But dynamic material played at 83 dB per speaker at forte sounds just fine and does not damage the ears, in my opinion, with these occasional bursts to forte.
Gaps still exist. The solution with iTunes is quite simple: all songs for an album include the gap at the end of the song file. At least the spacing between songs will be as the artist intends when the songs are assembled. Any releases in the iTunes store that are taken from albums will already have a gap at the end of the track that takes care of the album spacing. All mastering engineers will have already done that.
The best advice I can give is have a relationship with your mastering engineer and see what he or she suggests before you finish your mixes! I offer a free listen evaluation of one song for anyone who's coming to me for mastering. I always suggest that you send the first song that you've mixed for the album for professional judgement. Regarding some of the major problems: getting the bass right is the biggest issue. The monitoring [some clients have] doesn't reveal the problems in the bass. There was a fantastic band from Australia, icecocoon, and the bass player used a drop-D-tuning. That's so difficult to mix! When it came to me, the bass guitar was completely missing from the mix. I asked them to send three stems: vocal, bass, bass drum, and the rest of the band. I did a combination of mixing and mastering for them. I found an EQ and process for the drop-D-bass that gave it just the right presence to hear all the notes correctly. It sounds so low that you can't hear the notes too well unless you EQ it just right. Software synthesizers are almost as difficult to deal with as drop-D-basses. With some synth sounds, there often aren't enough distortion harmonics to give a bass note definition. A good tool to enhance subharmonics is the Lowender plug-in by reFuse. It's my favorite subharmonic synthesizer, but be sure to mix or master with a wideband monitor system or you'll shoot yourself in the foot. A good tool to enhance upper bass harmonics is the UAD Precision Enhancer, or possibly the Waves MaxBass; but, again, be sure you have an accurate monitor.
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