KVR MIX CHALLENGE - MC03 August 2014 - Voting period has ended, Winners announced (pg 17)

[Uncle E]

After listening to the tracks, I found a lot of them lacked transients, some of the songs had barely any transient throughout most of the spectrum, except the kick drum.

I have to take most of the responsibility for this. I used all NI drums for this mix and they completely kill transients.

[Grant S]

DC offset: Not something I thought was an issue now days, I was under the impression that my DAW took care of that as a normal process. Does this data show that only 6 tracks had no DC offset issues? Is this a matter for the engineer to address or should it be corrected by the mastering engineer?

Personally, my rule of thumb is to high pass at 30Hz, which will simultaneously get rid of useless junk and prevent DC offset.

Thanks, that sure seems simple enough

[Compyfox]

Sadly doesn't work with every instrument. At least not in this particular production.

In the mix statistics it says that my track is probably pre-mastered. ...

Yes, we determined a similar thing with Satya's mix, which also showed up very loud according to the stats and he also did not pre-master. Take it as a compliment, your mixes sound pre-mastered even when you don't pre-master them.

Metering tools can be stupid sometimes and focus on wrong signals.

In case of Satya's track, the music is about 1,5 times as quiet as the vocals. But the metering tools responded to the "average signal strength" that is masking over the music. So they responded stronger to the vocals than the music. This in turn resulted in high "RMS max" values. The range from RMS max to Digital Peak max determines the "Dynamic Range" (in this case, mathematically declared), and this one was also high in turn. During listening, you realize that this track is far from being mastered. But the readouts clearly indicate otherwise. It's a "false positive" so to speak.

I already adjusted the statistics sheet a couple of times after feedback from participants about their songs in here.

The thing is - after the loudness normalization it's sometimes hard to hear if a track was "pre-mastered" or not - which is a good thing for the loudness normalization (having a similar perceived loudness overall), but actually bad for the participants. Since the "pre-mastered" tracks are pulled down in volume to the desired value that every track is sharing (in this case -18LUFS). Those that were heavily processed then sound less "alive" due to a more dense mix (due to compression/limiting) and lack of transients for example.

The statistics were made "prior" to the normalization process and prior to me listening to the tracks. I should have done that all in one go. But I think I've added enough useful information into the statistics.






Sidenote:
Have you cast your vote already? If not, please take a dive over to page 10, listen to the songs and cast your vote.

btw Eric:
No glitch on my end for camsr's track.

[camsr]

I heard it as a high frequency transient. It's gone now, thanks for caring

[Denstrow]

Compyfox, I was curious about the "Dynamic Range" you mentioned. Since it shows a different value that the TT DR offline meter (and I imagine from the Brainworx plug which is based on it), could you explain a bit more how it works and why is it different?

Also, I think you said at an earlier post about the possibility of also doing loudness normalisation for future contests. I think that's a good idea, since it would be easier to focus solely on the mix and not its loudness, which would anyway be brought to a commercial level in mastering.

[Grant S]

Got my vote cast, just a suggestion, now that the submission post is on page 10, wouldn't it be a good idea to update the first post in the thread to include the submissions and stats to make things easier to find?

[Compyfox]

Compyfox, I was curious about the "Dynamic Range" you mentioned. Since it shows a different value that the TT DR offline meter (and I imagine from the Brainworx plug which is based on it), could you explain a bit more how it works and why is it different?

Simple - the DR "value" I create dis a theoretical one, declared with plain math. I used the formula:
RMS max peak - dBTP max = DR.

The DR offline meter declares the value out of 10 to 20 random checked points of the song. And it also only works with 44kHz 16bit (unless that was changed in an update from the Dynamic Range site- Brainworx never created a new offline analysis tool with the upgrade).

I also don't remember if the DR-Meter used 400ms for the offline analysis time frame, or 200ms, or whatever. So the value can be offset.

Keep in mind, this is a bonus info. The DR value is pretty much obsolete since the ITU-R BS.1770-x standard took over. It was never really objective either - but heavily program dependent.

Also, I think you said at an earlier post about the possibility of also doing loudness normalisation for future contests. I think that's a good idea, since it would be easier to focus solely on the mix and not its loudness, which would anyway be brought to a commercial level in mastering.

If it goes by me, no problem.

But if we talk about a possible mastering challenge, the Loudness Normalization makes the "master at a suitable loudness" idea kind of obsolete - and finding out in whether or not a mastering was "too much" (too strong compression/limiting) a bit difficult. At least with plain A/Bing post normalization (see issues that got brought up with MC03 and the "assumed premastering").

If you want to judge the overall sound however, how well the mastered mix was, this is a complete different topic.

Got my vote cast, just a suggestion, now that the submission post is on page 10, wouldn't it be a good idea to update the first post in the thread to include the submissions and stats to make things easier to find?

The first post already has a link to the voting process.

The MC04 thread handles that a tad better with a cleaned "first post".

[chaosbringer]

I just went through the statistics thing on page 10, was curious about the notes next to my submission- it said "kick detuned" but all I did was EQ the kick raising the sub. Am I missing something here?

Also, I read some statements about DC offset, though I'm not quite sure how it effects a track or what it does exactly. I noticed mine had the second lowest values. Would someone mind elaborating? If it's been posted earlier I will run through the missed posts later.

[Compyfox]

I just went through the statistics thing on page 10, was curious about the notes next to my submission- it said "kick detuned" but all I did was EQ the kick raising the sub. Am I missing something here?

To me it sounded as if the kick was "tuned" to fit more to the track. I also remember read that someone did detune it. It just sounded strange, so I mentioned it among "warnings".

Also, I read some statements about DC offset, though I'm not quite sure how it effects a track or what it does exactly. I noticed mine had the second lowest values. Would someone mind elaborating? If it's been posted earlier I will run through the missed posts later.

A quote out of the Audacity manual:

• A sound that has DC offset will not be at its loudest possible volume when amplified or normalized. This is because the offset reduces the headroom between the peak level of the audio and the maximum possible level without clipping. This problem can possibly extend to the mix as a whole, since a sound with DC offset and a sound without DC offset will have DC offset when mixed.
• DC offset can cause inaudible low level distortion. The distortion may become audible when effects that change the frequency content are applied, or when exporting the audio to a size-compressed format like MP3.
• DC offset can cause audible clicks where audio sections are cut and pasted together, and can cause a click on playback at the start and end of the track, even without editing.
• DC offset will become worse if the recording is amplified.

The "normalizing" process they talk about, is actually "Peak normalizing".

Take a dive to page 11, I wrote:

To my understanding, and according to tech papers, it's an "offset" of the voltage while recording. If you fixed the offset prior to mixing (most hosts offer that feature) but still have it after mix down (shown in the analysis), then chances are that you might have introduced DC offset again.

It's actually fairly simple as well why that may be the case: with an analog type plugin that has this offset modeled. Or you do several bounces and your host doesn't do clean ones.

If it's around the -100dB area, it's usually not a real problem. Unless you stack several tracks on top of it or try heavy compression. This can cause both noise issues, and compressors might not respond properly.

This is usually something that the mastering engineer fixes/reduces prior to starting his work.

In my case, I applied DC offset before I started working and also used a lot of high low-cuts on individual channels. Still I got a DC offset readout, which might be due to me reintroducing "noisy gear" (analog modeled plugins).

[chaosbringer]

Thanks for that.

So the lower dB on the dc offset better then? I'm assuming the -infinity ones mean none. What causes it usually if you're only using digital/in house technologies and how do you fix it? It says "or your host doesnt do clean bounces", but I'm assuming cubase 7.5 does.

Any suggestions on any free plugins that show dc offset?

[Compyfox]

So the lower dB on the dc offset better then? I'm assuming the -infinity ones mean none.

Correct.

What causes it usually if you're only using digital/in house technologies and how do you fix it? It says "or your host doesnt do clean bounces", but I'm assuming cubase 7.5 does.

Cubase should do clean bounces, indeed. Like I said, DC offset can be due to several things. Most notably "analog equipment", or analog type plugins that reintroduce a certain offset.

Again. I DC offset all files prior to editing. But I did create a couple of bounces and ran a couple of instances of Slate VCC, not to mention that I did utilize analog-type send FX as well.

Any suggestions on any free plugins that show dc offset?

You can zoom into the WAV file and see if the wave form is on the horizontal line. If it's slightly shifted, you might have run into offset. Else, most hosts these days should both show and remove DC offset.

[chaosbringer]

You can zoom into the WAV file and see if the wave form is on the horizontal line. If it's slightly shifted, you might have run into offset. Else, most hosts these days should both show and remove DC offset.

Ok thought so, I'll check it out, thanks!

[Doc Jon]

I'll be listening and voting this weekend
Just looked at the stats - OMG, my dynamic range is 5.8??

But I am confused by this, TT dynamic range meter says DR 10, do you measure this in a different way?

Jon

[Compyfox]

Check a couple of posts above, then you know how this value was "measured" - and why DR Meters are obsolete by now.

[psycho43142]

I just sent Uncle E my votes. There were some really good mixes in there. I was also curious why you felt my track had been premastered as it had one of higher DR numbers?