Well, yes and no.bmanic wrote:There's one risk with this thing though. If your recording contains already a lot of un-intended noise and generally only a mediocre mixing/production, the problems with Final Mix versus selected separate processes might not be as dramatic as on a high quality mix. The better the original mix the more care a mastering enginer has to take with the choise of tools.
- bManic
The original recording is fairly awful in parts. We had exactly 1 afternoon for all of us to get together to record most of the parts. Then Dave, who has never played bass in his life, had to learn how to play bass and lay down his track the next evening.
So, we have guitars recorded through a Behringer UB802 (I didn't have another pre-amp then), virtual amp sims for the guitars (I could re-amp them through newer sims, but I like the character I got originally and I'm not willing to take the time to re-tweak every single aspect of all these parts), and at least one of the guitar parts that somehow refuses to sit in the mix due to the nature of the original recording moreso than the amp model chosen (trust me, I tried a lot, and that original recording just needed to be redone).
We also have vocals recorded through a Shure PG58 (not EVEN an SM-58, this is their budget version!) because I didn't have a condenser mic back then, either. The group vocals are a bunch of guys in a non-acoustically-perfect room yelling in the general direction of the PG58, and my dog joined in for part of it.
It was a HELL of a lot of fun, but I'm not pretending that the sound quality is ace! Especially the bass part, played by a guy who never played bass in his life. I had to manually cut, shift, and cross-fade almost every single note.
Oh lord how I tried to make the bass sound reasonable in the mix, but it's very hard. I could have re-done it myself (I'm passable with a bass), but the point was that he needed to be the one with his fingers on the instrument so that we could say that he played it. 
His nickname now is "one-take". If anyone's a genius with muffly crappy bass parts played by a non-bass player, let me know and you can have a go at it before I submit a final mix, I guess. BUT...
That brings me to a different point: It shouldn't matter what the source material is. To take your argument to an extreme, you could say, "Well, you won't really notice the phase errors unless you do the mix over a set of 10 sine waves covering a range of octaves)" or whatever other more clinical example you could come up with. The point isn't that the phase errors exist or not in multiband compression-- we all agree that they do. The point is that Final Mix should be able to do a decent job of "final mixing" (or "mastering" if that's the term we want to use), especially for the target audience.
Are you going to consider it a failed experiment if Final Mix's phase errors aren't easily detectable? That doesn't make sense. You can't engineer the experiment to prove the hypothesis, you have to test the hypothesis with an experiment.
The interested parties will have the same stereo mixdown, pre-mastering (there won't even be a single-band limiter over the whole track) stage. Since they all have the same material, they all have the same limitations. I highly doubt that ANYONE will be able to make it sound exactly like a "commercial record" because the source material isn't good enough. If that's your only point, then fine... but your point seems to be that it's not a good test because you won't be able to detect the phase errors.See the faulty logic?
I only offered as a joke, and enough people have PM'd me that would re-mix/re-master it for me just because they're generous and think it would be fun. If nobody ends up participating, it's no skin off my back. But to say that the exercise is moot because the source material isn't pristine is faulty thinking.
So the "yes" part-- you're absolutely right if you're worried that a 'commercial-sounding' mix won't be produced. There's only SO much 'magic' that can be done with the right tools and skills.
But the "no" part-- if everyone has the same source material, it's still a valid comparison, because the only criteria is "Who came up with the best 'master', given the source material?"
Greg
), but I would debate whether THAT stance is in the interests of the community!
