In the context of remastering and restoration of full mixes it is common for dynamic ranges to be a problem across some or all octaves of the frequency spectrum. In addition, and probably even more obvious, it is common for the EQ to be off by quite a bit. This is why the audio is in the shop for repair!
Simply pushing the gain of a band, using a normal peaking filter, up or down in an attempt to fix the EQ problem gets confusing because pushing this same amount has worked in other similar cases. Why not in all cases?
I think if the dynamic range of the band in question is too great then it is obvious it might need a little compression or a surgical EQ cut - I can hear that kind of thing, and see it in metering. But if the dynamic range of the band is less than what it should be then I think this is where I'm running into trouble hearing and seeing (in metering) that problem.
In other words there is the RMS envelope that gives you the idea or concept of where the overall loudness of the audio is. A tool like SPAN shows me the RMS and Peak RMS (with number readout), same with Elephant - so I think the general metering for the audio RMS envelope is pretty good. I can set SPAN slow RMS speed and watch for abnormalties there also.
Then there's the Peaks & Transients. SPAN lets me set a Peak Hold so I can see when something overshoots it's intended range and pokes me in the face thru the speaker - I can hear that really well too. By speeding up SPAN RMS display this becomes visually obvious also.
But in places where the dynamic range of the RMS isn't up to par, and the transients are lower than they should be we have some great tools to fix this: GlissEQ, Electri-Q (I think the transient filter may help in there), and the secret weapon Transmodder. Using harmonics to fix a full mix just isn't appealing personally so...
Right now I'm still plugging away comparing dynamic metering ranges of commercial reference releases - octave-by-octave to my problem project. Along the way I'm listening too of course so Maybe it's just a learning process to be able to hear when to use GlissEQ or Transmodder to jack up the lo-mids for example. It's fairly obvious when to jack up the hi-mids or presence out that way...
So if anyone had the time to read this post and has any ideas...I'm all ears...
I mentioned dynamic metering in the title because I thought it might be easy for me if there was a 10-band RMS/PRMS/Peak meter so I could easily see which anemic bands to push up with Transmodder - or which bands were on steriods and had too much punch.
Anyway - I guess I'm overthinking this and underlistening...
Thanks
