KVR Audio

4damind · Post by **4damind** » Mon Sep 05, 2011 9:50 am

-0,7dB for Mp3

IIRs · Post by **IIRs** » Mon Sep 05, 2011 9:57 am

These numbers quoted are all totally arbitrary: ISP levels will depend on the nature of the program material, so the only way to determine the appropriate margin is to use an ISP meter, as I demonstrate in the video.

4damind · Post by **4damind** » Mon Sep 05, 2011 9:59 am

IIRs wrote:These numbers quoted are all totally arbitrary: ISP levels will depend on the nature of the program material, so the only way to determine the appropriate margin is to use an ISP meter, as I demonstrate in the video.

With 4x oversampling in the limiter you will not have intersample peaks

Crackbaby · Post by **Crackbaby** » Mon Sep 05, 2011 10:17 am

Thanks IIRs!!

I cant believe i never thought of the curve between samples ..... so obvious

Lookahead, it adds latency, right?

IIRs · Post by **IIRs** » Mon Sep 05, 2011 10:20 am

4damind wrote:With 4x oversampling in the limiter you will not have intersample peaks

Not entirely true. In Pro-L a combination of 4x oversampling plus a lookahead of at least 0.1ms will limit ISPs to no more than 0.1dB over the threshold. It won't prevent them completely, and they can still be signficant when using clipping type settings with zero lookahead.

IIRs · Post by **IIRs** » Mon Sep 05, 2011 10:24 am

Crackbaby wrote:Lookahead, it adds latency, right?

No not really: the latency is there already, and adjusting the lookahead time doesn't change it. Switching in one of the oversampling modes will result in a slight increase in latency however.

4damind · Post by **4damind** » Mon Sep 05, 2011 10:28 am

IIRs wrote:
4damind wrote:With 4x oversampling in the limiter you will not have intersample peaks
Not entirely true. In Pro-L a combination of 4x oversampling plus a lookahead of at least 0.1ms will limit ISPs to no more than 0.1dB over the threshold. It won't prevent them completely, and they can still be signficant when using clipping type settings with zero lookahead.

Try 11ms Lookahead

IIRs · Post by **IIRs** » Mon Sep 05, 2011 10:45 am

4damind wrote:Try 11ms Lookahead

That's a safer setting of course. But longer lookahead times can sometimes soften the attack of transients: if you're after a really hard hitting master shorter settings will often work better.

Kim Lajoie · Post by **Kim Lajoie** » Mon Sep 05, 2011 11:09 am

yairhol wrote:Kim, at which situations wouuld you want to peak at 0 dB?

I do it in the same situations that I prefer clipping to limiting. For aggressive and distorted music, pure limiting is too soft.

Mind you, these projects often have several stages of saturation and distortion introduced throughout the recording and mixing process. In these cases the final clipping in mastering doesn't sound 'wrong' (like it does for softer smoother music). Instead it actually enhances the distortion that's already in the mix.

If you want a real-world example, take a gander at:
http://punchcardpoet.bandcamp.com
(It's sort of a quiet sneak preview - the official website isn't live yet)

You should be able to hear that for this music, everything is overdriven. It's part of the aesthetic. So it's appropriate to respect and follow that creative direction through all stages of production - including mastering.

Of course, that doesn't mean I run the whole album through a stompbox right before burning a CD. But in mastering (just like every other production stage) there are choices that I make that affect the way the music sounds and feels. For Punch Card Poet, multi band clipping and inter-sample clipping is a deliberate choice.

Hope that makes sense!

-Kim.

Kim Lajoie · Post by **Kim Lajoie** » Mon Sep 05, 2011 11:16 am

Also, just one more note:

Music is fundamentally a creative endeavour. We should use everything at our disposal (and today, that's a *lot*!) to realise our creative direction and 'vision'. Everyone who walks away from Punch Card Poet does it for reasons completely unrelated to the mastering. No-one who is a fan and buys the album will be disappointed by the mastering.

All this -1/-.7/-.5/-.3/0 business is pretty insignificant in the scheme of things.

-Kim.

Bronto Scorpio · Post by **Bronto Scorpio** » Mon Sep 05, 2011 11:21 am

Kim Lajoie wrote:Also, just one more note:

Music is fundamentally a creative endeavour. We should use everything at our disposal (and today, that's a *lot*!) to realise our creative direction and 'vision'. Everyone who walks away from Punch Card Poet does it for reasons completely unrelated to the mastering. No-one who is a fan and buys the album will be disappointed by the mastering.

All this -1/-.7/-.5/-.3/0 business is pretty insignificant in the scheme of things.

-Kim.

+1

It really doesn't make much difference

Even if there are ISPs and so on. There are other things to worry about

Cheers
Dennis

4damind · Post by **4damind** » Mon Sep 05, 2011 11:39 am

Yeah some guys preferring clipping. Best known Infected Mushroom. They using Prism converters and don't using a limiter. But I would not say it's the best sound ever. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.

4damind · Post by **4damind** » Mon Sep 05, 2011 11:54 am

Kim Lajoie wrote:All this -1/-.7/-.5/-.3/0 business is pretty insignificant in the scheme of things.

This is a different story if we need all this things or if there are more important things like that

If I hear some chart music from well known artists, with distorted and over compressed sound then yes! It's completely insignificant if it was limited at -0.1 or -0.7 the sound is always the same crap. But crap or not.. people buy it and love it

So at the end of the day it's always the same thing: the content counts.

IIRs · Post by **IIRs** » Mon Sep 05, 2011 11:57 am

Bronto Scorpio wrote:
Kim Lajoie wrote:Also, just one more note:

Music is fundamentally a creative endeavour. We should use everything at our disposal (and today, that's a *lot*!) to realise our creative direction and 'vision'. Everyone who walks away from Punch Card Poet does it for reasons completely unrelated to the mastering. No-one who is a fan and buys the album will be disappointed by the mastering.

All this -1/-.7/-.5/-.3/0 business is pretty insignificant in the scheme of things.

-Kim.
+1
It really doesn't make much difference
Even if there are ISPs and so on. There are other things to worry about

Cheers
Dennis

I don't really agree with this at all. Yes music is a subjective art form. But of all stages in production, mastering is by far the most scientific and exacting.

I can accept that you might have artistic reasons to go for a very loud and distorted master, and to accept high ISP levels as a consequence. But I can't imagine what artistic reasons you would have to aim for high ISP levels, or in other words, to deliberately engineer an album that distorts when played on an iPod, but not when played on a high end CD player. The other way around perhaps...

If the thread was a general one about production techniques your comment might be apposite. But this thread is specifically about how much margin to leave, and the correct answer is "use an ISP meter".

Aloysius · Post by **Aloysius** » Mon Sep 05, 2011 12:07 pm

You know the way you can hear in real time what your Master is going to sound like when it's exported? Is there a real time VST Plugin tool that can allow us to hear what our MP3 Masters will sound like. Hope that makes sense. The idea of 'blindly' converting a WAV file to MP3 seems like a bad one. If you could hear exactly how the frequencies will be affected in real time it would help a lot. You could also avoid Inter-Sample-Peaks Etc.

Where do you "master" to? (what dB)