Andre calilhanna audio mastering excerpted from our new guide the musician s guide to vinyl this post digs into post production audio mastering for vinyl records.
Mastering for vinyl tips.
Izotope rx 7 s de ess module does an excellent job of isolating harsh sibilance with a transparency that s suitably unobtrusive to the overall sound of the master.
If you re mastering strictly for cd start by setting your final limiter s output ceiling to 0 2 or 0 1 dbfs never to 0 0 or intersample peaks can sneak through and cause distortion on consumer playback devices.
The only way to make sure your master is ideally suited for the vinyl format is by hiring a professional mastering engineer to pre master your material for vinyl.
Izotope rx 7 s de ess module does an excellent job of isolating harsh sibilance with a transparency that s suitably unobtrusive to the overall sound of the master.
Try to avoid using psycho acoustic processors to an excessive degree.
The conditions for recording and subsequent reading of vinyl records get worse with the decreasing diameter towards the middle of the record the label.
For vinyl the optimum source is 24 bit dynamic and limited either extremely lightly or not at all.
Vinyl is more popular now than it has been for many years but mastering your music for vinyl requires a different approach to other media.
And therefore many variables are at play.
Remember though there are many dos and donts of de essing.
Mastering for vinyl when submitting your music for vinyl production it is very important that it has been mastered for the vinyl medium.
It consists of a mono stereo image up to 150hz a tamed high end and if needed a track listing that is consistent with the frequency limitations of record cutting.
The sequencing difference is that delivery from mastering for digital is either individual wav files for download or a single ddpi file for cd replication whereas for vinyl the delivery is generally two wav files one for each side of the record.
At the end of the day listening to records is a mechanical process.
Due to the physical nature of the cutting and playback process there are a number of considerations and limitations that must be addressed in mastering.
Mastering for vinyl has its own special set of considerations.
Manual de essing of a digital cutting source is also a preferred method for many vinyl cutters and mastering engineers.
Mastering for vinyl is the process of creating a separate master that can be cut into a vinyl record without added unwanted distortion.
Manual de essing of a digital cutting source is also a preferred method for many vinyl cutters and mastering engineers.
Remember though there are many dos and donts of de essing.
