bonatoc said:

bluegangsta said:

Nonsense. Bernie Grundman adhears to industry standards and requests like most mastering engineers do. Take a listen to MJ's Invincible album and tell me that Grundman is a 100% hitter.

Now you're playing the naysayer just to get all eyes on you.
We get it, you're against the whole project, you made your statement through pages and pages.
And now you're just embarassing yourself. The man also got to eat. Sure he's gonna work on some horseshit from time to time.

He's a legend, and guys like Bob Ludwig and him practically wrote the whole book for the industry, and therefore the "standards" you're referring to. Do you happen to have any experience in high-end professional studios ? If not, save it.

You've essentially made that same point I did. He will do the best of what he's told. Simple.

And I'm not against the project. Pathetic ad-hominem argument, as usual.

bluegangsta said:

bonatoc said:

Now you're playing the naysayer just to get all eyes on you.
We get it, you're against the whole project, you made your statement through pages and pages.
And now you're just embarassing yourself. The man also got to eat. Sure he's gonna work on some horseshit from time to time.

He's a legend, and guys like Bob Ludwig and him practically wrote the whole book for the industry, and therefore the "standards" you're referring to. Do you happen to have any experience in high-end professional studios ? If not, save it.

You've essentially made that same point I did. He will do the best of what he's told. Simple.

And I'm not against the project. Pathetic ad-hominem argument, as usual.

Again, no. The man is following his own judgment. The final mix is delivered to him as it is, there's nothing he can do to change it. I can guarantee you that, from this step on, he takes over, and relies on his judgment only to give the best final product possible, matching the initial artistic view.

Again, he's given a final product. They don't need to tell him what to do. They wouldn't get what he's doing anyway. Now of course some schmuck of a producer is going to ask your average mastering studio to turn it up to 11. But consider that MJ's Invicible already came in the studio über-compressed. And this is Sony, and this is MJ, high as a kite by then, so please don't compare apples and oranges.

If "Human Nature" sounds so awesome, you owe it in large parts to this man.

As for the pathetic part, hey, it's me, your usual purple know-it-all little despot.

[Edited 4/26/17 17:25pm]

bonatoc said:

The blabber above about mastering being a facultative process is NONSENSE.
Even jazz records or classical music records go through mastering, especially in the analog era, where it was very ill-advised to have your needles go in the red, or below a certain dB level, for the master acetate. Like you wouldn't show a movie's final edit directly in a theater, EVERY commercialized record goes through a mastering process. The only case where it doesn't is if it's for your mama.

Mastering is not just mere preparation for mass replication of the record. It is also the last chance of putting the final mix into some fresh, expert third-party ears. The mastering engineer applies some surgical audio adjustments and subtle embellishments with state-of-the-art EQs, compressors, limiters, enhancers, spatializers. Mastering engineers of the level of Mr. Grundman are a very, very rare breed.

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Thanks for this as it reassures me that sitting down to write a long, detailed post about mastering in this forum is needed indeed, and I will try to do that later today when I have the time.
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It's funny how you refer to my post as 'blabber', then proceed to write up this text-book blabber about the importance of mastering (that, being a sound engineer for several decades, I never denied.)
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Indeed, there is a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding about the different purposes and often, false expectations about mastering and I will attempt to clear these up later.

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As mentioned in my previous post, sometimes [the process most often referred to as] mastering is not needed at all, especially when the mixing engineer has done a great job. That's what I said, not that it is a "facultative process".

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Of course, when you are talking about big budget pop releases, using a big brand mastering house is inevitable for the majors. If you're Ed Sheeran, you can even spend an extra 100K on polishing your turd, if you want to. That does not mean that there aren't many releases out there that didn't go through any EQs, compressors, limiters, enhancers, spatializers after they were mixed. (They will go through a horrible bunch of extra processes as soon as they are played on the radio anyway.)

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I have to go now, but just one more thing: how often do you think Prince has sent off his finished mixes during his later years to a mastering engineer (or employ an extra engineer at Paisley specifically for mastering) before releasing stuff?
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tbc

[Edited 4/27/17 2:15am]

Fair enough, and sorry about the "blabber". But I read your post like you were mixing "master" and "mastering" terms in all directions, hence the impression of a vague mess.

Since we are talking about this specific box remasterings, I didn't understand the purpose of talking about mixes that don't require mastering, since here it's an obvious case. But it's a tough subject for neophytes, a process quite hard to explain properly to people with no professional (or semi-professional) recording experience.

Tracklist now confirmed by Apple - new thread here : http://prince.org/msg/7/441628