I wouldn’t rather have been anywhere else this past long weekend than the 127th Audio Engineering Convention in New York City. I attended a plethora of panels, soaked up valuable lessons, stories and cutting-edge info from thought leaders, legends and other sought-after scientists of sound. There’s no way I could go through all the gems I gleaned from the symposiums but here are some highlights from my point of view:

Masters of the game

Opening day Friday was full of treats including a few great panels pertaining to the Motown sound. Songwriter/Producer Leon Ware shared his story of crafting Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You”. Engineers Bob Dennis and Bob Olhsson went through a short history of mastering the Motown hits, which included lots of cool photos plus some down and dirty file analysis. I got to see one of my favorites “Love Child” (Diana Ross) up on the big screen in sound wave form with detailed explaining of the principles, challenges and precedent-setting that went into the mastering process back in the day. Speaking of mastering- I had to hit the panel Platinum Mastering, featuring Bob Ludwig, Greg Calbi and Bernie Grundman. The three industry giants spoke of their history with a lathe and tied it in wonderfully with the digital present while interspersing anecdotes from record industry past. Greg talked about how the producer-engineer-mastering synergy has changed in today’s landscape. In the past, an artist, producer and mastering engineer used to cohesively approach a project “same page” style in order to faithfully complete the artist’s vision, whereas nowadays he gets short emails from faceless project managers that say things like “do your thing” and “you rock” in place of where personal appreciative meetings used to be. While Greg brought to life what true audio mastering is through the story of John Lennon’s Rock ‘n’ Roll album, Bernie Grundman put a spotlight on the process of mastering Thriller by Michael Jackson, complete with playbacks of mastered vs. unmastered comparison tracks (Billie Jean) on the killer system. Thankfully at another session later that focused on producing, I got to hear Michael Jackson’s go-to sound engineer- the man Bruce Swedien soulfully recounting meeting Quincy Jones in the late 50s along with other bits of his accomplished career up to shaping the sound of a generation and beyond.

Some pyschoacoustic issues were covered, the loudness wars were addressed, a few throwback marijuana references were made, all in all it was a great session. Bob moderated it through to the extended Q&A session at the end where even more wisdom was dispensed by the masters of mastering.

Loudness Envy

A couple days later Bob Ludwig was on another panel called Turn It Down! Consequences of the Ever-Escalating Loudness Wars. Bob Katz (author of the respected and definitive Mastering Audio) and Thomas Lund from TC Electronics joined him for an audiophile indictment of what’s become known as “the loudness wars”, or as Mr. Katz rephrased it “loudness envy” (of your competition’s CD volume). It was explained that folks have been fighting to get audio to playback louder since the invent of the phonograph. The pressures of the industry on loudness envy was also discussed. Bob played this superb video during his portion for anyone who was/is not familiar with what has happened over the past 20 years with regards to popular music mastering.

Indeed the room gasped when the panel showed a close up of a wav piece from the last Metallica album Death Magnetic to reveal an ugly brick wall of audio with it’s once dynamic peaks smashed to the top with big-time clipping. The panel seemed to agree that with the maturation of look-ahead compressors and magic of sonic enhancers, that the loudness level has reached it’s historical flattened peak- you just can’t pre-make stuff any (apparently) louder. The good news was that since soon most consumers will receive audio content from the digital pipeline very soon that a level playing field will be created by those servers during ingest- a sort of global normalization. Bob let it be known that manufacturers of broadcast limiters would like very much for the dynamic mastering style of the past to return to vogue so their products can take care of that function at the proper stage. He quoted an executive from Sirius/XM that was practically begging for material that still contained dynamics, since what you end up hearing on Satellite will be squashed to a slab anyway with only 2 overall dB of sway up or down. Thomas Lund broke out the advanced monitoring software to graphically illustrate what happens when the resolution distortion of extreme mastering meets mp3 encoding. Examples were played back isolating the very slight warbly ugliness that is a normal artifact of that process and again there were expressions of ‘yuck’ from the room once it was realized that this muck is actually present in so called high-quality mp3s made from aggressively smashed final masters. All this is a shame because the quality of digital compression and tools available for mastering engineers have also reached a level of awesome power, that if used with the mindset of shot-caller from yesteryear, would lead to some true long-lasting classics. I left this one becoming a Guns N’ Roses Chinese Democracy fan- even though I have not heard the album, it was mastered by Bob Ludwig. Axl, to his credit, insisted that it not be smashed to death, but rather treated like an album made in the 80s- nice peaks and valleys.

Pimping Your Mix

All the kids who rolled to AES seeking real tips on how to make their beat-centric mixes better flocked to the panel Pimp Your Mix, chaired by mix engineers Bob Brockman (Mary J Blige, Biggie, Babyface, The Fugees) and Ryan West (Kanye West, John Legend, Kid Cudi). Bob and Ryan were endorsing the concept of hybrid mixing- acknowledging that most everyone from bedroom boppers to platinum producers use some sort of compact setup involving Logic, ProTools or some similar platform. The hybrid style is to simply use outboard gear sent & returned to the DAW to enhance elements of a modern HipHop session that need more space in the mix . They highly recommended the employment of a summing box as a way to route groups of elements back into your session with some added juice. They had a Logic session up on the screen with a Monica Rush mix being worked on by Bob. A few of the outputs were routed to a Dangerous D-Box, then ran through select gear that cost more than your last car then back into a Logic aux. Along the way they verbally shared valuable keys such as the importance of watching your gain structure, the importance of using a high-pass filter on anything in your mix that isn’t supposed to have low end (Ryan recommended using 35Hz as an approximate frequency which anything that ain’t bass or kicks could be cut- and those kicks should remain mono). They liked using a 3-way monitoring system, and sang the praises of a stand alone sub. Mastering engineers these days like stems- meaning printed track by track of the main elements of your mix with all your effects and tweaking built in. This allows flexibility for the masterer, and saves tons of time in case one element needs to go up or down a smidge.

Other Shit

There was a session on hearing conservation that reminded me to blog about protecting your hearing if you want to have a career in audio, or at least want to enjoy hearing the full spectrum as you age. Once you view some audiograms detailing music-induced hearing loss due to improper use of earbuds or lack of protection during extended exposure to damaging levels…

Once your hearing starts following the dotted line you're done- DONE I SAID !

People look at me crazy when they see me in a nightclub or the movie theater wearing my earplugs. Well aside from protecting my precious ears, they also prevent me from hearing anything you have to say- some of you idiots on the train blasting the music hella-loud through your $15 earbuds are going to be saying “what” every 5 minutes by the time you’re 40. And some of these clubs blast the music so F’n loud with their mid-rangey systems it’s almost like an LRAD assault!

These AES events also tend to be big sausage-fests as well (too many dudes). Be sure to check out WAM (The Women’s Audio Mission) to read about why, and what’s being done to at least let women know they can be in the mix, the mixdown, and the master if they choose.

I’m now back in the lab armed with the inspiration and knowledge gleaned from this event. Time to get to work!