Fuckin' up the invironment with polivinyl chloride since 1996
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DoubleBeef Records Audio Mastering
MASTERING FOR WAX ONLY! FUCK A CD.
Despite what you may have heard, mastering for vinyl is the easiest type of mastering you can do, as it involves only two steps:
1: Find a mastering engineer who has mastered a ton of recordings for release
on vinyl.
2: Present your final mixes to DoubleBeef Records and say "Here, you
do it."
Vinyl is an unforgiving medium, and mastering for it is extremely difficult.
Its dynamic range is a puny 50dB or so, even with decent vinyl, compared
to the 80dB or more we enjoy with even the most basic digital media. As a
result, compression is essentially mandatory to shoehorn music's wide dynamic
range into vinyl's narrow dynamic range. But vinyl has other problems. There's
a trade-off between loudness and length. This is because a groove in a record
is just a waveform, and a louder waveform will cause the groove to have a
wider physical excursion. So, to get a lot of material on an LP, you have
to cut the vinyl at a pretty low level.
Bass is also troublesome. Bass waveforms have a very wide excursion and,
with stereo, if the left and right channels are even slightly out of phase,
the stylus can 'jump the track' as it tries in vain to follow different curves
for the right and left channels. We take concepts like stereo bass for granted
now, but back in the days of vinyl bass had to be mono.
And that's not all! As the record gets closer to the end, the tone arm hits
the groove at more of an angle (except with linear-tracking turntables),
causing what's called inner groove distortion. As a result, song orders often
used to be created with the softest songs coming at the end of an album's
side, so that the inner grooves would be less subject to distortion.
In the old days, recording engineers were well aware of the limitations of
vinyl, and took them into account during the recording process. Many of today's
engineers were brought up in an essentially vinyl-less world, and don't consider
the problems discussed above. This makes it more important than ever to use
a mastering engineer who is an expert in the art. When it comes to mastering
for vinyl, the advice is simple: don't try this at home!
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Time Per Side Reference
Seven Inch Vinyl Mastering
45 Loud - 3 mins
33 Loud - 4-1/2 mins |
Twelve Inch Vinyl Mastering 45 Loud - 10 mins
33 Loud - 13 mins |
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* Formats
accepted are PCM SVHS, Minidisk, CD, CDR, DVD, Cassette, Mp3.
* Also accepted are 1/4 or 1/2 inch Reel to Reel at 7-1/2, 15, and 30 IPS.
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Mastered by Mass MC
Seven Inch Vinyl ( 7" ) - AUD$150
Twelve Inch Vinyl ( 12" ) - AUD$450
PH: 0409 597 207
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DoubleBeef Records recommend Vinyl Factory Australia for all your pressing needs.
