|
The problem with "learning speakers" is that you can't fix anything you can't hear because the speaker couldn't reproduce it. Learning speakers is real important for mixing but mastering is largely about catching problems any mixer most certainly would have fixed had they been audible.
Abstract music is a special case where only the artist really knows what they had in mind. Mastering it is making adjustments so that their intentions make sense on most playback systems.
Back in the 1960s signal processing was so limited that everybody had no choice but to be pretty conservative. We learned to trust monitors that were very colored but still full range. As signal processing became more sophisticated in the '70s, it was found that having high resolution monitoring in the mastering room allowed making adjustments that resulted in a pretty big improvement in translation. The real pioneer in this was Bob Ludwig at Sterling Sound. His masters simply sounded better in more places than virtually anybody else's. There were literally weeks when Bob had mastered over 50 of the top 100 albums and Doug Sax at the Mastering Lab in LA had mastered most of the rest! The two of them changed mastering into what it is today and we are all really standing on their shoulders.
|