[bob katz]

Originally Posted by Samc

So it's a system for inexperienced engineers? I ask this because experienced and/or professional engineers have been able to achieve exactly what you described since the dawn of this profession, without the K-System. It's called gain staging and using your ears.

Professional mastering engineers have also been doing this forever without the K-system. They get masters all the time where songs were mixed in different studios (in different parts of the world even), by different engineers, and they are able to create a cohesive sounding album with these parts.

It also does seem genre specific, because people seem to be calibrating their equipment based on the type/genre of music the're doing.

One of the key precepts of the K-System is the calibrated monitor. While good ears and good monitoring (without calibration, a simple "unmarked" knob) can tell you "everything you want to know", the advantage of the calibrated monitor is you can tell AT A GLANCE how loud the recording your are mastering compares with anything else out there. And you can OBJECTIVELY learn the relationship, dB by dB between the openness of a recording and its degree of compression by observing the position of the monitor control. If I put on a pop or rock CD in my room, and to make it "pleasantly loud" I find I have to attenuate the control to, say, -10 dB, I KNOW OBJECTIVELY that this recording has been moderately "squashed". So the monitor control becomes an important tool in the mastering engineer's arsenal, and also helps us to produce more consistent masters and reduce the loudness race. The calibrated monitor also lets us "think backwards" but it makes so much sense----before beginning mastering, we can preset the monitor control to the position we would like the master to end up working at, and then master with our eyes closed, knowing we will be making a record with X absolute loudness and X amount of compression. It's worth a study, when you think about it!