[Samc]

Thanks for the detailed explanation Bob, your explanations only lead me back to square one, and to this question: Isn't this basically what pro engineers of all stripes do everyday except that it's just called good engineering? In effect good gain staging coupled with the ability to interpret what they are hearing?

If you're not supposed to use the spl and level meters as visual aids, then I really don't understand its benefit, and even if you're supposed to use the meters as a visual aid, its really not giving any more info to an experienced engineer than what he would usually have using his experienced ears and good engineering techniques.

The real concern I have however is what's going to happen to the inexperienced engineer who learns to only work with the system when they have to work without the system? How will they function? How will they be able to properly gain-stage their signal chain without the K-System to help? I ask this seriously because a similar situation exist in live sound where a lot of engineers cannot set-up and balance a PA rig, or mix without a laptop running SIA Smaart pro and a test mic holding their hands. Now we have an entire generation of live engineers who can barely think, they are not able to recognise a 1K tone even if it drop-kicked them in the face. Simply because they can only react to the info that the software gives them.

With all due respect, but this exactly why I cringed when I read this statement:

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.

In my book this kind of thing is listening territory, looking at the monitor control to see what your compressor adjustments are doing to the signal is just wrong. Engineers first need to really know and understand their tools (compressors EQ etc), they need to understand what all those little knobs and buttons do, how the sound is affected when they are adjusted. then they need to learn what to listen for, and how to interpretwhat the are hearing, and this comes from training and experience.

The K-System will not "reduce the loudness race", your clients are the ones that decide what the final level of their masters will be, and if the person with the checkbook says MORE, they will get MORE!

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!

Again, I don't really see any new concepts here or anything that engineers haven't been doing sucessfully since......forever. The part about the amount of compression did strike me though, since I always thought that using a compressor in the first place, and the amount of compression depended on what you and the client wanted to achieve sound wise and not on a preconceived monitor-level adjustment.