Dithering mistakes made by a certain "mastering engineer".

[Mises]

...

[crna59]

There are no rules that are set in stone that says one thing is wrong over the other. That being said, I would not work this way. I would want the highest sample rate and bit depth that I could get. No telling what some of these systems are doing to the math.
Also, the greater the bit depth, the more room I would have to work with as far as making any adjustments.
So yes, your first question would be that I request all files to be "at least" 24bit.
Dithering and sample rate conversion is not my job, but I would prefer to do it since I feel I have better tools and listening skills to make an informed judgement on what I feel is the best for the music/client.
When you get down to 16bit, yes the dithering noise is quite high. That's one of the reasons you can hear differences between the different dithering algorithims. No.. I would want ALL of the tracks dithered at the same time.
This is MY opinion so like I said, each ME has their own set of rules and workflow. I would really be more concerned if the genre of the music is acoustical with lots of room ambience. Electronica and metal is not as critical.

Regards,
Bruce

[chrisj]

Maybe he wants the sound of a lot of truncation. It's dryer and more electronic and artificial that way.

Does sound a little sketchy, but it's still possible the guy does know things about electronic music that you don't. It's NOT the same set of rules as pop/rock mixing and mastering. My criticism would be- if you want things a bit bare and empty sounding in the spaces between sounds, surely there are better ways to go about it- but that's just me.

[Mises]

Well, the guy really does fantastic work. I give him that credit. Musically, he really knows what he's doing. And your both quite correct, electronica music is different. It really does NOT require the level of clarity that acoustical music would. Grungy and distorted actually does tend to be a somewhat beneficial quality, kind of like with heavy rock music...

Still though, it just seems mildly bizarre to me from a technical standpoint. I kind of got the impression that he wasnt doing this for some sort of effect purposes, because if he wanted to make it grungy... he could do it himself just as easily.

What concerned me more though, wasnt this particular mastering engineer... I know the guy is actually really good from a musical production perspective. He does have a good ear for mixing and mastering.

My bigger concern were these musicians... They don't really understand technology very well, and I try to explain to them certain things about bit depth and sampling rate... but they dont want to listen... and I kind of didnt want them to learn the wrong things based on misperceptions.



The musicians were actually telling me that there is no difference between 16 bit and 24 bit.... because the mastering engineer told them so. I actually don't believe thats what the mastering engineer told them because I think the guy is smart (though I think he works a little wierd)... I think these musicians just dont know why the mastering engineer wants things a certain way, because they dont ask... but I am concerned about them learning the wrong things (like theres no difference between 16 and 24 bit).

ALSO, the musicians were also feeding me some line of shit about how you cant do compression as effectively at 24 bit, which is why the mastering enginer uses 16 bit??? Huh? Did I miss something? I dont know what orifice they pulled that misconception out of.... but thats another things that concerns me.

Anyway, so I was going to print out some of these replies to try to help these guys a little bit. They dont really want t listen to me because they know me so well and thats kind of a natural human reaction to not want to listen to people you know, so I figured they would listen to other people with experience.

[MASSIVE Master]

1) I can't even imagine a scenario where the mix engineer couldn't use 24-bit files.

2) & 3) don't really matter at that point.

-1) No problem at 44.1kHz at all. But I still can't understand the non-240bit part...

[Riccardo]

Why the ME is doing the mixing as well as the mastering?

[Labs]

Originally Posted by Mises

Well, the guy really does fantastic work. .

so it works.

Gustav