Mastering console - Sterling/Chris

[grandmasters]

Originally Posted by Thor

By the way, what's the deal with everyone changing their ID's to be <something>master or master<something>?

Thor

Dude, none of us would be changing our handles at all if we had even half as cool as a name as yours. (but i imagine Thor in Scandinavia is like John in North America) LOL

[macc]

That Dangerous thing looks nice... but I have to say; £ FOUR grand?? Sheesh kebabs... madness.

I would expect it to do my mastering for me, the laundry and cook dinner while it was at it for that money. Bloody hell.

[Thor]

You got it.

Although we do have a few Johns here as well

Thor

Originally Posted by grandmasters

Dude, none of us would be changing our handles at all if we had even half as cool as a name as yours. (but i imagine Thor in Scandinavia is like John in North America) LOL

[grandmasters]

Originally Posted by macc

That Dangerous thing looks nice... but I have to say; £ FOUR grand?? Sheesh kebabs... madness.

I would expect it to do my mastering for me, the laundry and cook dinner while it was at it for that money. Bloody hell.

In the world of mastering consoles, this is a fairly normal price. Chris Muth told me once that his costs for the attenuators used was $1200 alone.

I use a combination of Dangerous Master and Crookwood Master iMon. Its the best of both worlds and they work great together.

[jdg]

my simpleton-handmade console cost a bit over 2k to make in parts... stuff aint cheep!

[macc]

2k USD? See that's more like it (cheapskate here, come on...)

Now where's my XLR cabling gone..? Oh right, still plugged in exactly as it was a minute ago.

[Masterer]

Originally Posted by macc

That Dangerous thing looks nice... but I have to say; £ FOUR grand?? Sheesh kebabs... madness.

I would expect it to do my mastering for me, the laundry and cook dinner while it was at it for that money. Bloody hell.

20 years ago it woulda cost you ten times that for a Neve transfer console [and the Dangerous box is better].

At 4 grand you should do a little happy dance.

[jayfrigo]

Originally Posted by jdg

my simpleton-handmade console cost a bit over 2k to make in parts... stuff aint cheep!

You can spend five or six hundred bucks on a good custom passive attenuator alone! I'm just talking about the part, nevermind a box to put it in, some wire, connectors, and the time to put it together. Good stuff doesn't come cheap.

[jdg]

and mine is all passive.. its all the cost of the 2 deck, 4pole switches. (and the 4 deck attenuator)

i personally think all of these modern "consoles" are a really inexpensive...

i have over 80hrs in mine, and time aint cheep.

[Paul Gold]

Originally Posted by jayfrigo

You can spend five or six hundred bucks on a good custom passive attenuator alone!

Or twice that much depending on what you want. Like an H (not bridged) attenuator. That's 12 decks for stereo.

[Jerry Tubb]

Originally Posted by Masterer

Does Sound Blade let you use plug-ins like VST and whatnot?

Yes. As the other guys mentioned you can drop plug-ins in any of several different places:

1. Desk channels as dual mono, up to 4 plugs, on Source or Destination panels.
Don't know if "linking" the behavior of the channels would apply to plug-in parameters.

2. Desk "Events" directly into to waveform EDL, on Source or Destination Panels.
I think other apps refer to this as assigning a plug-in to an "Object".

3. Output buss of the Source or Destination panels.

Having this flexibility is very useful in many ways, however Sonic is still fine tuning plug-in usage.
Sonic recommends the use of AU plug-Ins, and indicate that VST plugs contribute to bugginess in sB.
Oddly enough the Sonic EQ is a VST plug, which sounds pretty good actually.

What about multitrack [for parallel stuff for instance]?

Yes. As the other guys mentioned the is an 8 Channel option available which could make it useful for parallel processing or surround..
I still do all my surround work in PT HD... it's sooo easy.

Can you cut DDP's with it?

Yes. As the other guys mentioned, it's built in.
When burning a CD-R, sB generates a DDP set first, and burns the CD-R from the DDP.
I like this feature. all the discs burning from the same image, rather than a separate "bounce" for each burn.

The idea of using Mac's for everything is very appealing to me. If I didn't like Sequoia so much I wouldn't have a PC at all.

Apparently Sequoia is so solid and advanced, I would hesitate to recommend anyone abandoning Sequoia for Sonic.
Maybe add Sonic to the workflow instead.

Best - JT

[Jerry Tubb]

Originally Posted by Masterer

I was a Sonic Solutions user for about 10 years but a few years ago I switched to Sequoia.

Hey Chris (or anyone who lived this),

Tell us about the great ME migration from Sonic Solutions to Sequoia.

Apparently after many years of using Sonic, many MEs switched to Sadie and then to Sequoia.

Curious as to why MEs switched horses rather than go from Sonic Classic to Sonic HD.

I also know of many MEs that didn't switch platforms, and hung in there with Sonic.

As you know I'm a loyal Sonic Studio, Pro Tools, & Mac user.

Cheers - JT

[jayfrigo]

Oh man, don't bring that stuff up! I've been a user for almost 17 years now, so I've seen nearly the whole history. After a solid run of being the undisputed king of mastering, Sonic Solutions decided to abandon the audio workstation business completely before HD was finished. Mind you, they had taken our money readily enough for pre-sales of a product they decided not to complete. They left just a couple token people in the department. DVD and mass market PC software was the new focus for the company.

The plug-in structure that was announced they didn't finish, upsetting developers (Massenburg, Weiss, Z-Systems etc); the feature list wasn't completed, the stability and even some of the feature set of classic was lost, modern features that everybody else had, HD didn't, like OSX operation, firewire drive support, support for CD recorders that were actually still made etc.

Well, the rough cliff notes version is that finally, after a couple years of this crap, a couple of the legacy audio department guys got together with some other folks who cared about the niche mastering market and decided to raise some money, get rights to the DAW code, and create a separate company called Sonic Studio LLC. This is the company that makes soundBlade today.

The first year or two of their existence they tried to make good on old Sonic's promises, even though they were a different company and different people and hadn't been responsible for the original mess. They fixed most of the stuff in HD and got it to work well. Unfortunately, it was past its expiration date by that point, still working on OS9 and not supporting things like CD-Text.

This also was a no-win situation for the new company, since we all were complaining, and they were fixing problems they inherited while not having new products to create revenue. During these dark ages, many people jumped ship, and those of us who didn't certainly had times when we were ready to.

Also around this time, Sequoia came out with a fade editor heavily borrowed from Sonic, and waveform generation similar to Sonic's, and the 4 point editing model set up pretty similarly too. Add to this PQ editing and DDP support, and basically they created a Sonic substitute on the PC. A few went to Sadie or Pyramix, but Sequoia felt most familiar for a Sonic user.

There was talk at the height of the madness of everybody who had pre-paid and not gotten what was promised getting together to sue the original Sonic, but that was more trouble than it was worth. In some ways, we're really just coming out of the woods of the original Sonic Solutions' (not Sonic Studio) abandonment now. All said and done, I'm a happy Sonic user again, but I definitely have some bruises to show for it.

Originally Posted by Jerry Tubb

Hey Chris (or anyone who lived this),

Tell us about the great ME migration from Sonic Solutions to Sequoia.

Apparently after many years of using Sonic, many MEs switched to Sadie and then to Sequoia.

Curious as to why MEs switched horses rather than go from Sonic Classic to Sonic HD.

I also know of many MEs that didn't switch platforms, and hung in there with Sonic.

As you know I'm a loyal Sonic Studio, Pro Tools, & Mac user.

Cheers - JT

[grandmasters]

Originally Posted by jayfrigo

Oh man, don't bring that stuff up! I've been a user for almost 17 years now, so I've seen nearly the whole history. ...SNIP

Jay, you should add all that to the Wikipedia entry!

[Masterer]

What Jay said.

Y'know, I liked Sonic a lot back in the day and had it not been for the closed architecture things may very well be different for digidesign right now. I used to do a lot of re-issue work when I was a puppy and sonic had the lesser of all evil no-noise and tick removal and such [you had to go "outside the box" to use Cedar, which I did occasionally anyway].

Sonic really shot itself in the foot as far as support and features go and that just didn't cut it at Sterling. If you're lucky enough to be really busy workflow and reliability are huge issues. When we jumped at Sterling it was with both feet [all of use were using Sonic] and there has been no looking back. Some of us use Pyramix, but no one is using Sonic anything at this point.

I'm sure it's improved a lot and may even rival Sequoia, but there is only so much time in the day for switching back and forth [I'm already using Bias Peak, Sequoia, Pro Tools, Logic, blah blah blah].

It is interesting that the company has made a comeback of sorts. If I were just starting out I'd definitely give it a shot.

[Jerry Tubb]

Originally Posted by jayfrigo

Oh man, don't bring that stuff up! I've been a user for almost 17 years now, so I've seen nearly the whole history. After a solid run of being the undisputed king of mastering, Sonic Solutions decided to abandon the audio workstation business completely before HD was finished. Mind you, they had taken our money readily enough for pre-sales of a product they decided not to complete. They left just a couple token people in the department. DVD and mass market PC software was the new focus for the company.

Jay (and Chris),

Thanks for the history lesson! Sorry to flashback to any unpleasant memories. Actually jogged my memory back to the early part of this decade, remember hearing the scuttlebutt about Sonic switching their focus to DVD and abandoning their loyal audio mastering base. Yikes!

Sounds like corporate pencil pushers were making the decisions during that period.

But Sonic Studio LLC has risen from the ashes like a Phoenix, and winning loyal users again.

I was using digi's SDII, PT, MLCD, thru that period, which also went thru some arbitrary changes to stop developing its' mastering products. So it's been a bit of a wild ride for us Mac user MEs.

Thanks - JT

[finetuner]

Originally Posted by jayfrigo

... a couple of the legacy audio department guys got together ... and create a separate company called Sonic Studio LLC. This is the company that makes soundBlade today.

The first year or two of their existence they tried to make good on old Sonic's promises, even though they were a different company and different people and hadn't been responsible for the original mess...

Good to keep in mind this part of the story in particular.

After all it is S.Studio LLC, who is keeping the spirit of S.Solutions alive on OSX and without the scsi hassle, but they're not the same company.



With the program stable now, i feel the company is slowly able to look forward instead of making up for lesser parts of the heritage.

Admitted, there is some wishful thinking involved in this (and thank you Jerry for dragging us through our bad days)
As long as i don't have to switch to pc, i'll stay loyal.

[Lampadinha]

Jay and Chris, what a lesson!

thumbsup

Rgrds.

Lamp.
Midas Studios.

[Masterer]

Originally Posted by grandmasters

I'll have copies in a week. You are first on my 'send out' list.

(For those who care, Chris mastered my own CD - after 11 years of mastering, it was weird to be a client. Working with Chris was awesome though.)

Cool.

I have to say you're probably the first artist I've ever worked with that is also an professional mastering engineer.

I was kinda shocked that you weren't a pain in the ass.

[prolearts]

Hey,

Can I ask those of y'all you are using 2 soundcards with Sequoia, etc.: How come? I have an RME AES16 (or some such) and I do source/dest in one instance of Sequoia. What am I missing out on?

Thanks!
Jason Ward
Chicago Mastering Service

[Cellotron]

Originally Posted by prolearts

Hey,

Can I ask those of y'all you are using 2 soundcards with Sequoia, etc.: How come? I have an RME AES16 (or some such) and I do source/dest in one instance of Sequoia. What am I missing out on?

Thanks!
Jason Ward
Chicago Mastering Service

Jason -
I believe folks are doing this in order to allow playback at one rate sample and capture at another rate - so that if you were mastering from say a 96kHz source that you were sending out to an analog process chain you could capture back at the 44.1kHz delivery rate without having to use any src.

I used to use two soundcards not clocked to each other in a single DAW running two instances of SAWStudio to do exactly this when I was at Europadisk - but since moving to my own room I prefer to use two separate DAW's - one for playback, one for capture - as I've found it allows me better work flow, and lets me load very cpu intensive plugins on either side of the chain without compromising stability. Obviously ommv.

Best regards,
Steve Berson

[24-96 Mastering]

Originally Posted by Masterer

Cool.

I have to say you're probably the first artist I've ever worked with that is also an professional mastering engineer.

I was kinda shocked that you weren't a pain in the ass.

I was gonna ask about that...

Did you two communicate directly or through manager?

[Masterer]

Originally Posted by 24-96 Mastering

I was gonna ask about that...

Did you two communicate directly or through manager?

He was there, live and in person.

[mischa janisch]

Originally Posted by prolearts

Hey,

Can I ask those of y'all you are using 2 soundcards with Sequoia, etc.: How come? I have an RME AES16 (or some such) and I do source/dest in one instance of Sequoia. What am I missing out on?

Thanks!
Jason Ward
Chicago Mastering Service

Besides the different source and destination sample rates - the way my setup works - this way it's also easier to reference the current track against the already mastered tracks of the album (or any track the client brought for reference). This is the main reason why I still use WaveLab for capturing, which can switch between auditioning the input and playback of a file or an EDL (auto muting the other) just by hitting the space bar...

I'm sure there are other ways to do this, but none of the solutions I came up with are this instantaneous.

[phild]

Originally Posted by Masterer

He was there, live and in person.

and buying lunch...

[24-96 Mastering]

Originally Posted by Masterer

He was there, live and in person.

I sometimes forget that still happens...

[Masterer]

Originally Posted by 24-96 Mastering

I sometimes forget that still happens...

Yeah, it was weird.

Lunch at Morimoto's kicked ass though.

[mischa janisch]

Originally Posted by 24-96 Mastering

I sometimes forget that still happens...

So most of you business is unattended? - We still have about 50% attended sessions - while indie work tends to be attended most major label work is unattended, but I'm sure they care as much...

[24-96 Mastering]

Originally Posted by mischa janisch

So most of you business is unattended? - We still have about 50% attended sessions - while indie work tends to be attended most major label work is unattended, but I'm sure they care as much...

Hard to say... I think more business is unattended lately. I would guess around two thirds unattended at the moment, it used to be around 50%.

Maybe that means I'm expanding my clientele - or maybe it's just temporary flux. Hard to say. Same here with major label work being mostly unattended. It kind of figures though, Germany is very decentralised, there isn't really 1 place to be only, so unattended sessions are bound to happen more often than in, say, Britain, Austria or France, where most of the music scene and entertainment industry is based in one city.