Counter to: The Reason Most ITB mixes don’t Sound as good as Analog mixes

[Prahlad]

Hi ppl

i was reading this article last night, where Infected Mushroom speak of their technique of clipping in channels as well as when recording into converters (as far as I understood it) to increase loudness without the artefacts of compression. It's actually a technique i've seen other trance acts also regularly do, instead of mastering just bouncing the track with the master fader 6 db up, and astoundingly if done well there is no audible distortion and the track sounds LOUD.

"AF: What compressor or limiter do you use on the final mixes? Because your tracks don’t sound so compressed compared to other electronic music songs.

Eisen: We don’t use compression at all in the final mix.

AF: Ok. Interesting.

Eisen: I mean, this is our- let’s say- our secret. Big secret. We do the mastering ourselves as well. We basically learned that if we push the gain really high and get everything distorted in a way that you don’t hear distortion, you just see the red really really - say 6db+ you don’t hear distortion yet and we record that analog to another convertor then we get much better sound. We tried even the Waves Ultramaximizer- I don’t find them sounding better than what we do. I find the Waves, for example, taking away the highs a little bit. And not only Waves, a lot of other companies that do the same things. The highs always go away, and something in the details goes away. This way, we record it analog, in our case we record it to the Prism Sound, and we get the Prism Sound distorted ['visually'. So the inputs are distorted and the meter shows that it cliping but my ears don't hear distortion]. We get really high gain and with a sound that doesn’t sound compressed."

Infected Mushroom Sound Alchemy - Audiofanzine


Don't get me wrong, Im a trained engineer, and I love the idea of artefact free music, but Infected Mushroom are definetely one of the groups in the scene with the very best production, they're stuff sounds great! I loved the concept behind the thread in the title, but this has seriously got me thinking...

Thought I would share this here and ask if anyone elde is using this technique and can expand on it, im sure its not the thing for accoustic ballads, but for Dance or certain styles of Pop??

best

Prahlad

[beanface]

He's clipping prism AD. Pushing prism AD harder than an L2 or L3 without as many nasties isn't hard, hes still mashing the sound. I'm sure its the production skills that make it sound better, not the fact hes clipping his ad. I've received tracks to be mastered before that have been clipped pretty heavilly at the master fader with no compression, limiter / clipper and, although flat as a pancake, they didn't sound quite as bad as they looked. Theres better ways to make stuff loud, and IMHO, Infected mushroom, although good, and really creative - isn't exactly the pinnacle of great sounding audio.

[Prahlad]

thx for ur feedback mate

For sure this is a matter of taste, altough i must say i used to tune and run rigs at various trance festivals in germany and their tracks off CD and live sets ussually put most other producitons to shame... i do think its a thing for dance music.

I was actually involved in melting a few 30" subs with one of their tracks in Italy once...it was a demo from a well known PA manufacturer and they had no filter or limiter on their demo rig... I also didn't realize the track in question had heavy kicks down to like 7 Hz when i gave it to their engineer for a laugh.

They were not amuzed as they had flown in ppl from all over the world to see this new rig .

It was not intentional, and their line array did sound really great for about 30 secs!

It was this track btw:

YouTube - Infected Mushroom - B.P. Empire - Never Ever Land