adama's Blog

Hey All,

I am Adam Ayan, mastering engineer at Gateway Mastering Studios here in Portland, PMF co-founder and board of directors member, as well as part time faculty member at the USM School of Music.

I started out as a rabid music fan as a kid, which naturally led to me becoming a musician (bass player), and following a career path starting at UMass Lowell as a music/sound recording technology major. Since then mastering has been my primary career/musical focus, and creative outlet.

I moved to Portland over 10 years ago after being hired as an engineer at Gateway, and have always been inspired by the Portland music scene and it's wealth of talent as well as it's real sense of community. I support music in all forms, and hope that the PMF offers some knowledge and support to our local music community.

Next!!

Nice thread Sam!

I was unable to make the workshop on Wednesday, but have heard rave reviews. Thank you to all of our speakers for taking the time to share their knowledge and experience with the audience.

My best decision was to pursue a position at Gateway Mastering back in 1998. I was hired then as a production engineer (cut references, QC masters, digital editing, etc...), and found myself with the golden opportunity to assist mastering legend (and Gateway owner) Bob Ludwig directly. Bob wanted a new assistant at the time, and I was more than willing and eager to put in the hard work. Bob and I had a great rapport (still do!), which led to him teaching me all of his mastering tricks and secrets, something he has only shared with very few engineers (only Gateway engineers, BTW). My position as his assistant naturally and quickly evolved to the building of my mastering room in 2001.

It was a lot of hard work, and still is. But, if you are presented with an opportunity you should be ready and willing to make the most of it.

As a side note: for those pursuing careers in engineering, the best way to develop your skills (I believe) is still through a good mentor + assistant relationship.

Hi JD,

Sorry I haven't responded to your question sooner...

I think there could be several answers to your question, and yes the weight/grade of the vinyl does make a big difference, and will produce a quieter record. I think this would be the reason for the better Japanese pressings, though it is of course also possible that the masters for those vinyl releases were done by a different engineer than the US release. I think that could be the case for some vinyl releases, as the master lacquer cut to make the pressing of a vinyl record can only be used so many times before cutting a new one, and shipping the lacquer a great distance could cause problems too.

Hard to say exactly, but also remember that "better" is subjective!

I still can't find any real tangible info about the CODE 'process'. For it to exist on a traditional DVD-Video disc, it technically can't be as high resolution as a DVD-Audio disc has the ability to be, though it can still be higher resolution than an audio CD - a step in the right direction IMO. Basically, it is either 48 khZ/24 bit stereo audio, or it is less than that, encoded with some lossy compression. My bet is on it being 48k/24 bit. DVD-Audio can go as high as 192 kHz/24 bit for stereo, though the sample rate differences can be negligible.

Blu-Ray is also a hopeful new format for both hd video, and the possibility of doing high resolution audio only type releases. I do know of a few Blu-Ray music video/concert disc to hit the market soon...though I probably shouldn't say just yet :)

Chris & Sam - in regards to the question about classic albums (those originally released on vinyl before CD) sounding better than their CD counterparts...I'm sure that is true in at least some cases. The difference in mastering styles could be part of it, though I really think that the main reason is that early CD releases (especially those of catalog releases) were victim of early digital technology. Low resolution digital technology, and early analog to digital conversion technology was a big part of the problem. Not to mention the fact that some were made from poor transfers of safety tapes simply transferred to digital. On a few occasions when remastering I have found that just doing a better transfer of the master tapes using my better analog and digital gear already beats the original CD release sonically...then I add some more mastering magic to make a huge difference :)

Well, I can definitely expand on Bob's quote from the PPH article with my own mastering experiences.

Virtually all of the vinyl made of new records that I have mastered are being cut from a digital version of the mastering I made. In a perfect world, I master the album high resolution digital (higher res. than CD), then send those mastered/edited files to the engineer cutting the master lacquers for vinyl pressing. That engineer's job is to then translate my already mastered digital audio to disc, maintaining as much of the integrity of my master to vinyl. (BTW: I would do this all myself, but we no longer have a cutting lathe at GW). Then a test pressing would be made at the vinyl plant, which would be sent to me for quality control purposes. Theoretically the vinyl would sound very close to the CD, and hopefully better given that it was made from the high resolution files, going to an analog medium (the CD is also made from the high res. files, brought down to regular CD quality).

This is in a perfect world!

Possibly some of these steps are skipped, especially the QC of the test pressing, which is most concerning to me. If a good cut wasn't made to disc, the vinyl could very well sound worse than the CD, or at least not as how it was intended to sound by myself, the producer, and most importantly: the artist.

So...did I answer the question at hand? Probably not :)

It all comes down to this - CD can sound really great, vinyl can sound really great, even higher res MP3's and AAC files can sound good - if proper care is taken in production.