Putting aside your personal biases or opinions on what constitutes “good” mixing and mastering, how much further do you think we can go with audio quality in productions?

Of course, when compared with the early ’90s, the productions of today have a lot more clarity and generally sound better. Again, if you’re prejudiced against the heavily compressed sounds of today, please keep it to yourself.

Do you think that in another ten years, people will look back on the productions of this decade and note how tinny and muddy they sound? Is there much more than can be achieved with mixing and mastering, or have we reached a state where any improvements will be basically negligible?

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Mix archive | Melbourne club guide

I think in 10 years we wont even use speakers or headphones anymore, we'll just jack into the fuckin matrix and rock out like mad cvnts. Since we would no longer be limited to the poor frequency range of the human ear, I would say mixing and mastering has a long way to go yet.

Shutup Kimset7, you are a noob.

lol wut?

I've often wondered if we will reach that stage too actually.

I've read experiments about sound behind beamed directly inside the human skull so that American soldiers can communicate in complete silence on the battlefield. Also, the cochlear implant plugs more or less directly into the parts of our brain that receive sound, yes?

I would love to jack into some kind of matrix because then you could listen to music as loud as you wanted, for as long as you wanted. I'm paranoid about noise exposure.

Also, it would be funny if all existing music became redundant in a few decades time because sound was beamed directly into our brains, bypassing the ears and giving us a far superior frequency detection, making pre-matrix music seem primitive and ugly.

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Mix archive | Melbourne club guide

Remember though music needs to be felt

quote:

[b]Originally posted by Domesticated Again, if you’re prejudiced against the heavily compressed sounds of today, please keep it to yourself.

You want us to talk about mixing but not talk about the only problem that has ever existed in digital audio quality?

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Do you want to talk mastering or matrix?!? .........

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Analogue Mastering
Esoteric sound for the discerning ear

quote:

Originally posted by Raphie Do you want to talk mastering or matrix?!? .........

Either or both, it doesn't really matter.

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Mix archive | Melbourne club guide

Yeah you started the thread by saying:

Give us your opinion, but not your opinion.

(my brain's a bit fried currently (just finished some intensive brain work), but I'll reply anyway since it's an interesting question)

I'd say the main reason for the change in audio quality now compared to 10 years ago is computer DAWs, and the number of people creating music due to it being much cheaper now.

Back in the day, people used a lot more hardware, and computers weren't as powerful. And there wasn't as much competition in terms of a lot of people creating very high quality audio in trance.

These days, you can put parametric EQs on every channel in realtime and spend as long as you want perfecting the sound. And you need to do that because the bar has been raised to a certain degree now. If your mix sounds like it was made in 1999, people will notice. If you have an unbelievably fantastic song then people will still listen to it, but they'll wish the mix was up to today's standards.

So the question is, will there be another change as monumental as going from hardware with a few EQs to hardware/software with as many EQs as you want, with all the effects running in realtime, being able to be adjusted in realtime? Will there be a further massive explosion in the numbers of people creating music, thus driving people harder to get ahead of the pack?

Any tools that help people to lift the quality of their music - great sounding sample packs, synths/ samplers that are capable of creating more evocative sounds, tools that help to balance your sounds based on the genre you're producing, tools that learn your production techniques and are able to automate some things you'd do anyway - who knows what lies ahead - but anytime you make things easier for people and lift the quality of those at the bottom, the quality at the top will rise as people invest that time (that has been freed up) on other aspects of production which will help to separate them the majority of people. You're always going to have those people who are willing to put in a heap more effort than others and drive things forward.

I guess my quick answer would be to say I don't know. If there are big developments in the next 10 years, then the trance we're listening to today could well sound inferior. I can't imagine it would sound the same. Otherwise a lot of people would get bored and move on to another genre which is progressing and changing.

It has improved significantly throughout the years.

But one should not underestimate the effect of imperfection and emotion in a track.

I can find a 10-15 year old track i have never heard before and just totally dig it.

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until recorded audio can sound exactly like it was being played live, there is room for improvement.

Will mastering improve?

One of my long-term studio goals is to be able to record from hardware summing into a Korg MR-1000. It's simply optimal for high-resolution recording, in order to capture detail and clarity that might otherwise be ignored. Programs like Sonar are capable of developing 64-bit resolution to audio recording but I don't think the day is too far away when individual tracks in a DAW will be capable of delivering one bit resolution.

I think, in-so-far as the question Domesticated posed, that such a "level" is still entirely subject, albeit generally, to Moore's Law. The higher the resolution that may be obtained, as the result of general technological development, the better recordings will become. Innovations, in both music hardware and software, will be developed to take advantage of the ever expanding ability of technology.