CD Mastering and Audio Mastering

If you have been thinking about taking your basic knowledge and skills of audio mastering to the next level, but you don't have the time and tons of money to invest, or better yet have no idea where to begin looking for this type of training, I suggest you keep on reading.

What if I told you there is a new school, located in beautiful South Padre Island, Texas, that offers a three day - comprehensive mastering course? And, the class sizes are relatively small so your training is personal and hands-on? Well the good news is - it does exist! Billy Stull, mastering engineer and pro audio equipment manufacturer, has just started this monthly course called the Masterpiece School of Mastering.

Various and extensive topics will be covered including specific mastering techniques (taught step by step), types of equipment you may find in typical mastering studios, and easy to understand principles of how to be successful. These and other projects will enhance and hone your current basic skills and at the same time bring you up to speed on all the current technology through proper and efficient training by professionals.

The cost of the three day course is $900 and includes daily lunch at the schools headquarters, the beautiful Shearton South Padre Island Beach Hotel. For more infomation about the school and an application form please contact info@legendaryaudio.com

Posted by Brian at 05:40 PM | Permalink

Your first question, more than likely, will be what exactly is CIRC or Cross-Interleaved Reed-Solomon Code? I could easily write about the technical side of CIRC but then this article would easily be several pages long. I will to try to explain the CIRC concept in laymen terms.

CIRC deals specifically with the issue of error detection and correction. All CD’s are incorporated with CIRC. CIRC is a powerful error detection code that can detect and completely correct all errors on a reasonably good disc.

The first step any good and professional CD mastering company will take once they receive a pre-mastered CD, will be for the CD mastering engineer to run the CD through a high end program that will evaluate the quality of the CD. If a major error occurs and a sample cannot be perfectly reconstructed by the error control circuitry, it may be possible to "guess" the content of the sample; that is, obtain an approximation by interpolating it off the neighboring audio samples. While this concealment will not "fix" the error, it will make it inaudible, offering a graceful degradation of audio quality as clicks and pops are avoided.

This same program will tell them the compatibility between the writer and the media and which type of media works best. In return this allows the mastering engineer to optimize disc quality and avoid problems, especially since media quality varies with each batch. Then the CD mastering engineer can discover bad batches to save them time and save customers money
Keep in mind that all CD's are not made equal and quality will vary, sometimes dramatically. Any errors that occur usually are a result of poor disc quality, type of burner used, or what speed the pre-master was burned at.

In GENERAL terms, the higher the speed you burn at, the more errors you will get. Even the opposite is sometimes true as well. If you burn slower that 4X you create an emulsion of the recording and makes the recording prone to different types of errors.

Posted by Brian at 03:32 PM | Permalink