Audio Mastering & Restoration

Q: What do you like most about your job?

A: Variety of clients and their music styles.

Q: If you were on a desert island and could take just 5 pieces of gear, what would they be?

A: 1. My speakers (BW 800), 2. Pultec EQ 3. Crane Song STC-8 compressor 4. Curve Bender EQ 5. Prism converters

Q: What type of music do you usually work on?

A: We are pretty confident we can handle anything you want to throw at us - from folk, through pop, metal, jazz to avant-garde experimental music. We are thrilled to help musicians of all kinds of genres to make the most of the audio delivery process.

Q: What other musicians or music production professionals inspire you?

A: Bob Katz, Mandy Parnell, Marc Dieter Einstmann

Q: Describe the most common type of work you do for your clients.

A: Stereo Mastering is the most popular way to master a finished mix. Every project is different and our approach will vary, depending on the client's goals. In general, we combine digital high-resolution mastering in Pyramix DAW with the benefits of analog outboard gear. As for Stem Mastering, that requires the submission of a mix dismantled into several submixes (groups of audio tracks). Usually, this allows much greater control over elements of the mix, giving us greater flexibility to alter the sound of the tracks. Target distribution format will also influence certain decisions and may require different approach in mastering. Music streaming services operate at different levels of data reduction and may apply some form of loudness normalisation. Your great sounding mix mastered for 16-bit/44.1kHz format can easily distort when encoded as an audio stream. To this end, we can provide an optimised master that sounds great with different streaming services. For CD distribution, we can prepare Red Book compliant audio files in addition to a DDP image. This image allows the producer and mastering engineer to have complete control over all parameters for the CD (gaps, CD-TEXT, track timings). A vinyl premaster is typically a 24-bit audio file that contains masters for each side of the record. We can also provide you with a dedicated "mastered for vinyl" premaster to ensure that your music translated into the world of vinyl will sound great. If the source track requires audio repair and noise removal, we have specialised tools to bring old and otherwise damaged audio recordings back to life.

Q: Tell us about your studio setup.

A: The most important component of my studio is the room itself. It has been acoustically treated to sound neutral and accurate. Designed by a professional acoustician, it combines the right amount of absorption, diffusion and takes into an account the room's acoustic response. Different materials are used for the front and back-wall treatment. To tackle first reflection points on the ceiling above the listening position, an absorption cloud has been mounted. As for monitoring, my main speakers (B&W 804) have been de-coupled from the floor through custom-made stands to reduce the transference of energy from the monitors to the floor and eliminate sympathetic resonances. They have been positioned far enough from the front wall to minimise the boundary effect. My studio has dedicated electrical wiring with a low impedance "Clean Earth" done by Miloco Builds. We use specialised voltage regulators to ensure optimum performance of our analog and digital equipment. All my audio outboard gear is connected to a pair of very transparent Prism Sound AD-DA converters. The signal chain is controlled by Pyramix DAW. As Pyramix operates with 32-bit floating point audio resolution (some operations are done using 64-bit floats) and converters expect 24-bit integers, to avoid bit truncation distortion, dithering (TPDF, flat white noise) is added to the signal before reaching analog gear. TPDF dither is very transparent, it eliminates non-linear distortion during re-quantization and has no signal modulation artifacts. My analog mastering desk has been built around unique sounding Chandler TG EMI units (TG12413- two Zener compressors and a limiter, with side chain filter up to 300Hz and switchable input impedance for hard or soft driving of the unit, TG12345 - dual-channel equaliser). For sweetening sounds with broad, musical adjustments, I often use Bax eq with treble and bass shelves following Baxandall Curves. DM implementation of Baxandall shelves maintains phase coherence which is important for transparent broad strokes across wide frequency ranges. But my true secret weapon is Rupert Neve's Portico channel, a unique combination of a four‑band equaliser, de-esser, broadband dynamics processor (VCA compressor / limiter) and a great sounding Texture section, designed to adjust the actual amount of musical harmonic content from the source material. As this is a single channel processor, I only use it in the M/S mode, sending either Mid or Side signal from Pyramix, depending on what I want to achieve with a track. I think that a combination of really transparent converters with transparent DAW, feeding an audio signal into the analog desk with gear that can be either colored or natural is what makes my chain very powerful tool in bringing life and impact to recordings.