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With the demise of many large studio facilities and label budgets dimished much more focus has been put on adding warmth and character at the mastering stage in recent years. With upgrades to the Blue Pro setup being frequent of late some clients have asked for us to summarise what is now in our racks and discuss its purpose in the mastering chain. Here are a few essentials:
WARMTH / COLOURED PROCESSING:
The Manley Massive Passive (Mastering Version): This EQ has a tube gain stage but is 'passive' meaning that the EQ has no further amps. When you boost a frequency band it's actually cutting the remaining signal content. Only the metal film resistors, film capacitors and hand-wound inductors mould the sound. This was first designed to be a transparent process but what we are left with is a distinctive warmth subtle tube saturation, particularly pleasing in the top end. We have customised the tubes at Blue Pro and reduced the noise floor by as much as 10db.
EMI Chandler Abbey Road TG12345 EQ: A lot of terms are loosely courted in the audio world. Vintage, warm and aggressive to name but a few. This EQ is worthy of them all. It is a near perfect solution for adding aggressive attitude to a recording while retaining warmth. It is based on the EQ design of the Abbey Road TG12345 console which was used for many Beatles album and Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side Of The Moon', with very unique sounding line amps.
Tube-Tech SMC-2BM Multi-Band Compressor (Mastering Version): A very distinctive tube sound that works well on some recordings better then others. It rounds off sounds quite noticeably which can be handy for really punchy but brittle recordings. It has a higher noise floor then any of our other gear, although we have managed to reduce this by approximately 15db from the originally shipped specifications.
CLEAN PROCESSING:
Maselec MTC-2 Mastering Console: The heart of the Blue Pro Mastering set up. However the MTC-2 is much more than just a control centre to select the signal and monitor path. The console's stereo width adjustment, high pass, low pass and elliptical filters especially are extremely useful tools in shaping your sound.
Maselec MPL-2 Pak and HF Limiter: The MPL-2 can help greatly reduce spurious peaks and help increase subjective levels of recordings without the coloration and increased distortion so often associated with soft clippers and other ultra fast limiters. As with any Maselec gear, clean is an understatement.
Maselec MEA-2 Mastering EQ & Maselec MLA-2 Stereo Mastering Compressor: Ultra low distortion solid state devices that can be used in any mastering situation. These are perhaps the the workhorses of the 80% of the time the MEA is the only EQ I need for masters because it's clean sharp and detailed.
Prism ADA8-XR AD/DA Converter: Prism pride themselves on some of the most transparent converters on the market and having this is the chain really does make a difference to results. Most importantly, all of the preceding benefit and character in the audio chain can be lost if not captured by truly honest analogue to digital conversion such as this.
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