Yeah, they present it in a less theoretical way, and more practical, with a focus on the tools at hand -- in this case the L3 Multimaximizer. Waves manuals have always offered little select tidbits of prized info, but some of those bits of knowledge from the old Waves manuals from way over a decade ago left me with serious questions that were not answered in the manuals or anywhere else that I could find. The most serious question raised by past manuals was the issue of double-dithering:Prime Mover wrote:WOW! I just read the L3 manual, one of the most FASCINATING reads on mastering and sample bitrate conversion I've ever read!
http://www.waves.com/manuals/plugins/L3.pdf
It basically goes into a lot of the same things about dithering, normalization and sample conversion that Bob Katz does, but honestly, whoever wrote this explained it a lot more cleanly than Katz does. I was kinda befuddled by some of the explanations in Mastering Audio, this clears things up.
What do you do when you know that the audio you're about to commit to a 2-track mix or master is very likely to be further processed later by TV, radio, or even by a mastering engineer?
When I first became aware of this conundrum, we were about to send some material to Bernie Grundman, so I got him on the phone and asked him. I might as well have been speaking Greek. Bernie didn't seem to have any idea what I was talking about. Suddenly it became apparent that Bernie and most other mastering engineers were analog guys, and that this digital stuff was still so new that there was going to be a lot of misunderstanding, if not outright mistakes, even by the top professionals in the industry. (this was in the 1990s)
I let go of it then, and let things fall where they may. That resulted in at least one mastering job that had to be done over, because it was so full of clipping that the engineer could not remove it all. (that didn't happen with Bernie, btw) It was free of clipping when it left my studio, so it had something to do with dithering, noise shaping, or rate conversions. But what was one to do? You couldn't just burn a file to 2-track without limiting and dithering it.
The L3 Multimaximizer manual actually deals with this. In several spots it gives hints or outright instructions on how to prepare files that will be re-processed later. If you focus on pages 16 - 26 of the manual, you will find most of that.
Here is one example of it:
Waves L3 Manual page 20 wrote:For 16-bit applications, Ultra shaping should be avoided in the following situations:
Subsequent Digital Editing When a signal is subjected to later editing, extreme Noise Shaping might, in rare cases, cause low-level, yet audible "clicks" at the edit points. This might occur when played on low quality CD players.
Applications in which you should avoid use of Ultra shaping include CD's with production music, sound effects libraries, or loop libraries. These would certainly be subject to further digital editing.
Poor Error Correction When errors that are not properly corrected occur, the Ultra setting (like all forms of heavy Noise Shaping and other resolution enhancement technologies) tends to cause audible background crackles, especially on very cheap CD players. While these effects generally don't occur on the majority of mid- or hi-fi CD players, they can be noticeable on very cheap products. The amount of such crackles on poor pressings is greatly reduced by the Normal Noise Shaping. An example would be a signal destined for a carrier medium with poor error correction, such as CDs pressed in pressing plants with poor quality control.
Subsequent equalization before duplication, when heavy treble boost equalization is subsequently employed. (We're referring to EQ by a pre- mastering person before duplication, not when the end user boosts the treble on their home system!) This can cause the strongly boosted higher frequencies used by Ultra Noise Shaping to become so high in level that they might feed excessive noise energy into loudspeakers. Therefore, Ultra shaping is best avoided in situations where subsequent equalization may be used in pre-mastering, such as in a compilation. Of course, if the mastering is done correctly the first time, large treble boosts would be quite unnecessary. Please note that much less HF Gain is used with the Normal and Moderate noise shapers than with Ultra (all of which could be observed on a real-time analyzer, such as Waves PAZ - Psychoacoustic Analyzer).