Following the Sonic Trail

I had a conversation with a client yesterday.  He was wondering if I would give the project my all because it's “just a kids group”.  

My reply to Jim was along the lines of, "kids deserve to have their project mastered to a high standard as anyone, platinum seller or street corner busker.”  

It kind of surprised me that anyone would expect less than my best for their project. 

Here’s why.  Long ago when starting mastering professionally and struggling through rough sounding projects, I was near throwing up my hands and letting an album go under-cooked; Then I had an epiphany.

I started to think about how I'd never heard any bad sounding work from my mastering heroes.  They must have a way to get things to sound good, no matter what.  hmmmm…

Pursuing and persevering to arrive at something that satisfies my ear is a whole lot of fun.  Even if that means pulling out all the stops, or doing next to nothing for a project, I’m game.  

Thanks for the music,

Dana

Tidal, why it matters

A Tidal .WAV?

I've been reading a lot of press lately about the music streaming service, Tidal.  Comments range from, "here we go, yet another streaming service", to "what a strange introduction with all the pop artists being paraded on stage for it's launch"...  Where's the celebration and hype about the sound?!

I see it differently, Tidal is the first music service to offer streaming music without lossless compression.  That's right, you can get the CD quality sound from this service.  This is the moment I've been waiting for as a music fan who is disappointed by MP3's sound.

That is not to say that the service is without growing pains, as sometimes I find the app a little finicky to use, and of course there is the monthly 20USD charge.

Why does this extra quality matter to the music industry?  I have seen the television world get a big boost for selling HD TVs and the high quality broadcast.  It's amazing to me that we have the picture clarity to see the lint on the outfielder's jersey from home plate, yet we consume music through a sonic funnel that is MP3.

Will consumers appreciate the higher sound quality?

Ultimately as internet bandwidth increases, it's inevitable that streaming audio at high data rates will be the norm, I think it's something to celebrate and hope the music consuming public will finally "open up their wallets to let the moths out" and get on board sooner than later.

http://tidal.com/

Specialized Mastering