Mastering Vinyl
Reply #64 – 2010-07-08 23:30:45
Well, where I used to work a tape would arrive in the cutting room that had already been mastered elsewhere. The cutting engineer would then cut the lacquer from that tape. The "mastering engineer" was so-called because he produced the master tape . Maybe you called the cutting engineer the mastering engineer because he produced the master disc - well, he didn't really it was actually grown by electrolysis from the lacquer but maybe that's spitting hairs You weren't at the "master plant", then. Step 1: Recording (tracking), with optional processing (eq, compression). Step 2: Mixdown to stereo, with optional processing at track and bus levels. These two steps were often done by the same engineer. For big productions, there could be separate tracking and mixdown engineers. Step 3: Cut to lacquer (and process as required to make it cuttable and trackable). Step 4: Make several copies of the tape with cutting processing included and distribute to other plants. Step 5: Each plant would then cut from the tape, make a safety copy and pass the tape on to the next plant in the chain. (But what often happened was that the plant would keep the original and pass down the safety copy. Several generations later, the result at the end of the chain often sounded nasty.) Note that the processing in Step 3 had to be done using a lathe. It was an iterative process - set up the processing via best guess and experience, cut, examine the result. If not satisfactory, adjust the processing and try again. Some mixdown engineers did have a good understanding of what was needed and could deliver a tape that required little or no processing.