Dig these mastering rooms...

[DSJR]

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/mastering-forum/424540-post-photos-your-mastering-room.html

The bigger speakers used look awsome and despite most being passive, a lot of thought seems to have gone into their design. It looks as if the ubiquitous B&W 802's have been kicked into touch in many of these places...

[Alex_UK]

Very interesting Dave. One thing I find confusing is the huge great consoles and computer screens placed right in the way of the engineers' ears on a lot of them - surely that must cause some disturbance to the sound? (I find even my laptop when it is sat on my lap degrades the imaging and tone.)

Also interesting to see some quite extreme speaker toe-in on a lot of the set-ups, and how extremely "near field" some of them are, how close to side/rear walls (quite a few narrow rooms) and the surprising lack of any room treatments in a lot of them, not even soft furnishings. No wonder some albums sound so pants these days! ;)

[Thermionic]

They are a bit different than when I was vaguely involved a long while ago. All very wood flooring and minimalist it seems these days. High fidelity though never had much to do with the business of recording, well for popular music at least, we aimed to get better than reality - had to in many cases (these days even more!) The agenda is different; impressing the producers with the latest fashion in recording kit and furnishing is what it’s about, and this brings in the business. Give them a control room that looks like a cross between a floating gin palace and the bridge of Star Trek, a digital desk with 96 or more channels, then blast them with 120dB from the biggest speakers in the world to ‘get the real sound man’.

Main monitor fashion has varied over the years; my own impression is Tannoys in Lockwoods up to say the mid 70’s, then Hindley / Kinoshita’s for the next decade, then Urei’s, then Genelecs not sure what now. B&Ws were to be found at Abby Road and at Decca round the corner, but these were mostly I believe for classical work. Proper or main studio monitors were usually a combination of compression horn HF unit and multiple bass drivers able to work consistently at levels of 120dB and above with a fairly flat response down to around 20Hz at the desk. This was in conjunction with bass trapping usually concealed within the walls and ceiling. So one would hope that they would have compensated for that flooring, but perhaps not...The smaller speakers often perched on the desk’s meter bridge are just to give an impression of what the mix sounds like on a home pair of speakers. In the old days they used Aurotones which were pretty nasty, these days it’s something rather better.

End of memorial lecture.:)

[Lodgesound]

Impressing the producers with the latest fashion in recording kit...............mmmmmmmm.....brings back nasty memories of the facilities sector and of working in it with people who were quite frankly becoming incresingly devoid of real knowledge with each year or two that passed.

I can remember being told at the age of 31 that I was far too old to be able to be considered for the position of either sound engineer or telecine colourist - happy days!!

Anyway back on topic - the whole "in fasion" thing with equipment was never more prevalent than with audio and mastering though quite frankly the sound in some of these so-called mastering suites was utterly awful along with some of the insufferable people who would come to use them and insist on, as you say Gino, working at 120 db flat out all day. Your ears would get compression to the point where you could'nt hear any sublety anyway which mattered not one jot as all producers were after was to "make it like really really loud yeah!"

On the subject of mastering I chanced to hear the re-issue of Jeff Wayne's "War Of The Worlds" and was gobsmacked at how completely and utterly awful it sounded - on analysis with Audition and Wavelab I found it to have an average dynamic range in the louder sections of 0.5 - 1 db!!! How anyone could have thought that this along with the completely over-compressed overall presentation was anything even approaching listenable even on an ipod is completely beyond my understanding of the term "Mastering".

[DSJR]

The original WOTW recording on LP was OK as I recall (can't remember if I ever bought it on CD though).

Many of these studios seem to be the smaller ones which "may not" attract the ignorant tossers in the main (?).

Polygram and EMI were all but given B&W speakers as I remember and they used them because of the "sponsorship" or whatever agreements were in place. The Belsize Road Decca mastering rooms (all tan coloured hessian, dead acoustic and no windows) used 801's (and later, M801's) driven by H&H amps IIRC. I'd like to have stayed longer and wish I'd met Paschal Byrne, who did (and still does for his firm "Audio Archiving Company") a splendid job on so many Decca (and now others) pop and rock stuff. He lived in my home-town too...

P.S. It's a tragedy that the gear that so many decent records were made on was slung out to make way for often worse stuff (some of the fashionable but horrible early digital mixing desks for instance). The thing now is that the gear is once again excellent I understand, it's the numpties who use them under orders that make the sound so bad quite often.

[Lodgesound]

Are you in Tring Dave?

I only ask because I work in Berkhamsted...

[DSJR]

I lived for my first 35 years in Tring and my Dad's family came from the immediate area for at least three hundred years (my Mum's lot all hail from the vale of Clwyd, hence the "half-breed" tag I endure ;)).

After a few years in sunny Luton (blech!) and some time in east Northants I'd rather forget (personal reasons), we ended up in genuinely sunny Suffolk as my wife has family roots here. I'm due to visit Tringsville soon to collect some audio gear that went with the amps and speakers I have, but it'll be the first time in two years since I ventured that way..

back in the 70's, I commuted to Euston station via Berko station, changing at Hemel in the mornings.....:)