22 replies to this topic

[MingusMonk&Amy]

Secrets Of The Mix Engineers: Tom Elmhirst

 

For her second album, Back To Black, Amy Winehouse and producer Mark Ronson crafted a heavily retro sound. Mix engineer Tom Elmhirst describes how he massaged their '60s soul vibe to create a radio-friendly hit in 'Rehab'...

 

https://www.soundons...rs-tom-elmhirst

[MingusMonk&Amy]

This guy together with the mastering engineer must be the reason why this is such a (technically) bad sounding album. Tom Elmhirst really did some crazy ugly processing. Bit-reduction! Yuck! Frequency filtering on Amy's vocals just because HE didn't like how her voice sounds. This is very disrespectful!! Way too much digital processing overall. I don't like this guy one bit.

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I can imagine this is why not many people like her live videos. He pretty much changed them and everyone expected her to sound like that in real life. Idk just my thoughts. But yeah, I really don't like that. i can only help but think about how much better the album would sound with a different engineer. I wish there was a way to fix it but it's still a good album.

[MingusMonk&Amy]

It is possible to make it a great sounding album. The album was recorded analog but mixed digitally. The recordings themselves are probably of very high quality so they could make a new mix from the original analog multitracks. It would be amazing to get a mix done completely in the analog domain and then transferred to high-resolution DSD or PCM without any additional mastering.

 

This is the best sounding issue of B2B so far: https://www.discogs....release/9402988

The songs mixed by Elmhirst still sounds like crap, but the rest sounds pretty good, especially those produced by Salaam.

 

btw, I absolutely LOVE how she sounds live

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I do too haha. My favorite performance is Hey Little Rich Girl (Sheperd's Bush) and I regret that they didn't let her keep that sort of vocal style in the studio. I suppose it wouldn't have been as big, as I'll admit that some of her live performances are an acquired taste. I hope it does end up happening though, having a better sounding album. We can only hope

[MingusMonk&Amy]

Actually there appears to be only 2 well-mastered tracks in her official catalog (excluding vinyl): Take The Box from the music video included with the CD Single + Body and Soul from the Bennett Great Performances Bluray.

 

Take The Box - Frank CD

 

Take The Box - LPCM track from music video ("clean" version)

 

 

Body and Soul - Lioness CD

 

Body and Soul - LPCM track from Great Performances Bluray

 

 

I believe everything else is mastered accordingly to the loudness wars philosophy, or does anyone know of more examples like these?

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Well, I'm not very good at telling what this is supposed to mean, but from what I've seen, editing audio and cleaning it up and such, the badly mastered ones are the ones that are all blocky? Not blocks, but just clumped together. 

[MingusMonk&Amy]

Yes, a big block with no peaks or clipped peaks is bad. If you don't understand my post just google "loudness war".

 

This is the regular CD mastering of Rehab which is just one big block: http://images2.image...00959435694.jpg

 

You can see the dynamic range of different releases here: http://dr.loudness-w...inehouse&album=

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Yeah, that's the one I was looking at. Funny how even some of her unreleased snippets sound better than that. How would one fix that though?

[MingusMonk&Amy]

There is no fix. Once the dynamics have been compressed there's no way to get it back. Some of the unreleased songs don't have excessive dynamic range compression, which is why the sound more pleasant and not harsh and aggressive.

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Ouch. I'm gonna try ripping audio from Spotify, and seeing if those versions are better mastered. I just need to figure out how

[MingusMonk&Amy]

The mastering will be the same. If anything it will sound worse. From Spotify you'll get both lossy audio compression and the infamous audible UMG watermarking (see https://www.mattmont...dible-watermark). The watermarking is truly a hideous invention. It's no fun being an audiophile these days...

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Oh that's foul. I've been trying to see how many different releases I can get my hands on. I was hoping to get the Japanese Deluxe vinyl version next week, and it might happen. I'd like to get the white vinyl release (that has the Bumbles Strips remix). Any releases at all. I just hope I can find one that doesn't have that loudness. It's plausible there was a release where Tom was on hiatus, or where the studio he worked at shut down. It can't all be bad

[MingusMonk&Amy]

Tom is not a mastering engineer, he's a mixing engineer. There is only 1 mix available of BtB so there's no way of getting around that. The mastering is a different matter.

If you want the best sounding release with the widest dynamic range this is the one to get: https://www.discogs....release/9402988

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Ah. So there will never be a better quality version of BtB? Or is that still on the table for the future?