Broadcast Audio mastering/Post-production

[SPZ]

Dear all,

I've been working in a song in the very consumerish program Garageband. Funny thing is, I have logic, Soundtrack pro and even FCP for audio, but used Garageband for recording due to the ease of use. Now I have a wonderfull track, but I have a problem: it sounds very different with my studio monitor headphones vs the DVD.

What I would like to know is if there's such a thing as a "Broadcast Safe" audio filter to avoid bleeding bass, for example, or for a very uniform sound, ready for broadcast? Everything was recorded with a Neumann KMR 81, which was absolutely fantastic, by the way!

Please take into consideration I work on a Mac and have access to the software I mentioned above.

Cheers, and looking forward for your help!

 

[Steve House]

Dear all,

I've been working in a song in the very consumerish program Garageband. Funny thing is, I have logic, Soundtrack pro and even FCP for audio, but used Garageband for recording due to the ease of use. Now I have a wonderfull track, but I have a problem: it sounds very different with my studio monitor headphones vs the DVD.

What I would like to know is if there's such a thing as a "Broadcast Safe" audio filter to avoid bleeding bass, for example, or for a very uniform sound, ready for broadcast? Everything was recorded with a Neumann KMR 81, which was absolutely fantastic, by the way!

Please take into consideration I work on a Mac and have access to the software I mentioned above.

Cheers, and looking forward for your help!

What do you mean by it sounds different in the headphones versus the DVD? How are you playing the DVD? Part of what you're hearing may well be due in part to doing your mix on headphones rather than studio monitor speakers. Phones are fine for evaluating takes and editing but should never be used for mixing as the sound spectrum and tonal balance they produce is very different from what you get with speakers.

The "uniform broadcast sound" comes about by applying fairly heavy compression to the final mix but it comes with a price in loss of dynamic range. Since dynamics are part of the expressive nature of music I, for one, don't particularly care for the result but it seems to be the norm in popular music today.

 

[Humanwire]

You should never be mixing and adjusting the sound of anything in headphones. They skew your mix completely. You should only use headphones for general editing of sounds, or picking out fine details (such as in dialogue editing). You should be working with monitors/speakers whenever possible to know what it really sounds like. Even then, make sure to take your song/film and listen to it on a few other systems, such as your living room TV, your home theatre system, and maybe even your car stereo. While doing that, make notes on how to adjust the mix of your song/film, such as adjusting the bass, the dynamics, the clarity of the mix (being able to hear everything you want to hear clearly), and not letting things get muddy and hard to hear, especially on the crummy, low end systems. There is no special filter EQ plugin that fixes this. It is the mixers job to do this. :thumbup:

 

[SPZ]

Those headphones cost me an arm and a leg- you hear absolutely everything in them...

Yes, my main concern goes to the dinamic range of the audio. While some speakers "hear"my bass line, for example, other completely distort it, making it terrible. Normaly I work with electronic loops and prerecorded wav/aif files, so this hasn't been much of an issue for me untill now, where we did live performing and are avoiding elctronic loops everyway possible.

Thanks for the answers. I was expecting a easy way out, but it seems it has to be done the hard way.

 

[Steve House]

Those headphones cost me an arm and a leg- you hear absolutely everything in them...

Yes, my main concern goes to the dinamic range of the audio. While some speakers "hear"my bass line, for example, other completely distort it, making it terrible. Normaly I work with electronic loops and prerecorded wav/aif files, so this hasn't been much of an issue for me untill now, where we did live performing and are avoiding elctronic loops everyway possible.

Thanks for the answers. I was expecting a easy way out, but it seems it has to be done the hard way.

It's not that there's anything wrong with your headphones. The problem lies in the way ALL headphones communicate sound to your ears. It's the physics of sound, not any quality issues with your headphones, that's the culprit. Because of that the balance of bass and highs that you hear in your phones will be totally different from what you'll hear on speakers. The position of the instruments on the stereo stage will be different. Some problems such as phasing issues that become apparent when the material is played on speakers will be totally absent when played on phones. Take a favourite song from a well-mastered CD and play it with both methods. You'll hear a dramatic difference.