Mastering represents the final and important touch to perfection in music production. It is an important step to successful production, because even the best musical performance is not a listening pleasure by poor mastering.
Easy to understand, competent and entertaining
To help audio engineers and amateur recordists with prior knowledge become unbeatable masters in their field, Bob Katz's Mastering Audio explains not only the processes and art of mastering, but also technical basics to cover the entire field. Written in an understandable and exciting manner, you'll learn everything you need to know to produce a successful record, including
Preparations and prerequisites
Numerous processing techniques
The contrast of mixing and mastering
Advanced compression and equalization techniques for all styles of music
The song order of an album
PQ encoding
New insights into high sample rates
Important information about levels, monitor systems, room calibration and acoustics
Optimizing an album for broadcast transmission
Numerous positive reviews confirm the high level of competence in conveying the content, the high level of technical understanding as well as the excellent translation from English.
Carstensen Publishing Mastering Audio Contents:
Credits and Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
Part I: Preparations
Chapter 1 No Mastering Engineer is an Island
Chapter 2 Making Connections - Cabling
Chapter 3 An O(h)rientation Session
Chapter 4 Word Length(s) and Dither
Chapter 5 Decibels: Not(s) for Dummies
Chapter 6 Monitor Quality
Part II: Mastering Techniques
Chapter 7 Putting together an album
Chapter 8 Techniques for Using Equalizers
How to profitably manipulate the dynamic range for fun
Chapter 9 Part I: Macrodynamics
Chapter 10 Part II: Down Processors
Chapter 11 Part III: The Forgotten Techniques
Chapter 12 Noise Reduction
Chapter 13 Top Processors
Part III: Advanced Theory and Practice
Chapter 14 How to make better sound recordings in the 21st century
Chapter 15 The Monitor System
Chapter 16 Other mastering techniques
Color section
Chapter 17 Analogue and Digital Processing
Chapter 18 How to Achieve Depth and Spatiality in Recording, Mixing, and Mastering
Chapter 19 Surround Mastering
Chapter 20 High sampling rates - is this the answer?
Chapter 21 Jitter - we separate the fairy tales from the mysteries
Chapter 22 Technical tips and advice
Part IV: Conclusion
Chapter 23 Education, education, education
Part V: Appendix
Appendix 1 Radio-Ready: the truth
Appendix 2 The Tower of Babel - audio file formats
Appendix 3 How to prepare tapes and files for mastering
Appendix 4 Premastering for Vinyl
Appendix 5 Logs and labels for tapes, discs and packages
Appendix 6 Conversion tables
Appendix 7 In the throes of speed
Appendix 8 I need space
Appendix 9 Footnotes to the K-System
Appendix 1 Bibliography, CDs for Equipment Testing and Ear Training