posted 02 June 2006 04:38            

David's mastering patches posted over at the Twiki are really very unique mastering tools and I am interested in working with them in real mastering situations - but I have a couple of issues with these two otherwise fantastic designs...

I am posting here in the hope that Mr McClain might respond, but if any others have experience the same, maybe we can figure it out...

The Crescendo Enhancer can sound amazing on most material, but when used on more stripped down material that features bass sounding on its own, like Minimal Techno , or a double bass recording, you hear the enhancer as a constant kind of ring modulation over the bass frequencies. By bringing down the !Intensity , it is less present, but then you get less Spectral Enhancement when higher frequency sounds kick into the mix.

I put the parameters !LowerLimit and !NoiseFloor back into the VCS , in an attempt to combat this undesired effect, and in a way it works, but I don't really understand if I am messing up the whole sound by doing this. David, maybe a roll off below 150hz, before doing the FFT and then recombining the enhanced spectrum with the unenhanced rolled off portion? I tried this, but I am unsure about how much delay is being introduced in the FFT analysis and re-analysis.

With the silky-smooth Super EQ , I would love to use it more, but I have had these frightening overloads when the disk-file material going through it contains any type of very fast transient peaks. Even by bringing the !Gain down to 0db, so i'm sure its not a peak from a gain boost , it seems to happen, which would suggest the filters are overloading - could this be due to the cascading of HPF? If so, how can it be attenuated, without losing overall level?