My two cents; seems I've managed to miss this entirely up to now...
Re. Yamaha NS-10's : once upon a time, they were the reference, but I've talked to many a musician who felt they were quite midrange-y and didn't like their sound at all. Before choosing my Rose Creek nearfields, I read everything there is to read about studio monitors, especially for the budget I had available. I chose Yamaha MSP-5's, based on the review of an actual sound engineer, who tested them thoroughly and posted a JPG of the sound curve (not the one Yamaha used in their promotion for the MSP-5), which showed that, a little nudge in the low end (around 80-100Hz), the monitors were as flat in response as you would get. Not bad for a budget baffle, methinks. And I can hear exactly what the curve showed : when I started working on them, I had a tendency to downmix the lower frequencies because I though they 'boomed' too much, then wondered where the bass was when I tested my mixes on other gear. After some careful testing with albums and songs I use as an example for me to live up to mix and master wise, I 'put the bass back in', so to speak. Only a certain Herr Blaast thinks I should put in even more.
Overall, I'm happy now with the performance of those MSP-5's. I did work with NS-10's, and Genelecs, and Tannoys; even heard ART's in action when we were recording 'Rvbicon' with Ancient Rites, and I still feel that my wee Yamaha's are contenders, good ones at that. It all comes down to the fact that no matter how neutral your monitors are going to be, they still have their quirks and you have to get used to them and learn how to work with them. Studio monitors are a tool, not mere baffles you listen to music to...
As for the loudness wars... Anyone listen to the new Metallica album and/or mp3's derived thereof? It sounds DISTORTED!! It's not just clipping; no, it is really distorted! I read in a thread on the SOS website the mastering engineer went so far as to disown the record, by publicly announcing the mixes were heavily limited before they even arrived. Moreoever, on his website he posted an image of Death Magnetic, encircled in red with 'FAIL' written next to it. Well, I think it was Rick Rubin who first made me aware of the loudness thing, as Slayer's 'Reign in Blood' was, at the time of first release, louder than anything else out there and, predictably, metalheads worldwide went 'WHOA, dude! That's SO cool! LOUDERRRR!!!'. Yes, I was one of them.
And your ears wouldn't get tired, because that album is so short, it would be over before ear fatigue had the chance to set in.
I find that the albums I keep coming back to, are either mastered carefully (purely soundwise, Tool's 'Lateralus' is a brilliantly mixed and mastered album) or are just taken from the final mix or a master that was only used to round out the sound, not to push the loudness levels to the insanity realm (eg. Mazzy Star's 'Among My Swan', Fields of the Nephilim's 'Elizium' or The God Machine's 'One Last Laugh In A Place Of Dying').
The truly sad thing is that the people buying music these days are so used to everything being louder than everything else (to coin a phrase) that they actually complain if your music isn't loud enough, compared to 'professional bands' (trust me, I've had to swallow that criticism more than once over the years). So it's easy to get overcome by this and join in with the loudness pushing,
because that's what your audience wants and you want your record to sell well. But after a while, you get tired of listening to your own mixes and you'll try to work out a compromise, with varying levels of success.
Basically, for us musicians on this forum who want to do it themselves, it comes down to a couple of rules of thumb :
- Get your feckin' mix right from the start and don't try to fix it in the mastering section. Using the mastering section of your DAW while recording will give you a false image of what you're hearing.
- Take the advice I've read here a couple of times and listen to your mixes - and the premaster, if you are a total DIY nut (like me) - not only through different speakers in your/a studio environment, but in other environments, like bars (you can be surprised how much you'll learn from listening to your mix through a set of bar speakers while there are punters around who don't give a s**t about the musical wallpaper they're aware of somewhat in the background) and car stereos. The latter is indeed a litmus test. I didn't send out the premaster CD of 'Marooned on Samsara' before I had checked it thoroughly on my car speakers, while driving to Cologne and back (meaning : plenty of time to judge the CD's sound under the varying driving conditions I encountered). This should be made compulsary for any budding sound engineer.
- When using a loudness maximizer for mastering (the root of all evil; its name says it all), I use the following standard rule : if the drums/percussion/rhythm samples aren't being limited on their own, you still have plenty of headroom for the other instruments, but you have to factor in that the vocals are in fact the loudest instrument on your recordings (well, not if you're in FGG, of course
), so that you'll have to make sure it gets through without being clipped.
In general, my maximizer settings are brickwalled at -0.1, as absolute zero in digital recording is a big no no and the amount of limiting/expansion can only peak at -3 at any given time, depending on the accuracy of the metering. Is it loud then? Yup. Is it as loud as everything else out there? No. But at least it's not clipping all over the place and hurting your ears. And it'll actually sound good while pleasing the customer, who may notice it's not as loud as Death Magnetic, but she/he'll find she/he can listen to my album for a lot longer than that sorry excuse for a mixed and mastered record (and this while 'DM' is in fact quite a good album musically, compared to the last 15 years worth of albums, but that's for a different thread
)...