Nowadays, there are so many ways of ‘seeing’ what is going on with your music. DAW’s are packed with spectrograms, VU meters and most mixing consoles come standard with some form of meter. Should you be looking at pre, post or current levels? What are they used for? How can I use them? I think most of us would be confused by it all. To begin with, one must understand what a decibel is.

Mastering is the final creative step in audio production. Simply put, creating the part (such as a CD-R master disc, or correctly encoded digital audio file) necessary for manufacturers or digital music distributors to make duplicates or replicas of the work.
 

We often get asked to convert people’s beloved albums to some form of digital format. The conversion itself is quite easy. Making it sound good is the hard part. The first thing you have to consider is the music on the vinyl has already been mastered for that specific record. So the last thing you want to do as an engineer is add more compression or effects. So, what kind of equipment are you using?

Let’s first start by talking about what SPDIF is. SPDIF, also known as Sony Phillips Digital Interface, is a protocol connection for carrying digital audio signals between two devices. The two companies got together and developed a standard with the IEC so that different manufacturer components could be linked without signal degradation.