Regular and Audiophile Mastering?

So it’s starting to happen! Tomorrow Trent Reznor’s new Nine Inch Nails “Hesitation Marks” album comes out and he’s offering it in a variety of formats including an “audiophile mastered version”. What does this mean? It means that in addition to the heavily processed and dynamically flattened CD and iTunes versions there will be download version that retains more of the dynamics.

This is how they put it on their web site:

“Hesitation Marks was mastered in two different ways – the standard, ‘loud’ mastering (which is what you’ll find on the CD, on iTunes, and everywhere else), and also an alternate ‘audiophile’ mastering, which we’re offering as a free download option for anyone who purchases the album through nin.com. For the majority of people, the standard version will be preferable and differences will be difficult to detect. Audiophiles with high-end equipment and an understanding of the mastering process might prefer the alternate version.

Alan Moulder, who mixed the album, offers a more detailed explanation:

When we were mixing Hesitation Marks we decided to treat the mastering process in a slightly different way to the usual. Since we had tried to treat every other aspect of making this record differently to how we were used to, it seemed to make sense. We were mixing as we went along with the production of each song rather than at the end, so we thought that once we had a song pretty close we would send it off to Tom Baker, our long time serving mastering engineer, to give it some mastering treatment. Normally you wait until the record is finished being recorded and mixed, then take all the mixes to mastering. But we thought doing it again, as we went along, might make us push the process further and spend more time on mastering rather than rush through it at the end. Whilst doing this we became aware of how much low bass information there was on the record. Since that can define how loud of a level the mastering can be, we were faced with a dilemma: do we keep the bass and have a significantly lower level record, or do we sacrifice the bass for a more competitive level of volume? The biggest issue in mastering these days tends to be how loud can you make your record. It is a fact that when listening back-to-back, loud records will come across more impressively, although in the long run what you sacrifice for that level can be quality and fidelity. So after much discussion we decided to go with two versions. On the main release Tom did exceptional work to maintain the integrity of our mixes and reproduce the low end as much as possible and still get a decent level, although it’s still nowhere as loud as a lot of modern records. The Audiophile Mastered Version is more true to how the mixes sounded to us in the studio when we were working on the songs. Have a listen, turn up the volume and enjoy the experience!
Mastering Engineer Tom Baker adds:

I believe it was Trent’s idea to master the album two different ways, and to my knowledge it has never been done before.
The standard version is ‘loud’ and more aggressive and has more of a bite or edge to the sound with a tighter low end.
The Audiophile Mastered Version highlights the mixes as they are without compromising the dynamics and low end, and not being concerned about how ‘loud’ the album would be. The goal was to simply allow the mixes to retain the spatial relationship between instruments and the robust, grandiose sound.”

Well, first my hat is off to Trent and his production team for trying this “two versions” idea with their new release. I can tell you the contrary to Tom Baker’s assertion that it has never been done before…it has. I’ve been doing this since 2000 on every record I’ve released on AIX Records. Not only do I put a “mastered” version on iTunes and a “non-mastered” version on our HD discs but I provide three different mixes of each track (and this is without mentioning the Headphones[xi]® versions ). This is what I refer to as “personalized music delivery”.

The idea of providing a downloadable file that avoids the heavy mastering and dynamics squashing that occurs in the world of pop/rock commercial albums is a major step in the right direction. I really hope that we’ll see more of these.

I would like to think that perhaps I had a little influence on Trent’s decision. He was here at the AIX Studios about 18 months ago and we got talking after he finished the thing he was doing with Dr. Dre’s Beats headphones. I told him about the kinds of records that I had been making and how we leave the real world dynamics in the tracks that we release. We talked for about 20 minutes and I think he was impressed with some of the things I was saying. I look forward to connecting with him again…maybe I can get him to let me create real HD-Audio mixes in full 5.1 surround of the new project! That would be fun.

When the record comes out tomorrow, I’ll get a copy of the CD and the “audiophile” track and do my usual analysis. It should prove interesting.