revisiting this thread.. and taking a step back to view the bigger picture.
Sorry for drifting off topic, but EQ has been something of a touchy subject for me. It's a bias that goes back to my analog taping days when EQ was frowned upon because it wasn't considered "pure" to do anything except hook a pair of high end Nak, Denon, or HK cassette decks together and making as close to an exact copy as possible with the master tape. Dolby was another sensitive subject as some believed in decoding on the playback deck being copied from, and others (myself included) followed the logic that if the master was encoded in Dolby, all subsequent copies should be made with Dolby turned off, since the encoding still passes through to the copy. But I digress.....EQ was something I felt made a recording tailored to the playback system of the person doing it, and that may sound terrible on another person's system.
Today I only use EQ for a recording that is almost unlistenable without it due to extreme bass, or muffled highs. I'm sure many recordings I've made would benefit from some very light EQ that would translate on any playback system. There are tapers that EQ almost every recording they make with great results. I just can't seem to get the old taper in me to make that part of my standard workflow.....oh well..
This is astute and totally reasonable.
In my way of thinking we should at least conceptually split any corrections made into three separate stages:
The first is whatever corrections we would like to make for the microphones themselves and the way they are mounted. That shouldn't change from recording to recording as long as the recording setup remains the same and that's what this thread is about. Once determined, it can be applied by rote, to get us to our "base-line-good" response of the recording setup without a lot of corrective effort each time. I look at these corrections no differently than the choice of what microphone or mic setup to use, or where to setup in the venue. These are setup questions and setup corrections.
The second stage is the mixing stage were we correct things specific to each particular recording, making subjective decisions about what sounds best. There are two sub-parts to this one- the first is fixing obvious glitches and problems. It not glamorous or fun, it's just getting to a problem free starting point. The rest is the more creative part, and mostly about making it sound as good as possible on our own monitoring system. Maybe we aren't doing anything here but leaving it alone, fading and tracking. Maybe we are normalizing, maybe mixing two pairs of mics, maybe doing a SBD/AUD matrix, maybe doing some EQ, dynamics manipulation, stereo-processing or whatever. Separating the first step from this one makes this subjective/creative step faster, easier, more enjoyable. This is stuff specific to each recording rather than the setup used to record it.
The third stage is the mastering stage. This is where things relate to the outside world. This is where decisions need to be made concerning making the recording sound good for everybody else, not just yourself at home. It concerns how others will listen. This one is quite tricky. It requires very truthful monitoring so that the recording will translate correctly to other systems, as well as truthful listening. Its also in someways destined to failure from the start- Do we want full range live concert dynamics which might only be appreciated on a big playback system? Do we want less dynamics suitable for listening in the car or otherwise on the go? Will it sound good on a tiny blue-tooth speaker, earbuds, in the Ford Focus as well as the Lexus, on the big home theater with a subwoofer as well as the clock radio? Well, each of those situations ideally requires different mastering choices. Format and distribution questions come into play here as well- FLAC, mp3, and for some like me, 2-channel stereo or multichannel audio.
It's that third mastering step I'm posting about here today, mostly because I can't find the other thread I'd started about these opposite-end-of-the-chain corrections which is where this post really belongs. In that thread we were talking about releasing the raw legacy file (thus preserving the raw master warts and all) along with a corrective "difference file" which when combined with the original would apply all our corrections. Various corrective files could be made, used and chosen from, acting like different mixes or remasters. New versions could be made and applied to the original recording at any time. Problem is that each corrective difference file ends up taking up as much space as a new mix, so in the end we don't really save any storage space. Instead we can just store the original file along with each edited version like we do now, which is better because it eliminates the need to recombine them at the listening end. We only need the edited version to hear what we want. So the idea although conceptually attractive becomes less compelling in reality. But if instead of a full-sized difference file we could just store metadata along with the raw recording describing how we mixed it, what EQ settings and dynamics manipulations and whatever else we applied to it, we could basically do that without a big storage hit. The key I think is to only apply that to the mastering stage stuff, not the mixing stage stuff. We aim to make it sound as good as possible in a no-compromise situation, then the end listener can apply whatever mastering option works for their particular listening situation. Full dynamics for home, squashed for the gym/subway-commute, whatever. I would require some processing overhead at the player, EQ, compression, etc, as instructed by the metadata.
This video made me think about this again-
https://youtu.be/KHzD-fR2XUw?t=54m5s The link points about 54 minutes into a Triangulation 221 podacast interview with Mark Waldrep of AIX records (he operates a label specializing in High Resolution recording) who talks a bit about the potential of this kind of flexible metadata mastering approach. At first they are talking about re-mixing by the listener (which is solidly within the mixing stage of the 3 stages I've outlined), but they both acknowledge that not many listeners are interested in doing that although it's fun to play around with a few releases where that's possible (Todd Rundgren, Trent Reznor). The bigger potential is one release which is adapted by the player to the listening situation, environment, and system. Then one release can be adapted to work everywhere. Preserving the raw master lineage in our case.
I haven't played further with the mic-setup correction stage this thread is intended to discuss, but plan to do so in the future.