Hardware rig for mastering

The Lounge Other Gear
#8

if you wanna improve the sound of you mixes for a budget of 1000 Euros, I recommend two options:

  1. buy a really good headphone like the Beyerdynamic 1990 or a sennheiser 800s, where you can listen very closely to every nuance of your mix.

  2. improve the acoustics of the room you mix in (if you havent done already). So you need to measure the frequency response of your room, place absorbers on the walls near the monitors and diffusors in the back. For equalizing room nodes, a dbx driverack pa2 might come in handy. But it can only equalize the frequencies for one sweet spot.

this should help you to listen and improve the sound of your mixes, so you can make better judgements.

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#9

I think Mastering is best left in the box. If you are printing your master to your daw, then you can’t change it later. Pro mastering will use high end converters to play the music through thousands of dollars of gear and record back into high end converters. You aren’t going to be able to find one peice of legit Mastering Hardwarre for under a thousand bucks and realistically you are going to need a at lest 5 peices of 3000$ gear, sick monitors and acoustic treatment. Mastering ITB can get you way more bang for you buck, is totally legitimate and you can save and edit your master instead of printing it. If you are just looking for a way to make your master output of hardware gear sound nicer, grab a heat!!!

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#10

If that’s the case, then I’m covered. I got a great set of cans and sharp ears. I won’t change my room, since I work in my living room and my wife will kill me if I do, so it is what it is. Also, I’m pretty good looking. Hardly relevant, but I don’t miss an opportunity to say it, if I may.

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#11

if you cant change your room, give the dbx driverack pa2 a try, it will greatly enhance the frequency response of your monitors.

#12

Must.resist.temptation.to.inappropriately.respond.to.cans.and.wife.reference. Sorry, I’m terribly bored today…

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#13

Well you need at least a compressor and an eq.
I would prefer tube driven devices. Have a look at this eq and the HCL varis:

#14

Ooh. Not bad. Will check it out. Thanks for the tip.

#15

You’re welcome!

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#16

The AH is a good starting point… I’m sure, although I don’t have on at the moment (December target). The next gear will be an Elysia Xpressor as an end of chain.

It’s expensive of course… but as someone who don’t like daws this is a versatile option. Think about it… later on buy a hw-eq… just step by step.

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#17

expensive answer: 500 series rack with some choice eq/comp/preamps and a nice a A/D converter -> lunchbox with elysia xpressor/xfilter/nvelope (i use this hope to get an nvelope in the future)
less expensive answer: a good multi channel interface for tracking with a nice set of plugins -> uad apollo would be my biased suggestion :slight_smile:
something within your budget: analog heat!

if I had the analog heat as an option a couple years ago when I invested heavily into this stuff I would have definitely purchased one before anything else. This with ableton and some plugins would be more than enough to make some really nice tracks.

2 Likes
#18

For 1000 euros your money would really be best spent on monitors, at that price point SW is going to do a much better job than HW.

If you had a bit more money I second the Elysia 500 series stuff (disclosure - I have done some video work for them), but it has a clean, powerful sound which might go against wanting stuff to be a bit of a mess.

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#19

I don’t like participating in conversations regarding Mastering because they’ve been pretty contentious for me, but I think finding a hardware compressor you like to work with will help get you far. For something that can be transparent and highly flexible, the Elysia Xpressor sounds like a good choice. I have my eye on an SPL clone myself, but the multi-band compressor from Drawmer (1973) caught my attention as well. A lot of these compressor have certain characteristics that may or may not be appealing, and this is highly subjective and dependent upon the music as well. It’s a ton of fun for me to research different compressor, and listen to all the demos I can find. You could add EQ, saturation, all types of goodies, etc, but these can be taken care of at the source when mixing as well.

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#20

Think I’m gonna give the Heat a run, see how far I can go with that first. Sounds like an attractive place to start.

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#21

Hmm, there are good options in the box for just EQ and some compression + limiting (especially since it often end up there for final limiting anyways).

That said, some outboard for tone, saturation might still be desirable. Something like a heat, finalizer or fat man might give something itb can’t. But maybe its not that important to get analog saturation type of sound if your source is noisy as is, but that’s up to you.

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#22

For ITB, according to Izotope - all you need is Ozone 7 Elements - choose a preset target - adjust three sliders - done. Yours for 99 Euro and no extra cables and boxes to annoy the wife. Also has “good looking” mode, maybe.

Worth a punt before you splash 1000?

2 Likes
#23

Yeah $1000 won’t go far with hardware.
Definitely stay in the box for mastering duties

1 Like
#24

I’m pretty sure OP wants hardware though. Besides Ozone, I also like Voxengo Elephant if you do convert to digital format and want to give it a final squashing.

#25

https://store.izotope.com/store?Action=DisplayPage&Locale=en_US&SiteID=izotope&id=QuickBuyCartPage

Is this all i need? Ozone 7 and neutron for ITB?

#26

For mastering you don’t need Neutron as Ozone does most of what it does, but Neutron is quite nice for mix buses.

1 Like
#27

Thanks. I will just get ozone standard.