compare these mastering samples!

ok... months ago i posted a lament about how the mastering samples i'd gotten back from the places to which i sent my music were awful, but...

this summer i thorougly remixed the music and sent it off to some studios in the next higher price range, and these samples sound incredible compared to everything else i'd gotten back (i can't detect any unnatural limiting on these, it's real nice)
now i'm down to these two: the mastering house and diamond disc audio,
and i can't decide which sample is better.. they each have different qualities i like, so anywho, here they are, please listen and let me know what you think

they'll take a while to download unfortunately because in order to maintain quality, i've posted them as wav files (though they're each about 40 seconds long)

http://www.angelfire.com/band3/jdawgs_music/mastering_house.wav

http://www.angelfire.com/band3/jdawgs_music/diamondisc.wav

these have both been slightly processed in sonar to get rid of their worst qualities and knowing that i would request from whoever i go with that they apply the processing that i applied

for the mastering house sample i applied a high shelf to cut 3 db up above 10khz (tom from the mastering house prefaced this sample saying he thought the cymbals were too loud, so i think i've done what he would do on another pass at it anyhow)
for the diamond sample, i used the sonitus multiband to compress the bass guitar a bit, otherwise it was way too bumpy, especially compared to the other sample

i'll reserve my comments so that they don't bias anyone, but hopefully i'll get a bunch of opinions that are all very strong in one direction (well, that's wishful thinking i know) cuz right now, i just can't decide

From what I can hear, using a pair of low quality pc monitors:
The one from Mastering house seems a little bit louder, yet it also sounds a little bit muddier than the one from Diamondisc.
I'd prefer Diamondisc because of what sounds to be a better and more transparent sonic image.

ORIGINAL: jmartinson

What equipment did you use & how did you record the vocals?

thanks for the opinions, keep em coming!

as for equipment, we recorded electric guitar (sm57), acoustic guitar (direct using taylor expression system), a cheap set of 5 drum mics on drums and an sm58 on the snare all the aardvark pro q10 all at once

all the guitar overdubs were done again with sm57, as was the bass (i recorded it since the band hasn't had a bassist in over a year)

that was all done in a carpeted dead sounding room... the vocals though were done in the thin hallway of my dorm.. it was a carpeted floor but a long hall with really hard walls, i didn't add any reverb to the vox during mixing at any point, all it's verb comes from that recording environment, and oh yeah, the vox were recorded with this mic http://bayviewproaudio.com/M20-p-17819.html it's a "cascade" large diaphragm condenser... when i bought the aardvark from bayview, i got the mic for free... not a bad deal

I got a message saying angelfire does not allow deep linking and then a pop up for a casino appeared.

;)

Got any proper space?

Kind regards

Dave Rich

Angelfire does not allow direct linking
from offsite, non-Angelfire pages,
to files hosted on Angelfire.

This practice of 'remote linking' reduces
our ability to serve out the homepages
of our members quickly and efficiently

Please use some service like soundclick, it's free and easy

well, i don't have any "proper" webspace... i have some friends who used this, so i went with it...
the remote linking works for some folks, not for others.. but you can go to the original website here http://www.angelfire.com/band3/jdawgs_music/
and click on the links to the files there...
though right now the site is running really slowly... maybe people are downloading to help me out? i hope

anywho, if you think there's a big difference between those two samples, you should hear the other 3 i got- they were absolutely awful with no bass anywhere and extremely audible limiting... so, these two are the two that i found useable

as for the mix, i spent for ever on this mix! i even let it sit for 5 months while i was in paris, then i came back started all over again... i'm still learnin, but this is the closest i've come to sounding like something real, but still, i'm definitely not a pro

DiamondDisc. Although, I wouldn't have said the mastering was much better than what could be achieved with Sonar plugins and/or Adobe Audition or SoundForge. Probably their listening environment and skill is superior to yours, but that doesn't seem to make up for less care, patience, devotion and time. Is there any basis for assuming that paying them would improve the result a little?

Thanks for posting those. Very interesting to hear.

ORIGINAL: Antifreeze


DiamondDisc. Although, I wouldn't have said the mastering was much better than what could be achieved with Sonar plugins and/or Adobe Audition or SoundForge. Probably their listening environment and skill is superior to yours, but that doesn't seem to make up for less care, patience, devotion and time. Is there any basis for assuming that paying them would improve the result a little?

Thanks for posting those. Very interesting to hear.

well i was wondering the same thing... but seeing as how i hear so many people tell me to have someone else master it, i went with that as my main reason for having someone else do it...
also, while mixing, i worked as best as i could to go with the idea that i shouldn't rely on mastering... that i should make it sound as good as possible during mixing, then the mastering engineer, with different ears, would work to make up for an imperfect mix- even though i tried to make it perfect, so i felt like i had gone as far as i could with it...

also, since we aren't a professional band and don't really need to keep any money we make off playing music, we're putting all the money from preorders for the cd and from a few gigs into paying for it.... so it's not a lot of money out of our pockets

and, i did give up on soundclick after i realised they would want me to pay for anything more than 128kbps mp3s (i don't even like listening to regular cds ripped all the way down to 128kbps, let alone use such a poor format to compare something like mastering samples)

ORIGINAL: Grünfeld

ORIGINAL: tunakdude
..i'll go check out soundclick

I'm not sure Soundclick would be much use for what you want to do here because they only permit mp3 uploads and unless you're paying the maximum quality is 128 kbps.


Oli

It's actually 10 songs for free.
Well folks... I didn't have any problem checking out the wave files. Wierd.