Just a few quations

[liquid beats]

im thinking about getting a couple of my tracks put on vynil but because i have no idea about eq compression etc im not sure if i can do it, i always cut my low end before i boost it in cubase sx, but i dont use monitors so im not sure how things sound, even tho people have heard my stuff and says it sounds ok i might get some of my stuff mastered by someone who knows what there doing

i use reason 2.5 and there has been a few comments about the sound quality issue with this product, just wondered if youve had any experiences mastering tunes made with this software and how it turned out specially as reason exports the audio at low levels and leaves the mix a little bit muddy,?

[Lorenz @ XARC Mastering]

Hi Liquid Beats,

thank you for your interest. I have some clients that use Reason for the production of their music and so far I haven´t experienced/heard problems that shield back directly to the software itself. In most cases it is problems which would occur on any software / equipment / mixing console and are more "errors" of the production/mix itself, like non-optimal use of EQ, the available stereo-image on the individual tracks of the mix and the general choice of sounds.

Since I prelisten to any supplied mixes before any work is started, I often give a few tips in this cases about how to improve the mix first before mastering it, which ultimately also leads to better results for the mastering and my work later on. So just in case there should be something wrong with your mix, I will let you know this and we can then decide how to continue from there until we are ready for the mastering.

Some generic recommendations are:

- always export at the highest bit depth possible (in most cases this should be 24bit or 32bit floating point)

- export at the sample rate you did the mix at, but in case you are using a lot of software synthesizers (especially older ones which don´t use antialiasing or oversampling) export at a higher sample rate like 88,2kHz or 96kHz. The reason for this is that any hearable aliasing artifacts from these instruments will be moved out of the hearable range through this and these artifacts will be virtually eliminated when I do the downsampling later on. However, please take care if you use software EQ´s or compressors, since some of them can behave *very* different at different sample rates, especially in the low-end area because of the nature of the various mathematic implementations of the filters.

- remove any processing from master buss except it is creative processing like a reverb or other effects of this kind.

- make sure the master buss is not clipping and leave a headroom of
about 2dB to 0dBFS.


Please let me know if I can do anything else for you or if you have any other questions, I would be glad to help.

Thank you very much and best regards,
Lorenz