Article Preview - Creating Your Own Reference CD

Whenever you need to troubleshoot routing or evaluate processing in any detail, it's really useful to have a set of known technical and musical test signals on hand. You could carry around a test-tone generator, a selection of your favourite CDs, and some WAVs of solo instrument and voice recordings for the purpose, but many working engineers prefer to consolidate all the things they normally need onto a single disc — often referred to as a 'reference CD' — for the sake of convenience. Of course, there are some useful commercial reference CDs available, such as the Court/Parsons 'Sound Check 2' test CD (), and Canford's own 'Quick Check Disc' (), but there are good reasons to compile your own: the contents of any two different engineers' reference CDs may bear little resemblance to one another, because each engineer will have different needs. That makes it difficult to decide what to include when putting one together for yourself for the first time, so in this article I'm going to be discussing the main options to try to clarify the process a little.

The feature reference CDs most frequently have in common is that they include a selection of the engineer's favourite commercial mixes, which are used when mixing to provide a benchmark of excellence for comparison purposes. It's very easy for your ears to start playing tricks on you when you've been working on a mix for a while, and mix references (as these tracks are often called) are one of the most powerful tools available to the engineer to keep the sound on the straight and narrow, so that it can compete with commercial mixes.

But what tracks should you use? The selection of mix references is a topic which seems regularly to exercise the SOS Forum (), and if you're looking for suggestions it's certainly worth searching for threads on this subject. I've also found that when you have a few tracks you like, seeking out other productions from the same mix engineer can be very fruitful. However, there are also a few more sources which can be handy, not least the list of tracks that Hugh Robjohns provided when discussing this subject in SOS September 2003 ().

Probably the best-known list of reference tracks is called the 'Honour Roll', it can be found on the web site of mastering engineer Bob Katz (), and it lists over 70 albums in all styles. Even if you haven't read his excellent book Mastering Audio, a quick browse around the site should quickly reveal that Bob is a leading figure in the fight against over-loud 'hypercompressed' CDs — so (without embarking on that whole debate here) you do need to bear this in mind when looking at the Honour Roll. If, for whatever reason, you need your mixes to compete on an equal footing with typical, heavily processed modern commercial records, you may find these tracks of limited use for mix referencing.

As handy as any of these resources are in highlighting tracks worth investigating, my firm opinion is that the only decent way to select mix references is by giving the process a proper slice of your time. This means vetting suitable tracks from your record collection as methodically as you can, on a variety of different listening systems: compare them side by side to knock out the lesser contenders. If this sounds like a drag, let me tell you a story that might help to change your mind...

When I first started mixing, I quickly felt the need for mix references to help me stay objective about what I was doing, so I selected a couple of dozen tracks (as many as I could fit onto a CD) that I felt sounded really good. Fast forward a few years to a point where I began to feel that this CD was getting out of date, because I'd come across new tracks I felt sounded better than some of those I'd previously selected.

At this point I...