Mastering

Frank Zappa produced a vast amount of recorded material during his career, often pushing both his musicians and the technology of the day to extremes. The task of editing, mixing and archiving these recordings is being undertaken by his son Dweezil, with the help of some cutting-edge computing hardware.

I've read that the SACD format uses a 1-bit word length throughout. Why is this the case, and how does it yield higher audio quality than standard 16-bit CDs?

Harbal enables you to shape the EQ of your mastered mixes to match any reference track, and by compensating for the loudness changes involved in doing so, it provides a truly neutral means of comparing the original and the treated master.

The biggest music technology manufacturer in the world has stuck to hardware — until now. Do Yamaha's first plug-in processors have what it takes to compete with the big names in Mac and Windows software?

I had four tracks transferred to vinyl and told the pressing plant to do any necessary EQ'ing required. I got the test pressings back and found them to be very harsh in the upper frequencies when compared to my CD master. Should I get my tracks professionally mastered for vinyl next time?