[geezer]

....Yeah, I just finished (hopefully) the mastering for a Taj Mahal CD using Wavelab and Waves mastering plugins....The linear phase multiband stuff is very impressive, as is the L2 limiter for the end of the chain.

This was one of a bunch of spinoff CDs from DVDs I've been doing for the last 4 years....All the DVDs end up as 48k/24bit files mixed from multitracks of the same format. It is always a challenge to come up with a good sounding CD at the lower bit rate and alternate sampling freq. I have traditionally done a "one pass" D-A, A-D, hardware mastering and dithering into MTU at 16 bit while monitoring through MTU....This has worked well, but did not allow me to use the plug-ins and process at higher bit rates.

This time around, I had the additional challenge of actually having done all the mixes at 96k in my DM2000. I chose to spend quite a bit of time, therefore, testing various dithering and rounding paths through both MTU and Wavelab......I have, in the past, been fairly suspicious of dithering in general, and have been fairly pleased with MTU's ability to apply some decent math to 24 bit files and bring them down to 16 for CD without dithering.

This whole testing process was truly mind-boggling. I found ultimately that, even though the real time process with the Waves plugins was extremely useful and effective, I could only trust the results after listening to a burned CD through a controlled monitoring setup....I went through literally 40 CDs figuring everything out. The small size of the changes that mattered (often 0.1 db!) was phenomenal.

In the end, I was a little less pleased with the MTU rounding process than I had hoped, though it still does something that no other program does.....The perceived changes in frequency response from the 24 bit file to the burned CD were subtle, but, in this instance, important. The CD did still retain the size and detail of the 24 bit file, though, and some of the ways the rounding responded to dithering, etc., could be useful on other projects.

The biggest problem was that I had to transfer processed files into MTU in real time because no one will tell me how to get these 24bit (actually 32 float, I think) files back into MTU.....A number of users have reported being able to open .sf files in Cool Edit, but no one has told me how to then bring them back into MTU.....This is essential if MTU is to keep any kind of significant place in my operation.

The CD setup in Wavelab is a little less intuitive, but it provides all the options you need (CD Text, Multimode, Hidden Track, etc....) you need to stay totally capable in the modern production environment.