TL 5052 For Mastering - Yay or Nay?

[anthonyeq]

Hi all,

first post here although I've been reading through these forums for ages... Just looking at getting a TL Audio 5052 for mastering my own stuff... What I'm after is something with nice tubes, compression, limiter, and eq... Of course its a big ask for $4000AUD but thats what I have to spend... I have been using the TL 5050 for vocals for sometime now and love it.

Any advice on the 5052 bit of kit? I'm sure some of you will swear at me for looking at it :)

Cheers,
Anthony.

[smash]

In Short...

Nay.

In slightly longer...

One of the signifigant points of mastering is to "take you" out of the sound.

More specifically, to adjust for any inherent problems in your final mix that may have been caused by the room, anamolies in your own ears, in the way you mix, etc.

My suggestion would be rather then spending 4K on a box that won't
*necessarily* impove the sound of your mixes, take $250 bucks, and
a single that you have mixed and give it to the company whose name is written across the top of the page in big letters.

I am sure you will be pleasantly supprised with the result.

Smash.

[chris p]

Not to mention that same mastering house has gear that's worth 10 times the value of that $4k and sounds 100s times better, working from the monitors back. I can only ditto what Smash says.

BTW, welcome to the forum Mr AnthonyEQ. As a further hint, do NOT apply any EQ or compression across the final mix before taking it to the mastering house of your choice. The mastering guys are true magicians (if they're any good - yes, RoN, take a bow if you must) at these "across the mix" tweaks.

[Luke Garfield]

Here, here.

Spend your money on something nice on the front end. What are you working with (Besides the other TLA)??

I "master" small projects for clients but I always say to them "I'm just making it a bit louder and stuff". Real mastering is for mastering engineers, which I am not. Go to a mastering engineer (not all mastering engineers are really as they seem either). I trust Rick because of the comments of those who end up listening to the music in the end.

Hope this helps with your decision.

Luke.

[davemc]

Honestly what is your front end like.
There are a lot of other preamps that will make your recordings a lot nicer then the TL Audio stuff.
I would buy a nicer mic, mic preamp, monitors, some acoustic treatment etc etc before I brought something for a mastering chain for home.
Just slap some plugins on it for ideas then take it to a real mastering house for mastering.
The whole home recoridng thing gets me sometimes. It is real cool to get down ideas, do pre-prod, I highly recomend doing your editing at home yourself on your dime after tracking in a studio, then getting down your overdub ideas to either keep or replace when you go back to a studio.
Although they keep getting sucked in to buy X or Y to get better results. Good engineers get results because they have had years of experiance, something you cannot just buy with a peice of rack gear.

Singer last week was asking how she could get the same sort of sound I got for her at home with here be!@#$%^& LDC into her m-audio card.
I said apart from the room is acoustically treated your running a Neumann Valve mic into a API pre then into a Neve compressor. Thats around a $12k channel path and add to that a good room, well its worth a lot of recording sessions with me to you break even. So for your ideas at home just use what you have..

[Peter Knight]

The whole home recoridng thing gets me sometimes. It is real cool to get down ideas, do pre-prod

Pre-Prod? Do you mean Pre-Production? What's that? I don't think the folks over this side of the Nullarbor have heard of it yet.

[davemc]

The whole home recoridng thing gets me sometimes. It is real cool to get down ideas, do pre-prod

Pre-Prod? Do you mean Pre-Production? What's that? I don't think the folks over this side of the Nullarbor have heard of it yet.

Yeah Pre production before you record. That is just plain silly :) You can just cut and paste ideas together so so easy now. he he he

[wez]

Pre-Prod? Do you mean Pre-Production? What's that? I don't think the folks over this side of the Nullarbor have heard of it yet.

i think it used to be called songwriting

[rick]

for a reality check $4k will probably buy you 3 visits for albums at my place so unless your really prolific and its not just your stuff you are mastering , that 4 k would see you good for three years of mastering here at turtlerock and at a level way above anything the tla gear level could deliver.

but you still want to do it yourself right...?
well i understand that

nothing i have ever experienced of the tla gear is worth hanging around with for three years.
so if you want to do it yourself , save a bunch of bucks and buy some plug ins.
or spend a bunch of serious bucks and buy some real mastering gear.

but plan to spend a lot of time figuring out what you really need to do
and time as they say is money

i suspect about 60-70 % of what i do could be done in a computer if i could be arsed figuring which plug ins to use, but its the other 30 % of my mastering time that makes me smile.

dont get caught out buying some junky tube a like box for big bucks
( and 4k is way too much to spend unless its your job)

buy microphones , or preamps or speakers , and just tickle your masters with a computer if its "your own stuff"
if its not just your own stuff
hell yeah that tla box is amazing
go and buy two !

[Jason Dirckze]

$4k on TL Audio? No way... There's a Massive Passive on mixmasters for $4800. You dont even have to touch anything and your audio will sound better!

Cheers,

Jase

[anthonyeq]

ok, so that was a massive chain of replies... Some of you sound almost angry!

Now for those that asked, my studio is comprised of the following:

Big assss P4 with Cubase SX, tonnes of plugs (mastering ones included - Waves L1, L2, L3, Ozone, PSP stuff, Elemental Audio stuff, etc.)
Powercore MkII PCI (Has Master X3 plug-in - Sounds terrible to me)
Delta 1010LT
Neutrik Patchbay
E-Mu Mo' Phatt
Korg Karma
Electrix Filter Factory
Electrix Warp Factory
TL-Audio 5050
Rode NT-1
Neumann TLM193
Dynaudio BM6P's Monitors(ref. amp is alesis - i know, i know, I'm getting a crown soon)

And some other bits and bobs -

Ok, so I got a few good bits of kit, and I suspected the 'all-in-one' TL-5052 solution wouldn't be great, and the confirmation is appreciated... Just curious as to how many people have actually used it and the results they've found with it...

I understand the 'science' of mastering, and I truly appreciate the art-form but is it so totally and utterly unheard of for a mixing engineer to have the ability to master well? This is what I am trying to do... I understand a master can help a bad mix but not save it, I'm not trying to cut corners here... I'd just like to get good at every aspect of the process; mastering included.

The main suggestion here is buy more front-end gear, all good advice, and I'll well consider it. Rick, just out of curiosity, do you ever use Plug-ins? They don't seem to ever sound the same to me as hardware does be they tube emulated plugins, reverbs, compressors or virtual synths.

Just for the record too, I don't do too much live recording... I'm an electronic producer so I mainly create very vocally heavy tracks (rnb, hip hop, dub, drum n' bass etc.) - Sometimes I record guitar, bass and keys too (usually d.i'ed in through the 5050) -

Rick, Andy Stewart might ask you about the TL-5052 as well, I spoke to him about it the other day (I'm one of the review guys from AT Mag).

Thanks again for the help folks!

[rick]

there is nothing too mysterious about being a mastering engineer and knowing the whole part is obviously the best end for any engineer looking for the best result , andy stewart is a good example, he was a good engineer when i met him but mastering was frustrating the hell out of him, and causing him to hate "finishing records" he did one session with me, and then really understood there was another level to it mastering he had not seen before in melbourne, he hung around for a while and even worked for me for a time , he picked up what had taken me years to learn / invent in about a month and was here for about two years , so yes any engineer can be a mastering dude.
andy obviously doesnt work for us anymore, but he still does master records, just not the ones he mixes.
i master those :)
i produce , engineer write and play , so i am far from avocating only specialists should do the job, i figure only the guy that is making everybody feel that the job is being done right should do it, and thats the part that takes the longest to learn in mastering , knowing your doing the right thing to a record, not knowing which box to buy.

and sure i use plug ins , just not the ones you would expect or in the way you would expect , the same way i use the boxes really i am way past caring if something sounds like the real thing, i cannot, it doesnt have to and in the end who cares? , does it sound good ... well thats the mission right?
TLA tread a very fine line between good workable stuff and hyped audio junk in my books