MIX CHALLENGE - MC098 June 2024 - Winners announced

[Mister Fox]

Quick update:
I just handled the license requests from @Michael_K (1st place, IK Multimedia) and @Christoph_K (2nd place, Metric Halo).
Next up is @WrightAudio.

[White Punk OD]

After a few years it does become a little testing to go around in circles. Are headphones ok to use? do we need a headphone amp? can we use a de-esser? are stock plugins ok or do we need to spend £10,000 on ones which say SSL on them? Should we mix loud or soft, what proportion of the time can we mix loud? Can we put loads on the mixbus or should we have hardly anything on the mixbus? If we do not have decent answers for all the questions then we are totally lost.

I enjoy the tech chit-chat, that's what a forum is good for. Less experienced folks and amateurs get a lot of inspiration about what they could try.
It's their task to find out if it works for them.
Those who have their workflow together and optimized, and their business is humming, wouldn't waste their time. Some are philanthropists and share their knowledge.



For the record, and as a topic of engineering, I disagreed about the two guitar tracks.
So, I can give proof of what I did.

This is the original import, magnified to sample accuracy:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1l_zh53 ... drive_link

This is how I shifted one track, to perfectly get rid of phase issues:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Hyy3Uz ... drive_link

It looks like an amount of 5 samples, which came possibly from some systemic latency, and will create no audible timing issue but a very audible change in the sum of the two signals. If my guess was correct, it would amount to 0.1ms in the time domain. If not corrected, this would cancel out 5kHz, right?
The math is based on a sample rate of 48k, which I use for all rendering.

(The different granularity in the display is caused by very different gain)

[Arnwyn]

Well done all and thanks again to the song providers, I don't want to appear ungrateful for all the hard work that you've done to create this opportunity for us to learn.

But...... (Sorry)

I wanted to say one last thing which concerned me because I know a lot of people are trying hard to learn here myself included. We can all have different approaches and sworn methods but in reality, objectively and truthfully there is nothing inherently wrong with a de-esser....

Agreed, there is nothing wrong with a de-esser or any other plug-in, it's more a question of how it is used. Most of the de-essers we heard were giving the vocals a weird lispy edge. We personally prefer not to use them.