Far be it from me to doubt the fact checking of the NY Times, but... I'm pretty sure the sound enhancer isn't applied to burned CDs. It's only applied to playback of tracks. (I think.)

Which doesn't mean that Ry Cooder couldn't have rigged it up to run his songs through in the mastering process, but I don't think he could have initially heard the effect by playing a burned CD in his car CD player.

This has Eddie Bernays' finger prints all over it.

Mark -- that is an extremely cool point. That makes total sense! Maybe Cooder was just experiencing a placebo effect!

Tony, heh.

Hey Mark, I think you're right - Sound Enhancer isn't applied as far as I can tell, but another feature called 'Sound Check' *is* - which adjusts all output to a similar level, which I'm assuming is calculated based on the RMS level of the music in question. So he's hearing *something* that iTunes is imparting onto his tracks. I'm just not sure what that is, other than possibly outright gain reduction on the louder tracks!

"Couldn't get it to sound right"?



ay yi yi.



The headline "Commercial Album Mastered Using iPod" is on the same level of silly as "Dinosaur Resurrected Using iPod" or "iPod Transports Man Into Parallel Dimension".



No. Didn't happen.



Mastering an album for commercial release is an amazingly complicated process, requiring lots of expensive equipment and a professional sound engineer who really knows what they are doing. The idea of running the entire studio mix through a teensy little 16 bit iPod (I guess using the analog 1/8" mini jack?) with the "maximizer" engaged is...is...is...breathtakingly ridiculous. It's like hooking up a little honda generator to a particle accelerator, or duct-taping bottle rockets to the outside of the space shuttle. Even the most outrageous hyperbole cannot overstate the mismatch. Really.



Steve's PR folks know that a critical mass of people know essentially nothing about how commercial albums are made, and that this preposterous story they planted would take hold in the blogsphere and (hopefully) make it a couple rungs up towards the mainstream (Yahoo! being the champagne popper).



Clever, innovative, bold...and I'm sure got the 26 year old who thought of it a gold star.



But, unfortunately, 100% false.

eep. Sorry about the extra line breaks in the above post. I'm a noob.

Nails, you minsunderstand - he's not putting the mixes through an *iPod*, but *iTunes*, the accompanying software, which can handle plenty of file formats up to high bitrate and sample rates. Basically he's loading his 24 bit outputs from his DAW into iTunes and hitting 'play' and iTunes applies some psychoacoustic processing to the file, that's what he's hearing. Not unlike a BBE Sonic Maximizer or TC Electronics Finalizer, for example (but I don't know exactly what is under the hood) - so not necessarily *good* (I'm not defending it!) - but definitely different to the straight mixes.

And stranger things these days are happening in the mastering world - Iron Maiden chose not to have their most recent record mastered at all, simply dithering down their mixes and having CDs pressed from that, so I'm not entirely shocked, and I do find this plausible.

Hey Marooned - you are absolutely right. I went a little wild on that one. ha ha.

I dunno, I think Marooned might have a good argument here. I've read just enough about mastering to know just how insanely subtle and complex it is ... so the idea that they "didn't do anything else to it", at very least, seems suspect, when you think about it. I mean, nothing else? They didn't even normalize the volume between the tracks? I can buy the idea that they didn't do any other EQing, etc., and simply enjoyed whatever tiny adjustments the sound enhancer makes, but it would seem unusual to not do a few other things to make it sound like a cohesive album.

There were tons of these sorts of stories when the first "prosumer" DV cameras started hitting the market, especially the Sony PD150, and like any good lie, there's a grain of truth in them.

You *can* do professional work with a PD150, but it's actually *harder* to do professional quality work with a "prosumer" camera than with a professional tool.

You have to be able to identify the parameters within which the toy will produce a credible result, and then make sure you stay within those parameters. Give me just the right set of circumstances and I'll get footage out of a PD150 that can very nearly pass for film, and *will* intercut with digibeta.

So who knows, maybe on this particular set of Ry Cooter tracks iTunes was *just perfect* (maybe). But the "couldn't get the right sound" sounds an aweful lot like the "could get places witht the PD150 you just couldn't get with a professional camera" bull that was being thrown around a few years ago.

I have used this technique before!
There isn't really any VooDoo to it, and it is actually quite easy:
Take a CD (of say "Final Mixes")
Add to your iTunes Library (hopefully at 16bit / 44.1)
"Tweak" the SOUND ENHANCER to the setting that "sounds best"
Make a Playlist
Burn a CD
presto! You get a Duplication ready CD of your "Final Mixes" with the Sound Enhancer settings applied to the audio!

I once did this MULITPLE times (re-imported the "enhanced" CD into iTunes, re-burned, re-imported those, re-burned....)

I work as a professional Audio Engineer, mixing and mastering in both the analog and digital worlds , and I gotta say on this one particular project, I took the rough mixes and assembled a "working" playlist to give to the artist, and I was hard pressed to beat the "multi-pass" Sound Enhancer Versions!

The Sound Enhancer does global "EQ Sweetening", as well as a "3-D" effect, along with some minor "Limiting", and on some material, you could spend days trying to re-create a similar sublte effect with "the expensive, analog, mastering equipment".

That being said, it sure can RUIN the sound of music that has ALREADY been mastered properly.
Some of the modern, poorly or overly mixed / masterd "crap" that you download from the store does actually benefit nicely from a little of this Sound Enhancer, especially when played back over ibook Speakers, or in earbuds, but in general, it is like ear candy and begins to take away from the real soundstage in the original master, most notably on the LEAD VOCAL !

Thanks,
"Brian"