“Can you make them sound better?”

Making special masters for digital delivery is in fact nothing new. Long before Apple offered official guidelinesfor audio engineers to follow, mastering engineers already made their own attempts to create master recordings that sounded “better” when compressed into the standard iTunes Plus format. Even in the early days of the MP3′s rise to popularity, mastering services offered custom encoding.

“In the early digital delivery days, each mastering engineer experimented around until he found an encoder that he liked,” Hull said. “But it always depended on the source material. Different encoders worked differently on jazz as compared to dance music, for instance.”

Apple has always done its own encoding for the iTunes Store, but other stores that sell MP3s generally allow direct uploading of compressed files. Remastering source material for different encoders wasn’t practical, but choosing a specific encoder to best match the source could give better results. “So we would encode them ourselves and try and make it better, and we could in fact make them sound better,” Hull said.

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http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/04/does-mastered-for-itunes-matter-to-music-ars-puts-it-to-the-test.ars/

“AUDiNT, short for “Audio Intelligence” is a collaborative, research team comprised of artists and scholars Steve Goodman, Toby Heys and Jon Cohrs.

Since 1945, AUDiNT has been conducting research, rituals, and experiments into the opening of the 3rd ear, a dimension that materializes when sound, ultrasound, and infrasound are simultaneously deployed in a precise schema of sequencing, duration, and amplification. The 3rd ear forms a conduit for the channelling of voices and frequencies, allowing communication between the living and the dead, sanity and insanity and between disparate locations in space and time.

Adapting to, and capitalizing on the viral dynamics and tactical battlefields of 21st century digital networks, we are systematically uploading the AUDiNT research archive that has been compiled throughout the past 60 years. Our research concerns the hauntological power of sonic weaponry). This ritualized uploading of the spectral archive aims to create a prospective archive of wave-formed affect that is propagated throughout the living dead networks of our communication systems. This tactical shift – to open up our archive to the public – relates to our new mandate of arming the mass populace with the efficacy of sonic weaponry so that it does not become the sole preserve of the military-entertainment complex. With its dark science and sonically dissonant content, Dead Record Office is the enshrined location from which this viral transfer begins.”

The new Pt. Juncture WA record is out that I mastered in February. Pick it up. It’s really one of their best records, and I believe the third record that I’ve mastered for them. They are one of my favorite bands to work with. Congrats P.J. WA!