Awesome paper by Dennis Drake about how he mastered the Mercury Living Presence CDs!

Check this one out, guys. The link is to a paper he wrote for an audio engineering society conference in 1992, describing how he mastered the CDs for the Mercury Living Presence series. Looks like he really cares about being true to the master. I really like all my Drake-mastered CDs.

link to pdf of article

 

Thanks for sharing the article.

 

I hope he has a hand in the three channel MLP SACD's that are comming out in March. Really looking forward to these. No fake rear channels on these SACD's!

 

A good read - thanks for the link!

 

What are MLP SACDs? Isn't MLP exclusive to DVD-A?

 

Mercury Living Presence, in this case... not Meridian Lossless Packing.

Martin

 

I especially appreciated the section that dealt with the actual manufacture of the CDs...and how one of the laser beam recorders was found to have a different sound than the others.

Along with the Roger Nichols article that described his frustrations with getting a CD that matched the digital master, we are getting a bit of insight into this phenomenon of some CDs sounding different than others, even though they may be digitally identical (Dennis Drake didn't mention it, but Roger Nichols said that all the CDs were bit for bit identical IIRC). Roger also specifically mentioned dither as the (likely) culprit.

 

I had no idea anyone was using high sample rates and high bit depths that long ago! Very interesting; thanks for posting.

 

Amazing...

Have the MLP's been re-released after Dennis Drake remastering job? I'd love to begin buying them, but not if they have been messed around with after what I just read.