Half Speed Mastering

[diamone]

Sure it is. It's called `the overdub track to The Chipmunks, the Birds and Mice (A Dream is A Wish your Heart Makes) from Motley Crue or the Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz.

[tragwag]

haha!! love it. "trolling" at it's best.

[mossboss]

Nuemann for a long time did not approve this half speed trend
Officially it was frowned upon to the extent that letters went out to clients canning the concept
I have sent a copy of a letter to Todd some time ago, if he wishes to post here It's fine with me
It was sent out to gotham clients back than
I sent it to todd some time ago asking him to keep it out of here
I am away from my archives at present
This issue always raises controversy
The anectodal post here by groove seems to fit history as at some time later they did relent offering half speed mods and additions
Seems that mr Temmer was quite convincing taking a half cocked up joke turning it into a reality
Hard to beat a good sales pitch to any manufacturer, since folks where asking for it

[opcode66]

Two quotes from the document

"We furthermore believe that the loss of one octave at the bottom of the range is significant enough to cast doubt on the feasibility of this technique. We know of no technical reason which would move us to recommend this process to anyone."

"the non-cutting aspects in lacquer - those which tend to emboss or "push" the lacquer - appear to be increased at half speed."

You need to add the same eq curve to your drive and preview lines in order to drop the riaa that is built into your cutting rack and p/d computer down one octave. Also, anything doing noise reduction needs to be running half-speed variants as well. I think that there is enough here for me to say forget it. I was interested for a while. Your mileage may vary. I personally don't see an advantage. And, a lot of the music I cut and produce is bass dependent. I don't want to loose data there.

[diamone]

Kid asked me over the weekend about 33 for 45 cutting, told me he was on the forum here (don't know his handle here though) so I told him I would link him here and to the other 33-for-45 playback threads on the board as well.

There's a couple references above to other quasi-related threads that cover other material that kinda-sorta has to do with what you are doing which would make for good reading as well.

Most people sadly do the ``synthesizing samples that aren't there'' routine in order to reduce both the tempo and the key down to 74.074.... percent (33-for-45 playback) with or without using tape which results in a flat 75 percent ..... because 75% of 45 is actually 33.75 - which IS audible due to the digital artifacting.

But the PERCENTAGE difference bumping to tape and back shouldn't be an audible issue because the difference between 33.3333333 and 33.75 is 0.41666666..... meaning just a little over 1/3rd of 1% - i.e. less than the quarter-tone mastering error on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue which people didn't hear until 50 years later and was even left intact on the first few CD releases.

But back to synthesizing samples that aren't there.
Bad idea as you see in the thread above.

However - the guys that have been able to rewrite the playback header on the file in question so that it plays back at half-speed just like tape say that they get good results on HALF speed mastering - so presumably some genius could rewrite the playback header on the same file to play at 3/4 speed making your 33-for-45 mastering a lot better than what it could have been without having to bump to 15 IPS tape and play back at 11-1/4.

But since a number of guys ARE bumping to tape and back ANYWAY to warm up the sound just as they are cutting or bumping to tube gear for the same reason - it might behoove a guy to have both tools in his arsenal - especially the half-inch 2-track that seems to be the most ubiquitous of the audiophile formats that include both 1 inch 3-track with timecode in the center on a quarter-inch size track with huge guardbands inbetween - or even a 2 inch 2-track-with-timecode on where track 24 would have normally been that the audiophile reel-to-reel special-edition avant-garde labels are using to charge people $750 for albums and artists nobody ever heard of.

This allows them to say ``1-1/2 generations down'' from the master because they bump it up to 1 inch or 2 inch 2 track at 30 IPS on tape that does +8dB where they are only laying down +5dB or +6dB striking their studio's idea of a perfect balance between a hot signal and low tape hiss.

Of course to lower the hiss and expand the dynamic range even further, there's always Dolby SR that the analog movie sessions use and DBX.

In the case of DBX depending on if your audience has DBX decoders - you could do a one-sided process and just do a DBX encoded disc and not have to worry about decoding it back prior to cutting. But even if you DID decode it back and then cut from that - again - you'd warm up your sound quite nicely from your digital files just as you do cutting through your all tube Gotham Audio recording amp.

I would try this and other avenues and see what you come up with.

Plus - I think all the 33-for-45 guys should have a little group all our own here as an offshoot of the Audiophile/Half-Speed-Mastering/Super45Sonic genre