The Future of Mastering Audio | Interview with Reuben Cohen

Mastering in immersive audio presents a few interesting problems. First and foremost, stereo mastering essentially only requires one output and a single stereo bus. For the most part, this mastered track exists within the confines of one mastering chain (and perhaps the occasional auxiliary track). For a multi-output format, this is not possible, and presents us with an interesting problem to solve.

Reuben Cohen (who has mastering credits on Happy by Pharrel Williams and the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack), takes Warren through his process for mastering in immersive audio. As Reuben puts it, this is essentially a method of applying a master bus without truly using a stereo master bus at all.

See, the issue with a multi-mono output file is less about EQ and other frequency modifiers, and more about dynamic processing. The use of a single compression chain across many mono signals leads to an uneven distribution of dynamics. A channel with primarily kick drum information may need a different ratio than a channel with vocal information. The solution to this? A signal summed mono track to sidechain compressors to.

We’ve never seen anything like this on the channel before, check this one out!

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[Producelikeapro]

Is Immersive Audio the next big thing? Share your thoughts below!

[mattv]

When I was engineering in San Diego my mentor and I sent a lot of records to these guys. Very very good at what they do, and super nice! Great to them continue successfully.

[leefchapman]

Just watched the short on IG and my mind is blown already. Looking forward to this!

[JayTheJolly]

Not specifically about this video but I just want to say thank you.
I've been experimenting with a lot of tips learnt from this channel recently and I've noticed how much it has improved my things.
I'm definitely excited to publish some of my new works in the future because noticing improvements give a lot of extra motivation.

So yeah, thank you big time. :)

[thismixissick]

De-essing while boosting the high end. Loving that way of approaching not only achieving a more bright while not harsh mix, but as well shape the warmth and body of a song. Fantastic video Warren and Reuben!

[AudioHaze]

Sidechaining dynamics to a "dummy" mono track is so clever! I would have literally never thought of that, so smart

[NathanBrown-dkwh]

Would love to get a mastering course from these guys they're amazing 👏 😍

[lastpedestrian]

Thank you for doing this video, Warren, but most importantly, thank you for asking all the questions that we would have had as we (I) tried to wrap our heads around these concepts. Your decision to go in uninformed proved to be a very good idea.

[nayanmirza]

All time favorite mastering engineer in the world ❤️

[teddinardo]

thank you great resolution I was using my Apollo x6 with my Cranborne adat to get channel counts with stems, and this really answered many thing I was running into, I you are really on-top of everything, thank you Warren, I am sure we are all thankful to have you helping us all to resolve to solid 
solutions that work .also thank you Ruben Cohen, great set up, i will be buying ik plugins, sounds great, just bought the earbud pros and this mix to mastering is excellent

[EndlessMeece]

Mr Huart, this was absolutely fascinating, thank you so much for doing this and for sharing it with us... a little tricky to get my head around EVERYTHING, but I learned A LOT.

I am infinitely grateful, thank you so much 🙏🙏🙏❤❤❤

[DolbyAtmosMixing]

This proves to show that Atmos is not going anywhere…. So glad to hear there is immersive mastering in the works.

[Joey-rpvg]

Fantastic video. The future is is seriously though, immersive is flooding out and the possibilities are endless. Great to see this new format thriving.

[plastiktide]

This is brilliant!! I always wondered what engineers especially in mastering did to achieve this

[johannesberglund]

Worked in a similar fashion over the years to be able to make ”bus compressed” stems from any mix.

[ferdinandobarisciano]

Great video as always!
If you are really interested in this subject i suggest you to check the Hornet SAMP (Spacial Audio Master Processor). It's the same concept condensed in one plugin that you can open on all the 128 channels and it provides : eq, compression, clipping and limiting. All the instances of the plugin are linked.

[BrooksAudio]

My main experience in object based spatial audio is d&b audiotechnik's Soundscape engine, but I now have a Dolby Atmos production setup too. I've used this technique before, but my version uses a live aux / bus rather than a printed 'key' track. This allows for live changes to the mix, without having to re-print the mono downmix each time. I haven't used the multi key bus setup inbetween each plugin though, that's definitely something I'll be trying out :)

[MikeBrayton]

Maybe you touched on this... but does this require that the mastering house receive a Pro Tools file of the mix? ...or can they work off of any atmos master file? ... like from Cubase/Nuendo, or Logic.

[bjfu]

So grateful that this content is given free to the community! Just couldn’t understand the part how he “link automation” in protools so adjusting one plug-in change all other same plug-in on the same slot?

[philjames]

Raspect bro, i need someone like you, stay safe and up, jah knows,