Hey Alain, thanks for the video, glad to hear both your positives and negatives with what I had to say! You actually mastered one of my personal releases quite a few years ago funnily enough. I'm a big fan of the channel :)

I appreciate that this is a fair analysis and response instead of a “tear-down”. All good and useful points.

the way I took that 2nd point is I think he meant the level sent to him doesn't matter if you send 32bit float.

I generally liked that interview. I don’t think Warren was asking ‘what is the ideal state to send a mix in before mastering?’ it was more just ‘what do you do when people send you stuff like this?’ and I respect that he said I don’t really care, I will work with whatever you send as long as you like the way it sounds.

I wouldn’t send a file off for mastering that has a bunch of clipping and limiting and saturation on the master bus. But I would send them that mix as a reference for where I got it on my own set up, along side the more dynamic version with room for mastering.

I don’t think him refusing to work with songs that were slammed would have been a good look. I think he could have given better advice for what is ideal though.

such a nice exchange between two artist/engineers.

His hair is much better than yours. I think that’s your real beef.

Vincent Price to  Michael Reeves on the set of Witchfinder General.. ",Young man, I'll have you know I have made hundreds of movies "..

Michael Reeves in reply to Vincent Price... "Well I've only made three however,  they're all good,  so we'll do it my way ".. It'd generally consiered to be Prices' best performance.

10:18 you're my kinda mastering engineer....I absolutely despise it when mastering folks decide they need to make major changes when the mixes are good and have been approved by the client.

You talked about Dark Side Of The Moon and I personally asked Andy Jackson (Floyd/Gilmour engineer for years) about limiting and he said: "there's no limiting whatsoever on the master. Both James (Guthrie) and I avoid it like it's the plague!" There you go and yeah, it's obvious! I always have to crank up my volume knob when I'm listening to Pink Floyd, but man does that shit sound GOOD, let moi tell toi! ;)

I kind of agree with the engineer on the limiting side of things. All he's saying is "if you want it to sound all distorted and clipped, it's fine to send it to me like that". Seems legit.

I laughed just when saw the preview of this video. Watched Stefan's video yesterday.

Still waiting for Alain's reaction to Teezio's "master-classes" in MWTM. I was just shocked and laughed harder than ever.

Isn't it also a logical fallacy to assume just because someone works for a prestigious company they must be right? Appeal to authority.

A song by a famous artist will be a hit even if it's oversaturated, distorted, too quiet, or poorly mastered... It's very easy to become a top-notch mastering engineer simply by mastering for famous artists...

Way to miss his entire point completely on that second point he made. His point was… he likes it left the way you thought it sounded best when you decided you were done with it. That was his point. If a limiter made it sound closer to the way the mixer or artist enjoyed it, he would prefer the mix to be sent to him that way. He even said something to the effect of “other engineers are sometimes different” if I recall correctly when I watched that video. If the master was clipped, it could have been an artistic decision. That’s his point. To not be neurotic about it and to just make music and let him take your vision and enhance it.

Another benefit to working on headphones is that it's incredibly easy to test your mix with completely different levels of sound quality.
The utility of having a bunch of different headphones with varying levels of clarity, dynamic range, and frequency response (all of which you should take the time to become intimately familiar with for each one) has been extremely helpful to me in making informed decisions.

I've been mixing and mastering with my trusted headphones for decades now. My work has played in big arenas, cinema theaters, auditoriums, cars, TV sets, smartphones, you name it - and it always sounds good. Movie directors seem to be a little off when they see my minimal setup as I master their Dolby Atmos theatrical release, but they always like it when they hear it in the theaters. It's all about knowing what you're doing, no more no less.

Perhaps Stefan would correct me... or agree with me but I think what he meant wasn't it wouldn't make a difference if the mix comes in with clipping/distortion baked in, like, all the same... but that the client pays and decide what he wants to get back. If the client goes "yeah, it is clipped as hell but I like it" he.would be like "Meh🤷🏻, whatever, you pay you say"

Going by the first 7 minutes of the video and trying to master with limiting on, my old mastering engineer told me to take the compression off my mix and just level up the sounds to how I like them and leave the rest to him. He made my cheap front room studio set up's mix, when compared to mixes done in pro studio,  sound the best mix on the album

Your Humor is hilarious…
You managed to make it seem like you are roasting him, while still portraying the actual respect that you got for him. Good facts and Humor and people hopefully know that it isn’t really meant as harsh as it might sound here and there…🎉

The original goal for mastering was to ensure the end result doesn't cause resonance or vibrations that would cause the stylus to skip. It was mostly to control how a mix translates from electrical signals to physical properties of turntables and speakers. A secondary role was to create a more uniform sound profile for songs in an EP that may have very different sound due to being recorded and mixed by different people at different times in different place. Finally, as distribution and promotion of music was mainly via radio, it had to optimize the sound to these limitations too. As we switched to digital and the infamous "loudness wars", the mastering engineer's job has changed. However, it is still a very technical job that requires experience, a very well trained ear, equipment, and skills. The "artistry" part of mastering is to preserve the artist's and producer's intentions while fixing/optimizing the final version.