Musikmesse: Steinberg announced a new DVD-ROM tutorial series that offers a complete guide to digital audio mastering. The new three-part series covers almost every aspect of producing a professional master, and provides both digital audio essentials and expert techniques, supported with practical examples throughout. Audio Mastering will be available in Q2 2007.

“This series offers one of the most complete step-by-step tutorials on audio mastering in digital environments that are available today,” states Frank Seidel, Steinberg’s Product Manager for Audio Mastering. “This series opens up areas of mastering and digital audio technology in a very accessible way to anyone who wants to produce their own masters, and offers an immense resource of detailed knowledge for both newcomers and experienced engineers.”

Audio Mastering offers a complete, authoritative library of mastering knowledge, all the way from fundamental principles behind digital audio through to highly specialized mastering techniques and strategies. Using Steinberg’s industry- standard WaveLab 6 mastering software as its reference application, Audio Mastering also provides practical examples that make the expert knowledge and techniques contained easily accessible.

About the author Friedemann Tischmeyer has been working professionally in audio mastering and mixing for more than 15 years. Being an engineer for countless well-known artists and the owner of his own independent mastering facility, Friedemann has also published his two extremely well-received books ‘Audio Mastering with PC Workstations’ and ‘Internal Mixing’.

Content Overview:

Volume I
“What is mastering”
Defining the goals of mastering
CD mastering of stereo tracks
CD mastering from groups
Time management
Studio acoustics & room acoustics testing and calibration
Choice of speakers & speaker layout
Equipment requirement for mastering
Cabling
Operation system settings
Audio interfaces
Frontend & backend
Our sense of hearing
The Fletcher-Munson curve
Listening strategies
Ear training
Frequency distribution
Metering for mastering

Volume II
Loudness and peak levels
What are interleaved sample-overs?
Headroom for encoding
Normalization
Judging loudness
Reference values for loudness
PCM – the principle of digital audio
Basics of bit resolution
What is truncation?
Sample rate basics
Sample rate conversion (SRC)
All about dithering
What is jitter?
AES/EBU & S/P-DIF
Wordclock and houseclock
What is DC offset?
ISRC / EAN
Redbook & DAO/TAO
Optimal workflow
Phase 1: Preparation
Batch processing

Volume III
Phase 2: Creative sound processing
Optimizing the best-sounding track
Using the leveler for A/B comparisons
Saving master section settings
PQ editing
Editing CD text & EAN / ISRC
Final master montage
Phase 3: Follow up
Verification master
Error elimination
Choice of master medium / DDP versus CD-R/CD-ROM
Audio CD report
Creative Processing: Basic strategies
Order of processing steps
Working with EQs
Fletcher-Munson curve and EQing
Important filter types
Compressors
Typical examples and strategies
Practical editing examples with master section

Price and availability
Audio Mastering will be available in three volumes priced at €49.00* each.