That particular sheet looks like what I would expect to see at a vinyl duplication plant, so I would refer to that as Mastering for Duplication. Just a guess because it specifically mentions four sides/two discs. I used to work for such a company, we manufactured CDs, cassettes, and vinyl.drhumr wrote:This is really cool! Thanks for doing this.
What kind of baffles me are the gear references. On one hand there's Pultec, which is a legendary passive tube EQ commonly used (in one form or another) in mastering, but there's also the UREI gear, while great for tracking and/or mixing, that couldn't be less suitable for that application, especially the 1176 limiter.
Would be nice to find out what it was all about.
At this point the source music is already "mastered" in the way most people think of that term. They (Bola) have already made a master DAT tape containing the songs with final processing to make them sound how they wanted. And when you manufacture the CD product, it's strictly digital 1-to-1 transfers from that point on, so nothing will change.
But when you duplicate analog products (vinyl or cassette) there is often the need for further processing. It's usually very small EQ adjustments or limiting to prevent distortion. Reducing bass, de-essing etc. because vinyl and analog tape have different qualities. At this stage it should not be considered a creative process to change the way the music sounds, but just small changes made to fit the music onto that specific media. That's what this sheet looks like to me, and it mentions the format as "DAT Running Master". The running master is the copy approved to "run" on the duplication lines. So that's what would be sent to the manufacturing department to cut/stamp/press the vinyl.
