L to R: Phil Demetro, Blair Francey, George Graves, Noah Mintz, and Kevin Park — Toronto AES Section -- May 26, 2015.
In Lacquer Channel's reception area, Blair thanked the speaker's for tonight's meeting. He introduced Noah Mintz who spoke briefly to everyone and gave a brief background of the hosts. He also introduced Maeghan Ritchat (Mastering Engineer and Manager), and George Graves, (Chief Mastering Engineer). He discussed the recent renovations (such as moving the cutting lathe into its own room) and changes in the facilities.
The attendees were divided into three groups to hear Noah Mintz, Phil Demetro, and Kevin Park in rotation each each discuss their setups and philosophies. The structure was generally loose and informal, frequently becoming discussions and Q&A, as opposed to strict presentations.
During Noah's talk he played 96/24 files in the background while discussing his equipment setup, plugin choices, monitoring, and power supplies. The topics ranged from current workflow, equipment mods, loss-y codecs, streaming, Mastered for iTunes and whether different hard drives actually make any difference in playback quality, or making files copies degrades the quality of the copied file. One interesting point regarding .mp3's is that he won't make separate masters for this format because the major aggregators won't accept actual mp3 files. They prefer to do their own encoding on hi-res/mastered .wav files.
Kevin Park discussed the state on the vinyl industry. There is only one supplier of lacquer in the world now. As a result of this Kevin believes that the quality of the lacquer is in worse shape than it has ever been. He discussed the equipment used as well as providing background briefly on topics such as the RIAA curve. His process is to make test cuts, then listen to them to judge whether any changes should be made for the final cut. He makes no track-to-track adjustments as the room is not ideally equipped for that procedure. The highlight was when he made cuts of test tones and then let everyone look at the finished grooves through the microscope.
Phil Demetro discussed his equipment and monitoring preferences. His current monitors are B&W Nautilus 802N. When playing back a file they exhibited a very distinct three-dimensional space. He feels these are "bright enough". This was more of a question and answer session rather than a presentation. When asked which plugins he uses he'll generally use those from the Cube-Tec software company.
At the end of the evening, everyone gathered in the reception area to take refreshments, socialize and continue individual discussions with the hosts.
At the close of the meeting Blair presented the speakers each with a Certificate of Appreciation and an official AES coffee mug.
