Mastering in Manhattan

Oct 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Mike Levine

Mastering is one of those mysterious arts that you hear a lot about but rarely get a chance to witness. So I jumped at the chance when I was invited to observe a complete session with Greg Calbi, one of the top mastering engineers around, working at New York City's Sterling Sound, one of the top facilities around.

Calbi has been mastering since 1972 and has a discography that spans 15 pages on the Sterling Sound Web site (www.sterling-sound.com). It includes some of the most acclaimed albums of all time including Paul Simon's Graceland and Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run, and CDs by current artists such as Ani DiFranco, Amos Lee, the Strokes, Gov't Mule, Lenny Kravitz, Branford Marsalis, the Kills, Kaki King, and many more.

Although much of Calbi's work is with high-profile, major-label acts, he also has a clientele of indie-label artists. The session I attended featured the music of a band called The Talk (see Fig. 1), who are signed to MoRisen Records, an indie label out of Charlotte, North Carolina.

10:30 AM Sterling Facilities

On an overcast spring morning, I arrived at Sterling Sound, which is on Tenth Avenue on the western edge of Manhattan's chic Chelsea district. The facility is located in a large industrial building that also houses Chelsea Market, a bustling mall filled with gourmet shops and restaurants. Understandably, Sterling Sound keeps a low profile, and only after wandering around the market for a while did I see a discreet sign for it.

As I exited the elevator into the Sterling facility, I walked into a huge open room with high ceilings and a modern décor. On the left I saw a raised café area with picture windows and a panoramic view of the Hudson River and New Jersey. To the right was the reception and administrative area.

I was told that Calbi, who is one of the owners of Sterling, was still in a meeting, and so I had a cup of coffee and waited in the café. About 15 minutes later, he emerged from his office and took me on a tour of the facility.

10:45 AM Going on Tour

Sterling, which was previously housed in an office building in midtown Manhattan, has been in its Chelsea location for five years. It opened on April 1, 2000.

The facility is about two miles north from Ground Zero, and had had a direct view of the World Trade Center towers. “We were all here on Sept. 11, 2001, for a 9 o'clock engineering meeting,” Calbi recalls. “We went on the roof and saw the smoke.”

The present Sterling location was custom designed as a mastering facility. It contains seven mastering rooms, five of which have an identical footprint designed by Fran Manzella of FM Acoustical Design. The mastering rooms all face a hallway that's located along an exterior wall. As a result, each room has a window to the hallway, which itself is lined with windows to the outside and thus provides natural light for the mastering rooms. “That was an important prerequisite,” Calbi told me. “We wanted to have that feeling of being attached to the outside.”

Another advantage is that the outer hallway provides a place, outside of the mastering rooms themselves, for keeping CPUs and other noisy gear. “When you go in the room, you hear dead quiet,” said Calbi. “It's really very helpful. Usually when you go into a mastering room, you'll see a closet with this stuff in it. These are all designed so this gear is out in the hallway.”

During the tour, Calbi introduced me to various other engineers and staffers. At Sterling, each mastering room has an associated production room. In one such room, we met Will Quinnel, an assistant to senior mastering engineer Chris Gehringer. “Will is a mastering engineer part time,” Calbi explained, “but his full-time job is to take Chris's stuff and basically manufacture it in this room, to go to the manufacturer. It's what we used to call ‘parts.’”

Calbi explained that one of the important parts of the assistant's job is to make sure that the files are not corrupt and that the version that gets sent to the manufacturing plant is the correct one. “There could be ten versions of the album in the computer,” Calbi said. “Especially in the hip-hop world, there could be clean versions, instrumental versions, a cappella versions, and so forth.”

11:15 AM Calbi's HQ

After checking out many of the other mastering and production rooms, we finally arrived at Calbi's mastering room. The gear in his work area is set up in a U shape, with analog processors and his XLR patch bay to the left of the his chair, his custom-built Muth console (mastering consoles are tiny compared with regular studio mixers) along with more analog processors in front of him, and his digital processors on his right (see Fig. 2). A computer monitor, displaying a Mac running Digidesign Pro Tools is on his far left, and a monitor displaying Merging Technologies Pyramix software (see Fig. 3), a multitrack editing environment for the PC is on his right.

His analog processors include a Dangerous 2-Bus Analog Summing Mixer (see Fig. 4). “It's one of the great tools that we have,” Calbi said. “The I/O from the Pro Tools rig comes out so we have each of those now analog, each of the eight pair come up analog, and I can route those into my analog EQs and resum them back in at the end [using the Dangerous 2-Bus], and I'll end up with something considerably different.”

Other analog devices he uses include a Pendulum Audio OCL-2 tube compressor, a Pendulum Audio ES-8 tube limiter, a Focusrite Blue 330 mastering compressor, a Focusrite Blue 315 equalizer, a pair of EAR 822Q equalizers, an Avalon Design 2077 equalizer, a Manley Massive Passive tube equalizer, a Manley Variable Mu Limiter Compressor, and an API 550M equalizer (see Fig. 5). For connecting his gear, Calbi has an XLR patch bay that features thick, blue-and-gold cables from a company called Wireworld.

“Every cable has a sound,” he explained, “and I auditioned a bunch of them about five years ago, and I really liked this one called Wireworld. They're made by David Saltz in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. They really do sound different. A much fuller, more detailed sound.”

His digital processors include a Weiss DS1 Digital Dynamics Processor, a TC Electronics Finalizer, a DBX 120A Subharmonic Synthesizer, a Z-Systems z-Q6 Mastering Equalizer, a Waves L2 Ultramaximizer, and a custom-designed Z-Systems peak limiter.

Calbi uses ProAc Response 4 monitors, which are tall, tower-style enclosures that have been placed about ten feet back from the listening position. I asked him what are the optimum listening levels when mastering. “Everybody's got their own level. I think mine's about 100 or 105 dB. I know that it's louder than it should be. We all have our level that we hear our balance on. George Marino listens lower than that. Ted Jensen listens fairly loud,” he explained, referring to two other Sterling engineers.

Calbi's ears are his most valuable asset, so he's very careful to minimize his exposure to loud volumes. “I only listen at my level when I have to,” he told me, referring to when he's actually figuring out settings for a song. After that, when he's transferring the song, he turns the volume down. “If the client wants to hear it again, I'll turn it up — but I won't turn it up as much.”