Through the chain

I master in WaveLab Pro, but most of the work happens outside the computer. WaveLab sends the signal into the room through External Gear and picks it up again on the other side, aligned to the sample. What sits in between is equipment you can put your hands on.

The clock

One thing first, because everything else hangs off it. The Burl B2 Bomber ADC is the master clock for the whole setup — the capture clock. Everything runs in step with the converter that ultimately commits, not the other way round.

That sounds like a detail. It isn't. The clock decides the moment each sample is taken, and if that decision comes from somewhere other than where the sound actually enters the digital domain, you pay for it in stereo image and in how tightly the low end sits. It's the kind of difference you can't point at and can hear.

Transport is hybrid: MADI alongside Dante. MADI for the fixed, shortest path to the converters, Dante for the channels that travel the network. Together they give a round trip of 5.25 ms in WaveLab — the time it takes the signal to leave, run the entire analogue chain and come back in.

Those 5.25 ms are why I can work with analogue equipment as if it were plug-ins. WaveLab compensates the delay to the sample, so it makes no difference to the result — but it makes all the difference to the work. I can switch in and out and compare immediately, without half a second sitting between my decision and my ear. Anyone who has worked with a slow loop knows that at that point you're no longer comparing, you're remembering — and memory is a poor meter.

Out

The source goes up to 96 kHz first. Not because 96 sounds better than 44.1 — it doesn't — but because everything after it is analogue. The more headroom the digital side has, the less you hear it at the point where the signal leaves and re-enters.

For stereo mastering that's through the Burl B2 Bomber DAC. For stems, the remaining channels run over Dante through the RME 1620 Pro: sixteen channels leaving together and in step. Stems that don't line up exactly aren't stems any more.

The summing

Every channel arrives at a Rupert Neve Designs 5057 Orbit, where they're added the old way: analogue, across real transformers, not as a sum in a calculator.

Silk sits on the sum, not on the individual channels. That isn't a limitation, it's the point: the transformer saturation doesn't go in sixteen separate times but once, across the whole thing — with Texture to set how far I take it. One decision, made where everything already sits together. Used sparingly, it's what turns channels that stood next to each other into channels that belong together.

The processing

From the sum into the SSL Fusion. Its insert holds the Dangerous BAX EQ first and the Dangerous Compressor second: decide what the track needs at the extremes, then look at how it breathes. The other way round you have a compressor doing work half a decibel of shelf would have solved.

The BAX is a Baxandall EQ — not a filter you park on a frequency, but a tilt of the whole end of the spectrum. There's no point in it to hear. Which is exactly why you don't hear it working; you only hear that there's more, or less.

The Fusion can present that insert in stereo or mid/side, and that's why it's there. I can treat the centre differently from the sides without building a second chain: kick and vocal tighter, sides wider, or the reverse — without one dragging the other along.

The last step before coming back

Out of the Fusion into the Empirical Labs FATSO EL7x. It's not there for compression but for what it does to transients: taking the edge off exactly where digital stays hard. That's what makes a track work on a phone as well as it does on a full-range pair.

And then back in, through the Bomber ADC this story started with. If anything digital is still to be done, it happens in WaveLab at 96 kHz in 64-bit double precision. Not because you hear it in one process, but because you do hear it across ten.

The power

Everything hangs off a SurgeX SEQ1216i. It does two things, and both are worth it.

Conditioning. What comes out of the wall is never just 230 volts at 50 hertz; there's whatever the rest of the building puts on it riding along. The SurgeX takes that off before it reaches my equipment. The result is a lower noise floor across the entire chain — not slightly less noise on one box, but less on everything at once, because they share the same supply.

Separation. The analogue chain sits on a different circuit from the DAW and the network. That's not overkill: a computer and a switch run on switch-mode supplies, and those put their own rubbish back onto the line they're on. As long as that's a different line from the one the Orbit, the Fusion and the FATSO are on, the rubbish stays where it belongs.

Noise you remove at the source is noise you don't have to mask further down. That's cheaper than any solution that comes after it, and it's the only one that costs nothing in sound.

The cabling in between

What sits between the equipment counts too, even though it makes no specification sheet.

Everything analogue is Mogami quad, terminated with Neutrik. That's the studio standard, and not out of habit: star-quad picks up an interfering field equally on both conductors, after which the balanced input cancels it against itself. In a rack where power supplies, a network and tens of metres of signal line sit within half a metre of each other, that's the difference between a noise floor you forget about and one you work around.

The network runs on Lindy Cat7 S/FTP. Not because Dante needs it — it doesn't, Cat6 has it covered — but because shielded cable behaves so much more politely around audio equipment. A network cable is a small transmitter too: it carries high-frequency traffic through the same rack as my analogue lines. That shielding costs a few euros and saves you a problem you'd otherwise only notice once you've been hearing it for a while.

It's exactly the kind of choice nobody sees and that you can't point at in the result. It's there all the same.

What leaves the studio

All three, as standard, with every master:

• 96 kHz / 24 bitthe master as it was made
• 44.1 kHz / 24 bitfor CD and for distribution
• 320 kbps mp3to share and to check

Other formats on request; tell me what your distributor asks for and it'll be in the folder.