This content is brought to you by Audiocourses dot com NEW YORK, NEW YORK: After more than three decades in the mastering business, engineer Barry Diament recently expanded his services to include direct to stereo location recording. Searching for a portable and sonically transparent interface for his PowerBook, he heard about Metric Halo's Mobile I/O 2882+DSP and was thrilled to discover that it lived up to its reputation.
Diament was initially looking for an interface between his PowerBook
and
mastering room reference system for playback, he explains. "I wanted
something that was up to the level of my reference system - something that
would be as revealing. The first thing that attracted me were the features,
but the final decision was made after an audition."
Commenting on the MIO's sound quality, he says, "The D-to-A
converters in
the MIO are just beautiful. Connected to the system, the converters are
really sweet and three-dimensional. They reveal the character of a
recording, the low-level details and they preserve delicate spatial
information."
"The monitoring system I use to listen back to recordings
in the mastering
room," he continues, "is very revealing of very small changes in
level and
EQ. I started playing with the EQs and I found they're really nice sounding
and easy to work with. The MIO's transparence helps make processing
decisions really fast and leaves me confident that I made the right
decisions."
Plus, he adds, "I like the whole layout of the MIO console
and the way it
operates - it just feels good. I'm pretty knocked out by the box and can
only wonder what B.J. and the folks are going to come up with in the
future."
Diament has been in the business for over 30 years and mastering
CDs for
more than two decades. In 1983 he became one of the industry's first CD
mastering engineers while working at Atlantic Records, then went independent
in 1987.
"What my experience taught me was that once the signal
leaves the
microphones the ultimate quality of the recording has already been
determined. Now, I'm starting to gravitate toward where I started, staying
with the mastering but doing the whole recording, from the microphones all
the way to the mastering," he says.
Diament's home-based studio is essentially a post-recording,
post-processing and mastering facility. He says, "My preferred method
of recording is on location and direct to stereo, rather than in a studio.
I prefer to work where a musical performance would be heard, preferably without
an audience, because that's where the music sounds best."
Mastering engineer, Barry Diament finds Metric Halo's Mobile I/O 2882+DSP
perfect for direct to stereo location recording.
The Metric Halo system proved to be ideal. "The portability
of the MIO is very important to me, as I do a lot of location recording. Though
I tend to work direct to stereo, one of the nice things about the MIO 2882
is that if I need any additional microphones there are inputs to spare."
Diament reports he has been working on several projects with
Art Halperin,
the last artist to be signed by John Hammond Sr. before he passed away
(Hammond, a producer and talent scout, discovered Bob Dylan, Bruce
Springsteen and many others). "I think he's one of the more musical and
gifted guitar players I've heard in quite a while," he comments. "We
first
met a year ago when I mastered an album he'd been working on with Onyan,
called 'Reggae Rock.'"
Indeed, the engineer's resume demonstrates a great affection
for music from
the Caribbean. "I was very fortunate when Island Records came to me and
asked if I would re-master the 13 original Bob Marley albums," says Diament.
"While it was over six very intense weeks, working with the original
recordings was both a gift and a privilege."
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