"All Great Art Is Born Of The Metropolis" - Part 2
by Scott Jay
12th August 2024
Sponsored by Audeze
If you missed out on Part 1 of this article, click here to read it now!
A sign pointing the way to Metropolis Studios in Chiswick, London, UK
Previously, in Part 1…
Today I’m in The Power House in Chiswick, West London, and inside this Victorian fortress is Metropolis Studios, a world-class collection of studios founded in 1989. Part of this collection of high-end rooms & extremely skilled people is Metropolis Mastering. Founded by ex-Town House (Virgin Records’ London studio) mastering and cutting staff Tony Cousins, Ian Cooper, Tim Young, and Crispin Murray in the early 90s a few years after the main studios, they are now considered to be one of the finest mastering facilities on the planet, and a destination for everyone from A-list label clients looking for all formats from stereo vinyl to Dolby Atmos to independent artists looking to have lacquers cut for limited-edition vinyl production, and everything in between.
Gearspace has been hanging out at Metropolis Mastering for a day to meet some of the talented engineers behind the consoles and talk about all things mastering with them - and of course, us being Gearspace, we additionally need to ogle over the gear a little too, including their “house brand” choice of headphones - Audeze.
After yet another quick flat white (they make them good here!) I push open the door to Mastering Room 5 to meet Felix Davis who is hurriedly running around the room getting set up for his next session.
He apologizes for his slight initial distraction. “The room that we're in now, is Mastering Room 5, which I've always known as Dylan for some reason - they've all got annoying nicknames, they've had nicknames forever but then they keep trying to move away from them. This room's got nothing to do with Bob Dylan or Dylan Thomas, I don't know what Dylan refers to - but - this room's amazing,” he states as he welcomes me in to take a seat in the comfy client chair.
In his blood
“I wish you guys could have seen what I was working on earlier - I was doing ‘Presence’, ‘In Through The Out Door’ and ‘Coda’, and we've previously done I, II, III, IV, ‘Physical Graffiti’ and ‘Houses of the Holy’. Every now and again you've got to recut it, because the stampers wear out, and everyone just keeps buying them, it's like a rite of passage to buy a Led Zeppelin vinyl when you first get your first record player!” he exclaims with a laugh.
Felix is the son of Grammy®-winning John Davis, a legendary mastering engineer who sadly passed away in 2023. John won his Grammy® for his work on remastering the Led Zeppelin back catalog at Metropolis in 2014, so recutting Led Zeppelin lacquers has almost become ‘the family business’.
“Also - please note this - D A V I S.” I always get credited with an ‘E’ in it because there’s a Welsh spelling and an English spelling. Some of my dad’s silver and gold records, they’ve got the ‘E’ in it and it’s just like, awwww. When you get a credit you’re really looking forward to getting that record and they’ve spelled your name wrong!” he laments.
Felix has been at Metropolis for 12 years, but despite his father’s opening of the door, he’s still had to do everything the hard way. There are no shortcuts to greatness in a field as technical as mastering - but taking the long road has led to a terrific list of credits at a comparatively young age already, including smash hits from The Vaccines and the Mercury Music Prize-nominated ‘Every Bad’ from Brighton band Porridge Radio.
From the top - or maybe the bottom
“I started as a runner/intern at the very, very bottom and then worked my way up to assistant Mastering Engineer, and now I've been working full-time as a Mastering Engineer for the last six years or so,” he explains.
“Obviously as an English person I have to compare everything to football,” Felix chuckles.
“It's a bit like if you're like a youth team player at Manchester United and all the players are world-class and you've got to be really f***ing good just to be in the same conversation with the others. It’s like that here except with engineers instead of forwards and defenders. It's really, really hard to break through and make a bit of a name for yourself and it's a very long kind of slow, steady process,” he continues.
“But once you do, to have your name in that same conversation (as Metropolis), people will come here to get (their records) mastered. They won't necessarily even worry about who the engineer is because they kind of know if you're here you're already at a certain level, so that's really been really helpful,” he confirms.
Converters, outboard, monitors… and Audeze
Felix demonstrates the workflow he uses - showing us how they load files supplied from central servers to run through top-tier Lavry & Prism converters into their Sequoia and Wavelab-based mastering console via some super awesome outboard processing - all the while making it sound easy - like a magician demystifying the entire process, a habit he got from his late father. He pulls up a reggae track he’s been working on to demonstrate. After running some audio through the console and showing us some of the hardware tweaks he might make on his custom EQs and dynamics processors, he picks up a nearby set of Audeze LCD-MX4s.
He starts recording the signal into his DAW. “I’ll hit record here and so that's recording (the playout) from the A to D. And then at this stage I'll get my headphones out and I'll listen to it in real time as the track is making its final recording. So once it’s in the DAW, I'm basically checking my own work. And even though these headphones are still insane and unlike anything I've really listened to, they're still a bit more ‘real world’. At this stage, you’re listening on the headphones, you’re checking what you've done. And if you catch anything, you can then intervene and make tweaks based on that,’ he intones about this vital part of the process.
He smiles - “I also love giving the headphones to clients when I'm having attended sessions.
If I just want to have a little break to myself, I'm like, hey just put these on and they go off into their own little world and I can get a moment back and nip to the toilet whilst they're listening on the headphones. And I always get crazy reactions,” he comments.
“My main thing with headphones is, you have to be able to trust them. If I feel I can give feedback to someone based on their mix, based just on listening to it once on a pair of headphones, then that does the job. Comfort is a big thing too though, because if you're doing anything where you're wearing them for a prolonged period of time, it can start feeling like it's tugging down on your ears. And I've got quite big, sticky-out ears. So it happens to me a lot, where you feel a kind of ‘drag’ on it. Then I'm not going to use them as often,” he says. “These LCDs do not have that problem!”
A mastering… cult?
“A lot of engineers are very precious about what they do and I think sometimes it works to the mastering engineer's favor that a lot of people don't really ‘get’ mastering or understand it,” Felix philosophizes.
“I think that there's probably an effort to maintain that kind of mystique but my dad, as good as he was, was just like, ‘oh no, this is what I do, these are the three bits of gear I really like’ and he was quite upfront and blunt and kind of showing that it wasn't magic or anything, and so he kind of gave me the confidence to think that if he can do it, I can do it, there's no kind of ‘big scary thing’ that you have to do, there's no secret you have to learn or like be part of a cult or anything to do it. A mastering cult,” he says drily as I speculate that we’re all picturing a group of hooded figures surrounding a lacquer cutter, chanting eerily.
We finish up our chat with a look to the past.
“When I started, it was like learning how to drive a Rolls Royce as your first car,” Felix reminisces.
“I was very lucky I got to work with my dad. I got to train under him and then the really beautiful thing was that if I was working down the hall and I had a problem with a mix and I couldn't solve it, I'd head over, ask him what he thought he'd do, if he couldn't solve it we could then go downstairs to [now retired] Tim Young - he had taught my dad everything that my dad knew so we had three generations of mastering engineers working in the same building. Living through multiple eras of popular music and just having that kind of breadth of knowledge that you can just pluck - like an obscure reference - you couldn't ‘out music nerd’ them. If you mentioned a live album from say Prefab Sprout or something, they'll be like, oh yeah that was done in Whitfield Street in 1986 and it was cut by this guy and it was a Tuesday - Tim Young was crazy with his encyclopedic knowledge. Here, it’s the people, the engineers and their passion for music - but also I just think the rooms sound amazing, so that's probably why Metropolis is the best,” he states, very authoritatively.
With that, he spins his chair back to his reggae and we say our farewells.
Down the spiral staircase
It’s a very London thing that we have to ascend an old wrought-iron staircase that might be an original feature of the building from 1905 to get to what is the most technologically advanced room in the facility.
Lead Atmos Mastering Engineer Mike Hillier’s studio space is a world away from the old-school stereo mastering rooms that the other engineers ply their trades in. The Dolby Atmos suite, a room full of speakers of many sizes (24, to be exact) pointing from every possible direction in an 11.1.8 configuration, and very little visible audio hardware. This is a totally “in-the-box” rig, with the famous Dolby Atmos Renderer software visible up on the big screen.
Mike is an ex-music tech journalist who found his way to mastering Dolby Atmos (as well as “regular” mastering) via the old-fashioned route of working the night shift at reception and grabbing assistant slots when they became available at short notice. Learning a lot of the trade via osmosis, he’s now a go-to for all things Atmos and has put the finishing touches on some brilliant records, including Disclosure, Chase & Status, Slowdive and many more.
Mike sits down at the mix position and picks up his pair of Audeze headphones straightaway.
“I split my time between Atmos and the stereo mastering world. In stereo mastering, headphones for me are very much a utility for checking things. So I really only use them for finding clicks and detailed things like that. I don't really like working on headphones for stereo stuff. In Atmos, on the other hand, I have to accept that 95%, probably even 99 percent of the end user is on headphones. And so the idea of just focusing on speakers is ridiculous.
And so every single track gets checked on multiple headphones. Usually, for me, that's going to be the Audeze LCD-XC (the closed-back version of the LCD-X),” Mike tells me in response to a question about his work days.
Sometimes I put the headphones on and I have to check that I've muted the room. It sounds especially good with the personalized binaural configuration. I thought before I had that done, the binaural specialization can be a little bit indistinct. You're (thinking) that sound is on my right, but I can't point exactly at it. And then you get the personalized binaural and you realize, it's there. I'm thinking to myself, am I sure I've haven’t - no, I have muted the room!” he laughs.
He is rather glowing about how much he likes the LCD-XC. “It just sounds the same. If I didn't understand the physics as well as I do, I would be like, this is some kind of voodoo magic. It's incredible.”
Mike brings up a passion project into Pro Tools that they frequently use as a studio demo piece - an as-yet-unreleased Atmos remix of a 23-minute track from a late, great Afrobeat legend that he’s been building from the stereo mix alone. He’s not happy about one thing though: it may be some time before anyone gets to hear it outside of this room.
Break the rules, not the machine
“It's kind of annoying because Apple have now set down a rule where you can’t do anything from stem separation,” he explains. He goes on to elaborate that Apple Music will not accept spatial music that is generated from any source material that was derived from any (generally AI-assisted) “stem separation” technology. You need to have official access to source multitracks, or it’s unwelcome - no matter what the historical significance.
“We were going to do the entire back catalog of a well-known Afrobeat legend. And they don't have most of that in multitracks - they just don't exist. So we did one of the tracks using stem separation tools. And I spent, I don't know, two or three days just doing stem separation. If you solo any of those (separated) channels, it sounds dreadful, really horrible, really artifact-y, but no one gets to listen to it in solo except me. If you listen to the music as a mix, it's phenomenal. We still use that track as a demo for people because it sounds incredible. You get to sit and listen to this mega well-known artist properly,” he tells me as he cleans up some of the inserts while I take a seat in the mix position. I hit the spacebar and my mind is basically blown. It’s like being in the room with this Afrobeat/Afro jazz orchestra - vibrant, alive, high resolution, and genuinely moving.
“Yeah, it's great!” Mike smiles. I notice the LCD-XCs on his desktop and ask him how he came around to them.
Audeze/Embody Reveal+ Plugin
Audeze offers a software plugin called Reveal+, developed in conjunction with software lifestyle company Embody that allows you to map an HRTF model of your ears to get the best immersive response possible from your chosen headphones.
“So I rocked up at Metropolis six or seven years ago. And all the mastering engineers had a pair of Audeze headphones, and literally, a pair was given to me. And they were just all ‘there you go'. Those are the headphones that you're going to use.’ And that was a pair of LCD-Xs. I do still have those, I use them a lot. And, you know, I've gone through dozens of pairs of headphones and there's always something that you're not quite happy with. So the nice thing about the Audeze is there's a flatness to them there, that's kind of more honest and more like what the music ‘is’ and what I'm used to getting out of, say, PMCs as well. Whereas I think a lot of other headphones have a kind of bias in the bass or, you know, trebles and that doesn't translate as nicely. Yeah, it's just nice listening to the Audeze!” Mike regales with an obvious affection for the cans.
Sitting here in a room which has a speaker arrangement and a rig that 99.9% of home studio users will never be able to replicate, I ask him about those users and what to think about if you’re a home producer who wants to do Atmos work.
“I would always want to have checked something on a room rather than just on headphones - you can always book me to master your Atmos project and come here at the end and we can go through it together” he reminds me.
“But, the fact that you can maybe get 80% of the way there on headphones alone is phenomenal. The fact is, anyone can at home just do it. The main thing for me is that people don’t overdo it. It's like a thing with Atmos that people do stuff that they shouldn't. They think about Atmos and they think ‘cool, here's all the things Atmos can do and I should do them.’ You don't have to, right? Like, in stereo, if your kick, snare, bass, vocal and maybe one of your guitars are straight down the middle, no one cares. That's cool. And maybe you've got a little bit of drums off to the sides so it is, you know, overheads and that was about it. That's a perfectly good mix. Nothing wrong with that,” he says.
“And in Atmos, the same rule applies. You don't have to throw stuff at the back. You don't have to make things move. You don't have to have things spinning. Please don't make things spin,” he laughs, then recounting an early failed experiment he did with an Atmos remaster of Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” that I will allow you to imagine in your mind.
“Yeah, I hear so many Atmos mixes where I just think, actually, what you've done is you've not listened to the song and treated the song for the music that it is. You've treated the technology for the technology it is first. The cart shouldn't drag the horse, the tech shouldn't be driving what you do - the music should be driving what you do. And that's always been the number one factor for me coming in here - I listen to the song and I see what it is in the song that should happen. If the song wants to tell a story and that story involves loads of movement, great. I can make it do that. If the song is a three-piece punk track and everyone's just at the front and I've got a bit of spring reverb at the back, that's fine. If I've got nothing at the back, that's fine. There's a need to pull things out, and there's no rule that says audio has to come out of every speaker. It's just you have those speakers as options,” he concludes thoughtfully.
Mike Hillier’s Audeze LCD-XC closed-back headphones
Much as I’d love to hear even more Afrobeat, that’s it for this session, and indeed the day. I head back up the old Victorian staircase to take my leave of the Power House, hoping for a bit of sunshine, and indeed, there is now loads of it. The clouds have all but vanished, and it feels hotter than it probably is in the burning late afternoon sun. It’s been an educational and entertaining day amongst the humans of Metropolis, and it’s been rendered pretty clear that with the talent at hand and all the superb tools at their disposal, the future of mastering - especially at Metropolis - looks as bright as the west London sky.
For more information on Metropolis Mastering, click here.
For more information on Audeze headphones, click here.
In case you missed Part 1 of this feature, check it out here.
If you missed out on Part 1 of this article, click here to read it now!
A sign pointing the way to Metropolis Studios in Chiswick, London, UK
Previously, in Part 1…
Today I’m in The Power House in Chiswick, West London, and inside this Victorian fortress is Metropolis Studios, a world-class collection of studios founded in 1989. Part of this collection of high-end rooms & extremely skilled people is Metropolis Mastering. Founded by ex-Town House (Virgin Records’ London studio) mastering and cutting staff Tony Cousins, Ian Cooper, Tim Young, and Crispin Murray in the early 90s a few years after the main studios, they are now considered to be one of the finest mastering facilities on the planet, and a destination for everyone from A-list label clients looking for all formats from stereo vinyl to Dolby Atmos to independent artists looking to have lacquers cut for limited-edition vinyl production, and everything in between.
Gearspace has been hanging out at Metropolis Mastering for a day to meet some of the talented engineers behind the consoles and talk about all things mastering with them - and of course, us being Gearspace, we additionally need to ogle over the gear a little too, including their “house brand” choice of headphones - Audeze.
After yet another quick flat white (they make them good here!) I push open the door to Mastering Room 5 to meet Felix Davis who is hurriedly running around the room getting set up for his next session.
He apologizes for his slight initial distraction. “The room that we're in now, is Mastering Room 5, which I've always known as Dylan for some reason - they've all got annoying nicknames, they've had nicknames forever but then they keep trying to move away from them. This room's got nothing to do with Bob Dylan or Dylan Thomas, I don't know what Dylan refers to - but - this room's amazing,” he states as he welcomes me in to take a seat in the comfy client chair.
Felix Davis at work at Metropolis Mastering, London, UK
“I wish you guys could have seen what I was working on earlier - I was doing ‘Presence’, ‘In Through The Out Door’ and ‘Coda’, and we've previously done I, II, III, IV, ‘Physical Graffiti’ and ‘Houses of the Holy’. Every now and again you've got to recut it, because the stampers wear out, and everyone just keeps buying them, it's like a rite of passage to buy a Led Zeppelin vinyl when you first get your first record player!” he exclaims with a laugh.
Felix is the son of Grammy®-winning John Davis, a legendary mastering engineer who sadly passed away in 2023. John won his Grammy® for his work on remastering the Led Zeppelin back catalog at Metropolis in 2014, so recutting Led Zeppelin lacquers has almost become ‘the family business’.
“Also - please note this - D A V I S.” I always get credited with an ‘E’ in it because there’s a Welsh spelling and an English spelling. Some of my dad’s silver and gold records, they’ve got the ‘E’ in it and it’s just like, awwww. When you get a credit you’re really looking forward to getting that record and they’ve spelled your name wrong!” he laments.
Felix has been at Metropolis for 12 years, but despite his father’s opening of the door, he’s still had to do everything the hard way. There are no shortcuts to greatness in a field as technical as mastering - but taking the long road has led to a terrific list of credits at a comparatively young age already, including smash hits from The Vaccines and the Mercury Music Prize-nominated ‘Every Bad’ from Brighton band Porridge Radio.
From the top - or maybe the bottom
“I started as a runner/intern at the very, very bottom and then worked my way up to assistant Mastering Engineer, and now I've been working full-time as a Mastering Engineer for the last six years or so,” he explains.
“Obviously as an English person I have to compare everything to football,” Felix chuckles.
“It's a bit like if you're like a youth team player at Manchester United and all the players are world-class and you've got to be really f***ing good just to be in the same conversation with the others. It’s like that here except with engineers instead of forwards and defenders. It's really, really hard to break through and make a bit of a name for yourself and it's a very long kind of slow, steady process,” he continues.
“But once you do, to have your name in that same conversation (as Metropolis), people will come here to get (their records) mastered. They won't necessarily even worry about who the engineer is because they kind of know if you're here you're already at a certain level, so that's really been really helpful,” he confirms.
Felix Davis wearing Audeze LCD-MX4 headphones at Metropolis Mastering
Felix demonstrates the workflow he uses - showing us how they load files supplied from central servers to run through top-tier Lavry & Prism converters into their Sequoia and Wavelab-based mastering console via some super awesome outboard processing - all the while making it sound easy - like a magician demystifying the entire process, a habit he got from his late father. He pulls up a reggae track he’s been working on to demonstrate. After running some audio through the console and showing us some of the hardware tweaks he might make on his custom EQs and dynamics processors, he picks up a nearby set of Audeze LCD-MX4s.
He starts recording the signal into his DAW. “I’ll hit record here and so that's recording (the playout) from the A to D. And then at this stage I'll get my headphones out and I'll listen to it in real time as the track is making its final recording. So once it’s in the DAW, I'm basically checking my own work. And even though these headphones are still insane and unlike anything I've really listened to, they're still a bit more ‘real world’. At this stage, you’re listening on the headphones, you’re checking what you've done. And if you catch anything, you can then intervene and make tweaks based on that,’ he intones about this vital part of the process.
He smiles - “I also love giving the headphones to clients when I'm having attended sessions.
If I just want to have a little break to myself, I'm like, hey just put these on and they go off into their own little world and I can get a moment back and nip to the toilet whilst they're listening on the headphones. And I always get crazy reactions,” he comments.
Felix Davis’ (Metropolis Mastering) Audeze LCD-MX4 Headphones
A mastering… cult?
“A lot of engineers are very precious about what they do and I think sometimes it works to the mastering engineer's favor that a lot of people don't really ‘get’ mastering or understand it,” Felix philosophizes.
“I think that there's probably an effort to maintain that kind of mystique but my dad, as good as he was, was just like, ‘oh no, this is what I do, these are the three bits of gear I really like’ and he was quite upfront and blunt and kind of showing that it wasn't magic or anything, and so he kind of gave me the confidence to think that if he can do it, I can do it, there's no kind of ‘big scary thing’ that you have to do, there's no secret you have to learn or like be part of a cult or anything to do it. A mastering cult,” he says drily as I speculate that we’re all picturing a group of hooded figures surrounding a lacquer cutter, chanting eerily.
We finish up our chat with a look to the past.
“When I started, it was like learning how to drive a Rolls Royce as your first car,” Felix reminisces.
Felix Davis at work at Metropolis Mastering - wearing his Audeze LCD-MX4 headphones
With that, he spins his chair back to his reggae and we say our farewells.
Mike Hillier at Metropolis Mastering, London, UK
It’s a very London thing that we have to ascend an old wrought-iron staircase that might be an original feature of the building from 1905 to get to what is the most technologically advanced room in the facility.
Lead Atmos Mastering Engineer Mike Hillier’s studio space is a world away from the old-school stereo mastering rooms that the other engineers ply their trades in. The Dolby Atmos suite, a room full of speakers of many sizes (24, to be exact) pointing from every possible direction in an 11.1.8 configuration, and very little visible audio hardware. This is a totally “in-the-box” rig, with the famous Dolby Atmos Renderer software visible up on the big screen.
Mike is an ex-music tech journalist who found his way to mastering Dolby Atmos (as well as “regular” mastering) via the old-fashioned route of working the night shift at reception and grabbing assistant slots when they became available at short notice. Learning a lot of the trade via osmosis, he’s now a go-to for all things Atmos and has put the finishing touches on some brilliant records, including Disclosure, Chase & Status, Slowdive and many more.
Mike sits down at the mix position and picks up his pair of Audeze headphones straightaway.
Dolby Atmos Mastering Engineer Mike Hillier with Audeze LCD-XCs - Metropolis Mastering, London
And so every single track gets checked on multiple headphones. Usually, for me, that's going to be the Audeze LCD-XC (the closed-back version of the LCD-X),” Mike tells me in response to a question about his work days.
Sometimes I put the headphones on and I have to check that I've muted the room. It sounds especially good with the personalized binaural configuration. I thought before I had that done, the binaural specialization can be a little bit indistinct. You're (thinking) that sound is on my right, but I can't point exactly at it. And then you get the personalized binaural and you realize, it's there. I'm thinking to myself, am I sure I've haven’t - no, I have muted the room!” he laughs.
He is rather glowing about how much he likes the LCD-XC. “It just sounds the same. If I didn't understand the physics as well as I do, I would be like, this is some kind of voodoo magic. It's incredible.”
Mike brings up a passion project into Pro Tools that they frequently use as a studio demo piece - an as-yet-unreleased Atmos remix of a 23-minute track from a late, great Afrobeat legend that he’s been building from the stereo mix alone. He’s not happy about one thing though: it may be some time before anyone gets to hear it outside of this room.
Break the rules, not the machine
“It's kind of annoying because Apple have now set down a rule where you can’t do anything from stem separation,” he explains. He goes on to elaborate that Apple Music will not accept spatial music that is generated from any source material that was derived from any (generally AI-assisted) “stem separation” technology. You need to have official access to source multitracks, or it’s unwelcome - no matter what the historical significance.
“We were going to do the entire back catalog of a well-known Afrobeat legend. And they don't have most of that in multitracks - they just don't exist. So we did one of the tracks using stem separation tools. And I spent, I don't know, two or three days just doing stem separation. If you solo any of those (separated) channels, it sounds dreadful, really horrible, really artifact-y, but no one gets to listen to it in solo except me. If you listen to the music as a mix, it's phenomenal. We still use that track as a demo for people because it sounds incredible. You get to sit and listen to this mega well-known artist properly,” he tells me as he cleans up some of the inserts while I take a seat in the mix position. I hit the spacebar and my mind is basically blown. It’s like being in the room with this Afrobeat/Afro jazz orchestra - vibrant, alive, high resolution, and genuinely moving.
“Yeah, it's great!” Mike smiles. I notice the LCD-XCs on his desktop and ask him how he came around to them.
Audeze/Embody Reveal+ Plugin
Audeze offers a software plugin called Reveal+, developed in conjunction with software lifestyle company Embody that allows you to map an HRTF model of your ears to get the best immersive response possible from your chosen headphones.
Sitting here in a room which has a speaker arrangement and a rig that 99.9% of home studio users will never be able to replicate, I ask him about those users and what to think about if you’re a home producer who wants to do Atmos work.
“I would always want to have checked something on a room rather than just on headphones - you can always book me to master your Atmos project and come here at the end and we can go through it together” he reminds me.
“But, the fact that you can maybe get 80% of the way there on headphones alone is phenomenal. The fact is, anyone can at home just do it. The main thing for me is that people don’t overdo it. It's like a thing with Atmos that people do stuff that they shouldn't. They think about Atmos and they think ‘cool, here's all the things Atmos can do and I should do them.’ You don't have to, right? Like, in stereo, if your kick, snare, bass, vocal and maybe one of your guitars are straight down the middle, no one cares. That's cool. And maybe you've got a little bit of drums off to the sides so it is, you know, overheads and that was about it. That's a perfectly good mix. Nothing wrong with that,” he says.
“And in Atmos, the same rule applies. You don't have to throw stuff at the back. You don't have to make things move. You don't have to have things spinning. Please don't make things spin,” he laughs, then recounting an early failed experiment he did with an Atmos remaster of Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” that I will allow you to imagine in your mind.
“Yeah, I hear so many Atmos mixes where I just think, actually, what you've done is you've not listened to the song and treated the song for the music that it is. You've treated the technology for the technology it is first. The cart shouldn't drag the horse, the tech shouldn't be driving what you do - the music should be driving what you do. And that's always been the number one factor for me coming in here - I listen to the song and I see what it is in the song that should happen. If the song wants to tell a story and that story involves loads of movement, great. I can make it do that. If the song is a three-piece punk track and everyone's just at the front and I've got a bit of spring reverb at the back, that's fine. If I've got nothing at the back, that's fine. There's a need to pull things out, and there's no rule that says audio has to come out of every speaker. It's just you have those speakers as options,” he concludes thoughtfully.
Mike Hillier’s Audeze LCD-XC closed-back headphones
Much as I’d love to hear even more Afrobeat, that’s it for this session, and indeed the day. I head back up the old Victorian staircase to take my leave of the Power House, hoping for a bit of sunshine, and indeed, there is now loads of it. The clouds have all but vanished, and it feels hotter than it probably is in the burning late afternoon sun. It’s been an educational and entertaining day amongst the humans of Metropolis, and it’s been rendered pretty clear that with the talent at hand and all the superb tools at their disposal, the future of mastering - especially at Metropolis - looks as bright as the west London sky.
For more information on Metropolis Mastering, click here.
For more information on Audeze headphones, click here.
In case you missed Part 1 of this feature, check it out here.
