Mastering in immersive audio presents a few interesting problems. First and foremost, stereo mastering essentially only requires one output and a single stereo bus. For the most part, this mastered track exists within the confines of one mastering chain (and perhaps the occasional auxiliary track). For a multi-output format, this is not possible, and presents us with an interesting problem to solve.
Reuben Cohen (who has mastering credits on Happy by Pharrel Williams and the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack), takes Warren through his process for mastering in immersive audio. As Reuben puts it, this is essentially a method of applying a master bus without truly using a stereo master bus at all.
See, the issue with a multi-mono output file is less about EQ and other frequency modifiers, and more about dynamic processing. The use of a single compression chain across many mono signals leads to an uneven distribution of dynamics. A channel with primarily kick drum information may need a different ratio than a channel with vocal information. The solution to this? A signal summed mono track to sidechain compressors to.
We’ve never seen anything like this on the channel before, check this one out in the video below
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Watch the interview with Reuben Cohen at Immersive Mastering
