More Than A Studio

Fidelity Rebellion isn't about being another "industry standard" studio churning out work that's been compressed and limited to death using the same production techniques as so many others. I'm a music fan first and foremost. There was a time when almost every compact disc had written disclaimers about how the goal was to reproduce the music as closely as possible with the highest fidelity. You'd see it on original cds for albums like Appetite For Destruction and Rust In Peace. Then somewhere down the line cds were made with the opposite philosophy-to decrease fidelity and dynamic range in an effort to play every part of the song back at the loudest volume possible.

This is a fidelity rebellion against ridiculous trends like this.

Does it make any sense to make every part of a mix extremely loud on just about every big name release aside from Guns N Roses's Chinese Democracy and Perhaps? Or would you rather have someone create a dynamic between the loud and quiet parts of your work and make sure they are heard in high fidelity sound?

Think about movies. A long time ago everything was in Pan & Scan "full-screen" where they removed the sides of the image and zoomed in on a 4:3 square so that a 4:3 TV would be filled. It was clearly stupid and that's why widescreen was accepted by the public with the advent of DVD.

Music that has been made with maximum loudness is like a Pan & Scan movie. You're chopping off the top and bottom peaks and then enlarging the middle part that's left. A lot of musical information is being lost just as movies lost a lot of side information when being put into "full-screen" format.

Streaming services like Spotify normalize all the volume to a preset level anyway. That means an extremely loud modern release and a dynamic 1980s original mastering will play back at the same volume. The dynamic recording now has the advantage because it will have peaks that the modern release will not. Note that when I mention 1980s recordings, I'm referring to original masterings that are on these services, not remasters that are usually as compressed as most every other modern release. Occasionally there will be remasters that are high dynamic range on a service like Tidal such as the 2014 Black Sabbath releases.

Going into the methods, I've done years of research into how to get as close as possible to a classic record aesthetic using a computer, software plugins, and a select group of audio hardware. The goal was to find a way to efficiently deliver these styles for clients in an affordable manner.

I'm not apt to blow my own horn and tell you about what an expert I am or that you can just take a bunch of plugins and a few hardware pieces and perfectly recreate the sound of a legit analog studio with a big mixing console, real echo chambers, digital FX units, and a tape machine.

What I can do is sort of reverse engineer classic production methods and attempt to recreate them as closely as possible using various pieces of hardware and software. Then add in beneficial features from these modern tools to deliver a high dynamic range high fidelity product for you in an efficient manner that doesn't cost a ridiculous amount of money.

info@fidelityrebellionaudio.com