Your mastering setup can be useful to minimise frustration and increase the quality of your embossings. This guide covers frequency management, EQ, compression, and other essential processing techniques that ensure your embossed lathe cut sounds as good as it can!
Audio Processing and Frequency Management
There's no point trying to cut frequencies that won't reproduce well, or that you can't hear - it just wastes cutting energy and can cause audible clipping problems. After trying numerous combinations of equipment and plugins, I've found these approaches to be both effective and accessible.
Selecting Your HF Cut Off
I use a brickwall filter at 14khz - I've tested multiple cartridges and it seems quite difficult to find a cartridge that doesn't fall off a cliff after this point (The Grado Red3 and AT95E are my cheap exceptions!). Any effort put into embossing frequencies above this is probably a wasted effort, and more importantly, wasted power output from your cutting amplifier!
Bass Management (200-260Hz)
This frequency range frequently causes tracking errors, particularly noticeable with 80s-style drums and some punk records. If not properly controlled, it's likely to cause skips and tracking errors.
Solution: ReaXComp for Bass Control
- Frequency Range: 200-260Hz
- Threshold: -15dB
- Ratio: 2:1
- No Makeup Gain, no other settings changed
This shouldn't be too audible - usually I can switch between it being off and on and not notice it.
Cutting Head Resonance Management
Every cutting head has a resonant frequency that needs to be identified and managed. Here's how to find yours:
- Remove any damping material
- Record a frequency sweep or white/pink noise
- Look for the peak followed by sharp roll-off
Alternative method: "Pluck" the stylus while the cutting head is connected to an audio interface - you should see a peak at the resonant frequency.
Once identified, use ReaXComp to control a narrow band centered around this frequency. This should kick in before the resonance becomes untamable, hopefully without changing the dynamics of the audio.
Sibilance Control
Two instances of Spitfish are used for managing high-frequency ess-ing and sibilance:
- First instance at ~6kHz
- Second instance at ~10kHz
- Depth set to Sense set to 10 o'clock and depth set to 1 o'clock
You may need to tweak these settings. A/B test them to ensure they're just catching the highs slightly - not enough to make it sound muddy.
Processing Chain Overview
Recommended Processing Order
- High-frequency brickwall filter (above 14kHz)
- Bass management compression (200-260Hz)
- Resonance control (specific to your cutting head)
- Sibilance control (dual Spitfish setup)
While other plugins can work, these have proven consistently reliable over thousands of cuts. The key is to make subtle adjustments and constantly A/B test your changes.