r/audioengineering • u/UnfairWorldliness882 • 1d ago

Mastering Using old CD's are reference

Can someone explain to me this.

Why the era/format also matters

A 1992 CD master was made for Red Book CD, a fixed 16-bit PCM format with no lossy transcoding step and no concept of "true peak" as a mastering concern at all ā€” true peak/inter-sample overs only became something engineers cared about once lossy streaming codecs (MP3, AAC) made it a real audible risk in the 2000sā€“2010s. That +0.03 dBTP result isn't the 1992 engineer making a mistake or taking a risk ā€” it's simply a number that had zero relevance to their format, so there was no reason to control for it. This CD rip isn't a broken master; it just predates a concern that didn't exist yet for the medium it was built for. Applying today's dBTP/streaming standards backward onto it doesn't tell you anything about your own file's target.

Yes, I know, I am a bad boy for using AI to help me master but I am trying to figure out if I am going down the wrong rabbit hole when comparing my work I am doing in 2026 to something that was made and manufactured in the 90s? Is it a waste of time to use old CD's pre-2000 or pre-2005 as reference?

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u/j1llj1ll 1d ago

You need to choose the right CDs. Some (many, actually) were mastered over-loud and thus too heavily limited. And there's plenty of not-great mixes out there behind that as well. This goes for any reference though. There are good and bad examples in every format.

On the other hand .. there's also over-thinking it. Choosing a genre-appropriate reference that everybody loves is never a bad place to start even if it's 'technically suboptimal'. Sometimes technically suboptimal is perfect.