IK Multimedia Lurssen Mastering IK Multimedia

Master your music with the secret techniques, workflow and world-renowned know-how of Lurssen Mastering

Lurssen Mastering Console is a groundbreaking new mastering tool for either iPhone, iPad or Mac/PC that puts a lifetime’s worth of professional mastering experience at your fingertips.

Created in collaboration with Mastering Engineers Gavin Lurssen and Reuben Cohen of Multi Grammy Award winning facility Lurssen Mastering, Inc. in Los Angeles, it puts you at the controls in the studio with all of the secret tools, settings and techniques that have made the Lurssen sound so sought after by the world’s top-tier recording artists and producers.

It faithfully recreates Lurssen’s “whole is greater than the sum of its parts” philosophy of mastering. With it, you get a top of the line mastering processor chain that has been created and tweaked by Gavin and his team to reflect the settings they use in the studio while mastering hip-hop, rock, pop and more. With Lurssen Mastering Console, you finally have a way to make professional sounding masters no matter whether you’re in the studio or on the go.

A sound philosophy

Lurssen Mastering Console is a totally new approach to digital audio mastering. It provides a complete emulation of the entire mastering processing chain used by world-renowned mastering engineers Gavin Lurssen and Reuben Cohen and their team. This chain includes tube equalizers, solid state equalizers, limiters, de-essers and solid state compressors. The simulation of this chain reflects their “whole chain philosophy”.

Hear the Lurssen Mastering Console difference

Here are just a few examples of mixes before and after being mastered with Lurssen Mastering Console. Using the “styles” presets as a starting point, the mixes were tweaked in real time using push, automation, and eq controls to capture the magic in the music. (Settings for each mastered file can be found in the audio file descriptions.)

Master your audio everywhere

No matter whether you use iPhone, iPad or a Mac or PC, there’s a Lurssen Mastering Console for you. It is available in two different versions depending on your needs.

It’s available as a universal iPhone/iPad app — just the thing for when you want to master on the go or demo your material on a wide variety of sound sources while mastering. This app is available as a free download that operates in demo mode, and features two full-functionality unlock modes: Play/Process and HD Engine.

It’s also available as software for your Mac or PC. This version can be used either standalone or as an Audio Units, VST 2, VST 3 or AAX plug-in in your DAW of choice for amazing audio mastering in the studio or on your laptop.

When you master, you want your audio productions to sound good when played on a wide variety of different speakers and setups from car radios to home hi-fis, iPods to club sound systems and more. Lurssen Mastering Console helps you achieve consistently great sounding results because it lets you demo your projects on a wide variety of soundsystems thanks to its iPhone/iPad version. Now you can take your projects with you anywhere so you can hear exactly how they perform in the wild.

A lifetime’s worth of mastering experience at your fingertips

It’s easy to get great results with Lurssen Mastering Console. It comes with 40 unique mastering templates, called “Styles,” that custom tailor its mastering processing chain for hip-hop, hard rock, heavy metal, country, Americana and more. These templates eliminate all the hard work of the mastering process; Gavin and his team have set everything up for you from the signal flow to the individual settings of each processor.

All you have to do is load a track, choose a template and you’ll be ready to start mastering. Or, in other words, Lurssen Mastering Console can help you achieve amazingly professional results even when a trip to Lurssen Mastering in Los Angeles just isn’t in the budget.

Streamlined control

Once you’ve selected a template, Lurssen Mastering Console presents you with three easy to use controls that let you adjust the master to your taste. Just like in Gavin’s studio, you can adjust a linked Input Drive, adjust a five band EQ and also use a special “PUSH” knob. The PUSH knob is particularly important because it lets you subtly and uniformly nudge the EQs so you can “ride” the flow of the song and highlight parts, adding that special Lurssen magic to your masters.

You also get two VU meters, a master bypass switch (quite handy for hearing your work versus the original file) and a STEREO/MONO monitoring switch. You can record the real-time adjustments to the two master knobs via the automation feature so you can really dig into the nitty gritty of your master and record your work for later.

Styles and control

Lurssen Mastering Console has been designed to sound great without any tweaking required on your part. That being said, you can view and alter some of the settings of Gavin’s processing chain thanks to the Chain view screen. Here you can view the individual components that comprise each Style template and make adjustments to things like gain reduction on specific pieces of gear. You can save your changes to the Style templates as presets, which can also store different EQ settings.

Mono, stereo and surround

The Lurssen Mastering Console plugin can be inserted in mono, stereo, multi-channel tracks and buses in any compatible DAW, for ultimate flexibility and usability as both mastering and mixing tool. The mono operation not only allows you to use the plugin on simple mono tracks (such as vocals, bass, guitars etc.) in regular mixing sessions, or stereo buses for stem mixing or mastering duties, but it can also be used on 5.1 surround or even greater projects, depending on the selected DAW.
The parameters, presets and Styles will remain consistent across all instances on a multichannel bus when settings are linked. This will allow more precision and coherency over surround operation.

Powerful processing and effortless export

As with mixing, mastering is about ensuring that your audio sounds as good as possible on as many playback devices as possible. Lurssen Mastering Console allows for an extreme degree of sonic detail thanks to its 88.2/96kHz DSP processing. Finished audio rendered with Lurssen Mastering Console sounds great in any format. It allows for export to all popular file formats from AAC to WAV, FLAC and beyond.

Projects in Lurssen Mastering Console for Mac and PC are compatible with Lurssen Mastering for iPhone/iPad. That means that if you have both applications, you can transfer your projects and use the iPhone/iPad version to hear how your work sounds on a variety of different output devices (you can also use the iPhone/iPad version to finish projects and vice versa).

With Lurssen Mastering Console, musicians finally have a way to achieve professional-quality audio mastering results any time and everywhere they go.

Digital Delivery Mastering

“Mastered for iTunes”

If you are mastering your music for digital distribution and streaming services like iTunes®, Pandora® and Spotify®, Lurssen Mastering Console can ensure your music gets heard. Lurssen Mastering Console has a new Digital Delivery Mastering feature that provides you with mastered audio files that comply with Apple’s “Mastered for iTunes” specifications for sample rate, bit depth and peak levels, ensuring that your audio translates perfectly for compressed formats like AAC.

Digital distribution and streaming services have become the current de-facto standard of music delivery to consumers, and engineers have started to put more care into the production of the final master to ensure that the quality of the audio, when compressed to AAC or other formats, is as close as possible to the original source file.
For this reason Apple has developed a set of best practices and tools that should be used for compliance to what has been labeled as “Mastered for iTunes®”.

Technically, files have to comply with high-resolution sample rate and bit depth requirements, but the most important aspect is peak level. As the tendency in contemporary digital music production is to go for super loud masters, distortion is created as a by-product of extreme use of digital peak limiters pushing up the level. Even though the file’s maximum peak level is not exceeding 0.0 dBFS, digital overshoots will still occur when the file is de-compressed back to PCM format for playback. Apple’s Mastered for iTunes® criteria states that no clipping at or over 0.0dBFS should be present in the digital master to be submitted. When checked with Apple’s tools specifically made for this purpose, masters with digital overs may be rejected.

This is where the new Digital Delivery Mastering option for Lurssen Mastering Console comes in. It offers an additional layer of protection against peak overshoots that could be generated by the AAC compression and decompression process. This can cause clips that may go unnoticed while mixing and mastering with regular sample peak meters. This is achieved by the peak limiter at the end of the mastering chain working in a specific way. This guarantees that the compressed file is safe from distortion when played back from digital distribution services such as Apple’s iTunes®, Spotify and Pandora.

The Digital Delivery Mastering option is part of the HD Engine in-app purchase, and can be enabled independently from the HD Engine in the settings menu. It is also included in the free update for Mac/PC users.

Note: Please be aware that under certain extreme circumstances such as an unbalanced high frequency content of the audio file or an overly loud and distorted master due to an improper use of the application’s gain staging could make for digital overshoots that may not be avoided by the DDM algorithm.