Broadcasting a finely tuned audio mix is like squeezing a three-tiered cake into a lunchbox. But Fred Miller at New York's Classic Sound can help. He's the creator and developer of AudioMax, his term for the Classic Sound process of audio mastering commercials.

Audio post houses record and edit voices, assemble sound effects and produce a seamless mix before committing your soundtrack to digibeta tape and sending it to broadcasters. At that point, your audio mix is subject to a broadcast limiter - a process designed to compress the audio mix into the allocated bandwidth - which frequently cuts off the high and low sounds in the mix.

For just $2,000 US a pop (and cheaper by the dozen) AudioMax pre-empts the arbitrary results of this filtering by deliberately mastering the sound at higher compression. Miller thinks it's high time someone applied the mastering process to spots.

"The New York Times, says 28% of American homes now have large screen TVs or some variation of home screen theaters and that demands better sound," says Miller. "This is one way you deliver it."

Audio mastering has been a staple in the recording business for years and Classic Sound has been involved since they first opened in 1991, doing mastering for Grammy Award-winning artists including Steely Dan and Canadian pop star Nelly Furtado. Miller, a former music director at Bates Worldwide, adapted the mastering process to spot work in December, just three months after joining Classic Sound.

Gregory Grene, music producer at FCB, NY was his first customer with spots for Cool Whip. Since then, he's made audio mastering a standard part of the package.

"It's a quantifiable difference," Grene says. "Either it has been mastered or it hasn't. It's black and white and it's uniformly met with delight. I think it's going to become industry standard."

Webfiles:
Classic Sound> http://www.classicsound.com