---
log: 020
title: "The master that was already clipped"
date: 2026-08-12
task: "#146 OPAL-26 mastering (also #91, #144, #145)"
tags: [mastering, tooling, opal2026, salvage]
shareable: true
---

## Cap (what & why)

ParVagues played Opal Festival 2026 — "Sunset Forest", Scène Cabane, sunset
slot, 15 tracks in 1h20. PLN did a quick Audacity master and asked for two
things: a critique of the set track-by-track *before* he shared his own notes,
and then a real master. Plus metadata, for the site and for Shipow's visuals.

## Manœuvre (how)

Cross-comparison first, blind. Aligned the 1 Hz gig log to the audio, measured
every track for loudness / spectrum / stereo width, then read PLN's notes
against it.

Then the master — from the **float take**, not the shipped stems, because the
shipped stems turned out to be destroyed. Clean stems at a uniform −15 dB, sum,
glue, loudnorm, PLN's edits (head to 0:06, encore gap trimmed, end on the
REVOLUTION vocal with a reverb tail), and a phase-correct low-band dip on the
one saturation event.

## Prise (findings / artifacts)

- **11 of 12 shipped s16 stems were hard clipped** — d4 with 2,066,873 samples
  pinned at full scale. The 32-bit float take underneath was fine (over-0 is
  headroom there, worst orbit +9.01 dB). A uniform −15 dB put the hottest at
  −5.77 dBFS with **flat factor 0.000000** on all twelve.
- Masters: streaming **−14.1 LUFS / −0.9 dBTP / LRA 9.4 / 48 kHz 24-bit**, club
  −10.0, a 24-bit archive, and 15 tagged per-track FLACs.
- PLN's "not loud enough — I had to set max volume" measured **−18.2 LUFS**,
  4.2 dB under target. Ear and meter agreed exactly.
- His "MAFIA bass goes too high for a few secs" was real and **at 1:02:10, not
  the 1:03:10 he filed** — +24.5 dB over local median in 60–250 Hz. Found only
  with a band-limited lens; broadband RMS saw nothing. That became a new tool:
  `tidal-ears master saturation --band`.
- **The rig held**: 17 xruns in the whole 1h27, in two events, despite the
  package hitting 100 °C. And the set was played **15 for 15 in the exact
  planned order**.
- Two silent bugs in our own mastering tool, found the same afternoon: every
  master it had ever rendered was **192 kHz** (loudnorm leaves the graph
  oversampled), and every split track's FLAC header **claimed to be the whole
  1h19 set** (`-c copy` carries the source STREAMINFO).

## Sel (the shareable learning)

Three times today something *sounded* fine and the metadata lied — clipped stems
that played, a 192 kHz master nobody chose, fifteen track files each claiming to
be 79 minutes long. None of it errored. **The failure mode of an audio pipeline
is not a crash, it is a file that opens.**

And the counterweight: the machine spent an hour hunting a "lingering arp",
narrowed it to five orbits, and built an elegant theory around d12 — declared by
the outgoing track, absent from the incoming one, re-declared by the next, which
explained the symptom perfectly. d12 measured **−72.6 dBFS**. Inaudible. The
theory was fitting a signal nobody could hear. PLN listened to five clips and
said "wait, rehearing master i dont hear any issue?"

The premise was wrong, not the orbit.

## Hameçon (hook)

*"Your master is clipped. Not the master you're about to make — the one you
already shipped."*
