Even if he still had golden ears, Parsons shouldn't be mastering his own mixes - it's like that old saying about people who act as their own lawyer in court "a person who represents himself has a fool for a client." Similarly, I think a person who masters their own work has a fool for a client.
Even if the mastering engineer does very little (or nothing) having a third party with a fresh set of ears that haven't been emotionally biased by having worked on the material is invaluable.
I was sort of curious though, because I always thought that
Eye in the Sky, despite not being the most exciting 5.1 mix, sounded really good from a tonality perspective, whereas all the subsequent 5.1 mixes (and the Al Stewart 5.1s) sounded abysmal, with the treble frequency range especially boosted to the point of absurdity. Looking at the credits for these discs, it turns out that Miles Showell (well-regarded Abbey Road remastering engineer who does a ton of vinyl cutting) did
Eye in the Sky, whereas Parsons either did the subsequent ones on his own, or more recently with Dave Donnelly, whose DNA Mastering is responsible for some high-profile abominations including the almost universally loathed 2002 Chicago CD remasters on Rhino. It appears that DNA now does immersive mastering (
https://dnaimmersive.com/) so it wouldn't surprise me if they're behind the sound of
Pyramid as well.
It's my general feeling that these mixes start out sounding good (or pretty good at least) and are probably mixed using a copy of the original stereo mix as reference, only to be smashed with a sonic meat tenderizing hammer right at the very end.
Turn of a Friendly Card is by far my favourite APP album, and when the 5.1 came out I was so dismayed (to say the least) by how it sounded - audiophiles throw the word "unlistenable" around a lot as a scarlet letter for remasters, but with this album for me it truly was the case - that I took it upon myself to try and remaster it.
I ended up matching it (EQ-wise) to the Classic Records 192/24 HDAD DVD (my favourite mastering of this album) and once I did that - and de-clipped the waveforms, which had an egregious 5dB brick wall haircut - it revealed itself to be a really nice mix, even if it's a touch sterile most likely due to being done in a DAW and not a multi-million dollar analog studio like the original stereo mix. The reason I say I think these mixes are mostly wrecked in mastering is that in doing this remaster, it seems like the treble boost (and massive lack of low end) is applied uniformly over everything in the mix, not just specific elements or instruments. For example, if the hot/sibilant hi-hats were treble boosted individually in the mix, if you attenuated the treble over the entire mix to try and fix it, you'd find that the other "normal" elements in the mix were muted as a result, but that isn't the case with the 5.1 mix of
ToaFC. Maybe I should revisit my "Second Guessing the Mastering Engineer" series for this one, if there's any interest at all..
But getting back to
Pyramid, and the APP remixes in general, you just wish they knew their prospective audience a little better - I'm not a betting man, but I'd wager there's no one buying surround remixes of Alan Parsons Project albums who feels like music is "too dynamic" or "not punchy enough." It's especially dumb to take this kind of approach with Atmos, where the DialNorm metadata setting is encoded based on the overall "loudness" of the mix, so the more the mastering engineer compresses the mix, the more the DialNorm value is telling your amp to turn down the volume. This makes the pursuit of "loudness" a zero-sum game where the only real result is the degraded audio quality introduced by aggressive EQ and compression/limiting.
