Music Mastering Studio

“before-and-after” mastering demo (A/B comparison switching every 5 secs.)

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Music mastering is the last stage of production, right before the master CD is sent to get duplicated and distributed. It is extremely important to your CD and can dramatically improve the quality and consistency of your studio recordings. Since many musicians have home recording studios, it is more important than ever to get your final CD mastered properly. For indies trying to stand out in a world of big recording studio budgets, this level of mastering art can make a huge impact.

Some of the processing done at the mastering stage include:

• Equalization and harmonic balancing for consistant sound throughout your entire album.
• Adjusting micro/macro-dynamics (volume changes) of your songs for consistency and loudness.
• Checking inter-channel phase and polarity for mono compatability.
• Final CD layout with proper song spaces, segues, fades and crossfades snapped to CD frame boundaries.
• Sample and bit rate conversion with dither to Red Book CD Standard.
• and a few tricks up our sleeve

• Proper final master CD burning with relevant paperwork (PQ Lists, BLER print-out etc.)
• Full QC (quality control) on all final masters (C1/C2/CU/BLER error checks).
• Individually silkscreened master CD with your name and contact info.
• A studio that takes it’s time (may take 1, 2 or more days; until you’re
• happy)
• A kickin’ album!

It’s amazing how a good mastering job can bring out the width, depth and dimension of a song. You’ll hear sounds that used to be buried in the mix, the vocals will shine through, the reverb and effects will be heard, and the whole CD will be more enjoyable over a varying range of playback systems.

We can accept audio CD, data CD (wav, aiff), DAT, 16-bit ADAT, DA-88, Mini-Disc, cassette tape, vinyl, USB/Firewire hard-drives.

Here is what you should do when sending us your music:

• Include all ISRC codes along with your songs, we need these before we burn the final master disc.
• DO NOT add any processing to your main mix bus (ie: compression etc). Keep it natural and clean.
• Do not clip your files, keep your peaks somewhere around -3dB and you’ll be safe. It’s nearly impossible to remove distortion.
• Leave space before and after your music (ie: 2-3 sec at head and tail of each song)
• If you have, include the UPC number of the disc.
• Make sure ALL your song names are in full. No abbreviations please! We need full names to add as CD-TEXT (which some CD players use to show your band name and song name)
• Give us a track list of the order you would like your songs to appear on the final CD.
• Include your CD album title
• Include your FULL contact information (Band Name, Album Name, Contact Person, address, tel, fax, web, email etc). We use this information to print onto your duplication master disc.
• Send along a few of your favorite songs as reference. Rip a couple of songs from your favorite CD and add these in with your original files. This can do wonders in helping the mastering engineer understand the ‘sound’ you are striving for. It’s always easier to ‘hear’ an example than it is for you to explain it!

Errors

Each and every audio CD in the world has errors on it. That’s just the nature of the game. But each and every audio CD player has built-in error correction. The CD player fixes these errors on the disc before you can hear them, giving you perfectly clean audio playback.

According to the Red Book Audio CD Standard, an audio CD is allowed up to 220 errors per second! Well, we like to think we have better quality control than that. We like to keep our error rate to no more than 30 per second. But we quite often average around 5 per second. A recent master we completed averages only 0.9 errors per second!

(We only use Plextor Premium CD burners with professional-grade Taiyo Yuden printable CDs.)

Book your music mastering session now to avoid any delays in your project.