Mastering
We approach our mastering work in much the same way as our recording: the
focus is on maintaining resolution, realism and overall sonic integrity.
Mastering can be seen as the final stage in the creation of commercial audio.
It involves various processes to polish the programme material and is the
final quality control check before your work is sent for duplication.
Many recording studios offer mastering as a service but very few have either
the tools or expertise required to turn your recording into a commercially
viable product. For small CD runs for selling to friends then these facilities
will be fine. But if you are striving for bigger things, like radio play
and record label interest, then you need to do things properly.
As well as the tools and expertise, we offer the often-invaluable ‘objective
opinion.’
This is where the monitoring chain and room are vital components to effectively
working on material at this level. Our room is based around 3-way PMC mastering
grade monitors, Mark Levinson amplification and Lavry Digital to Analogue
conversion. The room is acoustically treated and ultra quiet. This enables
us to hear everything within the programme material and will help inform
us as to how the material will translate from playback systems as diverse
as car stereos to hi-end hi-fi.
Our room is also available for ‘dry hire’ on request.
A few processes that mastering involves: overall assembly, level balance,
limiting and compression (if applicable), timings and fades, de-noise and
de-essing (if required), equalisation, filtering and dithering.
We then create the Red Book Audio CD for the duplication house. This involves
the adding of ISRC codes and CD-Text (if applicable), track cues and the
all-important error checking of the final master for duplication.
It is also sometimes possible to salvage poorly recorded or mixed material
at the mastering stage. For example, vocals can be brought forward in an
unbalanced mix, hiss can be removed from an analogue transfer and body can
be added to a ‘thin’ sounding recording.
Please contact us for a quote or to request examples of our work.
