/ Audio Mastering

What is Audio Mastering?

Audio Mastering is widely understood to be the final editing work of a completed audio production. The role of the master audio engineer is to thoroughly concentrate on fine tuning the overall sound of the musical composition to ensure that it has the most optimal sound possible for the chosen target media (CD, vinyl, digital download etc.). Often it is about adding some warmth and sparkling to the music and to create a homogeneous sounding aesthetic to the overall album.

Some Tech Voodoo

To reach the goal of a homogeneous sounding album, many technical tools come into play. It might be Equalizers or Dynamic Processors, here every engineer has his own secret weapons and the use of it is based on a lot of experience and deep understanding.

Mastering Process as Quality Control

It seems that with productions created in small project studios, there tends to be several over-emphasized frequency bands in the mix due to a non-optimized acoustic studio or nuances simply not being perfect. By means of Audio Mastering, one is able to counteract such mixing mistakes. The mastering engineer should serve as the primary technical quality control, also finding sounds such as clicks or distortion and intervening with either audio restoration or by way of direct consultation with the customer. And finally

it's always good to listen to productions with special attention and a „fresh ear“.

DDP Images for Production

These days we typically deliver so called DDP images, which can can be used for CD- and any other production. We offer DDP images with an embedded player, so customers (Mac / Win) can listen and check 1:1 the data which are used in later production, you can check all markers, CD Text and ISR-Codes.

Stereo or Stem-Mastering

Mostly we work with stereo files, but in some cases it can make sense to have the separate stems (drums, bass, vocals etc.) of the production to optimize the workflow. We can do both.

How should you provide your Audio Data?

Upload the material as WAV or AIFF, if possible use a high bit depth (24 bit). Please do not use plugins like EQs, compressors or limiters on the master bus! Make sure the peak amplitude is not higher than -0,3dB. If you want to show us your artistic vision, please include alternative versions with your processing in a sub-folder. In case of questions, email us!