Mastering is the process of taking a recording and enhancing it to its fullest potential. This not only makes each song from an album sound individually the best it can, but also makes the album as a whole sound unified. Send us your audio for mastering, your tracks will be listened to by an experienced engineer, on a state-of-the-art monitoring system in our acoustically treated studio. After we get an overall impression of the existing sound balance, your project is then professionally mastered using an appropriate chain of top drawer analog and digital equipment.

Mastering includes EQ, compression, bass management, effects if requested, fades, noise and hiss reduction, resequencing songs into a different order, song spacing, removing sound between songs making transitions between songs clean, final level boosting and limiting of all songs. Your songs will not only be consistent with each other, but they will be as high in volume level as possible while preserving their proper dynamic structure. Mastering adds punch and clarity to your sound. At the same time, mastering removes unwanted frequencies and noise that can reduce the overall quality of your music. Here are a few tools that we use in the mastering process:

Noise Reduction

The process of removing unwanted noise from audio. We use the best and newest restoration tools to remove noise & artifacts that your material might contain, wherever they are from.

The process of increasing (or decreasing) the amplitude (volume) of a digital audio recording. Typically normalization increases the amplitude of the audio waveform to the maximum level without introducing any distortion into the recording.

To make your music perform and sound well on all systems, we will find and apply the correct spectral balance to your mix, via extensive listening and equalization. Not only must applied EQ make a certain piece sound good, but the entire album is taken into consideration. The album must flow from one piece to the next.

For mastering, bass management delicately sharpens the bass without blurring other musical instruments. It will let you push the low-end capabilities of your speakers to the maximum. It creatively adds bass harmonics to extend perceived bass response.

The process of reducing the dynamic range of an audio signal by reducing the peaks to be able to boost the low levels.Depending on the type of music and the recording, more or less compression will be used.

Have you ever wondered why mastered music sounds so full? We add the same behavior to your material by adding new harmonic content to the fundamental frequencies of your mix making it fuller and giving it more life.

64-bit intelligent maximization is used to boost the overall level of your track (if it needs boosting), without it overloading or distorting. By limiting the peaks and bringing up the main body of the track, your mix can be made to sound both louder and fuller.

The Compact disc contains a number of subcode areas, each area is named with a letter, from P to W. The key subcode areas are named P and Q, containing the location of each track on the CD, whether the track contains emphasis, and whether or not copying is permitted. The mastering engineer performs PQ encoding just before cutting the CD Master.

You evaluate the results
Once your track has been mastered, if requested, we will mail you a "sample master" to listen to. If there are any changes you would like us to make, we make those changes and provide you with another sample master. We are happy to do this as many times as you like (within reason) at no extra charge until you are satisfied with the results. Once you are happy with everything, we will send you your final master CD.