Azure Wolf Studio - 90 Carothers Rd. Newport, Ky 41071 - (859) 655-3330
What is "Mastering" ?
Before you have your project duplicated on CD or cassette, make sure it is mastered. Mastering is the process of "polishing" your project. The mastering process has several aspects, ranging from simple to finely tuned in character.
The simplest aspects of mastering are putting the songs in order, putting appropriate spacing between songs, and making sure the song starts and ends/fades are perfectly clean. Also, making the relative volumes of each song consistent is important. It isn't very professional to have to turn the volume up and down from song to song of your final duplicated product. Sample rate conversion may be necessary, CD manufacturing requires a master to be sampled at 44.1 KHz. For some clients, mastering stops here, these may be all the services you need. These steps are less time consuming and on a budget, effectively take care of number of problems. Also, for cassette duplication, these steps may be all that are necessary.
The real luster of the polishing process known as mastering is in the next few fine tuning aspects. Volume consistency is taken care of by peak limiting and would not be done first.
Maximizing the signal to noise ratio and getting the music as loud as it can be on the CD without distortion: Briefly, there are two ways to accomplish this. One way is with compression and normalization. Normalization raises the highest peaks in the music to 0 dB (the maximum in the digital domain) and raises the rest of the material by the same percentage. If the peaks in the material are significantly higher than the rest of the music (like drum hits or dynamic vocals) compression is used to decrease the dynamic range. Then normalization is performed to bring the level up to the maximum, louder than without compression. Compression and normalization work well, but there is a better way; "peak limiting."
Peak limiting is a "look ahead" compressor/normalizer. The software actually looks ahead a few milliseconds into the music and bases it's compression parameters on what it sees. The result is a smoother and more transparent (and therefore less noticeable!) compression than standard real time compression. It's kind of like applying gas to your car before you get to the steep part of the hill rather than after the car slows down and flooring it. The ride is smoother the first way. At the same time, the music is normalized, and since both processes are done at the same time in the digital domain, there is no noise added, and it takes less time.
As a result of peak limiting, your CD will be smoother and punchier, and will be just as loud or louder than the next guys. You won't have to turn up your stereo to make your CD sound as loud or as you favorite national release.
The most critical aspect of mastering is in equalization and noise reduction if necessary. Equalization is used to make your music sound the best that it can. Our critical listening environment and experienced ears allow us to hear and correct subtle tonal deficiencies or oversights. Also it may be desirable to change the tonal qualities of some of the songs so there is consistency in tonal character between all of the songs. With the use of parametric and graphic equalization, a wide range of problems and inconsistencies can be effectively dealt with. If there are noise problems with your recording like tape hiss, hum, or clicks, we can achieve some incredible results with our digital editing and noise reduction tools.
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