Mastering – what is it?

Mastering is final, last improvement of sound before duplicating of the recording in thousands of copies onto CD records or audio cassettes. The ultimate goal here is achieving the highest possible technical quality of the material contained on the media, to make it capable of competing and winning over another recordings already present on the market. Actually, the mastered recording must sound not only impeccable from technical point of view, but also has to emphasize the artist’s style and idea of his\her music. Only achieving the optimal marriage of those two elements- technical and artistic- makes the mastered recording a real, true work of art, time-frozen on CD record, capable of carrying each and every nuance of artist’s emotion even into the farthest future. 



Mastering- its aim

Different to mixing, mastering is performed on already prerecorded, mixed-down material called the mix. The goal here is achieving the optimal, superior sound, the highest possible level of loudness without hearable loss of quality and the highest possible class of spectral balance of the recording before passing it on to the process of serial production of thousands CD’s and audio cassettes. A superior mastering has to very significantly improve the quality of music material, especially when the mix and final mix-down were not done in professional manner. Moreover, the professionally performed mastering of a CD contains certain technical elements, like PQ lists, ISRC codes, CD text and the like (so called Red Book Standard). Labels and distributors are interested in highest possible quality of their artists’ recordings because of one reason: they want to sell as many as possible excellently sounding records. 


Mastering- between the art and the science

It is said, that the mastering is as much a science as an art. There is much truth in this saying, because really a lot depends on the skill and experience of the person making decisions in all this process. Technology takes a very important, hard to over esteem place here, but even more important is experience, artistic feel, taste and the ear of person performing mastering. It is like putting an inexperienced pilot behind the controls of a modern, supersonic jet aircraft, the bare fact of having it at disposal will not make him an air ace, and actually it can become really dangerous.


Mastering has one main goal: to make music sound as good as possible without regard for the kind of equipment it is played on, no matter if it is played on the car stereo, radio, mp3 player, in the club or hi-fi home tower, headphones or speakers. It has great importance for the music material auditioned in a record company, a radio station or before duplicating in large series of thousands of copies. The hits, occupying first places of charts sound usually excellent, they are loud, they have much bass and treble, they sound coherently and powerfully. Simply putting it: they impress. This is because they were skillfully mastered. Your music does not have to fall behind them, neither in terms of overall loudness level nor transparency and details. After special treatment in our studio your music will gain sonic qualities comparable to or exceeding the best recordings heard on the radio or commercial CD records and cassettes sold in musical stores.