What Is Mastering?

Mastering is the finishing step after mix down of your hard- worked albums (or songs) before being sent to manufacturing for commercial release. Mastering is a careful and creative step that needs to be done technically and musically correct so the mastered songs can stand out in a competitive commercial market. Mastering is not just about equipment or about making your songs loud.

It is also about the engineer’s experience mastering your material. With his fresh ears, he is the essential final step of your production and so that all final sound judgments are done making it a piece of art instead of just songs.

Why Is Mastering Necessary?

Mastering is the final creative step and ‘Last Chance’ to do any modification before being sent to the replication plant. A project that has been mastered (especially by experienced mastering engineer) simply sounds better. It sounds complete, polished, and finished. This is because the mastering engineer added the right amount of EQ and Compression to make the project sound bigger, fuller, richer, and louder. He matched the levels of each song so they all have the same apparent
level. He fixed the fades and distance between songs so that they are all connecting smoothly. He checked if there is any glitch or noise. After mastering is finished, it will be more spacious, well balanced, more defined, more powerful and more intimate and more emotional and easy to the listener. Also they sound like one project even though each song was finished with different producer and mix engineer. Therefore, in a competitive commercial music market, Mastering is ‘MUST’ not a “LUXURY”.

Who Needs Mastering?

Mastering is used not only for albums but also includes video game soundtracks, to private single album,TV ads, and original sound track for movie and TV drama and even demo songs. Therefore, anyone who wish to make his music presentable and professional sounding can benefit from Mastering.

What is our Mastering Working Flow?

What is a "Dithering" and "Noise Shaping"?

Dithering is a bit (word length) reduction process that removes (or minimizes) the quantization distortions by adding a constant, but very low level noise (around -90db for 16 bit dithering).

Noise shaping is a little more complex. Noise shaping takes this noise (around 3k) and mathematically moves it to a frequency spectrum that the human ear is less sensitive to (10-22k). Noise shaping can be pricey and needs DSP power because of the complexity of the math involved. However, it gives you the additional resolution in the audio signal. For example, well noise shaped 16 bit recording can give around 19 to 20 bit worth of recording (final CD Master).

Thesedays many noise shaping redithering devices (or plug-ins) are on the market: ABC (acoustic bit correction) from Lavry, SBM (super bit mapping) from Sony, L1 and L2 from waves, POW-R developed by Weiss Engineering and UV-22 from Apogee. UV-22 takes a different approach by adding a noise above 20kHz instead of noise shaping, in other words, no recalculation of noise in the mid-frequency to make it least audible.

Every dithering process sounds different. Earlier days. I've used sony (SBM) or apogee (UV-22) to record final mixes to 16 bit DAT machine (mostly as a back-up to my real masters recorded on 1/2" tape at 15 ips, aligned at +6 for that wonderful tape saturation sound! ). Compared to 1/2" Master Tape, Apogee sounded much brighter and tighter on the bottom. In fact, some producer and record company actually chose the 16 bit DAT over 1/2 inch tape master! Thingking back then, that was a time when every album began to sound more compressed, brighter, and LOUDER!! Thesedays, I use the POW-R for Mastering for two reason (Mixing and Recording can stay within 24 bit until finished, so no need for dithering)

1. POW-R seems to have the most transperant dithering calculation for Mastering purpose.
   (As I said earlier, I used to use UV-22 dithering to intentionally make it brigher and punchier)
2. POW-R in the Sadie System allows me to apply the dithering Last when I make the final CD Master or DDP image.
   (Dithering should be applied at the very last stage and hopefully only once. This is why I always ask for non-processed 24 bit audio file, instead of 16 bit audio for final Mastering)

Since I am mostly using POW-R dithering, let me introduce some background of this programs:

• POW-R stands for 'Psychoacoustically Optimized Wordlength Reduction'.
• Program has been developed by the leading digital audio designers comprised of Weiss Engineering, Z-Systems, Melennia Media and Lake Dsp.
• POW-R (along with ABC from Lavry) is considered the most transparent and musically accurate by many audio experts.
• Several mastering systems (eg, Sadie and Sonic Solutions) currently using this program as a exclusive bit reduction system