Cheap Mastering - How Cheap Can Quality Audio Mastering Be?

Cheap Mastering - How Cheap Can Quality Audio Mastering Be?

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Online mastering can be low in cost but it is worth considering who is behind any of the operations that label themselves as "cheap". Let's take a look at what mastering is, it's a final procedure on your hard work as a musician or producer and let's face it for that you want to be employing someone who is very experienced. The procedure requires critical listening to the frequency response of your music so any changes that are made will be represented on your masters. That requires skill on behalf of the mastering engineer and quality of the equipment, especially the loudspeakers that are being used. Do you know anyone who is very experienced at what they do that works for a few bucks? No... exactly, mastering engineers are skilled individuals which should have a large no. of years audio engineering experience behind them. In addition I believe you would like your music to be mastered with some high quality equipment.

High end audio equipment that is capable of making enhancements to music mixes is costly and as such it is not reasonable to expect that a studio that charges $15.00 per track to be using truly mastering grade equipment. What is mastering grade equipment? Mastering grade equipment is audio equipment that should transparently pass audio before any settings are chosen on the device to make adjustments to the audio. It should have a clean pass through and yet have circuits or signal processing algorhythms which are capable of adjusting music in a musical and euphonic way. Such equipment can be both analogue and digital and it takes an experienced engineer to discern what equipment is worthy of being used in a mastering chain. This equipment could be clean compression, coloured compression, clean equalization or characterful equalization.

The overall advice to ensure that when you search for online mastering that you check out the studios engineer history, equipment choices, recent clients lists and if they offer a free preview, get one. this will help you make a wise choice.
Lowest price mastering may seem good value but if the engineer and equipment being used are not listed and not up to scratch you could end up with a sub par masters in return and this is not really where you want to be after all the hard work you have put in to your music.

In addition you should be able to see pictures of the room the music is being mastered in, you should see some acoustic treatment and some of the equipment that will be used. If you do not see any equipment I would request some photographs. (In recent times many established mastering studios have had their website stolen and pasted on to a less that truthful website) So again employ some diligence when choosing your online mastering studio.


About the Author:
SafeandSound Mastering is a low cost, high quality online mastering studio with serious monitoring (PMC IB1), high end equipment and highly experienced engineer
online mastering
audio mastering
cd mastering



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