Many people nowadays prefer to consume music in small doses and enjoy a random mix of genres. For others, the album is still the superior art form. A dozen pop music tracks making up a coherent artistic creation in the form of an album is almost as iconic as the four movements that make up a classical symphony. The compact disc is the digital home of the album as an art form. Even today, we find this to be a motivating premise for the production of inspired CD masters.
Our approach to mastering follows a strategy developed over a long period of time. Put simply, we conceal any tonal shortcomings in the music and bring out its inherent strengths. This allows us to enhance the sound of each individual title and hone its aesthetic appeal. These improvements alone are enough to raise the production quality to a higher level.
However, the main artistic challenge in CD mastering is to go beyond improving each individual track and give the entire album a sound of its own, which should be as enthralling and unmistakable as possible. Because an artistically and aesthetically coherent album sound is one of the most important ingredients that goes into creating a noteworthy and influential CD.
Our sound engineer uses all his skill and imagination to spin this imaginary thread linking together the sound of the individual titles. His work transforms a loose collection of differently sounding tracks into a work with a well-defined character and a unified dramatic structure.
As soon as the artists, producer and record company are happy with the resulting sound, the creative part of our mastering work is finished and the artistic part of the entire music production chain also draws to a close. For us, all that remains are the purely technical final stages of the CD mastering process, which are dedicated to quality assurance.
The technical si of CD mastering involves determining the final data content of your compact disc. To do this, we arrange the audio content into its final form and program the control data that specifies the logical behaviour of the CD and the player. The last stage of our work is to create a final production master − the CD premaster − which takes place as part of a defined workflow.
To create the CD premaster, we put the audio tracks in final order and fine-tune the loudness, fades and gaps. This offers one last opportunity to make any small adjustments to the sound and eliminate errors or noise. Once the content is in its final form, we encode the audio metadata and the necessary control data for the compact disc. We then convert our finished version into a file set in the Disc Description Protocol format.
This DDP file set is already your dedicated CD pre-master. However, we still need to put it through a series of test routines. These include the final check, which involves listening to the production master at a mood-enhancing 85+ decibels. Finally, we transfer your project’s production master and technical documentation to the pressing plant’s server − and we wish you and everyone else involved every success with your upcoming release.
Customers are sometimes in a hurry to approve a production. However, caution is advised because errors in the CD master can have serious consequences. So we are always on high alert for errors of any kind. However, we are quietly confident; of the many thousands of CD masters we have delivered to pressing plants over the last three decades, we are proud to report that we have never received a single complaint about any of them relating to technical issues. We ourselves are somewhat bewildered by this statistic.
Use this form to get a quote for mastering. Feel free to tell us about the artist, the work and the technical circumstances surrounding the production. Your personal views and ideas are also important to us.