CD masters

Many music lovers these days tend to listen to music only in bits and pieces or in a motley mix. Then there are others who believe that the music album is the highest musical art form. Indeed, the sequence of a dozen tracks in pop music that together create a coherent artistic whole is almost as iconic today as the unity of the four movements of the classical symphony. The Compact Disc is the medium that gives the art form album its digital home. We find this a truly motivating premise to produce inspired CD masters even today.

Album sound \ CD Masters

Our approach to mastering involves a strategy, developed over a long period of time. Put simply, we conceal the tonal imbalances in the piece of music and bring out its inherent strengths. We thus efficiently increase the euphony of each individual track and sharpen its aesthetic appeal. With these improvements alone, we are raising the quality of production to a higher level.

The key artistic challenge with CD mastering, however, is now to go beyond these improvements to the individual tracks and give the complete work a captivating album sound that is as distinctive as possible. After all, an artistically and aesthetically coherent album sound is one of the important ingredients for an exemplary-sounding and noteworthy CD release.

Now it depends on the creativity and skill of our sound engineer to spin this imaginary common thread along which the sound patterns of the individual tracks can be aligned. With his work he transforms a loose collection of music pieces, each with its own undetermined tone, into a smoothly flowing work with a unified sonic character and an effective dramaturgy.

Technical mastering

Once the artists, the producer and the record company are happy with the sound results, not only is the creative part of our audio mastering completed, but at this point the artistic part of the entire music production chain also ends. For us, only the purely technical and quality-assuring final work of the CD mastering process remains to be done.

In the technical part of CD mastering, we determine the final data content of the compact disc. To do this, we arrange the audio content into its final form and program the control data that defines the logical behaviour of the CD and the player. At the end of our work, we create a final production master, the CD premaster, in a defined workflow.

We supply tip top CD premasters

To create the CD premaster, we place the audio tracks in their final order for the CD and fine-tune loudness, fades and gaps. It’s still possible at this stage to apply small sound adjustments or eliminate any remaining errors or interfering noises that might be discovered. Once the content is in its ultimate form, we encode the audio metadata and the necessary control data for the CD. We then convert our final version to a data set in the Disc Description Protocol format.

This DDP file set is your dedicated CD premaster. The only thing left to do now is to perform a series of test routines that the DDP needs to pass. These tests include the final check, which involves listening to the master at a stimulating sound level of 85 decibels. After that, we transfer your project’s production master along with the technical documentation to the server of the pressing plant – and then on to success on the music market.

Error rate 0.0% CD Masters

Customers are sometimes in a hurry to approve a production – but they need to be careful because errors in CD masters can cause nasty surprises later on. We therefore remain on alert for any and all types of errors. We can happily report that, from among the many thousands of CD masters that we have delivered to pressing plants over the last three decades, we have never received a single complaint about any of them relating to technical issues. We ourselves are somewhat bewildered by this statistic.

Your benefits at a glance

CD masters with impressive sound
Consistent album sound
State-of-the-art audio technology
Perfect studio acoustics
Audio engineering expertise
Production masters meet all specifications
Technical communication with your pressing plant
Quality control of mix files and production masters

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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.

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