When you have spent months or more obsessing over the final details of your music, you need another set of ears to give an unbiased listen to your mixes. A mastering engineer with high quality speakers in a good room can hear weaknesses in your mixes that can be addressed and corrected during the mastering stage.

The first stage in the mastering process often involves correcting flaws and imbalances in your finished mixes. Common problems include narrow frequencies that poke out and cloud or cover a mix, an imbalanced stereo field, or excessive build-up in common problem frequencies such as bass or low-mids.

With the help of high quality analog tubes and transformers, your mixes can be enhanced to sound better than they did when you finished them. I pay close attention to achieving a sense of space and air in recordings and delivering added clarity and warmth.

One of the most important stages in the mastering process often gets overshadowed by the glamour of fancy mastering equipment, and that's making sure that your album, from song to song, flows like an album. The building of the final playlist pays attention to relative track volumes, spacing between songs, and creating an overall flow from start to finish to present your complete story in the most natural way. It is in this stage that details such as track crossfades, ISRC coding, CD-Text and other subcode editing can be applied.

The final stage of the mastering process is the creation of your production master for the replication plant. This master is sent to you along with a duplicate for listening and is burned to be an error-free (thus, stress-free) master for the manufacturer who is creating your complete CD package. Typically, a high quality CD-R (I use Taiyo Yuden here) is delivered to the replicator, but I can deliver in DDP format as well.