Re: [LAU] Linux mastering services?

Ding-ding-ding-ding!! That's what I suspected all along, and my reading so far confirms it.

So far, it seems like what is today called "mastering", is what back in the day, used to call MIXING. Keeping the levels consistent. Making sure all the frequency ranges are well-represnented. Hauling out any annoying peaks or resonances. Resolving conflicts between sounds in a frequency range. I believe this should all be done with faders and EQ and compressors IN THE MIX. And, yes, to do it properly, it helps to have years of experience and lots of expensive equipment. But that used to be called MIXING, and it happened before printing to 2-track 30ips tape and handing that to the mastering engineer (who would hand the mastered tape to a cutting engineer, who'd make an acetate test pressing and hand that back to you). So far, from everything I've read recently (and remember from way back then), mastering was just making sure the needle didn't jump out of the grooves when ths vynil LP was pressed-- squeezing the dynamic and frequency ranges to deal with the limitations of vynil. I suspect that once the CD era came along, mastering engineers found themselves more or less out of a job, until the home and project studio explosion, when people would walk in with all kinds of crappy mixes done by amateurs on lousy equipment, and the mastering engineers found a new source of income in trying to fix these lousy mixes at the mastering stage. Which I could imagine would definitely not be easy, and would require a tremendous amount of skill and expertise (and patience). And then of course we got into the "loudness wars" era, where everything is supposed to have all its sounds between -2 and 0 db. "Make it sound louder than so-and-so's record". But back to your point, I agree: if the mixes are well-done, mastering should just be maybe applying a final blast of compression using the engineer's favorite compressor-of-choice. Done, that'll be US$500 please.