MASTERING

Music fans can be the very definition of a niche, where a small group of people are super passionate about a musical group that most people have never heard of.

The one thing that all recorded music has in common, however, is that someone needs to do the mastering service, and do it right if they want the listener to stick around.

We were reminded of that recently while reading this story in the New York Times about the group Fugazi, which the writer describes as a “single-mindedly independent post-punk band.”

The group, according to the story, played gigs for years, and recorded nearly all of them. Now the group is in the process of taking some 800 recordings and posting them on the web for sale.

This is the bit that caught our eye:

The sound quality also varies, and taken as a whole, the project also tells a story about musical technology from the 1980s into the 2000s. The earliest recordings were made on cassettes, then came digital DAT tapes, then CD-R’s and a few hard drives. Sorting through it involved not only the process of formatting and mastering the audio but also even more tedious chores like scouring hours of onstage banter to identify unlabeled tapes. “I got sleuthy about it,” Mr. MacKaye said. “I’d listen to the accent of someone in the crowd and go, ‘O.K., that was in Italy.’”

It’s not often that the process of mastering makes its way into the New York Times or other mainstream press because it happens behind the scenes. But any audiophile will tell you that the difference between good mastering and bad mastering is the difference between a classic recording and something people walk away from.

If you’d like to talk to someone about your needs for a mastering service, please contact us.