How To Get The Most From Your Mastering Engineer.
Fidelity is of the upmost importance during the mastering process, and what you supply us can greatly affect the quality of the end product. Please follow these general guidelines to ensure you get the most from your purchase.
Bit Depth - Please provide 24 bit or 32 bit files. Changing the bit depth can impart harmonic distortion through quantisation error, we strongly recommend leaving any bit depth reductions to us for maximum quality. We also accept 16 bit files if necessary but recommend a minimum of 24 bit.
Never apply dither during an export or bounce, this should be the final step in the mastering process and can impact on the final quality of your audio.
Sample Rate - leave this at whatever your mix session was run in. Up or downsampling during your export or bounce can also cause quantisation errors and artefacts.
Headroom - Please try to ensure a maximum peak level of -10 to -4 dBfs. This ensures there is room for post processing and allows us to raise the level through gain staging and compression depending on the audio.
Mix Effects - Please ensure there is a minimum amount of processing on your mix bus, most work stations these days offer 'mastering' chains or effects, but these will be detrimental to the service we provide. We ask you remove all mix processing unless it is absolutely essential to your sound. This includes compression, EQ etc.
Formats - Please supply stereo, interleaved .wav or .aiff files and try to leave a few seconds of silence at the beginning and end of your track If your audio is for a specific format such as Vinyl please also specify this in the order notes, as it may require a slightly different approach.
Loudness - If you have specific loudness requirements please feel free to specify when ordering. For best results we recommend a higher dynamic range. However we understand that some music may benefit from a more compressed and louder sound. If you would like multiple versions for different platforms please enquire during the ordering process or contact us before, as this may incur an extra charge.
Revisions - We're happy to make alterations post mastering, up to 2 free revisions with every purchase, further revisions will be charged at the hourly rate.
Turnaround - We aim to have your order returned within 2 working days, however if you require a faster turnaround please feel free to contact us.
Please ensure all tracks are correctly labelled and numbered if part of an album, and if you would like to specify between track gap lengths just let us know when ordering.