What is Mastering and Is it Really Necessary? [Podcast 002]

Just what do mastering engineers really DO, anyway? Justin Colletti dives deep into this topic in the second episode of our new podcast series.

For more on this topic, you can find the two articles mentioned in the podcast below:

[nebstaism]

Soundtoys are definitely one of the best plugin brands no doubt

[sixto]

One of the most underrated podcasts when it comes to audio!

[TheSOLClub]

Just stumbled upon this channel after finding one of your fantastic compression videos. Thank you so much for the great content and keep up the helpful info!

[wafflestoast]

Great to go back to the basics. Love the bigger picture stuff

[geniustracks]

Do you have 1 of the cloudlifters on that SM?

[peterlagroove]

Is mastering becoming somewhat irrelevant?

[AlexValliMusic]

Last time I watched one of your videos you had absolutely no facial hair! But damn, son, you look good with facial hair no homo, of course. I also like the information you provide.

[DannyTaddei]

I am old school and I lived through the years of really mastering. These days mastering seems to be a final fix for horribly stupid and untrained mixing engineers. Mastering used to be taking my master and bringing it to the levels and compression needs of the various markets: LP, TV, Film *and for those commercial or program*, and FM vs AM radio etc. Compression for radio needed to have a floor of about 32dB so that you could hear it in a car, cassette tapes as well, whereas LP didn't need that compression.
These days is it an excuse to over saturate and over compress everything. The fact that another room helps is because bozo the clown thinks a laptop and a bedroom in the city apartment can be a recording studio.
If you start in a good sounding room, with a good instrument and someone that can actually play it, using a good microphone into a good capture device, with someone that actually knows how to engineer and mastering is exactly what it was when I was young. I had a bedroom studio 30+ years ago but I called my self a Demo studio because I knew better than to get paid.
The bottom line is that if you need anything more than a normalization to be mastered, your mix engineer doesn't know anything about mixing.