i second the post on carl saff. we just had our project mastered with him, it ended up being $200 for six songs--he charges by minute of music mastered rather than by the hour. he did three passes for us, and considering the mix we gave him was already quashed by an overzealous mixing engineer, he did a great job.
i think there are two major perspectives you could take with mixing/mastering, and particularly in mastering--that it's either additive or subtractive. i think chessrock's comments about the seriousness of a project are born, quite rightfully, from the belief that the entire recording, mixing and mastering process can really only
subtract, incrementally, from a brilliant original performance. since a good mastering on a brilliant performance will essentially be transparent, logically the opposite--an 'quick slap-together' mastering on a brilliant performance will likely destroy the recording.
logic would seem to extend further to state that a quick, inexpensive mastering on a budget performance will only serve to make
it worse, but i don't think this is necessarily true. in the tracking process technology lets us make up for uneven performances by letting us do overdubs. in the mixing process technology lets us make up for uneven recording equipment and tracking skills by letting us balance levels, alter eq, add effects, etc. the mastering process
can, to some extent, let us make up for artifacts and issues created by the mixing process.
of course, every step down this road also increases the chance that we'll make things worse instead of better, especially if we enter into each step of the process with the blanket assumption that we need to 'fix' whatever was done in the step before. mastering, from what i've heard (not read) is the biggest threat, and yeah, there are definitely some mastering houses it would be better not to go near.
but...
a lot of us aren't brilliant performers, tracking engineers or mixers. a lot of us are trying to make music ourselves anyway because we believe in our ideas, we're having fun, we hope to get as good as we can and it isn't all that expensive to try to be a jack-of-all-trades these days. but mastering is, because of its sensitivity and the counter-intuitively transparency of its desired result, is still something i would never go near trying myself. but i'd argue that mastering is something that, in the best situation, could improve a recording.
i think what chessrock was trying to say (in a highly abbreviated form) was that if you don't think your project deserves the best possible mastering, you shouldn't have it mastered at all--that 'sub-standard' mastering will only be a detriment to any project. but the problem is how do we determine a standard of quality for mastering? i dunno, i think i need to stop thinking about it.
i guess another point is that if you're trying to do just basic level matching from track to track, silence-trimming and track transitions and a super-delicate hit of album-shaping eq, the faintest water-color wash of reverb and a gentle, intimate squeeze of compression, there's really nothing stopping you from doing it yourself and calling the album 'mastered'. and if what you want is that louder than ass pop album squash loudness loud loud loud thing to make it sound 'professional,' then just buy the
rane PI 14 and be done with it.