ratnip101 said:
So no matter what kind of equipment a person is using to master your audio, sounds to me like it all boils down to experience. Do you think experience is the #1 most important thing in mastering? Or something else like equipment or the number of gold records they mastered? Or even who they studied under.
It takes both gear and experience to do it right.
Someone like Tom or John on this board could probably do a much better job than I could with mastering even if they were to use my lesser gear and room, because they have the talent and experience. But my gear would still severly hold them back; their equipment and studio space are what let their talent and experience stretch to its full extent.
As far as naming a piece of gear "mastering" gear, welll, that's kind of both right and wrong in different ways. The important thing to understand is that mastering is a *procedure", an operation that is performed on a recording, just like mixing is. A mixer or an audio editor can be called a piece of "mixing gear" because they are, or can be, used in the mixing process. It's the same thing with a "finalizer" or something like that. Whatever one maythink of that type of gear as far as quality of sound, It can arguably be called a piece of "mastering gear" because it can, and sometimes is, used in the mastering process.
But that does not mean that the "mastering gear" does the job all by itself. It takes talent to use it properly in the mastering process to actually get the mastering done.
A Craftsman hammer does not build a house, though a master carpenter uses one to build mansions. But just because someone owns a Craftsman hammer does not mean they can build a house.
A violin does not make music, though a master violin player can use it to make the most beautiful string solo. But just because someone owns a Stradivarius doesn't mean they can play violin.
T-Racks contains tools that can be used for mastering, but it does not DO the mastering. But - though it's no Stradivarius as far as mastering tools goes - a qualified mastering engineer could use it to do a competent mastering job. But just because someone owns a copy of T-Racks doesn't mean they can do a decent mastering job.
Mastering is a procedure performed by audio engineering's version of a carpenter or violin player. Doing a good mastering job, just like a good mixing or recording job, requires not only talent and gear, but it requires time. Like in any other tradecraft, that combination of gear, talent and time is not dirt cheap. If someone says they can master your CD for less than a hundred bucks and turn it around in 24 hours or so, all one has to do is the math to know that it is as impossible to do a quality mastering job under those contraints as it is for one carpenter to build a quality house in three days or to book an Itszak Perlman concherto for tomorrow night for a thousand dollars.
G.
