How Does Mastering Make Music Sound Better?

Many people understand that audio mastering is the final aspect of audio production, but they might not understand what exactly goes into it or how it makes the audio sound better. After all, shouldn't the recording and mixing phases fully dictate how well or poor an album may sound? The truth is that audio mastering a finished mix gives the audio mastering engineer a great deal more control over the finished product than you'd believe, and nuanced changes can make all the difference in a boring and dynamic/exciting sounding record. Let's cover how audio mastering makes music sound better to give you a better idea of the aurally aesthetic side of what our engineers here at AudioMasteringCDMastering.com.

When the producer/artist finishes recording their album in full, the tracks which make up each song are mixed together to compliment one another as effectively as possible. These various tracks are then bounced down or rendered to one final and finished mix file. This file is typically and ideally a high fidelity WAVE or AIFF file. That file is then sent to a designated mastering engineer, someone who ideally had nothing to do with the production process so that they're coming to the project with completely fresh ears.

The mastering engineer takes those finished mixes and puts them through additional audio processing which affects just that finished mix (as opposed to the various tracks which make up each song independently), breaking that audio into different bands by frequency, level, width, etc. A number of different effects both analog and digital are applied to the finished mix to get the greatest sound out of that finished mix, pushing the limits of what that song was capable off on its own in its broken apart, stems and tracks format.

An example of a widely used effect which can achieve a whole host and range of results is equalization. Equalization allows you to break the frequencies of the audio into multiple bands so that you can push or pull back their influence over the finished mix to sculpt and improve the sound. You can correct offensive frequencies without damaging the mix using narrow EQ bands, but you can also plain improve the audio by pushing the influence of lacking bands. Pushing or pulling back different frequencies influences will yield different results.

For instance, more higher end is going to brighten and clean up the mix but make it sound a bit more abrasive in the speakers if you go too far. Adding more low end will obviously push the bass and lower frequencies in the master, and pushing the mids will warm up the song while staying relatively true to the initial mix.

Compression is another powerful effect for gluing a weak mix together and giving it a lot more presence. This is achieved at the cost of taking away a bit of the dynamics, meaning the disparity between the loudest and softest moments of the track, so that it all sounds a bit more uniform.

A bit of compression can be just what the doctor ordered for a lot of tracks, but if it's abused like it so often is in this 21st radio century where the loudness wars still prevail, you will turn in a squashed mix which looks more like a sausage than a dynamic audio pattern in the wave form which might sound louder and have more presence but will fatigue the ears of anyone who listens to it.

In case you couldn't tell, the key is moderation with all of the effects you can use in audio mastering processing and finding just the sweet spot for each track as well as identifying what is necessary for a song. The engineers at AudioMasteringCDMastering.com know exactly how much processing to apply to get the most out of your music, so make sure you experience it firsthand for free by getting a free sample master of your own music back from us by clicking on the link above.