Ika nga:
"Mastering cannot fix a bad mix."
"Mixing cannot fix bad tracking."
"Great tracking equipment cannot fix a bad performer."
In audio, everything has to be RIGHT. But GRANTING you did a good job at mixing and tracking, why do you need to have your stuff mastered? It is because a Mastering House is like an overseer, which tries to make your mixes sound best on ALL listening environments. It's like a one size fits all approach. With minimal to no dedicated mastering equipment, you will always have problems in enhancing a mix.
Case in point: Gateway Mastering. They accept anything as lowly as 16-BIT 44.1KHz, to high quality DSD formats. As for analog, they can go for 1/4", 1/2" and 1" formats. So how can they remaster something with inherently low headroom (say a 1991 recording on ADAT)? They always need to bring things out of the digital domain and use outboard processors, before they slap them back to digital.
Anyway, I never can argue with Bob Ludwig if he says he cannot do anything to enhance say, a mix by Urbandub. The tracking was so atrocious, so he cannot do anything except cut some boom in the mastering stage...
aha! good set of questions. let me get started with why people need to get things mastered. mastering is like the topping on a cake, the packaging on a product, the post-production on a movie; mastering is the finalization of everything you've done in a mix short of normalizing everything. mastering is not simply overseeing everything in a set of songs and bringing them louder - no - mastering involves polishing those odds and ends that you may not have detected in the mixing environment. A mastering suite, if you've ever been in one, does not have very much stuff in it and this serves a specific purpose. A lot of what you pay mastering engineers go toward two things: their ears and the environment they mix your song in. The actual room you have songs mastered in are tuned differently than recording suites and this particularly emphasizes the accurate representation of the mix. Period.
Why do you have to have your mix mastered? Well, you don't really have to. But think of it this way, every artist wants people to look at their records a certain way; they want their work to be contextualized to other works of other artists, preferrably good ones. Mastering levels the playing field, so to speak, for records and gives songs that sheen and push that mixing does not provide.
Now as far as gateway mastering goes, most mastering houses accept a variety of formats. However, it is often a good (and standard) rule of thumb to submit a master with as much fidelity and information as you can provide so the mastering engineer has enough material and information in your digitized media to work with during the sessions. This argument of bitrates has been waged for a long time but here is the fact of the matter: a 16 bit 44.1khz mixdown file is NOT lowly, in fact, it is the standard bitrate of your lowly compact disk. The reason why most people mix down to a higher bitrate - pre-mastering - is because higher bitrates and sample rates have more information in them compared to material that has been comprehensively mixed at 16 bit 44.1khz. This is fact and something every recording rat will tell you outright whether you say you hear the difference or not. Again, it is in your best interest to record and mix at a higher bit rate because you are providing the mastering house with more "stuff" (data) in your song than they might need for the final mixdown. You can mixdown at your place or the mastering house will do it for you, eitherway, it is a good idea to have too much data than too little in this situation. Remember, an AD converter converts AVAILABLE information; it can't convert what isn't there and fill in the blanks with "magic" bits of information.
ADAT is still a standard in most places and you'd be surprised how many recording places still mixdown to that media as a means of submitting their songs for mastering/ archiving. A lot of DJs still do it because it has a warmth and fidelity that translates well to vinyl pressing. I processed some old records from the Smithsonian of 1920s era jazz recordings for a local historical society and my mixdown was ADAT. Very nice. It helps that the media doesn't get surface scratches easily.
@jepoy and BALDO: yes, undisputed na GAS king itong si BALDO. Idol! Siguro ka na hindi ka u-utot in the next few months?
