A History of Mastering

by Paul Stubblebine

Before the rise of the independent studios in the late sixties all the studios were owned by record companies. For example Columbia Records had studios in five cities: New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago.
Although these studios did outside work as well, their main focus was label material. In those days mastering was an entry level position. Once you were moved from the storeroom, or wherever you began the interning process, into the studio your first stop would be in mastering. After a couple of years you would be moved up into recording or mixing.

Many of the legendary engineers got their start this way. While in mastering your job was not to improve the sound of the recordings but to understand what would get lost in the transfer to disc and compensate for the losses so that as much of the music as possible made it across the transfer. If the song to song levels needed to be adjusted the material would be sent to an editing cubicle and a copy would be made with the level changes in it. Then you would then cut the lacquer from that. And of course you were also learning to make a part that manufacturing could work with. In this way mastering was not really considered to be part of the creative process, it was considered to be good ear training for aspiring engineers.

The late sixties saw the rise of the independent studios. The Record Plant in New York, Los Angeles, and Sausalito. The Wally Heider studios in Hollywood and afterwards in San Francisco. Bill Putnam started Universal Recording in Chicago, then United and Western in Hollywood and Coast Recorders in San Francisco. There was Bradley's Barn in Nashville...a few more.

While all these changes were going on the role of mastering started to expand. Producers and artsits wanted to make final adjustments to their recordings and it gradually became more common to do this in mastering. The mastering engineer became a specialist in making those changes and putting the final polish on the recordings. Mastering at this time came to be known as 'custom mastering'. Eventually the specialists wanted to be independent and with that came the independent mastering facility.

One of the first such facilities was the Mastering Lab in Los Angeles owned by Doug Sax. Bernie Grundman went from working at A&M to setting up shop on his own. Masterdisk and Sterling opened in New York, Glenn Meadows started Masterfonics in Nashville and Mike Fuller was working Criteria in Miami. Paralleling this was a growth of respect for custom mastering as a specialty and as part of the creative process.

The mastering fraternity in general during this time consisted of a very small number of people. The Billboard Studio directory in 1978 listed all the mastering engineers in the US at around 150, and many of these people were not involved in custom mastering but were just doing straight transfers. For example Armed Forces Radio put out shows every week on LP.

The majority of mastering now is done in independent facilities although not all of it. For example Capitol, Sony, CBS and Epic have mastering in New York and LA. RCA has a facility in New York. A few independent labels have chosen to operate their own mastering studios, and not just the audiophile labels that are in the business of doing high quality mastering to distinguish themselves from the original issue like the recently reborn Mobile Fidelity; also some labels like Telarc have in house mastering.