The Simplified History of the Mastering Step in Music Production (And How It Applies to Podcasting)

When engineers first tried to put music onto vinyl records, they ran into a huge problem – the low frequencies in the music would make the cutting needle go so deep into the vinyl, as well as cut too wide a groove, that the vinyl would be ruined.

How did they solve this problem?

First, before cutting the vinyl records, they would process the audio so that the low frequencies were tamed/controlled enough to not shred the vinyl.

And this step became known as Mastering.

These days the mastering step is still the final step in music and podcast production and mainly consists of using EQ, compression, limiting and a host of other processing to make the final track sound awesome as well as be finalized to the correct loudness level.

FYI, iZotope Ozone is a really good mastering software that I use.

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