So, what are mastering tools? First and foremost, you need a good set of ears. Successful mastering engineers can offer good advice about a mix. It is a good idea to take the ‘best’ track from an album and discuss the mix and sound balance first. Ideally, this would need minimal treatment from the mastering engineer and will act as a reference for the other tracks on the album.

You need a good monitor setup. Don’t choose a pair of monitor speakers with that typical ‘smiley face’ frequency response. They might sound cool, but if they are coloured you will end up with the exact opposite of what your speakers tell you.

Don’t use too large a speaker for your room and be careful with placement – not in the corner and not against the wall. Look at the room itself and consider some acoustic treatment. Ideally, discuss listening room issues with your speaker supplier.

Consider a quality set of AD and DA converters, without which you aren’t going to be hearing exactly what was recorded. A useful check for any converter is to drive it at low level. Pad down for AD or fade down with a properly dithered fader for DA.

Listen carefully to the results (obviously you’ll need to boost output level to do that).

Also, clocking. If changing the clock source improves the sound of your converter, it is probably not very transparent and may be affected by jitter. A good converter is immune.

Next the audio workstation. Its task is to record, play back, edit, PQ and then deliver the final master by DDP image or CD. All of this needs to be done as quickly as possible with 100 per cent reliability and bit accuracy. Any tool or function in your workstation that saves you time will be a welcome addition.

We all love a nice cup of tea, but waiting with your client sitting there with a rapidly mounting bill, while a fade renders seems an unnecessary evil, doesn’t it?
You may wish to use an analog signal chain for eq and compression. There is no hard and fast rule, it is a matter of personal preference, but many engineers work this way.

Some key features of suitable analog processors are stepped controls for precision and repeatability and small step sizes. You don’t need 24dB gain in a mastering eq section.

Prism Sound, Sadie and Maselec tools are used in many of the world’s leading mastering studios – such