Boulder Disc Duplication
CD Mastering Info Page

You have your stuff all ready to go but there are too many tracks on the CD, or it is on a cassette tape to be transfered, or it was recorded live and has no track ids. We can help you with all this. We do final mastering on the computer to  adjust your normalization, adjust bass and treble, adjust stereo image, etc. very inexpensively. Re-arranging tracks or adding track numbers is no problem. We can make your home recorded demo into a professional sounding CD in many cases. Levels on a live master too low, no track numbers, and other problems can usually be solved for $30 - $75. Call Hugh at 303-485-9226 or fill out our contact form. If you have technical questions. Most of the time I can help you or know who to call. Or look into the ideas published below.

When mastering for your production CD you might want to consider the following ideas:

• A Disc-at-once (DAO) CD burned at 16x or below is the preferred production master for duplication.  It should play flawlessly and have no marks, smudges or scratches on the read surface (side that the audio is burned into.) A master can play ok and still not duplicate properly due to the differences in error correction in a player vs. a duplicator. Today most people can make a master from their computer. The most common errors with homemade CDs are using the data writing CD software instead of audio and not writing Disc-at-Once. We also occasionally receive disks that are not closed or finalized. Usually with Easy CD Creator or Toast, if you use the Write Audio Disc feature this happens automatically.
• We will not accept CD masters with paper labels on them as they can cause terrible problems in high speed CD burners. We highly discourage the use of paper labels, I've had them become stuck in my car stereo on several occasions.
• Keep your levels a bit below 0 db. That is the point of "over" and you don't want to reach it. There are passing peaks that don't register on your meter (the meters are analog) but that will cause your amplifier to clip or distort at high volumes. The old vinyl records were all set to peak at what is -12db or slightly above on your digital meter. Nowadays most people master hotter than this going up to around -1 db or so. If you are going to have a mastering studio do the work on a computer mastering system they will need some headroom to work with also. For that purpose keep levels below -4.
  
• Space between songs is standard at four seconds. That is an eight count at a moderate tempo. Shorter times leave a never-ending quality to your selections and too long leaves the listener wondering if the next song is ever going to start. Sometimes people want a lot of silence between tracks for meditation CDs and the like, which is certainly possible.
• We can use our PEAK software to take out hiss, rumble, clicks,etc.
• Normalization brings all tracks to a common peak value so one track doesn't sound louder than another. RMS normalization allows one to bring highs and lows together and is great on voice recordings where one of the speakers is too far from the microphones.
  
• EQ, reverb, etc should all be added to the overall mix AFTER one has done the final mixing. Adding too much reverb etc to individual tracks can thwart this process.