Most people only ever heard cassette at its most abused. A well-recorded tape on a good deck with quality stock deserves a fair hearing. I cover plant duplication, home transfers, and mastering from cassette to digital.

What MP3, AAC, and Opus do to your transients, stereo width, and top end on the way to the listener, and how to master so the encoder has room to work.

The one topic guaranteed to clear the room at any party, explained properly: quantization error, TPDF, noise shaping, and the one rule. Dither once, at the end, at the final bit depth.

Mid-side processing splits stereo into what the channels share and where they differ. When the center of a mix needs attention and the sides don’t, or the reverse, I can fix one without touching the other.

Brooks Harlan and Shawna Potter built me a passive box that switches between a Telefunken, a UTC, and a Neve/St. Ives at matched level. Here is what each one actually does.

People ask which piece of gear makes the biggest difference. The honest answer is the room. If what reaches your ears is colored, every decision you make is colored too.

A professional two-track tape machine from The Hit Factory, with confirmed Otari delivery records, mystery modifications, and the philosophy behind when tape earns its place in a master.

The story of ITI Audio, the 1972 paper that named the parametric EQ, a console that went under in Baltimore Harbor, and the unpotted MEP-130 demo pair, serials 001 and 002, that I found on Craigslist for $100.