The sound quality of your vinyl varies greatly depending on who handles it. That single fact is the reason to care about every step between your pre-master and the pressing plant, and why vinyl brokers are almost never the right answer.

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. Here's how I handle plant duplication, home transfers, and mastering from cassette to digital.

The encoder is a harsh critic. Here is what lossy codecs do to your transients, stereo width, and top end, and how to give the encoder room to work.

The one topic guaranteed to clear the room at any party, explained properly. Apply it once, at the end, to the final bit depth. Everything else is downstream.

Mid-side processing splits a stereo signal into what's shared between channels and what differs between them. When something in the center of a mix needs attention and the sides don't, or the reverse, that separation is exactly what you need. Here's how it works in practice.

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's reaching your ears is colored, every decision you make is colored. It's that simple.

A purpose-built mastering 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 ITI MEP-130 is where parametric equalization began. This is the complete history of serial numbers 001 and 002, from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute to Hunt Valley, a knife in an office door, Baltimore Harbor, a Craigslist listing, and a phone call with Burgess Macneal at 86.