Meeting Topic: Demystifying Mastering
Speaker Name: Michael Romanowski (Coast Mastering), Jonathan Wyner (M Works Mastering, iZotope, Berklee), Jessica Thompson (Mastering, Restoration & Archiving Specialist)
Meeting Location: Coast Mastering, Berkeley, CA
Thirty-eight members and non-members of the San Francisco section gathered in the surround mastering room at Coast Mastering to learn about the art and craft of audio mastering. Two separate seatings made for intimate conversations driven by member questions. Mastering engineers Jonathan Wyner, Michael Romanowksi, and Jessica Thompson talked about the role of mastering in the music industry at large and how it has changed in recent years to accommodate the shift from vinyl to CDs to streaming as the primary mode of music consumption. They touched on the resurgence of vinyl and how they master for multiple delivery formats. Other hot topics included hi-res audio, MQA, and the need for better tools to encode and track metadata.