The Song Fight Bulletin Board

I just came across this article: Tips and Tricks for Mastering

Well worth a read or several.

Awesome! Dave Moulton's the man.

A great accompaniment to this is the Ozone Mastering Guide. Even if you don't master with Ozone, it's still an enlightening read.

“Your work isn’t done until the mix sounds great on ALL the speakers you have at your disposal, not just your favorite ones.â€

I recommend simplifying your mastering chain as much as you can. It's very very compelling to fire up ozone and harmonically excite every band, expand the stereo image, do some ambitious EQing and multiband compression and then swamp the whole thing in mastering reverb. But without absolutely knowing what all of these are doing to your song, I'd say steer clear. I'm much happier with my own mixes since I ditched all the bells and whistles and moved to just an EQ, a multiband compressor and a simple limiter.

I've recently noticed some really brutal sounding pro-mastering jobs, the worst offenders being System of a Down's Mesmerize and Sleater-Kinney's The Woods. The later is the loudest album I have ever heard, and it sounds like utter shit, partly because of the mastering. But, by hiding behind faux-lo-fi posturing and critcs' general ignorance towards recording they are praised for it.