Mastering - what should I look for?

Depends on what is communicated with the mastering house/engineer.
E.g. dynamic range, i mean, how much "louder" do you want your mix in the final master? 2 dB of limiting? Loudness war? Competitive to a specific product?
The mastering guy has ears but no clearvoyance. You might let him decide on his own or talk to him.

I would expect the finally mastered product to be absolutely free of any possible annoying translation problems. Therefore i expect the mastering guy to have a better or at least equal monitoring than me (including ears...). So he can identify nasty things that i can not fix myself because i do not hear them.
Normalized, free of digital clipping including possible inter-sample peaks. Ready to rock a few thousand trouble-free CDs (or SACDs or DVDs or MP3s or whatever. Another thing to remember: Mastering for specific media might need different masters to make the product sounds equal in perception. E.g. MP3 is different from CD is different from LP (artifacts of compression, limitations of LP e.g. track density, whatever can make the product sound inconsistently on different media).
BTW, normalization in regard to the whole medium. E.g. if mastering an album for LP or CD, levels may be different to adjust/compensate for different dynamic ranges of the tracks and maintain same loudness...
Nothing like this for radio version media or individual track downloads.

In fact, if a mix is extremely well, a good mastering engineer might do - essentially nothing to it, but only checking standards.

Thanks...that helps...My initial thought of what to communicate with the ME was exactly that - a general sense of overall EQ likes and dislikes, dynamics and general loudness. How many revisions (if any) should I expect?

I got back into mastering in the '90s behind my friends hating what was happening to their mixes on CDs!

First do no harm is the watchword. It's all too easy to end up louder but worse sounding because the mix got stepped on. I try to never impose my taste unless I hear something I feel is obviously over the top and distracting. Better is good but just different is a mistake because I must assume my clients have already done due diligence on the mix. That said, I'll get aggressive when asked. I also never hesitated to ask Bob Ludwig or Doug Sax for a fix and consider mastering an interactive process. The artist is betting their career on what we do and they need to be able to own everything about their recording in order to get on a stage and sell it.


I also think about where the recording is being pitched. It's stupid to slam a gorgeous recording that will obviously never go into the pile at a CHR programming meeting. When that is the case, it's important to be loud enough. At Motown we always checked masters against the top 5 and I still do that when it's appropriate. I am also checking everything against Apple's iTunes format these days to make sure it doesn't screw anything up.

Did you end up using anyone for some of your stuff JK?

Who at Georgetown is mastering it?

I believe Dan B.