The Smart Mixer

For many years the last person to listen to an album before release was the mastering engineer. He sat in a room with very good speakers, calibrated acoustics and equipment nobody else had, and received finished mixed songs from the studio. His work was subtle and almost invisible. He evened out the loudness so the second song would not turn out quieter than the first, adjusted the tone so the album would sound equally good in headphones, in the car and in a club, and added that last polish after which a recording became a record. Mastering was the craft of the last ears, and good ears were expensive.

In 2001 two MIT graduates, Mark Ethier, who had studied music and computer science, and his partner Jeremy Todd, founded the company iZotope in Cambridge and that same summer released Ozone. It was a mastering studio in a single window, with an equalizer, compressors, a stereo widener and a limiter, which any musician with a computer could install. The equipment moved into a program, but the decisions were still made by a person, and in unskilled hands Ozone made a recording louder and worse. These days I bring my own tracks to a master myself in Ableton, hoping I do not count among those unskilled hands, and I manage without a room with calibrated acoustics and without a person with expensive ears, both of which were mandatory for this work twenty years ago.