I get it and I'm not trying to pick on you. To me it was more of a pseudo Zen koan thing with the morale that you've got to realize the answer yourself, rather than depending on others to guide you the way. And while I agree with you to a large extent, there is nothing mastering specific to be learnt from your story - it's a rather generic thing. Your last post was much more helpful and a perfect example on how you can actually help out without having listened to the material in question. I'm not picking on you, this one is more general: I think a lot of the mastering engineers in here should be a lot more open and honest when disgussing the mysterious arts of mastering when noobs ask questions - or keep from posting in the noobs threads. It's like it's forbidden for non pros to asks questions in here?. To me, the mastering business is no more mysterious than fixing cars for a living. You get the car in, you find out what's broken, you fix it. Ofcourse you can't learn how to fix cars on autoslutz.com. And no way can you learn mastering on gearslutz.com. But even though mastering engineers tend to not wanna talk about it, there are lots of standard things that a regulary done in the mastering process. This could include a hipass, EQ, compression, limiting, clipping, MS processing, stereo widening / narrowing, dithering, level rides, fades, editing, noise removal and so forth. Oh well - the OP got his answer sp