Initally, I thought mastering was just putting the little deatailed touches on the mix. Wrong. It's getting the whole album ready for duplication and making sure all the levels are about the same throughout the whole album. It's the say all before it's off the production. I had a conversation with my mentor and a friend of his and mastering sounds like a group of elite, specfic people. They both said they know how to master, kind of, but they send it off to the people who know best. It opened my eyes as to what happens before the artists we love go out to the public.