How much does a good mastering chain actually cost? In my opinion, around £10,000 is where you can start building a genuinely high-quality analogue mastering chain — but there really is no upper limit.
You could build an excellent mastering chain for roughly £10,000, or you could walk into a mastering studio and find £100,000 or more worth of analogue equipment available. Both can produce fantastic masters.
The difference is not necessarily that the £100,000 chain sounds ten times better. What the larger setup gives the mastering engineer is options.
At Audio Animals, Studio A has well over £100,000 worth of equipment available for mastering. I would never use every piece of equipment on one master. The value comes from being able to choose the right equipment for the music in front of me.
My view on mastering chains:
Watch: How Much Does A Good Mastering Chain Cost?
Is £10,000 The Magic Number?
There isn't really a magic number when it comes to mastering equipment, but if someone asked me for a realistic starting point for a serious analogue mastering chain, I would say around £10,000.
For that money you can put together a genuinely excellent chain consisting of high-quality EQ and compression that is capable of producing professional results.
Spending £50,000 or £100,000 does not suddenly make somebody a better mastering engineer. What that additional investment gives you is a much wider choice of colours, compressors, EQs and different ways of approaching a master.
The Engineer Makes The Mastering Chain
The most important part of any mastering chain is still the mastering engineer using it.
You need to understand how your equipment reacts, how the different processors interact with each other and exactly what each piece of equipment can bring to a track.
A great engineer who knows a £10,000 mastering chain inside out can achieve exceptional results. Simply putting £100,000 worth of equipment into a rack does not guarantee a better master.
“I think the engineer is what makes the mastering chain amazing. It is knowing your chain, knowing how to use it and knowing how to get the best out of it.”
What More Expensive Mastering Chains Give You Is Options
In Studio A at Audio Animals, the total amount of equipment available to the mastering engineer is comfortably into six figures.
That does not mean all of that equipment goes onto every track. Quite the opposite. The reason for having different compressors, EQs and processors is so that we can select equipment based on what the music actually needs.
On one track I may want the character of a Fairchild-style compressor. On another I might choose an Elysia Alpha Compressor. Another track may suit the Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor.
I may even combine processors if that achieves the result I want.
Those choices are a luxury, but they are a very useful luxury when you are mastering a wide range of music every day.
Shadow Hills
A completely different flavour of dynamics processing that can work brilliantly when a track needs weight, control and character.
Fairchild Style Compression
For certain dramatic, cinematic or impactful material, a Fairchild-style compressor can bring something incredibly distinctive to the master.
Elysia Alpha
For material where I want a different style of control or need to preserve transient information, another compressor may be the better choice.
What Would I Buy For A £10,000 Mastering Chain?
I recently had a consultancy session with a mixing engineer who wanted to add a high-quality analogue mastering chain to his studio.
His goal was not to build a huge dedicated mastering facility. He wanted to finish his mixes through a really good analogue chain that would give him a professional result without making his workflow unnecessarily complicated.
My recommendation was to look seriously at digitally recallable analogue equipment from manufacturers such as WesAudio, potentially combined with something like a Bettermaker EQ.
A good EQ, a high-quality vari-mu style compressor and another flexible compressor can already give you an extremely capable mastering setup.
Why I Like Digitally Recallable Analogue Equipment
One of the main reasons I recommended digitally recallable analogue equipment is that the hardware does not have to live permanently inside one mastering chain.
You can use the same equipment while producing, tracking, mixing and mastering.
Open the production session and the equipment recalls the production settings. Move into the mix and the hardware changes to the mix settings. Open the mastering session and everything recalls again.
You can then jump backwards and forwards between sessions without taking photographs of every control, filling out recall sheets or worrying about whether you have recreated the exact settings correctly.
When you are spending significant money on analogue equipment, being able to use that hardware throughout the entire production process makes the investment much easier to justify.
“You can use the gear in production, jump into the mix and it recalls the mix settings, then open the mastering session and it is ready for mastering. It makes life incredibly easy.”
Recording & Production
Track through the analogue equipment or use it during production rather than keeping expensive hardware reserved exclusively for mastering.
Mixing
Use the same processors across individual instruments, groups or the mix bus and automatically recall the settings when reopening the session.
Mastering
Recall an entirely different set of settings when it is time to use the equipment as part of the final mastering chain.
Traditional Analogue Recall Can Be A Pain
I love analogue equipment, but using non-recallable hardware across lots of different sessions can become frustrating very quickly.
You change the settings for one production, move onto another project and then suddenly need to reopen the previous session.
Now you are looking through photographs or recall sheets trying to recreate every switch and control position.
Compare that with plugging the equipment into USB and having the settings automatically restored with the session. For a modern hybrid studio, that is a huge advantage.
The Equipment Also Has To Attract Clients
There is another side to building a mastering chain that is sometimes ignored: client perception.
If you run a commercial mastering studio, the equipment clients see can form part of the attraction of using that studio.
A smaller 500 Series compressor may sound fantastic. In some comparisons I have actually preferred smaller or cheaper versions of equipment to their much more expensive counterparts.
But a client looking at a large Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor, a full-size Fairchild-style compressor or another substantial piece of mastering equipment is naturally going to perceive that differently.
That does not automatically mean the larger or more expensive unit sounds better. But commercially, presentation matters.
“Sometimes the cheaper piece of equipment may sound every bit as good — or I may even prefer it — but the bigger mastering unit can have much more client appeal.”
Your Career Should Dictate How Much You Spend
How much you should spend also depends heavily on where you are in your career.
If you are mastering one track every so often, spending £100,000 on equipment makes very little commercial sense.
A £10,000 mastering chain could be far more than enough and could produce outstanding results for years.
If you are running an established mastering business processing many tracks every day, the calculation becomes completely different. More work allows you to justify more equipment, and the additional choices can become genuinely useful.
The important thing is that the equipment should make sense for the amount of work you are actually doing rather than buying equipment simply because another studio owns it.
Your Mastering Chain Can Grow With You
One of the biggest mistakes people can make is thinking they need to build the finished mastering studio immediately.
You don't.
Start with a few genuinely excellent pieces of equipment and build from there.
As you gain clients, increase your workload and develop your business, you can gradually add different compressors, EQs and processing options.
Eventually you can reach the position where you have an entire room of equipment to choose from, but that can happen over ten or twenty years rather than overnight.
That Is Exactly How Audio Animals Grew
Audio Animals certainly did not start with the mastering setup we have today.
One of our first serious mastering compressors was a Maselec MLA-3. I remember paying roughly £3,300 for it around 14 years ago.
We still own it today.
That is one of the things I love about genuinely good mastering equipment. A great piece of analogue equipment does not suddenly stop sounding good because something newer has been released.
That MLA-3 sounds just as good today as it did when we originally bought it.
Over the years we simply kept adding equipment. One compressor becomes two. You add another EQ. Then another colour of compression. Gradually the mastering chain develops alongside the business.
What Does Spending More Actually Get You?
A Serious Starting Point
Around £10,000 can build a genuinely excellent analogue mastering chain with professional-quality EQ and compression.
More Tonal Choices
As the budget increases you can start introducing different compressor designs, EQ colours and specialist mastering processors.
Maximum Flexibility
At this level you are largely paying for the luxury of having a wide range of premium options available for different styles of music.
So, How Much Does A Good Mastering Chain Cost?
If I had to put a number on it, I would say somewhere around £10,000 is a very realistic starting point for a serious analogue mastering chain.
That amount of money can buy you equipment capable of producing genuinely excellent professional masters.
What spending significantly more gives you is not necessarily a proportionally better master. It gives you more choices.
Instead of having one compressor sound, you might have five. Instead of one mastering EQ, you may have several completely different tonal options available.
In a busy commercial mastering studio, that flexibility is incredibly valuable. But it is still a luxury.
The most important thing remains the person operating the equipment.
Learn the equipment you have, understand exactly what it does and gradually add to your mastering chain as your workload and business grow.
You do not need to spend £100,000 on day one. Start with an excellent core chain and allow the mastering setup to grow with you.