Abbey Road Studios Launches Online Mastering Service

Legendary recording studio, Abbey Road Studios, is throwing open its doors to musicians and producers worldwide this month with the launch of its online mastering service. Available at http://www.abbeyroadonlinemastering.com/, the new service offers the opportunity to have recordings mastered by Abbey Road Studios' award winning engineers in their famous mastering suites. The online mastering service will operate on a cost per track basis for mastering with a fixed price per format for vinyl masters, making it easier to calculate mastering costs within a fixed budget. Final delivery will take a maximum of five working days beginning from point of purchase. This move into online mastering sees Abbey Road continuing its long tradition of combining great talent with outstanding facilities and inspiring musicians. It is also a further innovative step for a studio renowned for pioneering new recording, mixing and mastering techniques. The online service means that the millions who are recording and mixing music, miles away from traditional studios, will now have a chance to join the ranks of talented artists who have been mastered at Abbey Road — The Beatles, David Bowie, Basement Jaxx, Lily Allen and Franz Ferdinand to name a few. After creating a user account 2GB of audio can be uploaded onto a secure server where products and services can be selected as required before making payment. Files for upload have to be uncompressed stereo WAV or AIFF files, with a bit depth of 16 or 24 bits and a sampling frequency of 44.1kHz.and upwards. Abbey Road Online Mastering work will be carried out in its mastering rooms which house a varied range of classic analogue equipment and the latest in digital hardware and software technologies; namely the original and exceptional EMI TG mastering consoles with the SADiE 5 PCM8 digital audio workstation. The Studios are all also equipped with Neumann cutting lathes for vinyl, Meyer and B&W main monitoring, Benchmark A/D/A's, outboard from the likes of Prism, Weiss, Junger, SPL and TC Electronics and an extensive range of the CEDAR software plug-ins. Once the tracks have been mastered, users will receive notification that they are ready for download via email and a message through their Abbey Road Online Mastering home page with tracks available for download for one calendar month. Abbey Road will also provide a reference for listening purposes and the finished master either as a WAV, downloadable DDP Image File or an audio PMCD. Vinyl will be provided in the format requested which can either be 7" single, 12" single or LP album. Additional copies can be produced on CD or Vinyl format.