Who has high-end car or home audio systems?

Yup... Editing songs down is part of the mastering process sometimes too. Althought you'd probably get better results these days editing it digitally yourself beforehand.
Back in ye olden days of 45's and 33 1/3 LP's, the 45's were always edited down to about 3 minutes and pushed as hard as they could get them.

Pro mastering is definitely the way to go but you have to weigh the costs against the return. If you can afford it, then hell... go for it.

Mastering involves editing your songs for time, putting beginnings and ends on them, fading out.. etc.. Plus (using outboard profession top-end gear) EQing to bring out the best of each mix, Compressors and limiters to make all the songs of equal volume and sound regardless of when or where they were recorded. Plus a high end listening room that the engineer's worked in long enough to know exactly how to get the best sound.
As with anything though, you get what you pay for. You're basically paying for the mastering engineers years of experience.

If you're just releasing a home-demo CD though... it's a tough call to make.
Again, if you can afford it...what the hell. But if you're selling your own CD over the internet and moving maybe 100 copies if you're lucky.. it's a good idea to look into using software mastering and build up your experience yourself. You'll never get the high-end quality that you'll get with outboard high-end gear, but you can do a reasonable facsimile of compressing and limiting, EQing and all the necessary editing.

If your CD starts to sell really well, you'll be in a position to get it signed with a label, who'll then pay to take your original mixes in for proper mastering later.
(and pay for distribution and all the nifty advertising stuff. All against future royalties of course...blah)

I have Wavelab and the Waves Native Gold plugin's (1500 USD worth) however the rate limit is the acoustics of the room (I know are rough as I have run spectrum analysis algorithms and tried to correct for it using a big old stereo EQ just before my speakers...no joy !) and my monitoring system and I just can't match the results of a reasonable commercial mastering house !

Use headphones :D

Naaa the people at HR.com might tell me my mix sounded thin !!!

Just wondering if an 8 track Quadrophonic system still qualified as high end or am I a little behind the times :confused: ..................................................................................................................btw,pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, he's only pulling your leg!

Hey, Im not gona argue with any one who trains wild monkeys !

8 track quadraphonic, is that stereo coming from each speaker !

> Just wondering if an 8 track Quadrophonic system still qualified as high
> end or am I a little behind the times

As long as it's a Sparkomatic!

Yeah, something like that, it was the rage back in the mid-70's, some albums were even recorded in quadrophonic, turned out to be a short-lived fad, wow the mind pulls up the oddest bits from the past, but somehow can't remember what happened yesterday.......where'd I put that Ginko Biloba?

You are talking to a man with a DCC (digital compact cassette... remember them ) deck in his stereo !

When Syd Barrett was still around, Pink Floyd tried to do concerts in quadrophenia. They'd have four speakers, one per corner of the venue, and then they'd have sounds which would swirl around from speaker to speaker. Sort of like stereo on LSD. They soon realized that this was pretty limited, but not before issuing an album in quadro.