We have watched the audio industry reinvent itself more than once. Over twenty years in professional audio engineering, those years that predate ST Mastering as an online audio mastering service, we’ve seen the tools change hands from hardware to software, from vinyl to timecode, and now from creating sound to assisting it. Every time, the same question comes round: is this the jump that changes everything? We’ve learned to tell the real ones from the noise. This is a real one and we intend to lead it, on processes.
Twenty years at the desk and the analogue’s still powered on
In the 1990s, a studio was a room full of hardware. If you wanted a sound, you reached for a physical EQ, a compressor, a desk and you earned your result with your hands. Here’s the part that matters: that gear is still in daily use with us. Real EQs, real compressors, a real mixing desk the same class of kit that shaped records you know, is still shaping the masters we deliver today. We didn’t keep it out for nostalgia. We kept it because, in our hands and in our chain, nothing has beaten it for the job and we’re not in the habit of downgrading any client’s work to just save ourselves time.
Every jump, we were already there
Then, in the late 1990s, Steinberg’s VST — Virtual Studio Technology arrived, and analogue-modelling plugins started recreating those famous units in software. They were faster to wire up, faster to recall, faster to record. Some have since come close to the analogue originals that a listener simply wouldn’t notice, and frankly wouldn’t care as long as it sounds good and translates across whatever they play it on. That has always been the only test that matters.
You could watch the same story play out on the dance floor. DJs built their craft on vinyl, spinning on Technics SL-1200s, where a single EP of three or four tracks cost around £7 — a serious accumulating habit for anyone building a set. Then Serato let those same DJs play timecoded MP3s through real vinyl, keeping the feel while losing the heavy record bags and boxes. Around the same time, Pioneer brought that SL-1200 feel to CDs with the CDJ — devices that remain the most-used performance machines in clubs to this day. Every jump did the same job: it kept what worked and quietly dropped what didn’t. We paid close attention to every one.
The next jump is “assisted”—and why we said no to the easy version
The shift now underway is from making sound to assisted processing of it. This is not new to us. LANDR and a handful of others have offered automated enhancement for years, and we’ve watched that space closely the entire time. We chose, deliberately, never to offer automatic mastering, not because we couldn’t, but because our own processes and signal chains, refined over two decades and kept firmly in-house, already do what those tools reach for and we do it better. Our name goes on every master that leaves here. Turning down the cheaper, faster, generic path was never our limitation. How we get there is our ST Mastering signature sound and techniques used in all of our services. it’s the whole point of a twenty-year head start of constantly keeping up with how sound is processed using our techniques.
Early 2025: moving forward, on our own terms
So in early 2025 we made a deliberate decision to move with these advancements, entirely on our terms and at our own standard. We’ll say it plainly, as often as it needs saying: not automatic mastering. Instead, a series of online and personally customised tools, built per customer from focused sound processing through to full applications, each one carrying the same standard and the same proprietary thinking we’ve learned for twenty years. Not a product everyone shares and nobody owns. Tools shaped around your work adapted to the future, built by us, answerable to us.
What’s coming: the Processors
The first of them is nearly here. We call them Processors — dedicated, on-demand service tools that ST Mastering customers can reach for whenever the work calls for them. This is a serious, deliberate program, not a novelty and it’s only the start of what we have planned. We won’t be showing our hand before we’re ready; you’ll see and hear the results first, as our clients always do. More will be announced in the coming weeks, so keep an eye on this News section. For once, we’re not watching the jump happen. We’re the ones making it.