Lauren W. Hasten - Educator/Anthropologist

Sony Music Studios, New York City (defunct since 2007)

I spent nearly ten years of my life as an engineer in the music business in New York City; I gave it up in 1995 when I realized I wanted to be doing something -- forgive me -- more important. Below are just a few of the CD's I remastered (converted from LP to CD format) while at Sony Music. At the time, the process of CD remastering involved transferring old monophonic masters (either open-reel analog tape, lacquer discs, or the original metal stampers used to press the records) to a digital format and then applying various signal processing techniques to clean up the sound. I'd add a little EQ, perhaps a bit of compression, place the songs in order and then create the PQ code which told the CD player all of the track information. Then I'd burn the whole thing to a pre-master CD (these cost $10 a piece back then, and the process was so new that most wound up as coasters) and then send it to the plant for mass duplication. From there, the CDs went out to the shelves -- or, in my case, the cut-out bin. Once in a while when I'm feeling nostalgic, I'll go over to MSN music and search my own name; it generates a list of titles I mastered 15 years ago or so.

If you have RealPlayer, you can click on the links below to hear samples.

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