Master & Commander: Q&A with Mike Kalajian

I was engineering and producing for years. Doing that, I had worked with every mastering engineer under the sun. I didn’t really see a correlation between how much money you spent and what the quality was -- I mean, there are guys who are unbelievable who are really expensive and it’s justified, and then there are guys who are a great value. But there are also a lot of outliers. It’s not super correlated. So I was tired of paying a lot of money for people who I thought were going to be really excellent and getting something back that I didn’t feel was really excellent.

I kind of wanted to be the shop that gave you the amenities of a big name studio without having to spend a million dollars or having to go through three people to get to your mastering engineer. I wanted to offer the same attention to detail as a big name studio -- not just in regard to mastering. I wanted to be able to get an email two years after a project was completed and still deliver the requested files, unlike a normal home studio.