Infinite State Machine

Mastering for vinyl, for those who aren’t sure about this part of the process, is when a sound engineer plays the raw uncompressed master version of a track through his audio processing equipment in order to make the recording work well and sound loud in the vinyl medium. The master lacquer is a round disc of soft material that is cut buy a diamond tip lathe creating the grooves that will play back music when a stylus and needle run through the groove. Mastering involves compression and equalization to allow the lathe to cut the lacquer without distortion or errors that would cause pressing flaws. This is also the point where the label’s matrix number is etched into the runout grooves. reference