Just met with Jeff Lipton at Peerless Mastering. The guy is a spaz! A wonderful, brilliant spaz. His style of working is to put on your music, then constantly leave his chair, turn his back on the music and stand in front of you while you sit on a couch and tell you involved stories about all the ridiculous characters he has met in the music world. I was starting to worry that I was paying him to tell me war stories, but it turns out he does all this for a reason: to maintain perspective. He tries not to get tunnel vision, so he ignores the music, then suddenly turns around and gives it his full attention, immediately has a strong reaction, makes a change, and then steps back again for a while. It's a really weird procedure but it works. Also, he is reluctant to add compression, whereas many mastering engineers add compression to everything sort of de facto. So, while my album was getting mastered,Jeff told me lots of filthy stories (I'm sorry, I can't repeat them here) and now may album is mastered. If you are mastering a record, and you can afford somebody a little more expensive, and you enjoy a little filthy banter, check out peerless mastering.