The way mastering is executed at MOFI caused a lot of excitement among audiophiles and Analog, the magazine of the German Analogue Audio Association, made mastering the cover story. And here, one of the best mastering professionals, Christoph Stickel, has his say. Downloadable sound samples are included free of charge, and my favourite headphones are also being briefly discussed.

The fact that I consider Christoph Stickel to be the best mastering engineer, at least in the German-speaking world, is also strongly marked by subjectivity: It’s probably due to the fact that we worked together quite excellently, among other things, on the remastering of the MPS reissues I produced and on some recordings for Edel's Triple A label that my wife and I made, as you can hear in excerpts from the free downloads of Oscar Peterson's Exclusively For My Friends and DePhazz's Garage Pompeuse. But let's now move on to the entirely objective facts, namely Christoph Stickel's reference list, from which I already quoted in the article about the extremely positive influence of Audioquest's mains power technology on the quality of mastering. The list includes Keith Jarrett, Mariss Jansons with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Yello, John Williams and Anne-Sophie Mutter, John Scofield, Sir Simon Rattle, Die Ärzte, Seal, Sergiu Celibidache, Friedrich Gulda, Conchita with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, No Angels, as well as a Star Wars soundtrack.

Apart from the reasons already mentioned at the beginning, it also seemed to make sense to me to deal with the topic because various download portals often offer several versions of important albums, which differ only in their remastering. In the CSM studio in Vienna, which was decked out for the Christmas season, I met not only the host but also Carsten Hicking, one of the owners of audioNEXT, who every now and then provides Christoph Stickel with headphones from his portfolio, in order to get his professional opinion on the matter. It didn't turn out to be exactly a real conversation on the subject of mastering, though. Because as a lecturer at the Erich Thienhaus Institute - better known as the location of the sound engineer or „Tonmeister“ training at the Detmold University of Music in Germany -, the Munich University of Music, the ARD.ZDF Medienakademie (Media Academy of the German broadcast ARD and ZDF) and the SAE Institute, Christoph Stickel is used to lecturing both competently and entertainingly right after the first question arises.