http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/02/24/147379760/what-mastered-for-itunes-really-means?sc=fb&cc=fmp


In Apple's calculation, mastering a song or album "for iTunes" means that it'll sound better while remaining just as portable as the encoded files we're accustomed to packing by the thousands onto our phones and mobile devices. For Bob Ludwig, a mastering engineer who remastered Coldplay's latest album, Mylo Xyloto, for the new "Mastered for iTunes" store, this makes sense. "From a technical viewpoint, there are cases where the lossy 24-bit AAC file would be superior to the lossless CD," Ludwig wrote in an email. "I did an early demonstration for some engineer friends of mine and the difference between the 'Mastered for iTunes' file I created and the one that was ripped from a 16-bit CD was easily heard on the little speakers on my MacBook Pro."

(John) Vanderslice's studio doesn't do mastering, but as a musician, producer and studio owner, he hears many albums before and after the mastering process. "The idea of mastering is that you have the definitive high resolution product and you wilfully ignore every other variable downstream," he says, "whether it's compression codecs or speakers or whether someone's listening to it on earbuds."

The idea of mastering for a lesser format, Vanderslice says, is "completely insane. My first reaction was it would be like if you were a writer and you were told that you would have to re-edit your book for the dimwitted or the dyslexic."


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