Metropolis Mastering was founded in 1993 by Ian Cooper, Tony Cousins and Tim Young. Their motivation was simple: to master audio to a standard never previously achieved.
In the years that followed they were joined by other established mastering engineers; Stuart Hawkes, John Davis and Matt Colton to continue to raise standards and expectations.
From inception, all our rooms have been designed and built to the highest specification, in conjunction with industry-leading speaker manufacturer PMC to house their finest monitoring systems powered by Bryston amplifiers. This ensures we have the best possible listening environment in which to make critical judgements and changes to audio. PMC themselves describe our rooms as “the best audio environments in the world.”
Another longstanding key partner of Metropolis are Prism who supply all the analogue to digital and digital to analogue converters we use. Each room is then equipped with a range of outboard EQs and compressors according to each engineers needs and preferences. Equipment chosen to be in the rooms comes from the likes of Sontec, Avalon, Maselec, Shadow Hills, Weiss, and TC Electronic.
High-end audio manufacturer Audeze are at the heart of workflow at Metropolis. Their high quality planar magnetic headphones are used in all our mastering rooms.
Of our 5 mastering rooms, 2 have been designed for both for stereo and 5.1 surround sound mastering. This enables us to master for surround consumer formats like BluRay and SACD as well as cinema releases. While 2 have our lovingly maintained Neumann VMS-80 lathes installed for cutting vinyl records.
