Looking for pro mastering for dance/RnB

[Night Stalker]

Hi mastering engineers,
I am disheartened with the mastering engineers here in Australia. If I give a rock mix, I'll usually get great results. But as soon as I give any modern pop/dance/RnB track I end up being disappointed.

I have received a mix back from "the top studio and engineer" here down under. ( no names mentioned ) but I was horrified at the amount of distortion the mix had as if it was slammed aimlessly. My client will go back and get it touched up, but it's the last straw for me. Last year I was disappointed with the results with the same engineer, until a recent client of mine secretly had his track mastered and showed me the end result. It sounded awesome (it was a rock track) so I suggested to my current new client (latino-hip hopper) to give them a try.

I asked my no nonsense engineer friend to listen to my mix in his studio and to critique my mix especially looking out for any possible distortion of all things.... I didn't tell him what the reason was so he was just listening to another mix of mine. He thought it was one of my better mixes and was positive about it's sound.

What ticked me off was a phone conversation by me telling the engineers assistant that the track is distorted, a phone call back to me suggested that my 2 track was already "a little distorted" and that they could not hear any distortion induced from their mastering............tutt

I'm looking for mastering engineers who are experienced at mastering modern pop, hip hop etc. I can include a snippet of audio if interested to hear what I'm hearing in the problem track.


Tnx