What is mastering? Who knows. Know one knows.
Mastering is the final process that happens to a production before it gets released to the public. It is definitely a crucial step in the process if you want your release to sound professional that is.
As mixing engineers, we are often thrown into unfamiliar environments and thus our playback standards can be compromised from place to place that we go. Mastering engineers work in one place all of the time this way they can use to the way their room sounds and make very educated adjustments to your music. A mastering engineer has years and years of listening experience and knows exactly how a song should sound and often times have very expensive gear that will make your song sound absolutely pristine.
On a technical level, a mastering engineer will use eq to remove any problem areas with your mix. Things such as brightness, boominess, boxiness and many others can be fixed with a simple bit of eq. They will also make your track louder, the standard level for loudness on a master is around -9 RMS, the tools used for this process are called limiters. The way most limiters work is to bring the level at which the limiting engages down to the peak level of the music, by doing this you're increasing the amount of volume that can be squeezed out of the track while ensuring that your track won't be clipping at all. They can do many other things as well, such as saturation to add warmth, mid-side eq to clear room for things in the middle or to enhance the sides and add width to a track, they also might add with with a stereo widener or make things more mono, such as bass and subs.
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