DECEMBER CAN BE a cold, unforgiving time in Maine—the polar opposite of the vacationland that millions of Americans seek there every summer.

Knowing this, I was pleasantly surprised to discover sun and warm weather in Portland on a recent December morning. Although I was there on a personal visit, I made a point—as I always do when in Maine—to stop at Bob Ludwig's Gateway Mastering Studio, widely renowned as the global epicenter of music and multimedia production.

As nice as it was to get an unseasonably balmy day, it was even more gratifying to spend a few hours with Ludwig—a notoriously busy engineer who is typically booked months in advance and works long, grueling hours. On this rare occasion, Ludwig did not have a mastering session scheduled. He had set aside the day to tie up loose ends before departing on a short vacation, and he seemed glad to entertain a guest as he worked at a leisurely pace.

After introducing me to some of the Gateway staff—including CFO Gail Ludwig; editing/production engineers Jennifer Munson and Adam Ayan; and scheduling/production coordinators Donna Ryan, Angela Smith, Tom Ryan, and Rachel Pequinot—Ludwig ushered me into his studio, which is arguably the largest and most acoustically perfect mastering environment in the world.

We listened to 24-bit, 96-kilohertz -encoded stereo tracks from recent DVD video titles by John Lee Hooker and John Marks, among others. Ludwig also played portions of Beck's "Mutations,'' which he mastered, and it all sounded astonishingly good through Gateway's new EgglestonWorks Ivy speakers (serial numbers 1 and 2). Developed by Memphis audiophile William Eggleston III, the new units—larger versions of the company's signature Andras models—will retail for a cool $96,000 per pair when they hit the market in the near future.

"When you have five Andras speakers in this room, they move plenty of air, but when there are only two of them they're a little too small," said Ludwig matter-of-factly. "So I told Eggleston that if he was going to build something bigger I might consider it, and he decided he was going to do a no-holds-barred model."

(Incidentally, Eggleston is not related to Genelec Inc. marketing director William Eggleston, who also knows a thing or two about speakers.)

Ludwig's Ivys—which are powered by Mark Levinson Cello Performance Mark 2 amplifiers—sit on concrete foundations that are isolated from the floor and walls of the studio. Despite their size and weight, they are mounted on caster-wheel platforms that allow them to be transported between the mastering studio and Gateway's "speaker garage." For 5.1-channel sessions, Ludwig wheels in Andras speakers. He also has five Andrases permanently installed in Gateway's new DVD room.

An uncompromising listener who will stop at virtually nothing to get the best sound, Ludwig tested several brands of cable before deciding on products by Transparent Audio, a high-end manufacturer headquartered a few miles down the turnpike in Saco. The wires that connect the amplifiers to the speakers run $10,000 a pair, and they're only the tip of the iceberg, according to Transparent president Karen Sumner. She estimated that the Gateway complex contains approximately 5,000 feet of analog and digital wiring, most of it top-of-the-line grade.

"Bob Ludwig," said Sumner, "has a full-bore commitment to getting the very best resolution in the analog and digital signal paths." I'll say.

The rest of the gear in Ludwig's room measures up to the same exacting standards applied to speakers, amps, and cables. The analog section consists of a custom Neumann console, Sontec, Massenburg, and Avalon equalizers; Ampex ATR and Studer tape machines that can be customized to each project with either stock tape preamplifiers or Cello units; and other pieces of ultra-high-end equipment.

In the digital domain, Gateway is so far on the cutting edge that it serves as a barometer of the state of the art. In fact, many of the manufacturers whose high-resolution digital gear is represented at Gateway— DCS, Nagra, Genex, Sonic Solutions, Pacific Microsonics, Weiss, Apogee, and Sony, among others—consider Ludwig's input a vital link in their research and development chain.

The brain trust of Gateway Mastering in the studio's DVD authoring suite. Shown, from left, are director of engineering/DVD project manager Scott McConville, mastering/authoring engineer Brian Lee, and Gateway founder/owner/chief engineer Bob Ludwig.

One of the points Ludwig tries to drive home when discussing digital technology—or lecturing about it in schools—is that a system is only as good as its converters.

"A converter in a fantastic unit like the DCS or the Apogee or the Pacific Microsonics at 44.1 kHz is probably going to sound better than a mediocre converter at 96 kHz, just because the rest of the technology is so much better," said Ludwig. "But, a $5 96-kHz converter is going to sound a lot better than a $5 44.1-kHz converter in the same player, so it's all relative."

Among Ludwig's recent mastering projects was the Bruce Springsteen four-CD Columbia Records boxed set "Tracks," which brought the Boss to Portland for three days. It wasn’t Springsteen’s first visit to gateway, nor was he the only superstar to be spotted in the local burger joints in recent years. Eric Clapton is another notable Ludwig client who likes to attend mastering sessions, as do hundreds of artists ranging from Tori Amos to Paul Winter. In fact, Ludwig said, artists attend his sessions at Gateway in greater numbers than they did when he worked at Masterdisk in New York.

After our listening session, we went upstairs to the DVD suite, which was built as a showcase for the fledgling format and a space in which clients can experience multimedia titles. There, we sampled a handful of Dolby Digital and DTS titles, including Clapton's "Unplugged" and Steely Dan's "Gaucho."

Down the hall from the DVD room, Gateway director of engineering/DVD project manager Scott McConville and Mastering/authoring engineer Brian Lee toiled in a state-of-the-art authoring room that they and Ludwig designed to accommodate Gateway's increasingly wide range of multimedia projects.

McConville said, "Early on we felt that the DVD authoring needs to occur in the music mastering stage and that mastering houses need to get involved with it. It's at our stage that we determine what songs are going on the CD or DVD, so therefore, we're in the best point to decide what multimedia material goes on there as well. Otherwise, the client has to wait for the finished CD to be done and then send that to a multimedia house."

In order to juggle the 20 or so projects they work on at any given time, McConville and Lee have optimized various workstations for each of the processes they do. "Just yesterday, for instance, we had video editing happening on one system, while another system was doing video encoding and another was doing authoring and two others were doing graphic design and Web site design," said McConville.

Lee added that the DVD suite is networked with the rest of the facility, allowing any Gateway engineer to import audio that Lee or Ludwig might have processed in the mastering room, or export multimedia data to rooms in the facility dedicated to quality control.

"DVD authoring fit into our flow because we were already on the Sonic Solutions MediaNet network," said Lee. "If I do an audio pass in here, another engineer can go in another room and QC it because it's all on the network."

Among Gateway's challenges is educating clients about multimedia technology, from its creative potential to its terminology.

"The record companies know the audio business, but now they have to have DVD coordinators," said Lee. "If we need an element—a video, an audio stream, subtitles—one per son's going to have to oversee that now, whereas before all they had to worry about was mixing and mastering."

Gateway's position as a nerve center of music, video, and multimedia production belies its location, which is about as far away as one can get, physically and otherwise, from New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Silicon Valley. Ludwig himself was concerned when he left Masterdisk in 1993 to open Gateway that his clients might not make the trip.