Love 'Purple Rain' or 'Thriller'? Thank Bernie Grundman's skill in the studio

"A mechanical tool is following an intricate signal."

"These are coaxial speakers, and the tweeter's in the throat of the woofer."

"Now you have 16 sets of stampers for a set of lacquers."

The language can get pretty heady when Bernie Grundman is talking shop at his 20,000-square-foot studio in Hollywood.

One of the music industry's most respected mastering engineers, Grundman specializes in an arcane yet crucial part of the recording process - the last step, essentially, before a piece of music is readied for mass consumption on CD or vinyl or, as is most often the case these days, as a stream of digital information beamed down from the cloud via Spotify or Apple Music.

Mastering involves striking the final balance of the various elements in a mix, getting the dynamics just right, controlling the amount of silence between tracks - each