Will the record sound exactly like my master?

Close, and not identical. That is the format rather than a fault.

Cutting is a physical process. A needle has to track what the lathe wrote, so very hot low end, wide stereo bass, hard sibilance and heavy limiting all behave differently on a record than they do on a file. A good cut keeps your record sounding like your record, and sometimes that means a decision the streaming master did not have to make.

This is what the test pressings are for. You hear the actual cut, on a real record, before we press the run. What to listen for on a test pressing