Yeah Bud,

Right on. What also frequently gets missed in these discussions is what is going in and going on before mastering. Mastering to me is minimal tweaks after a long process.

At the extreme of old school, you have guys like Tom Petty who refuse to record on anything but tape and who throw in a lot of twelve string, and carefully mic'ed drums, etc. You can expect a lot of warmth in that scenario and the "mastering" engineer doesn't have to do a lot after it is MIXED (another five hour discussion) which as we all know involves some "mastering" of each track in term of EQ, levels, etc.

BUT, if you have bad or noisy or boring tracks to begin with there is no "mastering tool" that can save you. In fact, any preset in Ozone is going to take what you have done to make things sound bad and make it sound 100 times worse.

This is a point that often gets lost in these discussions--garbage in, garbage out.