What are you looking to get mastered? The US can compete with Europe for cutting, although some of the dance stuff being cut in the UK is hard to beat.

yupp, i lived and worked long years in london, they are very good in pumping dance cuts, it's not a bad thing to know your cutting plant and work / comunicate with them, really depends what you want taste is different, you are part of deciding on the sound as well, hard, soft, pumping...

usually you tread hardcore music for example different than a dance track or jazz or... unless otherwise requested!

Michael Fossenkemper wrote: What are you looking to get mastered?

melodic trance

Is it better to get the mastering done at the cutter or have it
mastered somewhere else first so you got an extra pair of
(hopefully) objective ears listening to it?

if you talking vinyl, the exchange in england is pretty hot.
they offer very good in-house mastering, but except any mastered material as, well
for dance stuff i can definetely recomend them

Exchange is super cool if you attend the cutting session or have your man there, but we had some 'not so good' cuts made by them and some 'super good' also. There is also Wally at Masterpiece, he did some great stuff for us (some of Recycled Loops, Earresistible Musick, Sharkastique Tunes releases). For club orientated dance music i suggest that you do some proper mastering before you send it to cutting.
I do production, mixing and mastering for all kinds of dance music for years now and i always look for as close as possible transfer from master to vinyl. Best thing to do is to attend the cutting session with properly mastered track that already has that club sound and just transfer it to vinyl.

If you want it loud(assummining we are talking about a single two trax A+B max lenth seven mins) then do not pre master your audio,You can send two copies of your audio one mastered and one without any square waves, In order to give the engineer some idea of the sound that you require.

Loud Cuts for Vinyl

Hi Dendenna,
I have read your question about vinyl mastering. We are a mastering company in The Netherlands and started cutting into real vinyl 3 years ago. Since January we also cut lacquers for Production on a Neumann VMS 70 in combination with a Weiss 102 mastering system and various outboard gear. If you like you can try us and we can make very loud cuts for you if the duration per side does not exceed 9 minutes on 45 rpm or 12 minutes on 33 rpm. We can send you lacquers to any pressing plant choosen by you.

Lex