Hello, this is a subject I feel very passionate about, so here are my rantings :)

I think some of the philosophy of mastering should be mentioned here. These are just my opinions, so let the flames begin! First of all, lately it seems that anyone who has a PC and soundforge or wavelab thinks that they are now a mastering engineer. MAYBE they have the tools, MAYBE, because a real lab will have quite a few more tools, both analog and digital. A mastering lab is set up to work in a two track scheme. All things optimized for a recording studio, with many tracks and channels, are for the most part absent there. There is a ENTIRELY different way of working and more importantly a COMPLETELY different goal in a mastering lab then a recording studio.

I believe that any recording studio that also offers "mastering" in the same room, with the same equipment, and MOST importantly with the same engineer as did the tracking and mixing, should be avoided like Roseanne Barr's underwear!!! I would never think of giving my business to a place like that!

From all the money you have saved by learning to use vegas, instead of all different manner of equipment and studio time you could have spent, you have tons of pennies left over for a mastering lab, and if its a customer, they will foot the bill hopefully.

All that said, many of us do need to push a CD occasionally, maybe for practice copies, reference disks, etc...So we gotta try some DIY mastering.
A good chain to work with is a strong eq, followed by a compressor, followed by a detailed EQ, followed by a limiter/ditherer.

A good try would include TC electronic parametric, followed by a compressor such as waves c4 or waves RCL or maybe timeworks compressor-x, followed by another eq, such as timeworks eq, or timeworks mastering eq, or perhaps another instance of tc native parametric. At this stage, HINT HINT HINT to SF software engineers, we could REALLY REALLY REALLY use a real time analyser plug in, something like penguin audio meter or SA pro...the timeworks eq has a response meter which will help somewhat. After this usually I would use waves L1 for final limiting and dithering.

If your mix is at 48 k you will need to put a sample rate converter somehwere in this chain, and a HUGE flame war would erupt if I said to place it in one place over another :)

Hope this helps, and let the flames begin from the " project mastering " community!