Los Angeles, CA (October 27, 2025)―As the Bakery celebrates its 10-year anniversary this year, mastering engineer Peter Hewitt-Dutton reflects on an essential tool in his and his team’s workflow.
Originally hailing from London, Hewitt-Dutton began his mastering career at Metropolis Studios, where some of his biggest projects included contributions to remasters for Led Zeppelin, Oasis and Black Sabbath. In 2018, he relocated to Los Angeles and joined The Bakery, where his credits have only continued to expand, with a client list full of major acts, such as Billie Eilish, Ringo Star and Rufus Wainwright.
As vinyl cutting specialists, Hewitt-Dutton and his team have standardized their toolkits with Nugen Audio’s Monofilter. “For vinyl, you have to control the depth of the groove very carefully,” Hewitt-Dutton explains. “If it goes too deep, it can destroy the equipment. If it goes too shallow, you create a groove that doesn’t play. The main culprit for creating problems in that area is stereo bass; Monofilter is designed specifically to deal with that. It provides a ton of control on how much we’re monitoring the bass and where.”
He continues, “Every other similar solution we’ve used in the past is kind of stepped and we have to just refer to our settings, whereas the Nugen version offers much more control over what we’re doing. Monofiler allows us to pick the exact point we need to mono the bass in order to get the depth we want.”
The Bakery Serves Up Vinyl and More
This level of detail is especially crucial when clients request longer album sides, which is something Hewitt-Dutton sees more frequently as artists push the boundaries of vinyl’s physical limitations.
“People want to make a pop album and put it on vinyl the same way it’s on Spotify, but these albums can be 45-50 minutes long,” he said. “The format was really only designed to handle more like 35-40 minutes. One of the first things we’ll always attack in these cases is the stereo bass. The more stereo bass we’ve got, the deeper the groove is going to get, which means the more space it takes up on the disc.
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“The less we need to do to get the result we need, the better,” Hewitt-Dutton concludes. “Monofilter lets us do exactly what we want without adding anything else to the sound.”
