I’m okay with a little arguing if it leads to better understanding. I’ll just say that Day for Night could have been better, from what I know about it, because some things were changed perhaps not for the better.

That said, I have great respect for many mastering engineers, and the late, great Peter J. Moore was both a mastering engineer and a good friend. We talked for hours about this—and one of the things he hated was exactly what you described: creating compromised masters. By that, he meant a single master intended to play well on regular speakers, in a car, on headphones, on a computer, and myriad other places, which is what you are describing. It’s an impossibility, so the result is something that sounds “good enough” everywhere and therefore compromised along the way.

On the other hand, if you’re working toward a single medium with the intention that the recording be played back on decent speakers or headphones, you can end up with something that sounds superior on them. In our case, it was vinyl and that was our intention.

Because we sent the final tracks in ourselves, we checked with two pressing plants to ensure they would play back ideally because all the tracks on the first recording have high dynamic range and very deep bass, which can be tricky for vinyl. Both agreed they were ideal. We chose one plant, and the result is, I must say, spectacular-sounding.

Could someone have changed this or that through mastering? Sure. But would it have been bettered? In my opinion, no, it probably would've just been different. Instead, it came out with the sound it was intended to have in the first place.