Fight the Loudness War

noloveinfear21

The sound issues with Metallica's Death Magnetic (as with RHCP's Californication) have a sparked a bit of an uprising. This time round things are more organised. With even the mastering engineer distancing himself from the record. Very interesting and worth a look even though its just in its early stages.

www.musicquality.org

Power to the fans.

NoQuarter

what exactly is wrong with the mastering in laymans terms???

DECEiFER

Without going into detail, listen to how awfully distorted the album sounds.

In some detail, have you ever seen an audio waveform? When it comes to music, you can tell when something has been recorded / mixed / mastered properly by just looking at one. Death Magnetic looks like a rectangle brick, totally peaking above the limits, thus causing distortion. Further to this, the dynamics and acoustics of the sound have been crushed. Think of it as having two cans of coke. They are as clear as day when in their original form. Crush them and squeeze them together, and it becomes that bit harder to tell exactly what it is. The sound on Death Magnetic is not just too loud, but the sounds' uniqueness has been crushed together (too much limiting), and it sounds like a total mess.

That's the best analogy that I can come up with on-the-fly, sorry.


But here, don't let my crappy explanation confuse you totally. Below is a screenshot of an Adobe Audition session, showing three Metallica songs from Death Magnetic in six waveforms. The top three are how they rip from the retail CD, while the bottom three are the same songs, only Guitar Hero III rips. The ones from Guitar Hero III, however way they received the tracks from Metallica, have managed to retain their dynamics and and are not as loud. Just look at how the amplitude manages to vary a lot more in the bottom three waveforms. In short, it is how the album should sound. I happen to have a copy of the Guitar Hero III rips on FLAC and they are absolutely much more pleasing for the ears!

grumpytrousers

go to www.turnmeup.org .

or watch this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

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Now playing: Crowded House - Locked Out
via FoxyTunes

JNive

the site might be changing names within the next 24 hours, but that domain will be kept and redirected.

If anyone else here is fed up with this commercialised trend in music, or wants to try and find out more about it / discuss sound quality issues, come on over

www.musicquality.org :-) we just started up 2 days ago, so are still getting things together

Big Tone

Ah, a little hobby horse of mine and I dont mind picking a bone with some of these bods!

Records sounded better in the 1950s than they do now and its due to digital processors and the engineers who dont know how to operate them correctly.

Nobody wants an album to sound deliberately bad but go back and listen to the old stuff and you'll hear a much clearer, warmer, more musical sound from the old analogue tubes that you just wont get from the modern transistor-based digi models.

It should be back to basics time for the recording industry..and dont get me started on MP3 audio quality!!

Justice fror audio..its about time, even the sonic audio from Ireland's Super pirates in the 80s sounds way better than whats on offer now from the locals and even on national level think Century Radio with its superior audio quality back in 1989 compared to the poorish audio of its successor Today FM.

nyarlothothep

Hmmm, I don't agree, records from the 50s don't compare in terms of sound quality with todays releases. There is way to much mastering on records these days and that is a problem but a well produced/mastered record is going to sound better than anything from the 50s/60s simply because the technology is there to make it better. The 70s though, any of the records I've heard from that decade sound really good, in their own way, disregarding obvious tech differences with the present.