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According to many Metallica devotees, the official version of the band's 2008 record Death Magnetic is not the one worth listening to. Upon the album's release, fan forums exploded in disgust, choked with complaints that the songs sounded shrill, distorted, ear-splitting. These listeners liked the music and the songwriting, but everything was so loud they couldn't really hear anything. There was no nuance. Their ears hurt. And these are Metallica fans—people ostensibly undeterred by extremity. But this was too much.
The consensus seemed to be that Death Magnetic was a good record that sounded like shit. That the whole thing was drastically over-compressed, eliminating any sort of dynamic range. That it had been ruined in mastering. Eventually, more than 12,000 fans signed a petition in protest of the "unlistenable" product, and a mass mail-back-a-thon of CDs commenced. The whole episode provoked a series of questions, not just about what had gone wrong with Death Magnetic but about the craft in question: What is mastering, exactly? How does it work? Beyond the engineers themselves, almost no one seems to know.
An article on sound engineering, but the real question is, people listened to Metallica after 2000?
(Score: 5, Informative) by tractatus_techno_philosophicus on Tuesday May 24 2016, @09:40PM
As a classically trained musician, I've spent years honing the ability to transition from pianissimo to fortissimo, and everything in between, in order to express musical ideas and phrases with greater emotion and complexity. Music is more enjoyable when there are changes in the volume throughout the composition, and metal is no exception. When CDs first came out, a large selling point was that they were capable of producing greater dynamic contrast, whereas cassettes were not capable of producing the range of volume which one would experience in an actual performance setting. Then along came compressors and maximizers, and the age of obnoxiously loud music began. Don't get me wrong, some of the tricks which producers do with techniques such as side-chaining (Deadmau5 comes to mind) are pretty cool, but eventually it becomes tedious to listen to. Given that Metallica hasn't had any interest in producing good music since the '80s (I still love Kill 'Em All, Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets and ...And Justice for All, I don't see why anyone should be surprised by this. It's very hard to find recordings nowadays which do not artificially maximize and compress the levels. The most recent recordings I recall listening to which where recorded without said "enhancements" were Aphex Twin's Analord series, and those are a decade old now.
No moral system can rest solely on authority. ~A.J. Ayer
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2016, @09:47PM
All great albums (although KEA is a bit rough), but Justice really sounds like shit compared to the others. I believe the band-members have had several discussions about their mastering choices, for better or worse.
(Score: 1) by tractatus_techno_philosophicus on Tuesday May 24 2016, @09:55PM
I agree that ...And Justice for All doesn't sound as good as the others. What I mainly appreciate about it is the instrumentals and the lyrics (especially in "One"). I once heard someone say that ...And Justice for All sounded like it was being played through a metal trash can in a botched attempt to sound like Anthrax. I don't know how apt a description that is, but it certainly made me laugh.
No moral system can rest solely on authority. ~A.J. Ayer
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2016, @10:16PM
Of course. The stories in the songs are amazing, and the actual instrumental workmanship is phenomenal. But as you said, the whole album is tinny and shallow. Would love for someone to dig up the original master tapes and give it a good reboot.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday May 25 2016, @12:45AM
To me Death Magnetic sounds like a lame formulaic attempt to recreate the original sound. It's like they're just going through the motions without really being into it.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Tuesday May 24 2016, @09:52PM
...And Justice for All wasn't that great either: it's infamous for Newsted's bass being nearly inaudible. Newsted himself blames it on Lars.
I sometimes wonder how things would be different if Lars and Cliff hadn't switched bunks in the tour bus that fateful night and Lars had been smooshed instead. We probably would have had 2 more decades of great music from them, and some better drumming too.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2016, @09:55PM
(Score: 4, Funny) by RamiK on Tuesday May 24 2016, @10:38PM
I'd be more careful mentioning Justice for All's inaudible bass in public. That sort of talk got us St. Anger...
compiling...
(Score: 3, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday May 25 2016, @02:43AM
He never gets respect.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 4, Funny) by Alfred on Tuesday May 24 2016, @10:00PM
But back to Metalllica, when your only tool is a loud hammer...
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday May 24 2016, @11:49PM
Spinal Tap had the obvious solution: When you need an extra dynamic push, turn your amp up from 10 to 11.
(And actually, what they usually train classical guys like myself to do is simply play your pianissimos barely audibly, so that when you go for really loud there's more contrast even with less volume.)
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @01:07AM
Thank you. One of the first CD I ever tried back when they were new was a collection of classical music. I'll always remember the general sense of the warning that was on that CD. Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture had been recorded with actual cannon firing. Playing that track, it warned, on full volume would shred your speakers!
Perhaps that was meant to sell the idea of the potential dynamic contrast. At any rate, it brings to mind visions of Marty McFly blowing the amp in Doc's place at the beginning of Back to the Future, and I wouldn't doubt it!
One of the other CDs I bought when they were first coming out was Holst's The Planets. Venus, the Bringer of Peace is barely audible and still has good fidelity, yet Mars, the Bringer of War will practically deafen you at its crescendo!
So I got older and I realized that I had been deprived by not listening to Yes or Starcastle in CD format. Over about a year and a half, I gradually ordered nearly a full discography for both bands. Now, what's interesting is that these different albums were released in a certain order, then were remastered for CD in a different order through the years. Take any given FLAC I have from ripping, and if I turn replaygain off, I can tell you approximately when it was remastered for CD. It turns out that they all just simply get louder the later they were remastered. The classic Yes albums that were remastered always include a number of bonus tracks with quite a few repeats. Sure enough, the exact same recording of the exact same song simply gets remastered louder over the years.
The trouble is that even though 16 bits should be enough for anyone (knock on wood), compression reduces the number of bits that can effectively express loudness. When CDs first came out, there were say 8-12 bits of a difference between your pianissimo and your fortissimo. These days, it's more like 4 or 5. It sounds like Metallica here decided that they wanted all the bits of loudness, but they wanted it at levels that could only be expressed by large numbers in the 18-20 bit range or so, thus resulting in lots and lots of clipping. Talk about losing orders of magnitude of information.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @07:24AM
I guy I used to know actually did this. He had gotten new audio gear, and turned up the volume so that his neighbor across the street could hear how great it sounded.
The first cannon shot killed one of the speakers.
Realizing his mistake, he ran back in to turn the volume down, but he wasn't fast enough.
The second cannon shot killed the other speaker.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday May 25 2016, @03:39PM
I think the most important lesson we can take away is you should never use a compressor on an entire track because squashing the entire track simply makes no sense and is gonna make it sound canned and shitty. As someone who plays electric bass I'm probably the musician that values compression the most because if you don't use compression on fingerpicked electric bass you...ugh its really hard to put it into words, it just loses definition and punch and gets muddy, but would I ever use compression on the whole band, even in my little home studio? Not no but HELL NO as it just crushes the dynamics, especially on guitar and keyboard. Instead I use the compressor as the local studio engineer taught me, strictly as a limiter to insure someone doesn't start pounding their instrument and damage the recording unit.
But the upshot of the whole "loudness wars" is that it makes local and indie bands sound better frankly because unlike the big label artists they aren't squashing the shit out of their CDs which make them a lot more listenable. Its just a shame that big label engineers have taken an effect that can be great if used on an instrument in moderation and given it a bad rap by running everything through it and just wringing the life out of a track.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.