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from the some-art,-some-science,-and-a-whole-lotta-black-magic dept.
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: 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