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The Dark Art of Mastering Music

posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday May 24 2016, @08:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the some-art,-some-science,-and-a-whole-lotta-black-magic dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

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?

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Tuesday May 24 2016, @09:52PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday May 24 2016, @09:52PM (#350496)

    ...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.

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2016, @09:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2016, @09:55PM (#350497)
    Good thing this kind of "bunk switching" and "smooshing" as you call it is so much more well received in our more modern society now.

  • (Score: 4, Funny) by RamiK on Tuesday May 24 2016, @10:38PM

    by RamiK (1813) on Tuesday May 24 2016, @10:38PM (#350513)

    I'd be more careful mentioning Justice for All's inaudible bass in public. That sort of talk got us St. Anger...

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