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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: 3, Informative) by slinches on Tuesday May 24 2016, @10:30PM
CD Audio at 44kHz and 16 bits is just barely above the theoretical minimums required to cover normal human hearing ranges. So it is adequate iff the available dynamic range is used to the fullest and the proper signal conditioning is done using higher sample rates and bit depths prior to the final downsample. So, while you are technically correct that a CD can contain an audibly identical representation, masters will often sound better anyway due to the mastering engineer placing a higher value on volume than perfect reproduction of the master (aka, the "loudness wars").
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday May 24 2016, @10:49PM
Every stereo made in the last century has had a volume control.
I think a "loudness" button is common too, but may have fallen out of favour due to the loudness wars.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by slinches on Wednesday May 25 2016, @12:15AM
Yes, true. But the volume control doesn't help remove distortion caused by the waveform on the CD itself being clipped. The distortion is being introduced before it even gets to the amplifier in that case.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday May 25 2016, @02:11AM
The dynamic range on a CD is large enough that that should not happen with a competent sound engineer unless the distortion is intended.
Did you notice, on the DR site somebody else linked, that some vinyl albums had more dynamic range than CD releases?
That is not due to any technical limitation of the medium.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @02:28AM
I've noticed that CDs aren't able to deliver a brass section the way vinyl does. Vinyl can make you swoon; with CDs, you're still fiddling with your phone or whatever else is at hand.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday May 25 2016, @07:32AM
Did you transfer than vinyl track to CD using good audio equipment? No? Then how can you know that it was the physical limitations of the CD, and not the mastering?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @12:27PM
I gave away (sold to a used vendor for a song) my vinyl collection years ago, and have replaced a few of my favorites with CDs (purchased, not hand transfers). There have been disappointments. I suppose it could've been the work of indifferent audio engineers doing the remaster.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @12:41PM
(part 2) Here's one:
https://vimeo.com/19195708 [vimeo.com]
Around 1:21 the brass behind Sonny Stitt moves to the foreground. The guy who posted it obviously chose vimeo over youtube for a reason, although I get a choppy download because of my limited ISP bandwidth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2016, @11:01PM
masters will often sound better anyway due to the mastering engineer placing a higher value on volume
This is why god created the volume knob and high efficiency speakers.
At best, you could make the argument that 24/192 is more forgiving with digital filters.
In practice, there are far more compromises throughout the audio chain for it any improvement to be realized.
CD audio is near perfect for consumer reproduction.
(Score: 2) by slinches on Wednesday May 25 2016, @12:20AM
I agree. Tell that to the mastering engineers. They're the only ones who can control whether the full dynamic range capabilities of CD Audio are actually used or not.
Like I said before, it's not that the format isn't capable, it's that it isn't currently being used to its full potential.