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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2016, @11:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2016, @11:01PM (#350530)

    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

    by slinches (5049) on Wednesday May 25 2016, @12:20AM (#350564)

    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.