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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: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 25 2016, @12:18AM
This isn't the only example - pop music has been compressed for many decades, it makes it "pop" through cheap speakers in noisy situations and you can hear the quiet stuff without destroying your speakers on the loud stuff. Many movies are delivered _without_ audio compression, which is why you have to crank up the volume to hear people whispering to each other, then get blown out of your chair by the chase scene's sound effects. Like anything, compression can be, and has been, overdone to the point that it makes listening to music tiring, even painful. To me, overcompressed audio makes me feel like I'm listening underwater to something really constantly noisy - there's no quiet time, it's all just hammering away at you at a relatively constant volume.
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