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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @12:29AM
Depends.
There are albums that are defined by their production. Good quality sound is good quality sound regardless if you're an audiophile or a harried mother. Starting with a good recording is the difference between 100 hours in post-production and 1000. Not to mention microphone selection, preamp characteristics, etc.; it's a lot more detailed than you make it out to be.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @01:01AM
The listening needs (or desires) of the audiophile and the harried mother are like night and day.
The audiophile's listening environment has a noise floor below that of a library. The harried mother's listening environment has a noise floor that leaves her maybe 10dB of range below the pain threshold (depending on how loudly the toddlers are shrieking that day).
The audiophile's system provides crystalline response from below 20Hz to above 20KHz. The harried mother's van is in ROCK EQ preset, and has been since five minutes after she bought it, regardless of the fact that little Bobby has been shoving pretzel crumbs in the rear speaker grille just to watch them wobble.
The audiophile's speakers are exquisitely placed to provide the optimal stereo field. The harried mother's van's sound system was turned up to reflect the fact that the speaker on the right occasionally likes to blink out for no clearly defined reason, and unless she cancels her cable bill she'll never pay a technician to find the loose wire.
You could present the audiophile with a listening test based on an MP3, compared to a CD, and the audiophile would have a greater than 80% chance of differentiating the two. The harried mother wouldn't notice, and wouldn't care, and would still bob her head along and try to ignore the fact that the kids are practicing pagan rituals in the back.
Now, it's true that clarity on the track is important if you want audibility. It's true that you want a polished outcome, with a minimum of (unintended) distortion, solid signal/noise ratio, an EQ curve chosen to both respect the limitations of the media and highlight the various instruments and vocal contributions, it's true that you want a sufficient degree of amplification and compression and normalisation to have the tracks be proportional to each other - but having said all that, if you're delivering music, you're delivering compositional intent, and if you're not delivering that, you're engaged in sonic masturbation.
This is really where audiophiles go adrift. They can waffle on (and on, and on, and on, and ON) about how warm, or spacious, or exacting, or whatever buzzword makes them feel important, a given track is, and then when you ask them about the actual musical implications of a given set of modulations they don't know what to say because they were too busy paying attention to the space of the soundscape or something equally abstruse. The harried mother bobbing her head and singing along off-key to Michael Bolton is more involved in the actual musical content than most audiophiles.
If your mix is solid, the audiophile might sigh wistfully about how the real buzziness of the DX7's old circuitry denotes authenticity, or sniff disdainfully at how cheesy those old Casio synths sounded, but unless you're trying to charge $1000 per album for the audiophile market, what your bulk audience cares about is that the pounding beat doesn't wreck their speaker cones.
Mastering isn't a black art, it's polishing a window. You want that pane of glass to be clear so that you can see the music behind it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @01:18AM
Do you really think all the Metallica fans that complained about Death Magnetic were audiophiles?
Get over yourself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @01:38AM
No, I don't.
Here, have a WOOSH . Go ahead, it's on me.
What happened as far as Metallica was concerned was that they went a bridge too far in the loudness wars. That's in direct contradiction to what I said above, about mastering being polishing a pane of glass; they ended up sandblasting the glass. Result: backlash.
Now I don't know what happened there, but I will guess that Metallica determined that they would nuke the ground in the loudness wars, and kept telling the mastering engineer to take it up to 11. The mastering engineer then sighed, dried her tears with a wad of money, and cranked the dial.
None of this has anything to do with the central contention that mastering isn't a black art, Pitchfork is scraping the bottom of the barrel for stories to publish, and most of the supposed benefits of mastering can be locked in in the mix, and should be. What I was really saying above (but apparently I was too devastatingly subtle) was that mastering for all possible listening environments is a lost cause. At best, you can master for a medium, and try not to make your audience actually cry tears of blood. At this, Metallica failed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday May 25 2016, @02:28AM
You don't have to master for all possible listening environments.
You make sure the music has the instruments in balance, reasonable dynamic range, no unwanted distortion and call it a day.
Then when the soccer mom is playing it back in the minivan with crappy speakers, and screaming kids: the playback device can add any needed compression.
However, if you add the compression before the playback device, the audiophile has no way to filter that out (garbage in, garbage out).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @03:17AM
Amen, brother.
In fact, I'd go further to say that the instruments being in balance is something that should be done by the mixing engineer, and if it isn't, that's not a mastering flaw; it's a flaw in what the mastering engineer got.
Mastering should provide for dynamic range and clarity within the constraints of the target medium, and then you're done.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday May 25 2016, @03:34AM
I was not aware those were two different specialities. Especially since mastering seems to be done so poorly with commercial music.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @04:06AM
Yeah, the breakdown is something like this (details vary by studio, common practices, type of music, audio sources and the phase of the moon):
Musicians make grunts and squeaks.
Microphones (where applicable) pick up the primitive howls. (Otherwise it comes from synths, prerecorded samples, or similar alternatives.)
The various barbaric screechings are recorded (often in multiple takes). The screechings that go into the next stage are the stems.
The mixing engineer puts the evil chanting through levels, per-track (or bus) effects, panning, EQ, various side-chain effects (of which compression is only the most famous) and provides the mixed track. Depending on how much latitude the mixing engineer is given, this can include addition of further instruments, samples, looping of elements and more. This provides you with the mix.
The mastering engineer takes the mix, and prepares it for its commercial, on-media form. This can include further compression, application of EQ, normalisation and so on; perhaps even some additional reverb. The mastering engineer is not afforded the tools with which to fix a bad mix, but the mastering engineer can screw a good mix up out of recognition.
Then it gets cut for vinyl or CD or whatever. Generally there are different masters for different media depending on the limitations of the media and typical playback devices.
Your end-to-end bedroom producer only working with samples and synths can do everything on one laptop, or if it's a singer/songwriter thing with a guitar, with one microphone and and audio interface to the laptop. Your symphony orchestra can have a whole team of audio engineers wiring up your orchestra like they're planning a building demolition, and mixing that can be a massive undertaking. Your mastering engineer then has to cope with that really complex sound environment.
Hope this helps.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @07:30AM
So... put the compressor in the car stereo, not the studio.
On second thought, didn't they use to do that back before music went to hell?
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday May 26 2016, @12:07PM
Thank you so much for your post! I found it to be educational and extremely entertaining.
Many years ago when I was in college, I got involved with the 'Instant Audio' group out of our student union. We set up the mics, mixing board, amps, speakers, ... everything having to do with sound for concerts held at the student union. Had great fun doing that and learned a lot.
I even got to mix a concert once. Was long ago, but ISTR that show had 5-6 performers on stage, each with a feed for vocals and their instrument. I think we had 3-4 mics on the drum kit, too. So, I'm sitting at the mixing board and looking across the sound stage.
I listen to the lead guitar. Sounds a little too bright. Turn down the high end just a smidge using the parametric equalizer on the board. That's better. Bass end is a little weak... turn that up a smidgen. That sounds okay, but is a little hard to hear among the rest of the band... a little nudge to the volume for that input. Good! Oh, wait. He's standing left of center, but the sound is coming from right smack in the middle of the stage. A little twist on the pan control to get them to coincide. Got it!
Next up were his vocals. Ignore everything else and just listen to his voice. Adjust, tweak, nudge. Bingo!
On to the saxophone. And then the horns, and drums, and so on.
Then one more listen to the whole sound stage. How well is the mix balanced? Anyone too loud/soft compared to the others? How does it sound across the whole frequency spectrum? Is it too bright or boomy? A few more nudges and adjustments.
I can remember it like it was yesterday. There has been nothing else to compare with that experience since. I could reach out, and with exquisite control, adjust each and every voice and instrument — independently and as a whole.
The next day, I'm in my dorm room and turned on my single-speaker radio which had two knobs: volume and tone. That was painful!
My first car (bought used) had an aftermarket sound system installed. The speaker in the passenger door would pop in and out depending on how I hit bumps in the road. :(
So, I've found myself in the position of both the audiophile and the harried soccer mom of your wonderfully-written comment. So many times since then, I've wished I could decompress songs and bring out greater dynamic range. Seems that once you have made a 'sound soup', there's no getting the ingredients separated again.
Again, thanks for posting your comment! Thoroughly enjoyed it and brought back some fond memories.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 26 2016, @04:07PM
Glad you enjoyed it!
I think that the next, new audiophile format will be a set of raw stems, and the next, new audiophile equipment will be a mixing board.
If you want to recreate that experience, here's what you do today:
First, get equipment. A multichannel audio interface for your computer, a mixing board, and a couple of monitor quality speakers. This is less expensive than you think, but if you're shooting for quality, be prepared to drop four figures on it. Depending on the mixing board, some of them can take in multiple channels of audio through a USB interface. For software, use your favourite DAW, or just download Audacity. It works fine.
Next, get your stems. There are lots of remixing groups online, and it's not hard to get stems as a rule. Sometimes even big-name bands provide stems.
Then, load up your stems in Audacity (or whatever), play them through your mixing board, and listen. Let the tweaking begin!
You may find that your remixes do well in competition, if you have a knack for it.
If you really get into it, you can add effects units, and get really deep into remixing. It's a big topic.