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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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @01:07AM
Thank you. One of the first CD I ever tried back when they were new was a collection of classical music. I'll always remember the general sense of the warning that was on that CD. Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture had been recorded with actual cannon firing. Playing that track, it warned, on full volume would shred your speakers!
Perhaps that was meant to sell the idea of the potential dynamic contrast. At any rate, it brings to mind visions of Marty McFly blowing the amp in Doc's place at the beginning of Back to the Future, and I wouldn't doubt it!
One of the other CDs I bought when they were first coming out was Holst's The Planets. Venus, the Bringer of Peace is barely audible and still has good fidelity, yet Mars, the Bringer of War will practically deafen you at its crescendo!
So I got older and I realized that I had been deprived by not listening to Yes or Starcastle in CD format. Over about a year and a half, I gradually ordered nearly a full discography for both bands. Now, what's interesting is that these different albums were released in a certain order, then were remastered for CD in a different order through the years. Take any given FLAC I have from ripping, and if I turn replaygain off, I can tell you approximately when it was remastered for CD. It turns out that they all just simply get louder the later they were remastered. The classic Yes albums that were remastered always include a number of bonus tracks with quite a few repeats. Sure enough, the exact same recording of the exact same song simply gets remastered louder over the years.
The trouble is that even though 16 bits should be enough for anyone (knock on wood), compression reduces the number of bits that can effectively express loudness. When CDs first came out, there were say 8-12 bits of a difference between your pianissimo and your fortissimo. These days, it's more like 4 or 5. It sounds like Metallica here decided that they wanted all the bits of loudness, but they wanted it at levels that could only be expressed by large numbers in the 18-20 bit range or so, thus resulting in lots and lots of clipping. Talk about losing orders of magnitude of information.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @07:24AM
I guy I used to know actually did this. He had gotten new audio gear, and turned up the volume so that his neighbor across the street could hear how great it sounded.
The first cannon shot killed one of the speakers.
Realizing his mistake, he ran back in to turn the volume down, but he wasn't fast enough.
The second cannon shot killed the other speaker.