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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, @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.