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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @02:28AM
I've noticed that CDs aren't able to deliver a brass section the way vinyl does. Vinyl can make you swoon; with CDs, you're still fiddling with your phone or whatever else is at hand.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday May 25 2016, @07:32AM
Did you transfer than vinyl track to CD using good audio equipment? No? Then how can you know that it was the physical limitations of the CD, and not the mastering?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @12:27PM
I gave away (sold to a used vendor for a song) my vinyl collection years ago, and have replaced a few of my favorites with CDs (purchased, not hand transfers). There have been disappointments. I suppose it could've been the work of indifferent audio engineers doing the remaster.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @12:41PM
(part 2) Here's one:
https://vimeo.com/19195708 [vimeo.com]
Around 1:21 the brass behind Sonny Stitt moves to the foreground. The guy who posted it obviously chose vimeo over youtube for a reason, although I get a choppy download because of my limited ISP bandwidth.