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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, @12:53PM
Yeah, I got bit by a few of the 24-bit remasters.
The irritating thing is that short of hearing the original, you'd never suspect anything was amiss. It's almost like a counterfeit.
And depending on the bit rot, it's hard to say which will survive as the definitive version. I mean in one sense a brickwalled recording is what the mobile crowd prefers. It works better when compressed.
Maybe it is just coming to terms that the age of hi-fi is ending. I'll be like those old actors complaining how color film lost something to the B/W, and people look at you funny about the extravagance of having a proper stereo.