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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: 2) by goodie on Wednesday May 25 2016, @01:42PM
Obey your master!
Thank you, i'll be back with more lame jokes later.
Seriously, I don't really think that the recording of Metallica's songs was very good. The sound is not pleasant and "spoils" the melody to me. I have a Boss multitrack recorder that creates the same type of issue (mine is a $400 piece of equipment mind you...) especially with recording some of those 90's type of metal distortions. I have a friend who studied music recording for a year or so and was telling me that as long as your EQ is done properly, the "mastering" should not be a huge issue. Anyway, those songs just do not come out very good in recording for some reason in my (very limited) experience. In the S&M album (no matter how much people like to bitch about that album), I find the sound more pleasant to listen to. I do think however, that other bands such as Sepultura or Fear Factory have done a much better job at this around the same time.