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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: 3, Informative) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday May 25 2016, @03:24PM
Nyquist's theorem assumes infinite samples and an accurate clock. As long as the signal is not at exactly at 1/2 of the sampling rate, the phase will drift.
Every wave can be broken down into frequency components (with a Fourrier Transform) that are pure sine waves. A square wave is a sine wave with odd harmonics, for example. Nyquist's theorem requires that the input signal be bandwidth limited. That means that for example, any square wave will have rounded corners as the higher frequency harmonics are filtered out.
Yes, you are supposed to filter those out with a low-pass filter. That may be what you are getting at in your overall comment. No (physical) filter is perfect, so there is some benefit to a higher sample rate: just to make sure any unfiltered higher frequency components don't cause the problems you mention.
Maybe I misunderstand the design of "HD audio" equipment. If you can reproduce frequencies up to 96Hz, you can almost fit an FM stereo broadcast in the pass-band. A wider pass-band means that you are processing information that can't be heard anyway. If ultrasonics get into the signal, it may cause problems with equipment not designed to handle it. It can also be used for "traitor tracing" by embedding extra information during playback.
If "HD audio" is still using a pass-band of 20Hz-20kHz, then I suppose to only real problem is the waste of bandwidth (which may actually be a feature if you want to discourage lossless copying).
BTW, I agree extra bit depth is beneficial for processing.