SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 Hairyfeet on Wednesday May 25 2016, @03:39PM
I think the most important lesson we can take away is you should never use a compressor on an entire track because squashing the entire track simply makes no sense and is gonna make it sound canned and shitty. As someone who plays electric bass I'm probably the musician that values compression the most because if you don't use compression on fingerpicked electric bass you...ugh its really hard to put it into words, it just loses definition and punch and gets muddy, but would I ever use compression on the whole band, even in my little home studio? Not no but HELL NO as it just crushes the dynamics, especially on guitar and keyboard. Instead I use the compressor as the local studio engineer taught me, strictly as a limiter to insure someone doesn't start pounding their instrument and damage the recording unit.
But the upshot of the whole "loudness wars" is that it makes local and indie bands sound better frankly because unlike the big label artists they aren't squashing the shit out of their CDs which make them a lot more listenable. Its just a shame that big label engineers have taken an effect that can be great if used on an instrument in moderation and given it a bad rap by running everything through it and just wringing the life out of a track.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.