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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, @07:44PM
Yes, you're right.
You can find lots of similar cases in choral harmonies as well, where you have a large number of parts.
But that's not what I was talking about. Different parts having separate articulations is not what the second violin section's individual members of the Greater Flyover Symphonic Ensemble is about. The second violin section is, in a sense, a single instrument, with a single staff on the score (as a rule, I know some people play around with the definitions) and the fact that one violin exited the initial attack thirteen milliseconds before another is not compositionally relevant. The interpretation is up to the musicians and conductor, and that's fair enough, but it does not mean that the composer intended that, or cares about that, or even listens for it at all.
So do you see the difference? On one hand, compositional intent. On the other hand, compositional irrelevance. Provided that the mastering doesn't bury what was revealed in the mix, and works within the limitations of intended equipment and context and media, you're not far wrong. If you're desperately trying to provide for resolution beyond relevance, you're wasting everyone's time and money.