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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: 1) by toddestan on Saturday May 28 2016, @02:17AM
It's a lot more complicated than that if you want it to sound good. You don't want the trumpets to be too loud, or the drums too soft, the flute to get drowned out, and so forth. So you typically have several microphones positioned in and around the orchestra, which you then have to mix it all together to get it to sound right. Generally you'd also want it to be in stereo too (or perhaps even surround, though that never really caught on). Yes, you can try to have one (or two) well positioned microphones and then press it right to wax/vinyl/CD/whatever but it won't sound nearly as good.
(Score: 2) by purple_cobra on Monday May 30 2016, @12:14PM
"...the flute to get drowned out..."
Please send this person to record Jethro Tull!