Loading ...
Austin American-Statesman pop critic Joe Gross gives a thorough, fascinating overview of what’s happened to the mastering process of records in the last 20 years–or why your older CDs sound so quiet and textured when they’re mixed up in the changer with albums you bought last week. The answer lies in the compression of albums, and overdoing it–which is something that artists from Mastodon to Christina Aguilera are guilty of–may actually result in shorter attention spans on the part of listeners:
Here’s the punch line: The brain can’t process sounds that lack a dynamic range for very long. It’s an almost subconscious response. [...]
“It’s ear fatigue,” [engineer Jerry] Tubbs says, “After three songs you take it off. There’s no play to give your ears even a few milliseconds of depth and rest.”
Alan Bean is a recording/mastering engineer in Harrison, Maine. He’s a former professional musician and a doctor of occupational medicine.
“It stinks that this has happened,” he says. “Our brains just can’t handle hearing high average levels of anything very long, whereas we can stand very loud passages, as long as it is not constant. It’s the lack of soft that fatigues the human ear.”
Everything Louder Than Everything Else [austin360.com]
A similar article:
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/impe...
“Everything Louder Than Everything Else,” that’s a track on Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out Of Hell 2″
Which makes Zeppelin geniouses, right? Something like that anyway.
The advent of digital mastering processors and software has definitely produced a slew of records with practically no dynamics, but this is not a universal problem. You run into it mostly on major label releases; their theory is that loud grabs attention. The music’s dynamic envelope is like a solid brick of shit. Which actually if you think about it, is appropriate.
Many independent labels use different mastering engineers who actually care how their music sounds, who are more conservative in their use of compression.
It also should be noted that while CD quality audio has a much wider dynamic range than vinyl, it has less practically usable dynamic range, because weak signals are represented by fewer bits of resolution. Quiet passages can go down to 8 bits of resolution, where they sound grainy and nasty. Part of the race to compress and limit CDs is to get more of the program material into the resolution sweet spot between -24dB and 0dB.
Like everything else, we can blame the worst of this phenomenon on the major labels. It seems like another short sighted marketing strategy — your business is selling music, and you’re making your customers go deaf?
“Damn you compression!”
I agree there is way too much compression on most records and I think it is in order to boost the low end…
This is going to date me a bit, but the example I can think of off the top of my head is Queensryche (I know not at all current)
Listen to the Queensryche record EMPIRE (the bass is thin, but a decent mix) and then their next album 4 years later, PROMISED LAND. Suddenly there is a ton of bass and general low end and the overall mastered volume is significantly higher…
I imagine there are alot of other examples that are more current…
Mastering with tons of compression makes CDs sound better in cheap “bookshelf” college-dorm-style stereos…as well as makes music sound better in compressed MP3 form on your cheap iPod earbuds.
Luckily (?), the stuff that sells the most has very little dynamic range anyhow – but it’s depressing that lots of music listeners are now conditioned to hear very-quiet passages as erroneous – or not to hear them at all on their portable devices or shitty computer speakers.
It’s easy to view vinyl purists as assholes, but most new releases sound loads better on vinyl than on CD, because vinyl mastering tends to allow more dynamic range.
When CDs first starting being released and jazz classics were being made available in the format, I remember hearing my Miles-Davis-obsessed dad rave about the huge audio range CDs made possible…but now audiophiles have to turn to the old, less-capable technology to get high-quality sound.
also, in the four years between the recording of those albums, digital recording technology advanced enough to get a better bass sound on a record.