Bare Knuckle Pickups Forum
At The Back => Time Out => Topic started by: Modular1 on July 28, 2008, 05:54:13 PM
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Grr... Im fed up of buying cds and finding they have been mastered so loud that they distort. Do the artists know how these cds sound? If you don't know what i'm on about have a quick read of this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war)
Why is there not an industry standard sound level for cds? The distortion on the cds is bad enough but now my cd player (A £250 Nad model) has decided that when the level is too loud its gonna start clicking too! I thought it was the cd player at first before i discovered its only certain cds it does it with.
3 cds in point:
Slayer - Christ Illusion. Distorted like hell all the way through. I bet its not like that on the master tapes. All the dynamics of past classics (reign/south/seasons) is gone.
The White Stripes - Icky Thump. Good album but i cant bear to listen to it cos all i hear is the crackly bass drum etc. It also makes the recording sound as flat as a witches tit.
Mastodon - Blood Mountain. This one doesn't distort as bad as the others but its still so loud it $%&#s my cd player up.
id rather have a great sounding cd and use my own volume control. I didnt fork out loadsa cash on a decent hifi system to play broken cds. grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!
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A must-read:
http://www.geekrants.com/articles/mastering.html
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i was just reminded of another awful mastering job.
rush - vapor trails this cd sounds hellish.
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heard a few of these overly loud cd's..think calafornication is about the only one that works well
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An interesting read. Hmm, will have to search my music and have more thought into this.
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I couldn't agree more with all of this having dabbled in the mastering process myself, it's blatently obvious when your pushing the final limiter way too hard.
The Mastering guys over on the Sound on Sound forum hate this as much as we do, mind you if they're paid to do it they will!!
It's not guitar based (The odd bit of nice twanngy Grestch aside) but if you take a look at this http://brianstagg.co.uk/p_t_a_clipressed/ about the difference between the CD and Vinyl versions of Depeche Mode's Playing the Angel.
We now have a medium (Digital) which can take deliberate errors in it's production. Not wanting to sound like an old tw@t but if you tried this with Vinyl you would end up with unplayable scr@p plastic which would do nothing but jump.
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Not wanting to sound like an old tw@t but if you tried this with Vinyl you would end up with unplayable scr@p plastic which would do nothing but jump.
an inherent quality control in the medium. it proves vinyl was better. :)
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^ :lol:
this is annoying. i'm more annoyed that often you can't get the volume to a low enough level (e.g. if other people in the house are sleeping).
they do a similar thing with adverts on tv, to try to catch your attention. needless to say, i just turn the sound off or switch channel. but apparently a lot of people don't.
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Iggy Pop's Raw Power CD is an unholy-loud CD, but sounds $%&#in great for it.
otoh, Lamb Of God's 1st album remaster is a real arse up - the bass end is distorted all the way through the album which is a shame since the album totally rules.
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I hate it when I listen to a cd and it has loads of clipping on it. I never noticed it til I got some decent headphones though so maybe I'm better off with low quality speakers :P
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It's something I've noticed a lot on remastered CDs. "Remastered" always seems to equal "louder".
Having said that, some older CDs suffer from the opposite problem of being extremely quiet - I don't know if it's just the volume levels or something in the mastering process, but they seem to seriously lack dynamics. An example would be the MCA CD of Wishbone Ash's Front Page News, which is ludicrously quiet. And even when you crank it up to ridiculous levels it sounds like there's a blanket on the speakers.
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I don't really have anything to say on this topic, as there's nothing we can really do about it or the rest of the music industry, but I've got to say that YES, it is the most annoying thing. It's getting harder and harder to find a decent mix that isn't clipping every couple of seconds. I think that CDs should come with the bare takes and let you mix it yourself. That'd be far easier.
I've also taken to buying the vinyl of albums I really like, because the mix is for some reason usually a lot better on the vinyl release (not always though). That way you can record it on the computer and change it into Apple Lossless with all the other music. Voila, a digital recording with decent mastering.
EDIT: I haven't heard the Slayer and Mastodon albums Modular1 is referring to, but I do have Icky Thump by the White Stripes, and for some reason I'd never listened to it until just now. OH MY GOD - it's absolutely AWFUL. I've never heard such blatant clipping ALL THE TIME. What kind of a retarded producer created this monstrosity? Seriously, who heard this and thought "yeah, that's good! Take it to print!"!?? I'd heard that The White Stripes were making good sounding albums aswell :? maybe the earlier ones were better?
EDIT 2: The actual music ain't too bad though! Really sad that it's butchered. Might need the vinyl. In fact knowing the White Stripes that's probably what they're trying to make yu do - buy the Vinyl, thus bringing back the old analogue ways.
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Interesting what Indy says. Just made me realise that I fell into the trap myself.
Wife's family clubbed together to get me a USB turntable last christmas. After the initial "wow" of being able to listen to my extensive vinyl collection again, I found myself spending increasing amounts of time compressing and editing peaks to try and get my "home-made" CDs as loud as modern CDs. Eventually, I ended up putting it all "on hold" because it took so much time and effort -and the turntable has been gathering dust for a few months now...
D'uh!!! What a pillock (especially seeing as I was aware of much of the above) :oops:
Many thanks - I think you've freed me up again!
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but I do have Icky Thump by the White Stripes, and for some reason I'd never listened to it until just now. OH MY GOD - it's absolutely AWFUL. I've never heard such blatant clipping ALL THE TIME. What kind of a retarded producer created this monstrosity? Seriously, who heard this and thought "yeah, that's good! Take it to print!"!??
The issue is not with the Artist, producers or engineers, although they should speak up about it, but are too afraid of the people with the cash.
A final mix down is produced to be as great sounding as possible, bearing in mind the various mediums it is created for. The Vinyl and CD editions have the exact same mix, the difference comes when that mix is sent off to the mastering engineers. The record company will ask them to supply press ready finals for the various mediums. The vinyl mastering will be treated sympathetically with careful stereo imaging and bass balancing, as if they don't the result will be unplayable and possibly unpressable.
With CD they can compress and limit the hell out of it as it will always play but will sound shiteee, and the record company will be sitting there shouting make it louder so they do.
On the album in question there should be NO digital clipping at all as Jack White is a retro fiend and uses analogue tape. So any digital brick wall clipping you hear happened after the final mix.
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Iggy Pop's Raw Power CD is an unholy-loud CD, but sounds $%&#in great for it.
i HAVE to disagree. hehe! its another proper clipped to $%&# cd. digital distortion sounds horrid!!!
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On the album in question there should be NO digital clipping at all as Jack White is a retro fiend and uses analogue tape. So any digital brick wall clipping you hear happened after the final mix.
do you reckon he has even heard the cds that are on sale?
i heard the vinyl version is fine. id hate to think the pressed a digitally clipped album to vinyl. that would really take the piss.
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i $%&#ing hate it!
before, i didnt give a damn, majorly because all my headphones and speakers sucked. now that i'm on a proper system (shut up ben! :D ) i heav every damn nuance and it's pissing me off
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I noticed this with SOAD Steal This Album, I had to back off everything or it distorted, i didn't understand why at the time but i do now after playing with cubase for a few years. Those meters only have to stray into 0 db and it sounds like cr@p. With compression and limiters you can really raise the overall volume a hell of a lot. I didn't realise this was such a common problem now. It seems stupid to do it, why invest so much time and money into a recording only to let some suit dictate what it ultimately sounds like?
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I noticed this with SOAD Steal This Album, I had to back off everything or it distorted, i didn't understand why at the time but i do now after playing with cubase for a few years.
But that doesn't work either - because the digital distortion is written into the CD, you can back off everything as much as you like; all that's going to happen is that the volume is reduced.
My audio interface has level lights on it that show when the signal goes above 0dB; with many modern CDs they are lit 98% of the time. The layout of most tracks seems to be relatively quiet for the first five seconds, and then brickwalled for the rest of the song. Tragic.
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On the album in question there should be NO digital clipping at all as Jack White is a retro fiend and uses analogue tape. So any digital brick wall clipping you hear happened after the final mix.
do you reckon he has even heard the cds that are on sale?
i heard the vinyl version is fine. id hate to think the pressed a digitally clipped album to vinyl. that would really take the piss.
The couldn't press that it wouldn't play, the bumps in the track on the vinyl would be to severe and cause the record to jump. Which si why you would nnever have a loudness war with Vinyl.
If only it didn't rumble, click, pop and get scratched it would be perfect :P
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If only it didn't rumble, click, pop and get scratched it would be perfect :P
A properly set up turntable won't do any of these things; vinyl should last forever.
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If only it didn't rumble, click, pop and get scratched it would be perfect :P
A properly set up turntable won't do any of these things; vinyl should last forever.
But we're musicians though! :lol:
Dunno, it might have changed, but back when I were a young man, chaps could be roughly divided into two classes of audiophile:
Class 1: Hi-end hifi owners
Expensive turntables, amps, speakers, headphones, purpose built living rooms
No-one allowed to touch their vinyl (or sometimes even record sleeves) unless properly trained.
These guys would talk stylus, tone-arm balancing, etc.
They wouldn't be prepared to play your records on their system...
Class 2: Musicians.
Record player with plenty of oomph please...
Rusty old nail for "needle" (What's a "stylus"? isn't that what the Romans used for writing on wax tablets?)
Pass us a Pink Floyd album would you, I need to er, "lean on it" for a moment...
Now I'm old and trying to convert some of my records into digital, I somewhat regret being a member of Class 2 for all those years...
On the hot mastering though - the bit that really gets me is the digital clipping that gets left on commercial products. I don't mind too much if the dynamic range is squashed on new product and it comes out as a wall of sound. I feel like that's an "artistic" decision (possibly not taken by the artist, but that's another argument).
But clipping is just poor bloody workmanship - didn't they check the wretched thing? Didn't they spot the little red light go on??!! (or whatever mechanism the software used to highlight it, cos I bet there's one there on whatever mastering software they used)
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If only it didn't rumble, click, pop and get scratched it would be perfect :P
A properly set up turntable won't do any of these things; vinyl should last forever.
Back in my vinyl days, it wasn't the turntable that put the scratches on the LPs, that was the way they came from the shop.
Just taking the discs in and out of those stupid paper sleeves was enough to scratch them. And unless the disc actually stuck or skipped, there was no point taking it back because the replacement was guaranteed to be scratched as well.
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But clipping is just poor bloody workmanship - didn't they check the wretched thing? Didn't they spot the little red light go on??!! (or whatever mechanism the software used to highlight it, cos I bet there's one there on whatever mastering software they used)
Ah but they aren't clipping, the CD is most certainly not be going above -0.01dbs otherwise the pressing plant rejects them for overs (I think the limit is 10 overs per disk before it's rejected)
Brickwall limiters pushed to the hilt for maximum gain reduction is the problem. To bring the RMS up anything that would peak above -0.01dbs is rounded off. Of course we've had limiters for years and when used carefully they just round off the very peaks of transients bringing up the level nicely without artifacts. Of course now they're being used to bring already loud mixes up by 5-10dbs which is mental. A lot of peak data is rounded off then and you get artifacts which is just digital distortion. It's madness.
Your nice bass drum transients go from ~~~~~~~~~~~ to ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬
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I noticed this with SOAD Steal This Album, I had to back off everything or it distorted, i didn't understand why at the time but i do now after playing with cubase for a few years.
But that doesn't work either - because the digital distortion is written into the CD, you can back off everything as much as you like; all that's going to happen is that the volume is reduced.
My audio interface has level lights on it that show when the signal goes above 0dB; with many modern CDs they are lit 98% of the time. The layout of most tracks seems to be relatively quiet for the first five seconds, and then brickwalled for the rest of the song. Tragic.
I noticed that it didn't make a difference and didn't know why, I do now though. It is a terrible thing to do to a recording after all that hard work. I remember level meters bouncing along nicely just flicking near 0 db, now they just stay there. Its all wrong. Did this all start because of ipods?
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Did this all start because of ipods?
No, this can be blamed on one man: Rick Rubin. May he burn in hell for this.
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Did this all start because of ipods?
No, this can be blamed on one man: Rick Rubin. May he burn in hell for this.
Please explain for us Ben
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Yeah please explain. I've got a lot of Rick Ruben produced rock CD's (Slayer, Danzig, Cult, Johnny Cash ;0) and they all have dynamics and aren't over limited Well as much dynamics as Slayer Get. they are loud but thats his style it was done with dynamics and mixing not limiting the shitee out of it :D
This is worth a read
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article1878724.ece
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17777619/the_death_of_high_fidelity/print
And Join
http://www.turnmeup.org/