The reason I enjoy this forum so much is because it's so refreshing to have objective measurements compared to the subjective audio forums out there. But it doesn't do any good if you feed the excellent equipment with inferior software, aka music. Here's a pet peeve I have. My son complained about me always playing "old" music. So I sat him down in front of my main stereo system and showed him the difference between music mastered today and how it used to sound. So now every time I played music, he asked me to play some "dynamic" music. Within months he started to give me tips on great music like old blues artists and other great recordings. So it seems there is hope for the younger generation. If one looks around on the subway, people are starting to buy better headphones, so maybe we will have a revival of good sounding music? Perhaps the main reason people purchase vinyl again as well? You can't over-compress music without the needle jumping out of the groove. they have 12" vinyl singles for that.
We have the "loudness war" raging, and it's not getting any better. The funny thing is that it used to be used to boost the volume when the records where played on the radio and be easily listened on crappy sound systems in cars. But all the streaming music services today use variants of replay gain, which negates the effect and actually plays hot mastered records at a lower volume!
It still baffles me that people who master records don't know about inter-sample peaks, they just looking at the dB meter on the digital side. All they need to do is to download the free plugin Bitter to check, or even better, the music microscope, appropriately named MusicScope which I highly recommend even to the casual music listener.
So why not put up a thread on the worst mastered records you've encountered? If I buy a CD and it's over compressed and with a metric ton of inter-sample peaks, for me thats an defective product and should be handled as such.
Here's one from the latest album I bought. Billy Gibbons - The Big Bad Blues. Here's a guy who (at least before Eliminator), has put out some excellent music that is impeccable when it comes to the recording. Let's have a look at how one of the songs look in MusicScope. The software emulates the analogue output and shows inter-sample peaks, how much compression, and also tells you if you've been fooled by high-res music that's actually just 16-bit 44.1kHz upsampled.
Unlike analogue recordings, where you could overdrive the recording level (for specific effects,) when done in digital, it just clips. Even if the peaks are within limits, the interpolation between samples can be outside of the limits, thus creating distortion. If you have $2000 to spend on a DAC, you could get a Benchmark DAC which has built-in 3dB of headroom. But isn't that kind of overkill?
So let's take a look.
You see that red wiggly line around the circle? Everywhere you don't have a green line but red, you have intersample peaks. Not a lot of variation of the dynamic either. This mastering was done by a guy called Joe Hardy, who also plays guitar and bass on the album. I guess he should stick to his day job.
Just for shits and giggles, let's compare this to a Mötorhead song? Should be loud and over-compressed wouldn't it? This is an older recording, so no. It still doesn't follow the CD specifications, aka "the red book", because it should nicely taper down at 20kHz, but compared to the Billy Gibbon one, just wow...
Maybe there should be a thread of good mastering as well to accompany this one?
We have the "loudness war" raging, and it's not getting any better. The funny thing is that it used to be used to boost the volume when the records where played on the radio and be easily listened on crappy sound systems in cars. But all the streaming music services today use variants of replay gain, which negates the effect and actually plays hot mastered records at a lower volume!
It still baffles me that people who master records don't know about inter-sample peaks, they just looking at the dB meter on the digital side. All they need to do is to download the free plugin Bitter to check, or even better, the music microscope, appropriately named MusicScope which I highly recommend even to the casual music listener.
So why not put up a thread on the worst mastered records you've encountered? If I buy a CD and it's over compressed and with a metric ton of inter-sample peaks, for me thats an defective product and should be handled as such.
Here's one from the latest album I bought. Billy Gibbons - The Big Bad Blues. Here's a guy who (at least before Eliminator), has put out some excellent music that is impeccable when it comes to the recording. Let's have a look at how one of the songs look in MusicScope. The software emulates the analogue output and shows inter-sample peaks, how much compression, and also tells you if you've been fooled by high-res music that's actually just 16-bit 44.1kHz upsampled.
Unlike analogue recordings, where you could overdrive the recording level (for specific effects,) when done in digital, it just clips. Even if the peaks are within limits, the interpolation between samples can be outside of the limits, thus creating distortion. If you have $2000 to spend on a DAC, you could get a Benchmark DAC which has built-in 3dB of headroom. But isn't that kind of overkill?
So let's take a look.
You see that red wiggly line around the circle? Everywhere you don't have a green line but red, you have intersample peaks. Not a lot of variation of the dynamic either. This mastering was done by a guy called Joe Hardy, who also plays guitar and bass on the album. I guess he should stick to his day job.
Just for shits and giggles, let's compare this to a Mötorhead song? Should be loud and over-compressed wouldn't it? This is an older recording, so no. It still doesn't follow the CD specifications, aka "the red book", because it should nicely taper down at 20kHz, but compared to the Billy Gibbon one, just wow...
Maybe there should be a thread of good mastering as well to accompany this one?