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Distortion in Music, Clipping, Noise - intentional or mastering failures?

gamerpaddy

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From listening hour and hours, i found some Music that made me think something is wrong on my side, because it cant be mastered this bad can it?
i tried listening over different headphones, amps and speakers, some showed more and some less those effects.

In particular distortion, clipping and other unwanted noises. not speaking of "vinyl scratch and pops" post-effects those are obviously intended to be there.

Listen for yourself:
(i dont have those songs in a higher quality format other than what those streaming platforms provide on a free plan, but it cant be all due to it being aac/mp3 compressed..)

London Grammar - All My Love
at 1:40 it sounds like someones ringing the doorbell next to my ear.

Aurora - Little boy in the grass
listen at 0:40 when the bass kicks in, theres like a crackling onto of it, as if someone stuffed a piece of newspaper into the bass vent

on the other hand,
Kevin Morby - Farewell Transmission
at 2:15 when she sings "want this to beeee"
that eeee rings like crazy on a few of my speakers, but not all of them.
big metal dome tweeters like on some backes & mueller i once had were the worst, unlistenable. KEF Q150's were not as bad but still noticeable.
AMT's didnt show this problem (elac bs203.a)


What were they thinking at the studio? was this intentional or is it just me hearing it?
Do you got any tracks with such "defects" in mind, just wondering.
 

AnalogSteph

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because it cant be mastered this bad can it?
Oh yes, yes it can. Studio glitches are not super rare in my experience. Clipped ADC, clipped mix, before things even get to mastering. Here's an example off the top of my head:

I think they just ran out of headroom in the DAW on the crescendo.

Also, the mastering on this album (from 2012) used to absolutely drive me up the (brick)wall:

It is my impression that things have improved over the last decade though. Oversampling brickwall limiters alone constituted major progress.
 

Matthias McCready

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The distortion you are hearing is probably not from the mastering stage but the mixing stage of the albums.

----

Distortion, compression, drive, saturation, and harmonics are tools that are often used to artistic taste. Different artists and engineers have different amounts they are going for, and sometimes they can be a little heavy handed, as in the examples you posted above.

For what it is worth I use these tools quite a bit in the mixing process. And no they don't have to be obvious, they can be incredibly subtle and actually add fidelity and detail.

Just one mix engineers take. :)
 

MRC01

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I'll add to this thread. I was listening to the Hu's album Gereg on Qobuz. It's cool music but the audio quality is a massive wall of distorted sound. So while listening I captured the stream for educational purposes. Here's what the album looks like in Audacity (red denotes clipping):
1657837193285.png


So... what is the point of recording this album in 24 bit when they're only using the top 4-6 bits?
And what is the point of recording it at all when more than half the album is clipped and distorted?
Whoever recorded & mastered this did a total fail for the band and for this music.
 
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RayDunzl

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Whoever recorded & mastered this did a total fail for the band and for this music.


Recorded at Nature Sound Studio, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
Engineered by DASKA, TS.SHINEBAYAR, TS.OYUNBAYAR
Mixed by DASHKA, TEMKA
Mastered at Howie Weinberg Mastering, Los Angeles, US
Mastered by Howie Weinberg
Copyright (P) 2020 Better Noice Music LC 30124 all rights reserved better noise music 38 west 21st street , #300 New York, NY 10010.

 

Matthias McCready

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Whoever recorded & mastered this did a total fail for the band and for this music.

You are presuming that is not what the band wanted as a result... :oops:

Artist's can have some intrieging requests at times, and not all of them are well informed.
 

MRC01

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If that is the artist's intent, they might as well encode it to 8-bit!
They wasted 3x the storage space just to claim it's "high-def" purely for marketing reasons. This is most definitely a "low-def" recording.
I like the music but the terrible recording prevents me from buying this album.
Musically there is a lot going on with percussion & bass but it's difficult to hear because it's so severely clipped & distorted.
 
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MRC01

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From listening hour and hours, i found some Music that made me think something is wrong on my side, because it cant be mastered this bad can it?
i tried listening over different headphones, amps and speakers, some showed more and some less those effects.

In particular distortion, clipping and other unwanted noises. not speaking of "vinyl scratch and pops" post-effects those are obviously intended to be there.
...
I listened to the London Grammar All My Love piece from Qobuz. The format is lossless 44.1 - 24.
It has a constant scratchy background noise like a vinyl LP.
The doorbell-like sounds are a synthesizer that plays throughout.
The vocals are recorded too hot with obvious distortion, sounds like mic or tape overload, or clipping.
This overload distortion effect also applies to the rest of the music, though is most obvious with the vocals.
In short, it's a terrible recording. But, to answer your question, it sounds intentional to me. No doubt somebody, somewhere, thinks this is artistic and serves the music.

Now that I've sat on my porch shaking my stick at the terrible quality of modern recording, I'll give an example of something that is well recorded. Veronique Gens singing an etude by Reynaldo Hahn:
The YouTube version doesn't sound as good as the lossless original, but it's not bad:
 

Robin L

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From listening hour and hours, i found some Music that made me think something is wrong on my side, because it cant be mastered this bad can it?
i tried listening over different headphones, amps and speakers, some showed more and some less those effects.

In particular distortion, clipping and other unwanted noises. not speaking of "vinyl scratch and pops" post-effects those are obviously intended to be there.

Listen for yourself:
(i dont have those songs in a higher quality format other than what those streaming platforms provide on a free plan, but it cant be all due to it being aac/mp3 compressed..)

London Grammar - All My Love
at 1:40 it sounds like someones ringing the doorbell next to my ear.

Aurora - Little boy in the grass
listen at 0:40 when the bass kicks in, theres like a crackling onto of it, as if someone stuffed a piece of newspaper into the bass vent

on the other hand,
Kevin Morby - Farewell Transmission
at 2:15 when she sings "want this to beeee"
that eeee rings like crazy on a few of my speakers, but not all of them.
big metal dome tweeters like on some backes & mueller i once had were the worst, unlistenable. KEF Q150's were not as bad but still noticeable.
AMT's didnt show this problem (elac bs203.a)


What were they thinking at the studio? was this intentional or is it just me hearing it?
Do you got any tracks with such "defects" in mind, just wondering.
The first one is an awful needledrop.

The next two sound like semi-pro home productions. I doubt what you're hearing are deliberate distortions. However, there has to be a copy of the song before it became a very bad sounding LP.
 
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MRC01

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BTW, after apply Audacity "clip fix" the album looks like this:
1657918493127.png

I used settings of 89% (-1 dB) and -15 dB. This means Audacity assumes any level above -1 dB is clipped or soft limited, and tries to restore the waveform. You can see that lowering the overall waveform by 15 dB still was not quite enough to restore the peaks. This whole process is of course imperfect as it can only guess at what information was lost in a clipped waveform, but I'll have fun comparing it with the original to see which sounds better.
 
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Vacceo

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Poorly mastered records are, sometimes, great because they are poorly mastered.

Hell Awaits from Slayer, Bestial Devastation from Sepultura, In the Sign of Evil by Sodom or my all time favorite, Fallen Angel of Doom from Blasphemy are incredible albums in part due to the crappy production.
 

MRC01

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It's much like a bad movie that knows it's a bad movie, doesn't try to be a good movie, and is great because it is so bad.
Like Sharknado
 

Barter

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All of the originally cited examples are almost certainly intentional, and in the mix.

London Grammar has scratchy vinyl sample in there, a drone (prayer bowl or sample of?), and distorted electric piano. The vocal has its own distortion on its channel, and then the vocal reverb, which is mixed high and has a long tail, is being bussed so that distortion is post effect on a stereo buss, that’s that ringing effect at the time stamp cited. And there’s probably some tape saturation on the whole thing. But it’s all in there and clearly supposed to evoke a dreamy retro haze.

The other track is pretty compressed, and many elements are sidechained to kick after it enters, which causes the mix to duck and pump. At the time stamp mentioned it sounds like there may be a heavily compressed and clipping tom part mixed low and panned hard L-R, and the piano is a very wide perspective and has what sounds like tape distortion and a little wow and flutter. Again, all sounds intentional.

Last example is just a bit of a “shh” edge on the consonant brought out by EQ and activating the tape slapback on the vocal.

Whether you like any of these treatments is one thing, I have opinions about em, but they’re decisions, not mistakes. Not that sloppy engineering doesn’t happen in the world, but these are all choices.

Many people think they know where these kinds of “mistakes” are coming from, or that it’s all just terrible loudness war mastering, which surely exists, but most distortion in recordings is there on purpose because people like the way distortion sounds on their favorite old records, basically.

It’s definitely a mistake to start thinking that glare or distortion or whatever that maybe wasn’t previously apparent must be a flaw in one’s system. We learn to hear distortion, and usually a cleaner playback makes what’s in a recording more obvious rather than masking it.
 

MRC01

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... It’s definitely a mistake to start thinking that glare or distortion or whatever that maybe wasn’t previously apparent must be a flaw in one’s system. We learn to hear distortion, and usually a cleaner playback makes what’s in a recording more obvious rather than masking it.
I agree. The more transparent your playback system, the easier it is to hear these effects. In some cases, the compressed & distorted audio sounds OK on cheap earbuds or in a car, yet sounds terrible on a good system.
 

bennetng

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Example of unintentional clipping. Audio sample attached:
 

MRC01

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Experimenting how to "fix" this album. The above clip fix was like a sledgehammer. Sounded even worse - if that is possible. Audacity fills in the clipped sections with the simplest curve, and the clipping is so severe that the restored portions were giant blats of super deep bass. So I tried a different approach.
Once again, here's the original:
1658193422767.png

Since most of the amplitude is in the low frequencies, and this album is very bass-heavy, a bass cut helps. -3 dB at 20 Hz, gradually tapering to flat at 300 Hz eliminates much of the clipping, and sounds better. All the bass is still there and powerful, but less bloated, and the rest of the mids & treble are unmasked. More of the music can be heard.
1658193080457.png

On top of this, apply clip fix with a threshold of 95% (about 0.5 dB) and cut of only -3 dB is milder, limiting the amount of restoration Audacity attempts to do.
1658193344078.png

This restores some punch & rhythm to the music that was squashed by the heavy compression. By punch & rhythm I mean the difference between bap-de-BOP-de-BAP and BAP-de-BOP-de-bap which is important to the drive of the music, and which heavy compression squashes.
 

2020

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Youyou can
Experimenting how to "fix" this album.
There or better declippers out there than audacity. The most well-known one is probably iZotope RX, although you can look into most audio restoring suites and see if they have one.

After declipping, you can experiment with restoring transients by using dedicated transient designers or transient based plugins in general such as GlissEQ. Ultimately this approach works best on music that is actually been clipped heavily limited, such as it will not work as well with music that has been subject to upward compression (ie the transients and loudest peaks are never distorted or mangled, instead the sustained phase of the music is brought up in level) or downward compression.

If you need more control or don't have a traditionally distorted song, you can look into expanders instead (opposite of a gate).
 

Zaireeka

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Obviously made on purpose, and to me a ballsy yet very coherent artistic choice:


Same goes for this one, Albini can be such a dickhead :facepalm:

 

MRC01

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... There or better declippers out there than audacity. The most well-known one is probably iZotope RX, although you can look into most audio restoring suites and see if they have one.
...
If you need more control or don't have a traditionally distorted song, you can look into expanders instead (opposite of a gate).
That's probably good advice, but my solution is simpler: I don't listen to heavily compressed or clipped music. Fortunately, my favorite genre is classical which is free of this nonsense and this genre is so deep & broad one can spend a lifetime exploring it. I like some modern music but it's just not worth the hassle to un-tangle the excessive and unnecessary processing they do to it that makes it sound so bad.
 
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