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

[2020]

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.

Your solution would never work for me. I obviously haven't looked into the "genres" of audiophile recordings, but from the outside looking in, I find them to look stuffy, boring, dated, and UNstylized. I don't want to listen to classical, real instruments, live recordings, vocal acrobatics (ie Mariah Carey - amazing voice but loss of emotion). etc... I'd be more at home listening to 2009 Ke$ha and club music. I love distortion too, but from an intentional point, not as a side effect of bad practices. I also feel like there is so much deep meaning in music that people would toss to the side simply because it sounds bad or is pop, like this.

It's also unrealistic for the average consumer. During the mixing and mastering stage, loudness isn't just a pissing game, consumers may not have headphones/speakers that get super loud so a highly dynamic mix would be lost on them. Then you have "pre-mastering" where the construction of the kickdrum for example is designed from the ground up to tolerate loudness going forward by design or play into the quirks of DSP... in this case there is no "saving" anything. From what I've read, mixing and mastering are no longer 2 completely separate practices now. There is an intermingling along the way, mixes aren't pristine before sent to mastering and being quashed.

I've had an interest in this kind of thing in the past (higher fidelity POP music) for a long time, even on shit level equipment. It's a great introduction to using a DAW in various basic ways and playing with plugins. I highly suggest you give it a go if it interests you some time. The varieties of DAWs are crazy. Everybody looks at Audacity but they need to move beyond. BandLab Sonar was not too long ago a $500 DAW aimed at competing with CUBASE and LOGIC and now it's free. Unbelievable! You also have other things like MixCraft which is shockingly intuitive for the non-musician and mighty cheap.

If I could monetize it or make money from this, I think it would be amazing to do for a living, but I feel like that is a pipedream and it's been so long, the spark isn't there the same way right now. How the fuck is one mixing or mastering engineer gonna convince zeitgeist artists to preserve their art in high fidelty (in a real way, not "mAsTeReD foR ItUneS") and lead a revolution?

 

[MRC01]

Your solution would never work for me. I obviously haven't looked into the "genres" of audiophile recordings, but from the outside looking in, I find them to look stuffy, boring, dated, and UNstylized. I don't want to listen to classical, real instruments, live recordings, vocal acrobatics (ie Mariah Carey - amazing voice but loss of emotion). etc...

People say audiophiles use music to listen to their equipment, and music lovers use their equipment to listen to music. I bounced back and forth over the years but landed firmly in the latter category. There's only 2 kinds of music, and life is too short to listen to the bad stuff, no matter how well engineered the recording is! I listen mostly to classical not because it's better recorded (though that is true), but because it's the music that I have always connected with the most and liked the best. Though I also enjoy ancient, medieval, folk, jazz, blues and other genres.

With any genre of good music, classical or anything else, I'll listen to a bad recording if the performance is good enough to compensate for it. I would like to explore more rock & modern but most of it just sounds terrible and the music doesn't speak or connect with me enough to justify the hassle. One exception is the above mentioned Hu album, which I do like and was worth the effort to clean up the ham-fisted recording.