I'm certainly going to aggravate a number of folks with this post, but in the interest of science, let's discuss this like rational audiophiles instead of knee-jerk audiophools.
I have both the original Rick Rubin 16\44.1 boosted CD to FLAC rips, as well as high quality 24\192 vinyl to FLAC rips of RHCP's Stadium Arcadium. This CD gets bagged on by EVERYONE for being compressed and brickwalled to death. I keep going back and forth between them, and you know what? The CD sounds better. Once your eyes roll back down from the top of your skull, hear me out.
The tools we use to determine Dynamic Range, are, in my humble opinion, faulty. We are painting a wide range of albums with the same broad brush as those that are terribly mastered because the utility we leverage to tell us what the DR is cannot distinguish between properly boosted levels and mashed up crap. I will offer up some evidence for my thinking.
Aside from the usual DR Meter utility, our standard method for finding if a track is compressed too much is to look at the waveform in something like Audacity. Here is the CD version of Slow Cheetah, a fave of mine.
Looks pretty bad, right? The louder sections are all mashed up against the limits. Here is the LP version...
Better, right? Lots of headroom, visibly apparent. This should sound better. But it does not sound better.
Here is what bugs me about this method of judging DR, and maybe I'm wrong about this. This waveform representation of the music shows nothing about the actual frequency spread of the audio waveforms. It just shows relative energy, unless I miss my guess. Now, sure, there is MORE energy in the CD version, but that is because the recording engineer made some decisions about how best to EQ the frequencies and boost up some of the tracks in relation to others to smooth out the sound. Some advanced algorithms are used in that process making sure the music does not actually go into clipping, but honestly, I don't think there is much of that going on. This waveform-only view of sound is super deceptive. Let's look at this another way.
Here is a VU view of Slow Cheetah from the loudest section of the song, CD version, @3:50...
Same timestamp from the LP version....
Now, according to my version of Dynamic Range Meter for Foobar2000, the LP version has a DR of 13, while the CD version has a DR of 5. This has all the armchair audiophiles up in arms, demanding that Anthony and Flea kneecap Rick Rubin and get Steve Hoffman to issue his remaster in CD format. I get that the LP rip has issues, lots of translations going on here, but come on. The CD version is visibly more even, has much nicer dynamics and no huge midbass hump. So what gives? Why is our understanding of dynamic range so flawed? Maybe it is my understanding that is flawed (and my ears) but something stinks here.
Please don't take this to mean that there are no badly mastered digital hack jobs. In fact, as I understand it, the same guy that turned Metallica's Death Magnetic into even worse-sounding hammered shit did this album also. But in this instance, I think we might want to take a deeper look and advance our understanding. Yay science! I stand ready for my beat-down.
I have both the original Rick Rubin 16\44.1 boosted CD to FLAC rips, as well as high quality 24\192 vinyl to FLAC rips of RHCP's Stadium Arcadium. This CD gets bagged on by EVERYONE for being compressed and brickwalled to death. I keep going back and forth between them, and you know what? The CD sounds better. Once your eyes roll back down from the top of your skull, hear me out.
The tools we use to determine Dynamic Range, are, in my humble opinion, faulty. We are painting a wide range of albums with the same broad brush as those that are terribly mastered because the utility we leverage to tell us what the DR is cannot distinguish between properly boosted levels and mashed up crap. I will offer up some evidence for my thinking.
Aside from the usual DR Meter utility, our standard method for finding if a track is compressed too much is to look at the waveform in something like Audacity. Here is the CD version of Slow Cheetah, a fave of mine.
Looks pretty bad, right? The louder sections are all mashed up against the limits. Here is the LP version...
Better, right? Lots of headroom, visibly apparent. This should sound better. But it does not sound better.
Here is what bugs me about this method of judging DR, and maybe I'm wrong about this. This waveform representation of the music shows nothing about the actual frequency spread of the audio waveforms. It just shows relative energy, unless I miss my guess. Now, sure, there is MORE energy in the CD version, but that is because the recording engineer made some decisions about how best to EQ the frequencies and boost up some of the tracks in relation to others to smooth out the sound. Some advanced algorithms are used in that process making sure the music does not actually go into clipping, but honestly, I don't think there is much of that going on. This waveform-only view of sound is super deceptive. Let's look at this another way.
Here is a VU view of Slow Cheetah from the loudest section of the song, CD version, @3:50...
Same timestamp from the LP version....
Now, according to my version of Dynamic Range Meter for Foobar2000, the LP version has a DR of 13, while the CD version has a DR of 5. This has all the armchair audiophiles up in arms, demanding that Anthony and Flea kneecap Rick Rubin and get Steve Hoffman to issue his remaster in CD format. I get that the LP rip has issues, lots of translations going on here, but come on. The CD version is visibly more even, has much nicer dynamics and no huge midbass hump. So what gives? Why is our understanding of dynamic range so flawed? Maybe it is my understanding that is flawed (and my ears) but something stinks here.
Please don't take this to mean that there are no badly mastered digital hack jobs. In fact, as I understand it, the same guy that turned Metallica's Death Magnetic into even worse-sounding hammered shit did this album also. But in this instance, I think we might want to take a deeper look and advance our understanding. Yay science! I stand ready for my beat-down.