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[SteveR]

Originally Posted by BonzoHansen

FWIW, the song on the new GHIII cd is supposedly better soudning. Why I do not know.

They could have done it two different ways; they could have taken the pre-mix tracks and handed them over to another studio to take the tracks and create the session for GH3 with a different mix and code it for video games (I forget the coding name, Coding for Mixed Media is the next class at Berklee). This would result in a totally different mix, as well as the coding to allow for each section of tracks (drums, vocals, bass, guitar) to be isolated for the game.

Or, they could have taken the post-mix tracks and sent them off to a different studio and re-processed the mix to add dynamics. I did this a few times for situations like this, and it's a bit of studio trickery. What you do is consider the post-mix tracks as say 0db, or at the digital peak level. Then record them into Pro Tools at say -10db. This would take the 0db clipped mix and bring it back into Pro Tools at a lower volume, but, it still wouldnt have dynamics. So, what you do then is either sent it back out to be processed externally (to the computer) or you can do it in the box as well. You could run the mix through reverb to add a little life to it and run the reverb returns to a set of aux tracks and mix the levels. This will add some dynamics. Then run the summed outs to a transient modulator and set it high to try and pull some of the transients out. This will increase the attacks, or wave peaks, and synthetically add dynamics. Now, you have to address the issue from when you re-recorded the tracks back into Pro Tools at a lower volume (half actually, as -10db is half perceptual volume). You can use a perceptual level modifier, like the Sony Inflator that increases perceived volume, while keeping the electrical level the same. Now, you wouldnt want tot just push the volume fader up to make it louder, because that would result in the same outcome of what you were trying to fix, as the wave peaks you just created would get clipped as the RMS level got closer to the peak level of 0db. So, what you would do is use something like the Sony Inflator to increase the perceived volume level, while keeping your wave shapes the same. Magic, now you have the new Metallica album with more dynamics. Unfortunately, this wont fix the mix, only make it more listenable and add more dynamics to it.

One of the first things I was taught was appreciation for all forms of music from an engineering stand point. The one thing the teachers all said was take this from funk and R&B; everything in these styles is groove, and groove is the fundamental for a catchy song. Funk and R&B are full of it, and as an engineer, you know you have a song that grooves if you can look at your stereo master level indicators and you see them bouncing up and down with the rhythm, and your head is following them. If you squeeze all of the dynamics out like they did here, it kills the groove.

[Squirrel]

[shane27]

Originally Posted by HardcoreZ28

What I want to know is why Shane's wearing a buttondown under a Metallica t-shirt.

cause i make my own style

[BonzoHansen]

Saw this elsewhere, I laughed

End of session day, Rubin works away:
I'm your source of song-destruction
Tunes that hurt you ear, poor sound engineer
Leaving spikes on my instruction
Trust me you will see
Volume’s all you need
Dedicated to
How I'll limit you

Compressing faster
Limit your Master
Your albums sell faster
With a loud Master
Master

[NastyEllEssWon]

its sad when this is what you do to avoid being embarrassed

[BonzoHansen]

Even the Wall Street Journal thinks it sounds like ****. A cover story on it today:
************************************************** *
SEPTEMBER 25, 2008 WSJ
Even Heavy-Metal Fans Complain That Today's Music Is Too Loud!!! T
hey Can't Hear the Details, Say Devotees of Metallica; Laying Blame on iPods
By ETHAN SMITH

Can a Metallica album be too loud?

The very thought might seem heretical to fans of the legendary metal band, which has been splitting eardrums with unrivaled power since the early 1980s.

But even though Metallica's ninth studio release, "Death Magnetic," is No. 1 on the album chart, with 827,000 copies sold in two weeks, some fans are bitterly disappointed: not by the songs or the performance, but the volume. It's so loud, they say, you can't hear the details of the music.

"Death Magnetic" is a flashpoint in a long-running music-industry fight. Over the years, rock and pop artists have increasingly sought to make their recordings sound louder to stand out on the radio, jukeboxes and, especially, iPods.


Compare the sound quality from two Metallica clips: from "Death Magnetic" and "…And Justice for All."

But audiophiles, recording professionals and some ordinary fans say the extra sonic wallop comes at a steep price. To make recorded music seem louder, engineers must reduce the "dynamic range," minimizing the difference between the soft and loud parts and creating a tidal wave of aural blandness.

"When there's no quiet, there can be no loud," said Matt Mayfield, a Minnesota electronic-music teacher, in a YouTube video that sketched out the battle lines of the loudness war. A recording's dynamic range can be measured by calculating the variation between its average sound level and its maximum, and can be visually expressed through wave forms. Louder recordings, with higher average sound levels, leave less room for such variation than quieter ones.

Some fans are complaining that "Death Magnetic" has a thin, brittle sound that's the result of the band's attempts in the studio to make it as loud as possible. "Sonically it is barely listenable," reads one fan's online critique. Thousands have signed an online petition urging the band to re-mix the album and release it again.

Metallica and the album's producer, Rick Rubin, declined to comment. Cliff Burnstein, Metallica's co-manager, says the complainers are a tiny minority. He says 98% of listeners are "overwhelmingly positive," adding: "There's something exciting about the sound of this record that people are responding to."

Key Witness

But the critics have inadvertently recruited a key witness: Ted Jensen, the album's "mastering engineer," the person responsible for the sonic tweaks that translate music made in a studio into a product for mass duplication and playback by consumers. Responding to a Metallica fan's email about loudness, Mr. Jensen sent a sympathetic reply that concluded: "Believe me, I'm not proud to be associated with this one." The fan posted the message on a Metallica bulletin board and it quickly drew attention.

Mr. Jensen regrets his choice of words but not the sentiment. "I'm not sure I would have said quite the same thing if I was posting it to the bulletin board," he says. But "it's certainly the way I feel about it."

The battle has roots in the era before compact discs. With vinyl records, "it was impossible to make loud past a certain point," says Bob Ludwig, a veteran mastering engineer. But digital technology made it possible to squeeze all of the sound into a narrow, high-volume range. In addition, music now is often optimized for play on the relatively low-fidelity earbuds for iPods, reducing incentives to offer a broad dynamic range.

The loudness war began heating up around the time CDs gained popularity, in the early 1980s. Guns N' Roses' "Appetite for Destruction" upped the ante in 1987, as did Metallica's 1991 "Black Album" and then the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Californication" in 1999.

Less to Hear

Music released today typically has a dynamic range only a fourth to an eighth as wide as that of the 1990s. That means if you play a newly released CD right after one that's 15 years old, leaving the volume knob untouched, the new one is likely to sound four to eight times as loud. Many who've followed the controversy say "Death Magnetic" has one of the narrowest dynamic ranges ever on an album.

Sound engineers say artists who insist on loudness paradoxically give people less to hear, because they end up wiping away nuances and details. Everything from a gently strummed guitar to a pounding snare drum is equally loud, leading to what some call "ear fatigue." If the listener turns down the volume knob, the music loses even more of its punch.

But many musicians, producers and record-company executives "think that having a louder record is going to translate into greater sales," says Chris Athens, Mr. Jensen's business partner and a fellow engineer. "Nobody really wants to have a record that's not as loud as everybody else's" in an iTunes playlist, he adds.

Mastering engineers are caught in the crossfire. "I've had lots of people -- I mean lots and lots of people -- try and push a record to a place I thought it didn't belong," Mr. Athens says. "We try to deliver something that mitigates the damage the client wants. I drag my feet and give them something a little louder and a little louder."

Albums by some of the biggest names in rock, including the most recent by U2, Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney, have drawn flak. Bloggers last year singled out Mr. Ludwig, the veteran engineer, for the sound on Mr. Springsteen's "Magic," which some thought was tinny and loud.

Mr. Ludwig wouldn't discuss the instructions he was given, but said, "Bruce doesn't let anything out unless it's exactly the way he wants it to be." Mr. Springsteen and his manager, Jon Landau, declined through a spokeswoman to comment.

As for the deafening "Death Magnetic," it struck one fan as fitting for these tumultuous times, thanks to songs like "Broken, Beat and Scarred" and "All Nightmare Long," says Metallica's co-manager, Mr. Burnstein. He says an investment banker emailed to say that "the album and its song titles have just become the soundtrack of Wall Street for fall 2008."

[SteveR]

That's a very good article. It really shows how there is a constant huge struggle between clients, engineers, and labels as to 'what sounds good.' The engineers know exactly what technically is correct (for those engineers that know what they are doing), the clients don't usually know or care for that matter and just want things like "I want it louder" or "I want my voice to sound like so and so's voice" and all other unhelpful comments. The labels never really know what the public wants. So what they do is push some outdated over played ideal out to the masses. Look at it like this, bands come out that are unique and sell records, like Pearl Jam. What happens for the next 15 years? The labels release cds with 8 trillion Eddie Vedders singing on them. Or Kurt Cobain's, or Maynerd's, etc. They push something so hard that the public gets sick of it. The labels turn people off from music in some ways. What sucks and often happens is you get a new young band with crazy talent and a fresh contract, and the label assigns some idiot corporate producer to come in and transform the band into some cookie cutter BS and the cd comes out and the label wonders why it doesnt sell like the Spice Girls. The industry really is a bunch of over paid insecure clueless childish adults for the most part. The hand-holding involved should make me qualified to run a pre-school.

This one paragraph is incorrect though:

"Music released today typically has a dynamic range only a fourth to an eighth as wide as that of the 1990s. That means if you play a newly released CD right after one that's 15 years old, leaving the volume knob untouched, the new one is likely to sound four to eight times as loud. Many who've followed the controversy say "Death Magnetic" has one of the narrowest dynamic ranges ever on an album."

Perceptual loudness is measured in dbu, or decibels-unterminated, and is the professional reference and measurement for perceptual sound levels while the signal is still inside a system. Perceptual loudness is measured in human hearing as a +/- 3db change being a perceivable change in volume to the average listener, and a +/- 10db change is an increase/decrease in sound by a factor of 2, or twice/half the volume. When it says that "likely to sound four to eight times as loud", that's an increase of 40-80db, which is not possible. dbu is also not measured by percentages either. Say your dynamic range is 50db. A 25% decrease in dynamic range is 12.5db, not 40. The dynamic range is certainly smaller and it very well could be an eighth to a fourth as wide, but it's not going to sound four to eight times as loud solely based on dynamic range adjustments. There is a lot more technology available today than 30 years ago that allow you to adjust perceptual loudness without affecting dbm- or the actual loudness as a measurable electrical signal in a system referenced to 1 milliwatt across a 600 ohm load. There are also a lot of studio tricks to do the same using hardware instead of software. The best way is an old way from the early days of recording that I don't think anybody even knows about anymore.

I was actually going to post in this thread today with some new info I got from some friends last night. I was talking to a few people about what's going on in the industry and I heard that the record companies have big plans. There was about ten years ago a huge plan to introduce the next step in music distribution to the masses that would dramatically increase the crap quality of cds (and replace them). It was a great idea and I was in on it from the start and just as it was coming out in the pro world, napster happened. With this new idea in the public that music should be free and screw paying for music etc., I heard that the industry canceled the program. The mindset is that if people are going to steal it, screw giving them tens of millions of dollars worth of R&D in a new high quality product, let them deal with crap quality mp3s. So because of all these selfish assclowns, we won't be getting 96Khz, 24 bit, streaming uncompressed 5.1 surround music to your local music store. Thanks, ****heads.

[SteveR]

Here's the future of music folks. If you're going to steal it, don't expect it to get better.

http://www.comcast.net/articles/news....Memory.Cards/

Summary:

Because everybody steals music, we'll just throw some crap quality mp3s on a thumb drive and copy protect it and call it an album. Enjoy.

[BonzoHansen]

I read about that yesterday in the WSJ.

Bring back vinyl.

[Savage_Messiah]

death to teh interwebs!

[shane27]

album sounds good to me