Quote:
Originally Posted by masteringhouse  If you really feel that strongly about it don't do it and/or don't buy it. That's the only way that I know of for voting in this election. |
That's it. Just don't do it. And keep explaining why. Except to urban idiots and metal morons. Either send them elsewhere or just butcher their (already badly mixed) BS with a smile. ("Have a nice day!")
I am convinced that true musicians and artist will eventually come around from this loudness butchering. We don't have to go back to -20 like in the early cd days. With the skills and tools some of us have these days it is possible to make records relatively flat ("loud") without destroying them. I don't mind K10 or even K8 on loud passages in rock music for example. When it is done well, I like the sound of it.
I do appreciate macrodynamics within a song and totally hate it when I hear the release of a compressor slowly bringing up the quieter section of a song, especially since it is destroying the impact of the "louder" section following..
I was looking forward to the new Tricky album being released and downloaded it as flac to check it out. To my surprise it was happily bouncing around -12 in the intro of the first tune, moving up to -8 when the tune got going. Not too bad... I wasn't expecting any macrodynamics anymore though!
When the chorus kicked it, levels went up to -4/-3 (this is AES17/RMS +3) with intersample values approaching +3dB. Still sounded pretty decent (considering the insane level), but then I was playing on decent converters, with 6dB of extra headroom. I wouldn't want to play it on a cheap cd system, or ripped to mp3 on an iPod!
There are still some macrodynamics on the album, which I appreciate, but almost any drumhit (even hats) in any of the louder parts shoots up to +3dBFS.
It was obviously done by someone with quite some experience and good tools, since it still sounds decent as wav/flac on convertors with headroom. But yes, maybe he (Tricky, not the engineer) should have listened through a streaming mp3 encoder/decoder before deciding on this madness. I'm probably not buying the disc, although I'm still debating. I like a lot of the songs, and generally appreciate Tricky.
If they'd mastered the whole album 3dB quieter it would have been very decent sounding. But too quiet on the quieter part? It's a shame. I guess they chose between having no macrodynamics or having clipping choruses..
