Mastering question

[nuway1]

hey guys..

i am not a professional musician or an engineer but it is my favorite hobby. The way i learned most of the things i know are by either asking others or by listening and experimenting with commercial music recordings to figure out techniques for doing this and that... anyway...
another day i tried using a waves L2 on a commercial recording (think it was some Lloyd Banks shit or whatever) and was amazed when i brougt the threshhold on it down all the way to -30db... obviously, the whole 30 db that i added was attenuated because the ceiling was at zero... my question is. with all that shit happenin (30 db addition and reduction) it seemed like the mix did not suffer at all!!!!!!!!!!!! the reason im amazed by it is because if u do the same to any amature mix( such as my own) it'll be rumbling and cracking and the dynamics would be sounding soooooo weird..... was this because the commercial mix is so overcompressed?????? please help me undersand!!!!!

[AlexLakis]

Limiting that much should pretty much kill the low end. Are you listening on headphones or something?

[Ricey]

if you did that to a track that was already mastered, i'd say it was mastered well

[MicLust42]

What was the recording you subjected to this test?

Reuben
Studio STATS, NYC

[nuway1]

i did it to a lloyd banks track, but it works with any well mastered song..

[MASSIVE Master]

30dB with no apparent damage?!?

Are you sure it's not bypassed?

[matt thomas]

whilst I'd have a hard time believing there was no damage I'm guessing the explanation for this is that the recording you tried it on was mastered prior to "the loudness race".

If you look at the waveforms of old recordings they are alot more sparse than those done recently, they have a lot more room. Nowadays everyones trying to make things as loud as possible so there isn't any room for more "loudness" processing ala L2

narco

[Bob Olhsson]

Tracking and even a headphone mix can make all the difference in the world how loud something can get without sounding distorted. If the performer hears themselves right, their dynamics will be right and not need fixing with compression.

[WEAPON_X]

Nowadays everyones trying to make things as loud as possible so there isn't any room for more "loudness" processing ala L2

-you can always put a c2 before or after the L2.
-there is aways a guy who is louder than you
- loudness race sucks big time
- but bands do demand that. and customers do demand loudness, too.
- if you sound weak, you loose.
- i guess the majority of the people hearing e.g nu metal are either deaf or deaf and dumb, because nine out of 10 will not hear the introduced artifacts of overcompression. and, to a certain extent, the overcompressed sound of an l2 is the defining sound of modern nu - metal. strange, but true.