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Topic: Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ? (Read 447701 times) previous topic - next topic
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Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #100 –
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I have never been able to sit through St. Anger. Its ugly and in a bad way not an artistic one.
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You're just no friend of trash cans. 

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #101 –
Last week I borrowed the CD "Eagles - Hotel California", a new digitally remasterd CD transfer. (www.warnerremasters.com is printed on an adhesive label on the CD)

The CD sounds ugly overcompressed to my ears.
Replay Gain confirms my claim. An Album Gain of -7,5 dB is quite a high value for a rock album which was originally recorded in 1976.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #102 –
I've gotta chime in about Oasis here. Number one, that is most definitely the sound they want. On the Definitely Maybe DVD they actually claim that the producer or whoever it was is the first one to do 'brick wall' mastering, which works beautifully on that album.

Another thing i see alot in this thread is people complaining about the distortion and guitars making your ears bleed on a rock album. YES! Thats what its all about.

It brings me to What's the Story Morning Glory, and the dynamics that DO exist on that album. I will never forget, I bought that cd, like so many other people, for Wonderwall when it came out. I will never forget putting it in, hitting play, and hearing much to my surprise, Wonderwall as track one, only really quiet. So I turned it up really loud to what sounded right and then that BLIP BLIP followed by the wall of Marshalls from Hello completely blew me away, and I had just cranked it. Leave it up that loud. That is beautiful in my opinion.

edit: to make this post on topic, I do think Heathen Chemistry from Oasis is mastered pretty bad.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #103 –
I'd imagine there's a few Depeche Mode fans here, yes?  Well if you haven't bought their new album already, think twice. I wish I'd saved my money. I've read a lot about over-compression but never really appreciated what a negative effect it can have until I listened to Playing The Angel. It just sounded flat from beginning to end. Being used to previous albums such as Violator or Black Celebration soothing my audio senses, I wasn't prepared for what was about to be inflicted on my ear drums. To say I was disappointed is an understatement.

There's digital clipping within the first second of track 5, Precious (released as first single from album)...

[a href="http://img411.imageshack.us/my.php?image=depecheprecious0013ys.jpg" target="_blank"]

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #104 –
Quote
I'd imagine there's a few Depeche Mode fans here, yes?  Well if you haven't bought their new album already, think twice. I wish I'd saved my money. I've read a lot about over-compression but never really appreciated what a negative effect it can have until I listened to Playing The Angel. It just sounded flat from beginning to end. Being used to previous albums such as Violator or Black Celebration soothing my audio senses, I wasn't prepared for what was about to be inflicted on my ear drums. To say I was disappointed is an understatement.

There's digital clipping within the first second of track 5, Precious (released as first single from album)...


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Wow...pretty ugly.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #105 –
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Dream Theater. I've not seen anyone mention their stuff yet, which maybe means that not many people listen to them. A prog-metal band who prides themselves on their technical proficiency (deservedly so, though many of their songs seem written to show off that proficiency). But many of their albums are mastered really loud.
The worst-sounding of them all is 1997's "Falling Into Infinity". The album gain is around 8.5 if I remember correctly, so not extremely loud compared to other hard rock, but the sound is so obviously compressed, very badly. It can be a pain to listen to on a number of songs, which isn't true for msot of their other albums, even other ones that are mastered just as loud or louder. It's really a curious thing for a band who likes to think of themselves as appealing to audiophiles.
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replaygain_album_gain = -9.70 dB for Falling Into Infinity.  It's actually louder than any of their newer ones, which are also too loud.  The music's good though so I do my best to overlook it I suppose.

Uh well I listen to a lot of progressive metal and a lot of it is newer so a lot of it is mastered too loud anyway.  Not sure of any particular one that sounds worst.
Nero AAC 1.5.1.0: -q0.45

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #106 –
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Have you ever heard new album of Limp Bizkit (The Unquestionable Truth Part I)? This is the worst remastered album, that I ever heard. It sounds like it was remastered from very low quality mp3 (like 96kbps).
Other are Metallica - St.Anger, Slipknot - The Sublimal Verses, first album of System Of A Down.
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I had a roomate who downloaded that song, i thought it was some crappy 96kbps encode or something, but thats how it sounds on the CD...
Chaintech AV-710

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #107 –
im no audiophile like the other people on this site, but i just recently listened to metallica - 'and justice for all' again. that album is a production debacle. the guitars are thin, there are no dynamics, the bass guitar doesn't exist, and the drums have little kick. just the sound of the album gets tiresome after a while. couple that with songs that are too long, and justice is one of the most boring, hard-to-listen-to albums i own. the songs are good on an individual basis, but to listen to the album the whole way through is a struggle. metallica's first 4 albums (and st. anger) severly need remastered by an expert.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #108 –
Yeah, metallica - st anger. All instruments were recordered all in one (in live). Original CD sound like SBR 80 kbit AAC. Some new bands have no money to record their first CD at high quality and may be audio tecs of 80´s weren´t good but  metallica has made a lot  of  tours in America and Europe during 20 years. Producer of Metallica Bob Rock was a bass player and  man who mixed all material  at the same time.  . Bad job.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #110 –
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im no audiophile like the other people on this site, but i just recently listened to metallica - 'and justice for all' again. that album is a production debacle. the guitars are thin, there are no dynamics, the bass guitar doesn't exist, and the drums have little kick. just the sound of the album gets tiresome after a while. couple that with songs that are too long, and justice is one of the most boring, hard-to-listen-to albums i own. the songs are good on an individual basis, but to listen to the album the whole way through is a struggle. metallica's first 4 albums (and st. anger) severly need remastered by an expert.
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Really? are you sure you didn't get a remastered version?

Over here it sounds just fine, in fact I think the sound is quite clear. The drums do sound with little kick if compared to current beat recordings, other than that I believe that's the sound they intended.

About the length of the songs I too think it is fine, as long as they are fine songs that do not fall into the repeat over and over again the same shit, just try to imagine listening a 5 minute song by Britney Spears!!, much less listening to epic songs like Estranged (GNR) or Orion (Metallica).

Just my 0.02

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #111 –
Type O Negative -- October Rust
Remy Zero -- Golden Hum (love the album but it's badly mastered and overproduced)
Suede -- Dog Man Star (also like it, but it doesn't exactly sparkle sound-wise)

I had one that stands out from fifteen years ago (I was a youngish teenager): the self-titled Firehouse album -- it had exceptionally awful production, even to someone who didn't know what the word meant.

There are albums that have *weak* production, but it's not necessarily compressed/clipped production. High compression is just frustrating...

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #112 –
check out Finedisc, they don't have much content but want members to tell them what they want remastered. Free to join too. They say if they get lots of requests they will try and get permission to remaster .

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #113 –
some local band (no idea who did the mastering job), sounds horrible in more than one sense (track RG is tipically -20 dB).
PANIC: CPU 1: Cache Error (unrecoverable - dcache data) Eframe = 0x90000000208cf3b8
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Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #114 –
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Quote
Sleater-Kinney, "The Woods": [...]

This is actually the first album I've bought that has this kind of extreme compression... I don't buy much "mainstream" rock. It's ugly; I can't listen to it with headphones. On speakers it isn't as bad.
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Yeah this is true. The distortion is really bad. But it's an amazing record nontheless. I kinda just accepted it and listened to the rockingness. All I did was imagine that they did it for artistic effect. Or something stupid to that effect. But I can enjoy it at least.
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Sadly I can't stand it because of the sound. I really like Sleater-Kinney, but I don't think I have listened to "The Woods" more than twice.

It was produced by Flaming Lips' Dave Fridmann, and it really hurts to see these people comitting such horrible crimes.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #115 –
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I'd imagine there's a few Depeche Mode fans here, yes?  Well if you haven't bought their new album already, think twice. I wish I'd saved my money. I've read a lot about over-compression but never really appreciated what a negative effect it can have until I listened to Playing The Angel.

ugh, i second that one too.  what a letdown. rush, as previously discussed - vapor trails has some okay songs on it but everything is so smashed 

one album i haven't seen mentioned is Keane - Hopes and Fears ... being a piano based band one would at least have some small hope there'd be some dynamics in the record, but nope, it's a complete 2x4 when viewed in an audio editor.

sucks that label management and the people pushing the money are the ones who decide how it sounds, in the end.  as an avid music fan and audio engineer myself, just like everyone here i'd love to see dynamics come back into music, but all the labels care about is selling more records to kids picking up the latest my chemical romance album, or what have you.  clipping is trendy! 

i'd say "it can only get worse" but at this point mix engineers might as well just put the master section through a distortion box and have it overwith.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #116 –
I'd like to add the Megadeth Remaster of "Youthanasia". It just sounds totally bad. I wish they'd just kept the original sound. Another thing is the EMI copyprotection, but that doesn't belong here.

You should definitely hear it before buying it.


Cheers


micmac

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #117 –
Quote
...sucks that label management and the people pushing the money are the ones who decide how it sounds, in the end.  as an avid music fan and audio engineer myself, just like everyone here i'd love to see dynamics come back into music, but all the labels care about is selling more records to kids picking up the latest my chemical romance album, or what have you.  clipping is trendy! 

I posted about this on a Depeche Mode forum, along with this LINK but it seemed like many of the their fans, having been starved of new material, were delighted with the album. They couldn't hear or see (looking at the flattened waveforms) anything wrong, and were excusing it as deliberate....apparently DM were going for a new harder sound, the clipping was 'intentional' distortion! Real cutting edge stuff  If the masses can't appreciate what they loose through squashed dynamics the situation can only get worse. It's becoming essential to audition new music - even if it's by a favourite artist - just to ensure the recording is of a quality worth paying for. Or at least keep the receipt....the CD will probably be copy 'protected' and you can claim it won't play on your system

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #118 –
worst in my personal collection is Evanescence - Fallen

"Bring me to life" clicks and pops almost like it was recorded from a crappy MP3

"My Immortal" has lots of background distortion

Other than that, all my Staind albums disappoint me, along with SOAD Toxicity and Mesmerize

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #119 –
anything by the offspring(come on for the most part the cd's listed have nothing on the crap sound on the offsprings albums)

worst offenders are ixnay on the hombre and smash, but the older self titled and ignition albums are rather crap aswell(but they were tiny tiny releases). Their newer stuff is kinda better sounding but not by all that much, but ofcourse the new songs are just crappy songs anyways.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #120 –
I updated my article, to show a comparison between the CD and vinyl editions of same album...

p_t_a_clipressed

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #121 –
thats why i think we should support this new company Finedisc. They tell me if their members request a remaster of a CD and there is enough interest they will look to do a remaster version... but they need to know it will be worth the time and effort to do it. so lets join them and support this and get CD's we want to hear in good qualityformat.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #122 –
http://www.finedisc.com/

By reading the first page of their site, I'm not too convince.  Basically they make is sound like they are leaving out the mastering phase all together.  This is NOT a good thing.
"You can fight without ever winning, but never win without a fight."  Neil Peart  'Resist'

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #123 –
Yeah, it sounds reads to good to be true. They describe it as some sort of magical one-pass DSP that will remaster a finished recording. Ain't gonna happen. Maybe they can slightly 'enhance' a recording, but...
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The improvements you hear on a FINEDISC CD such as 'live-like' ambience, deeper sub-basses, warmer mid-tones, crisp, clear highs ... were all in fact generated naturally, from within the original signal, recorded at source. They were always there. The FINEDISC FORMAT digs them out to reveal a more defined separation of instrumentation, clearer vocals, enhanced outlines, and an improved 3D feel.
The type of blurb you'd expect from an audiophile snake oil salesman  But they do say "Hearing is Believing!" so perhaps I'm just being too cynical.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #124 –
There are CD's that are just loud, but the Guilty Gear XX soundtrack is an example of a CD (well, in this case two CDs) mastered in so many wrong ways.  It's obvious that there was no actual work done at all when transferring the songs from the game to two CDs, as not only are the tracks still in the order they appear in the sound test with no regards to arranging them in an album-listening fashion making a large portion of them flow extremely awkwardly with each other (it's so bad I have to re-arrange the tracks in order to listen to it all the way through), but the volume levels fluctuate all over the place (something which shouldn't be happening in-game either).  And the louder ones are, as you might have guessed, too loud.  Looking at the waveform it's obvious there was no limiting or compression done at all; the tracks just hard clip (like on quite a few other CDs, see: Manowar - Louder than Hell).  On some songs (notably "Momentary Life" (Baiken) and "Suck a Sage" (Chipp Zanuff)) the clipping is so frequent you can hear audible crackling in the sound.  To make matters worse, they often max out way below full-scale, making the effect even more severe.

Here's some auravisual picks from the CD's worst offender, Biaken's stage (click the image to see the full, vile shot):

 

30 second sound sample (listen closely!)

Obligatory ReplayGain stats:
Code: [Select]
Title:							Peak:		Gain:
-------------------------------------------------	---------	------
[101] Feedback.mp3					33543.979	-8.6
[102] Noontide.mp3					34340.864	-9.44
[103] Keep Yourself Alive 2.mp3				34241.544	-10.57
[104] Holy Orders (Be Just or Be Dead).mp3		34526.331	-10.4
[105] Blue Water Blue Sky.mp3				35044.196	-10.54
[106] Writhe in Pain.mp3				34346.009	-8.78
[107] Feel a Fear.mp3					33930.412	-9.56
[108] Burly Heart.mp3					37855.887	-9.96
[109] Suck a Sage.mp3					34358.231	-10.79
[110] The Original.mp3					34268.414	-8.42
[111] Make Oneself.mp3					34814.427	-10.93
[112] Momentary Life.mp3				34807.841	-10.38
[113] Fuuga.mp3						33969.504	-9.98
[114] A Solitude that Asks Nothing in Return.mp3	35024.83	-8.97
[115] Liquor Bar & Drunkard.mp3				33098.531	-8.9
[116] Babel Nose.mp3					34071.478	-9.34
[117] Bloodstained Lineage.mp3				34811.38	-8.39
[201] Awe of She.mp3					33897.087	-10.17
[202] A Simple Life.mp3					35326.296	-8.65
[203] Havent you got Eyes in Your Head.mp3		33755.103	-8.18
[204] Good Manners and Customs.mp3			33995.424	-8.89
[205] Kagematuri (Dark Ritual).mp3			32568.771	-8.93
[206] Nothing Out of the Ordinary.mp3			33319.78	-7.96
[207] Existence.mp3					33555.808	-7.32
[208] The Midnight Carnival.mp3				33101.316	-7.05
[209] Till Next Time.mp					33998.635	-8.68
[210] Boom Town Blues.mp3				35396.616	-7.44
[211] Missing.mp3					29995.172	-4.31
[212] D.O.A.mp3						33101.84	-6.41
[213] VS.mp3						31728.402	-8.44
[214] GO FOR IT!!!.mp3					30963.466	-8.18
[215] Game Over.mp3					30494.458	-7.69
[216] Pride and Glory.mp3				32489.964	-6.9
[217] Meet Again.mp3					26880.967	-7.41
[218] Primal Light.mp3					30898.323	-6.34
[219] Calm Passion.mp3					30742.249	-6.81
[220] Walk in the Dust.mp3				26647.069	-2.05

Album Gain:	-9.74
Again, note the major discrepancies in gain values considering that most of the tracks are similar in arrangement, and that some of the more intense tracks ("The Midnight Carnival", "Meet Again") have absurdly low gain values in comparison to other tracks.

A completely abysmal rush job.  A great game like GGXX deserves better than this.

FAKE EDIT: Also take note that the last three tracks are remixed versions of the ending music tracks from Guilty Gear X, none of which appear in GGXX itself, gameplay or sound test.  While this is a nice treat in itself, mysteriously enough three story mode-exclusive tracks ("Fatal Duel", "No Mercy" and "Still in the Dark") that DO appear in the gameplay and the sound test (though in their original, non-remixed GGX forms) are absent from the OST, despite there being plenty enough space left on both discs to hold them.

EDIT: For an audible example of the OST's severe track volume discrepancies I made two clips from the game's battle music tracks:

Dizzy stage ("Awe of She")
I-No stage, Arcade mode final battle ("The Midnight Carnival")

EDIT 2: I also forgot to mention the obscenely long silences between all the tracks, like the "mastering engineer" put all the tracks in Nero and didn't bother to remove the preset 2-second pre-track gaps.