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Topic: Regular CDs with lossy compression (Read 43961 times) previous topic - next topic
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Regular CDs with lossy compression

Reply #50 –
Mikey Fremer did a very informative interview with Rick Rubin a while back, and IIRC, in the process of Mikey trying to grill Rubin on the subject of mastering quality, Rubin commented that hypercompressed recordings - and Vlado Meller's work was very specifically cited here - tended to hold up much, much better under adverse listening conditions than less aggressive masterings.

Regular CDs with lossy compression

Reply #51 –
This reminds of Austrian Death Machine's Total Brutal, that seems to have a low-pass above 20Khz.




"I never thought I'd see this much candy in one mission!"

Regular CDs with lossy compression

Reply #52 –
Quote from: C.R.Helmrich on
Quote from: Cavaille on
And please be careful. You can´t say that audiophiles are generally stupid because of this CD. ... But this fact alone is no proof that MP3 is transparent.

Cavaille, I never said or even implied that audiophiles are stupid! Sorry if I was unclear. What I wanted to express is that lossly compressed audio can be transparent, or in other words, of more than sufficient quality, even to a mastering engineer which is used to high-quality recordings (as the "G.I. Joe issue" showed). It seems that some (of course not all) audiophiles don't want us to believe that. Of course that's no proof that it always is transparent.

The thing with Varèse: Why would providing the mastering house with lossless tracks instead of MP3s be be more costly? Transmission over the Internet has never been faster. If it's the producer's fault, they could easily have re-sent the tracks at no extra cost. Unless the mastering engineer already mastered the MP3s... which is what I think happened.

But I give you that, a good mastering engineer would probably never apply loudness-war compression levels from personal belief, but only because the money-givers want it that way.

Chris
Oh, I´m sorry. I didn´t want to agitate you. I basically think the same as you: a really good mastering engineer wouldn´t have done it. I suspect Patricia Sullivan of deliberately mastering the lossy source. She must have known this and continued anyway. And Varèse didn´t mind or indeed found it too costly to master the score again (that´s what I meant with "too costly"). How very unprofessional and disturbing this all is.

And you´re right of course, lossy compressed music can be transparent. I´m far from denying it.
marlene-d.blogspot.com

Regular CDs with lossy compression

Reply #53 –
Quote from: odyssey on
I'd like to believe that, but in a thread at some hi-fi forum (linked from here some time ago and I don't remember either forum, exact comments or anything), users/testers(/other mastering engineers?) were praising a mastering engineers work high above the sky for it's "hotness" - Which are mastering-engineers general term for "compression/limiter-abuse".
Yeah. Vlado Meller. They praise his hotness. A group of deranged people. Vlado Meller is responsible for mastering "Californication" too "hot" and Rick Rubin (also claimed to be a legend) was responsible for the near monaural sound. And this sounds even worse then 192 kbps MP3.

Quote from: odyssey on
It seems to me (from the spectrogram) that the lossless-part recording has picked up a 16khz sine probably from a tube-tv... Which leads me to think that more than said "mastering "engineer"" both have no idea of what a spectrogram is (and should look like) and lost hearing ability at these frequencies.
Mmm... most mastering engineers who master scores leave those things alone. I´ve got so many scores where such sines are visible at 16 kHz. I always think that they leave them alone because they are not that loud, most people can´t hear them anyway and additional processing at that area would require more time and maybe degrade the overall quality.
marlene-d.blogspot.com

Regular CDs with lossy compression

Reply #54 –
Quote from: /mnt on
This reminds of Austrian Death Machine's Total Brutal, that seems to have a low-pass above 20Khz.
It´s a lowpass filtering, you´re right. But it´s quite normal for aliasing filtering. Seems to be the filtering done by the A/D-converter or the resampler. It really is quite normal, about 50% of CDs look this way. CD players "ignore" the area from 20-22.5 kHz anyway (it´s filtered away).
marlene-d.blogspot.com