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Topic: An all-time low for mastering quality? (Read 103558 times) previous topic - next topic
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An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #25 –
And yes, the differences we're talking about on this thread are night and day: distortion and badly-engineered masters vs. 15-25 year-old properly mastered ones - not some audiophile's fanciful imagination.
Listen to the music, not the media it's on.
União e reconstrução

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #26 –
I just listened to a song by them (Demons). I only had a Youtube video to listen to (http://www.youtube.com/user/ImagineDragonsVEVO), but the distortion is easily noticeable both on the drums and on the vocals.

The distortion is pretty awful indeed, but I really think it is there for artistic reasons. It is so obvious that it is not something that can be missed even on sub-par studio monitors.

I also believe that the distortion - or at least most of it - was introduced in the mixing rather than mastering. It sounds like the mixing engineer applied (simulated) tape/tube saturation on the drums and vocals. Personally I think the effect would be better if it was not so strong, but that's a matter of taste.

[edit]Listened again, and now I am not so sure if it is mixing or mastering. In the loud bits the distortion seems to be there on all instruments, which seems to indicate that the damage was done in mastering (or pre-mastering at its earliest)[/edit]

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #27 –
In the 80's there were nothing like this, but quite many of albums sounded like shit anyway due to overdone gated reverb or something.

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #28 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
To use your example, we haven't had distorted guitars on every single popular record released in a decade irrespective of sub-genre. There were always tracks and albums where it made no sense to include a distorted guitar, and guess what - in those cases, there was no distorted guitar! Whereas now you just find the entire mix distorted - even on the "quiet" tracks - just by default.

There was a time in the 80s where Phil Collinesque gated-reverb snare-drums were used (seemingly) by default as well, even where it seemed to make little artistic sense.
Quote
It kills the hi-fi industry too. If all the CDs/downloads you have are mastered like that, there's no point having a decent amp and speakers. Though again, people said that in previous generations when electronic music was all the rage. "Why would any of these people need a decent hi-fi - there's no real sound to reproduce - you don't need a decent hi-fi for artificial bleeps and clicks like you do to reproduce a real orchestra" is what people said. IMO they were wrong. For one thing, few people listen exclusively to music with absolutely no real sounds in them. For another, artificial sounds tend to exercise the frequency extremes far more than orchestral recordings, so in that respect they are more demanding. Far easier to build a hi-fi that can only cope with chamber music, than to build a hi-fi that can cope equally well with chamber music, orchestral dynamics, and drum+bass loudness and frequency extremes. Covering the full dynamic and frequency range in a natural way is quite a trick to pull off.

I guess that any acoustic or digital waveform presents its challenges when it comes to reproducing it "accurately". While non-electronic music is challenging in that we have absolute references, electronic music may be challenging in that people have heard this song e.g. at a venue where ample subwoofer power was available? Square waves normalized to -0.001dB FS may put stress on DAC inter-sample headroom, etc.
Quote
If you're 22, does a decent hi-fi make these loudness war recordings sound worse to you, just like it does to me? Or don't you notice?
(I know most people of any age won't notice - but I feel sure there are a minority of picky enthusiasts at 18, 22, 40, or any other age who want things to sound great)

Cheers,
David.

"Most" people put their loudspeakers wherever there is room for it (e.g. under their sofa) and live happily ever after. People like us who are interested in music and sound (and are "perfectionists" or "audiophiles" or whatever) tend to dislike recorded clipping. I have a lot of respect for people who (in any way) try to "improve" the art and practices of recorded and reproduced audio.

Now, I'll return to listening to some music that was popular in my formative years (when they knew how to make _proper_ music)
http://www.bobborst.com/popculture/top-100...year/?year=1995

-k

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #29 –
Quote from: knutinh on
"Most" people put their loudspeakers wherever there is room for it (e.g. under their sofa) and live happily ever after.
You're about a decade out of date.  Haven't you noticed? Most youngish people don't have stereos any more. Those that do just haven't had a life event (moving house, stereo breaking) that means their old one has gone.

Cheers,
David.

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #30 –
I just listened to the Demons song and yes the distortion is bad. Real bad. My speakers are Soundsticks II with subwoofer.

I am kind of an exception when it comes to young people when it comes to the way I enjoy music. I am unable to practically listen to portable music players "on the go", because a severe physical handicap means that someone would have to help me put my headphones in and out every time ... so I usually listen to music on my PC.

Now, I am fairly tolerant towards audio quality (I don't find even old 128 kbps CBR Xing to be really that bad, although I find Blade encodes unlistenable) and have a soft spot for "lo-fi" (old LPs that my father bought in the 80s and old cassette tapes), but the distortion in some modern recordings is just awful.

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #31 –
Quote from: Porcus on
Quote from: includemeout on
It really makes me wonder what midlife crisis for today's younger generation is going to be like, in 15-20 years time. 


(I used to counter my old folks by "I thought you were the ones who went to Woodstock and invented free sex on acid". And I wish I had known the most radical free jazz of their time, that should have shut their mouths on my noisy music.)


I guess the clash of generations will go on forever! In my early teens, my dad used to compare my 80's music to sounding like 'the devil dragging a chain on the tarmac' but whenever I revisit them today, by Jove! Their mastering was spot on! Sometimes even annoyingly conservative, as in Dire Straits' 'Brothers in Arms', for instance - which even RG cannot stop it from sounding one of the subtlest recordings I've ever owned. [edit] But far from me to complain.[/edit]

Listen to the music, not the media it's on.
União e reconstrução

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #32 –
Quote from: Neuron on
I just listened to the Demons song and yes the distortion is bad. Real bad.
Vlado Meller must be jealous. I guess he's just now sitting there asking himself how he can top that amount of distortion on his next CD.
It's only audiophile if it's inconvenient.

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #33 –
Quote from: Cavaille on
Quote from: adupree on
Also, I don't remember who it was, but there was a pretty big release last year that the whole album was mixed on Apple earbuds. I completely understand wanting a mix to translate well, but mixing to earbuds is very sad.


If you know the flaws of the equipment you use for mastering, you can circumvent them. Sure, it´s more difficult compared to using balanced equipment but it´s possible.

Quote from: adupree on
There's also so many people "mastering" there own tracks, which I'm not saying isn't possible, but in my opinion is not a good idea. Or you get people just running the mix through Ozone and just compressing the crap out of it, instead of understanding what mastering actually is. 


So Ozone is bad? In my experience the tools you use don´t matter, far more important is how they are used. Ozone is a powerful tool, it just needs to be handled correctly. For that you´d need experience, technical knowledge and good taste.



I completely agree that if you know your gear you can work around it, but when you master it to only sound good on them "because that's what they listen to it on" is the real issue. I actually really like Ozone, used properly. I use it periodically, especially for spectral repair work, but I can't tell you how many times I've seen people just run a mix through it and compress it without knowing what they are doing.

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #34 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
You are right knutinh, and at nearly 40 (heck!) I can't comment. As I've inferred in this and other threads, that "distorted" sound is "now", and people want it.

But as I sit on the porch in my rocking chair, moaning at those pesky kids  it does seem more than that though, because of the loudness wars. There are tracks where it makes no sense, yet still happens. To use your example, we haven't had distorted guitars on every single popular record released in a decade irrespective of sub-genre. There were always tracks and albums where it made no sense to include a distorted guitar, and guess what - in those cases, there was no distorted guitar! Whereas now you just find the entire mix distorted - even on the "quiet" tracks - just by default.

It kills the hi-fi industry too. If all the CDs/downloads you have are mastered like that, there's no point having a decent amp and speakers. Though again, people said that in previous generations when electronic music was all the rage. "Why would any of these people need a decent hi-fi - there's no real sound to reproduce - you don't need a decent hi-fi for artificial bleeps and clicks like you do to reproduce a real orchestra" is what people said. IMO they were wrong. For one thing, few people listen exclusively to music with absolutely no real sounds in them. For another, artificial sounds tend to exercise the frequency extremes far more than orchestral recordings, so in that respect they are more demanding. Far easier to build a hi-fi that can only cope with chamber music, than to build a hi-fi that can cope equally well with chamber music, orchestral dynamics, and drum+bass loudness and frequency extremes. Covering the full dynamic and frequency range in a natural way is quite a trick to pull off.


If you're 22, does a decent hi-fi make these loudness war recordings sound worse to you, just like it does to me? Or don't you notice?
(I know most people of any age won't notice - but I feel sure there are a minority of picky enthusiasts at 18, 22, 40, or any other age who want things to sound great)

Cheers,
David.




There's some stuff I can't listen to because how much I notice some stuff. Clipping and distortion kill a song instantly.

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #35 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
Quote from: knutinh on
"Most" people put their loudspeakers wherever there is room for it (e.g. under their sofa) and live happily ever after.
You're about a decade out of date.  Haven't you noticed? Most youngish people don't have stereos any more. Those that do just haven't had a life event (moving house, stereo breaking) that means their old one has gone.

Cheers,
David.



This is what is truly sad. I remember growing up, (some of you will still call me a kid lol) my parents had a Technics, and I would sit down and play their albums, Journey, The Eagles, ZZ-Top, Van Halen, Stevie Wonder, literally everything. I'd do the same thing with my grandparents, Marvin Gaye, Ben E King, and so on. It's sad to think that in 10-20 years, very few people will have an actual quality system in their home. But it is up to us as audio professionals and audiophiles to push back and keep audio sounding the way it should.

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #36 –
Quote from: adupree on
This is what is truly sad. I remember growing up, (some of you will still call me a kid lol) my parents had a Technics, and I would sit down and play their albums, Journey, The Eagles, ZZ-Top, Van Halen, Stevie Wonder, literally everything. I'd do the same thing with my grandparents, Marvin Gaye, Ben E King, and so on. It's sad to think that in 10-20 years, very few people will have an actual quality system in their home. But it is up to us as audio professionals and audiophiles to push back and keep audio sounding the way it should.


I was the same way. I remember being able to play an LP record by myself when I was just 4 years old. I can still know which records I liked to listen the most because those ones have the most scratches on them  . It influenced my music taste a lot. It should be said, I am not a "I am not like the other kids!" snob, my music taste is very wide. I like Skrillex, Tears for Fears, electroswing, R.E.M, dubstep mixes on Youtube, Aphex Twin, Fatboy Slim, Foster the People, Linkin Park, Red Hot Chilli Peppers... so almost literally everything. And while I regret the lack of good mastering on say Skrillex or RHCP albums, I still enjoy the music. I think more dynamics would make the music even better tho.

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #37 –
Quote from: adupree on
But it is up to us as audio professionals and audiophiles to push back and keep audio sounding the way it should.

We will fail for that reason alone that a growing percentage of teenagers is hard of hearing. In some countries more than one third of the young people is already yet reported to have to deal with serious auricular problems. A deaf person has no chance to educate his ears to music or recording quality..

In the past, a lot of people have made tape recordings. To avoid distortion they had to monitor and adjust the input levels, which also made them receptive to recording challenges to a certain degree. Today's average music listener knows nearly nothing about recording and has nothing to do besides clicking the "buy this track for $0.99"-button if he wants to listen to (new) music. That's why I expect the situation to become rather worse than better and "we audio professionals" can't influence this.

Maybe the typical music listener of the future will have a constant stream of music playing in the background and he will listen to trivial shit music that won't make demands on his intellectual and emotional skills, all shallow and uniform, which also means an uniform loudness level - and perhaps he will be happy; and the music industry will be happy then because it will have reached its goal.
This is HA. Not the Jerry Springer Show.

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #38 –
I don't agree with this. For example, I am a fan of electroswing and dubstep, and a lot of very engaging, good music, is ridiculously badly mastered. I see a tinge of "kids are listening to all crap nowadays" snubbery here.

I think a bit part in bad mastering is because of inane, half-deaf mastering "engineers" like Rick Rubin (and more "amateur" people like dubstep DJs just aping what the "big people" are doing in terms of mastering techniques) and also because most phones have a ridiculously low maximum volume, so in orders to even hear your song properly on the phone speaker it has to be compressed to shit.

Let's not forget that while mastering in the 1980s was good, it is not like "teh youth" cared about audio quality in those times, quite the opposite. A year ago, I was tasked doing the playlist for a new years family and acquitances party. A lot of the folks there were my parent's friends, meaning they were about 35-50 years old. I have a lot of 80s music, but mostly in suboptimal formats like Xing and l3enc mp3s from "greatest hits" complitions and such. To me, the dynamics make it sound pleasant despite the slightly washed out sound, but I warned my father in advance that some of my files were not of best quality and let him listen to some of them.

His response? "Are you kidding me? This is what you consider bad quality?". He proceeded to tell me about how back when they were my age, they listened to recordings of shortwave radio (often from Western European stations that were jammed by communist authorities, Slovakia was a part of communist Czechoslovakia in 1948-1989), recorded on cheap, low quality cassette tape, re-recorded often more than 10 times.

So much for sound quality.

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #39 –
I fall in the age demographic of your parents.  My friends and I cared very much for sound quality long before the loudness war came to CD.  Back then "the" was always spelled "the."  Please don't attempt to speak for my generation, at least not for those of us who grew up in the Free World.

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #40 –
Just because I am a data point of my generation it does not mean that I am a representative one, but FWIW I do remember these devices:


FWIW, even those of us who did care about sound quality owned and used them - only the most snobbish refused to listen to good (or even just new) music just because it wasn't available on the state-of-the-art media. We would sit by the radio even if we had to use the mono button to get the noise out of the way.

(Besides, I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.)

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #41 –
Obviously, there were people who cared about sound quality. God, did you take it as an insult? I don't think the "free world" listened to radios and cassette tapes any less. There are people who care about good sound quality now, yet you guys generalize my generation. What I am tryimg to dispel is the notion that audiophiles were ever a mass phenomenon.

Good quality is more accesible today, if anything. Ipods are miles above transistor radios and even transcoded mp3s do not sound nearly as bad as results of multiple analog generation loss
The only thing that is worse today is mastering.

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #42 –
Regardless of representing this or that age group, I believe I speak for a significant number who still remember the downright elation felt when listening to their first [cough!] late 80's-mastered [cough!] audio CD - boy was that sound clear!

Crappy, old fashioned car players apart - which would give me no choice but resourcing sometimes to the dreadful cassette tapes in all their hiss & distortion glory (not to mention awkwardness) way into the 90's - I have personally never looked back since and, if anything, I own to MP3 the reassurance that I do have a true aversion to crappy quality - without the need of being pedantic or pretending I have golden ears. Hence my not understanding this illogical 'back to crap' tendency of nowadays when IMO, it should be the other way around.
Listen to the music, not the media it's on.
União e reconstrução

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #43 –
While we are reminiscing... you have to remember that in the early 1980s most people were listening to vinyl or cassettes, played on a music centre with a ceramic cartridge and no Dolby. Many people didn't buy most of their music, so they were listening to cassette copies of cassette copies of records copied on a music centre with a ceramic cartridge (and no Dolby). Or (and this was me and everyone else I knew!) cassette copies of chart songs taped off the radio during the top 40. I was doing this into the 1990s. Also had cassette copies of CDs by then, and CDs themselves of course.

While early CD releases of early 1980s music are sometimes well mastered, and a mint vinyl LP from that time may sound good enough, that wasn't the sound that "most people" experienced back then. Decent vinyl playback was available, but not at the budget end of the market. CDs and players were very expensive.


The people today who have put decent speakers in their living rooms have mostly done so as part of a home cinema. I know these can sometimes sound just as good as a decent stereo, but they don't seem to at the same price point, for obvious reasons.

Cheers,
David.

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #44 –
That is true. 80s recordings sound superb - on high quality hardware. My father was really glad he that he bought an expensive hi-fi record player with a diamond needle, because he knew well that sapphire needles would slowly grind the records to dust and provide much poorer fidelity. Even so, most of his music was still cassette copies from other people.

I am not a fan of "back to shit", but I like lo-fi. I like history, I like the various changes different obsolete reproduction methods bring to sound. I do however like the freedom of choice, and when I want to hear something in high quality, it better be high quality. It is true that modern mastering takes away this choice, thus creating an ironic situation where the sound quality of modern music is almost universally total shit despite even cheap mp3 players being capable of hi-fi, transparent reproduction of music.

Just as reproduction devices became better, the mastering became worse.

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #45 –
Comparing "kids nowadays" to those of us who grew up in the eighties is useless; "now" and "then" are two entirely different realities.

I won't say that younger people now are all careless of sound quality, but I can say every young person IME is. (I'm pretty much only talking about the abuse of dynamic range compression. I don't hear or perceive the artifacts in good lossy encodes nor am I as sensitive to clipping as others seem to be.)

Just my most recent example of Why We Can't Have Nice Things: I discovered that a certain recent metal album, which was crushed to DR4-5 was for some inexplicable reason a noticeably better DR10 on HDTracks. (I say "inexplicably" because I personally inquired about whether there would be a "vinyl master" and the label informed me that they were all the same--which goes to show that you can't get a straight or knowledgable answer out of anyone. I personally just give up.)

You'd think anyone could hear and appreciate the difference between DR4 and DR10, right? Apparently not. At first they were saying stuff like "well the drums do pop a little more!" (Of course they "pop" a little more when they aren't clipped and smashed sounding like muffled shotgun blasts.) But after a listen or two most of them were cool with the CD again saying "the difference is subtle" -to- "no big deal--I'm not really hearing it."

The point is IME most people don't really care. If "kids nowadays" weren't completely used to and ok with it, and didn't really outright prefer loud/bricked over semi-dynamic, the labels would stop doing it. Some, like me, complain...but we're just a vocal minority.
The Loudness War is over. Now it's a hopeless occupation.

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #46 –
I would argue that the recordings my father made in the 80s sound a lot worse, despite technically having "more dynamics". Dynamics are kind of irrelevant when your tape has been copied so much that it has the frequency response of an mp3 that has been reencoded with Plugger, Blade and other "wonderful" tools about a hundred times, at 64 kbps. When I first heard my father's Queen recordings, I was amazed how bad analog generation loss can get.

The conclusion in my opinion? Most people in any era don't really care about sound quality, well, they certainly appreciate the difference, but they aren't gonna stop enjoying music because of it. "Good enough" is far from "transparent" or "hi fi". That is why 128 kbps FhG mp3s used to be touted as "CD Quality", they certainly were not that, but for most people, being better than worn out tape was good enough.

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #47 –
Quote from: Neuron on
That is true. 80s recordings sound superb - on high quality hardware. My father was really glad he that he bought an expensive hi-fi record player with a diamond needle, because he knew well that sapphire needles would slowly grind the records to dust and provide much poorer fidelity. Even so, most of his music was still cassette copies from other people.

I do mind the statement that 80s recordings sounded well. My first album on CD was 'Let It Roll' by Don Johnson (yeah, I´m ashamed too). It sounds like crap: thin and flat. It always did so but back in 1989 I was too young and too dumb to notice. Other examples I bought were 'I´m Breathless' by Madonna or 'Till I loved You' (B. Streisand)... not very well sounding. And on a record player it doesn´t matter whether the needle is sapphire or diamond, they all grind the records to dust

Quote from: Neuron on
Just as reproduction devices became better, the mastering became worse.

That is indeed true. IMO every media we nowadays have is far better soundwise than the sound quality it usually transports.

Quote from: Engelsstaub on
You'd think anyone could hear and appreciate the difference between DR4 and DR10, right? Apparently not. At first they were saying stuff like "well the drums do pop a little more!" (Of course they "pop" a little more when they aren't clipped and smashed sounding like muffled shotgun blasts.) But after a listen or two most of them were cool with the CD again saying "the difference is subtle" -to- "no big deal--I'm not really hearing it."

The point is IME most people don't really care. If "kids nowadays" weren't completely used to and ok with it, and didn't really outright prefer loud/bricked over semi-dynamic, the labels would stop doing it. Some, like me, complain...but we're just a vocal minority.

When I was young I couldn´t tell a bad recording from a mediocre recording. This was 25 years ago. I think it´s normal for kids not to know what to listen for, experience comes with ageing. So does the desire for something better... for some.
marlene-d.blogspot.com

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #48 –
I don't doubt they did if he was copying "cassette copies." I don't know anyone who did that. I guess early tape-traders did because they had little choice when it came to band demos and such. There was also an underground market for bootlegs and live recordings. None of my cassette copies were copies of anything but the retail cassette or LP.

If you're basically saying "cassettes suck and today's digital kicks ass!" you'll get nothing but a resounding "Amen!" from me.

(Edit: response was to Neuron who I should have quoted.)
The Loudness War is over. Now it's a hopeless occupation.

An all-time low for mastering quality?

Reply #49 –
Quote from: Neuron on
I see a tinge of "kids are listening to all crap nowadays" snubbery here.

How can the quotation of medical facts be snobbery (I referred to "kids" with my first two sentences only)?

Quote from: Neuron on
What I am tryimg to dispel is the notion that audiophiles were ever a mass phenomenon.

Nobody said anything like that.

Quote from: Neuron on
Good quality is more accesible today, if anything. Ipods are miles above transistor radios and even transcoded mp3s do not sound nearly as bad as results of multiple analog generation loss
The only thing that is worse today is mastering.

And the latter makes nonsense of the former.
This is HA. Not the Jerry Springer Show.