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Topic: Is this bad digital mastering? ("Spoils of Failure" from Buried Inside) (Read 3669 times) previous topic - next topic
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Is this bad digital mastering? ("Spoils of Failure" from Buried Inside)

Hi there,
these days i stumbled upon a CD copy of "Spoils of Failure", the final album of the famous - and now defunct - canadian Post Metal/Hardcore band Buried Inside, maybe some of you know them.

As i always do, i ripped the CD to my pc with EAC and had a look at the resulting uncompressed WAV-Files when i saw this:



This spectrum doesn't look like a "healthy" WAV-File to me, more like some old transcoded mp3.
As i couldn't believe this is ok i downloaded the same album lossless from the official Relapse bandcamp store, only to get the same picture on every song.

So my question is: why on earth are frequencies cut off at around 16 KHz? Has this a particular reason?
Or is it just bad mastering? I can't quite believe the people involved here didn't know what they were doing when looking at the credits...
Produced by Kurt Ballou and Buried Inside
Recorded by Kurt Ballou at Godcity Studios
Mixed by Matt Bayles at Red Room Recordings
Mastered by Alan Douches at West West Side

So, can someone tell me, is this really a bad job or is there any other reason?
Thank you in advance!


Re: Is this bad digital mastering? ("Spoils of Failure" from Buried Inside)

Reply #1
It's hard to say...    It's possible that the tracks were lossy-compressed somewhere in the production process.   It's unlikely that it happened at the mastering stage.   And, it's unlikely that it was intentional.

I found this about GodCity Studio:
Quote
More than a studio. More than an engineer. Established in 2003 in the heart of the Witch City, Salem Massachusetts, this state-of-the-art analog and digital recording studio...
Maybe it was something analog. ;)      A "studio quality" analog tape recorder should  go over 16kHz, but we don't know what they were doing.   It was common to limit vinyl to around 16kHz (at the mastering stage) but I'm not sure how common that is now.    

How does it sound?    It's hard to tell, but the waveform looks clipped too.

...Even if you can hear those higher-frequencies in a hearing test with loud-pure tones, you usually can't hear them in the context of music where they are at a lower level and mixed with other sounds drowning them out.       The "traditional" range of human hearing is 20-20kHz and it's generally good if your audio equipment can record/reproduce audio over that range.   But not all music covers that whole range.   

Quote
more like some old transcoded mp3.
If you look at an MP3 spectrum it's the loss of high frequencies that you see.    But if you hear compression artifacts you're usually hearing something else that doesn't show-up visually.

Re: Is this bad digital mastering? ("Spoils of Failure" from Buried Inside)

Reply #2
It's hard to say...    It's possible that the tracks were lossy-compressed somewhere in the production process.   It's unlikely that it happened at the mastering stage.   And, it's unlikely that it was intentional.

Thank you for your answer, that's what i thought, too - someone just messed things up during recording or mastering.

Any other opinions on that?

Re: Is this bad digital mastering? ("Spoils of Failure" from Buried Inside)

Reply #3
If anyone stumbles over this thread, i got answers from the guys involved and it looks like there was some fuckup done with the mastered and mixed files during production.

Quote
Kurt and I have been talking and our belief is that the wav files that Relapse has at some point were converted to mp3 and back. We haven’t quite figured out how this may have happened but I certainly hope that it wasn’t done that way for the original CD and vinyl master.


Re: Is this bad digital mastering? ("Spoils of Failure" from Buried Inside)

Reply #5
They aren't the first who (knowingly or not) scams the customers with fake "lossless" records.

> It's hard to tell, but the waveform looks clipped too

This is a completely different problem, see "Loudness war".
a fan of AutoEq + Meier Crossfeed


Re: Is this bad digital mastering? ("Spoils of Failure" from Buried Inside)

Reply #7
This reminds me of several cases I've seen from both Judge Judy and The People's Court, where people are dealing with "mastering" albums and producing CDs. Each of them, the artist spoke of a disc full of "MP3s" that they gave to the studio for mass production.