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Topic: Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ? (Read 446424 times) previous topic - next topic
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Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #250 –
Quote from: fistandantilus on
So I decided to buy the 2003 "the complete greatest hits" eagles cd thinking it might even sound better, how wrong i was. To show exactly why i have included the wave forms loaded into audicity (nothing altered, exact same scales etc) shows the problem with modern mastering.

Top image 1991 release, bottom 2003 release


That doesn't look bad to me. You've never used any mastering tools, have you? A lot of people automatically assume that since it doesn't look exactly the way they want it to, it's automatically bad. What did you judge the album with first, your eyes or your ears? I don't have this album, and it might sound like utter crap...however, a moderate bit of limiting (as evidenced by the waveform) is not enough to cry about. I've seen more limited albums than that sound brilliant.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #251 –
Red Hot Chili Peppers - 'Californication' is certainly among the worst I've heard.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #252 –
Top ten album gains in my collection (~900 CDs) right now:

Code: [Select]
-11.97  Big Generator (Yes, Japanese HDCD)
-11.00  Musicology (Prince)
-10.93  The Gold Experience (Prince)
-10.49  Exodus (NPG)
-10.45  The Rainbow Children (Prince)
-10.31  Motown 1's (Various)
-10.10  Feedback (Rush)
-10.00  Os Mutantes (Os Mutantes)
- 9.91  The Vault (Prince)
- 9.90  The Ladder (Yes)


That Eagles waveform doesn't look so bad to me, either.  I've seen worse.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #253 –
Iggy & The Stooges - Raw Power (1997 Remaster) - -16.85
Creature of habit.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #254 –
Yikes.  I think we have a winner.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #255 –
Quote from: krabapple on
Top ten album gains in my collection (~900 CDs) right now:

Code: [Select]
-11.97  Big Generator (Yes, Japanese HDCD)
-11.00  Musicology (Prince)
-10.93  The Gold Experience (Prince)
-10.49  Exodus (NPG)
-10.45  The Rainbow Children (Prince)
-10.31  Motown 1's (Various)
-10.10  Feedback (Rush)
-10.00  Os Mutantes (Os Mutantes)
- 9.91  The Vault (Prince)
- 9.90  The Ladder (Yes)

About all that Prince stuff in the aural sledgehammer mastering category, speaking as a reasonably hardcore fan myself, it's sad but true. Starting from the Symbol Album in 1992, his stuff has become progressively more brutally mastered. If he was the one pushing for digital compression (which wouldn't be surprising considering his control freakness), then it's ironic that in "Musicology", there's a line that has something about "throw[ing] CDs out the win-da" cos "we don't need them", implying that vinyl sounds better to him - or maybe it's the nostalgia value? Thankfully his pre-1992 back catalogue hasn't yet been mauled by remastering.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #256 –
Quote from: euphonic on
... then it's ironic that in "Musicology", there's a line that has something about "throw[ing] CDs out the win-da" cos "we don't need them", implying that vinyl sounds better to him - or maybe it's the nostalgia value? Thankfully his pre-1992 back catalogue hasn't yet been mauled by remastering.

What makes you think he's referring to vinyl? Perhaps it's a reference to downloading music from the internet? I don't know the track so perhaps there's something I'm missing.
daefeatures.co.uk

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #257 –
One of the worst mastered records I've listened to so far is Marilyn Manson - Eat Me Drink Me.
I've always liked that Manson's records had been well produced (talking about Antichrist Superstar, Mechanical Animals and Holy Wood) but this new record is a complete joke. It is so overcompressed that it really made my head hurt.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #258 –
We gotta start a website or something that has a database of replaygain values.

For everything.

That way we'd all have an idea as to whether the mastering is halfway decent or not before buying. IMO, it depends a lot on the style of music, but most stuff will end up seriously compromised if the RG is -7 dB or worse. But if it's a greater than 10 dB attenuation, then I think we can all agree that's not going to sound right, unless it's Merzbow or something.

So yeah. Let's start a website for this. Any ideas on how to set it up?

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #259 –
The website itself is not a big deal. But to make submitting values convenient enough for the average user there should be a player plugin that automatically submits those values.

I had no problems setting up the web site, but I have no clue about network programming in languages other than PHP. Furthermore there should be plugins for more players than just foobar2000. So who's gonna write plugins for Winamp, Amarok and so on?

Because we are talking about albums here I would only use album gain values. So, to submit an album you need the artist's name, the album's name and the album gain value. Of course, that would lead to several duplicates due to typos and sometimes there are different gain values because of different editions that have the same name, like the old 80s original version and the new 2000s remastered version. So in the end you'll have lots of trash in the database.

Alternatively you could make submitting manual and provide additional textfields for the user to specify what version it really is. There could also be a comments section. Then, everything would be more community driven. But the disadvantage might be that you only get three submissions a year because people are too lazy to copy and paste a value to a site each time they listen to an album.

But let's hear what others have to say.

P.S.: Maybe this is better discussed in a new thread.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #260 –
One of the worst CDs I've ever heard is Sevendust's Animosity. Open up any of the tracks in an audio editor and you'll see incredible amounts of clipping. Plus, the liner notes say it was recorded in a barn and it sounds like it.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #261 –
The worst one in my collection is Ozzy's 2002 remaster of "Randy Rhodes Tribute". I put  my collection  in shuffle mode, and any time a song from this album would come on it would scream at me like an annoying commercial-EXTREMELY loud, and no difference whatsoever between the quiet parts and the loud parts. The compression is so bad that the feedback and hum are actually turned up to the top between songs.  I expect modern studio music to have no dynamics, but this was a live album and it was recorded in 1981.  There was no excuse for this 2002 remaster. My other 3 Ozzy albums- Original "Diary", original "Blizzard", and 1995 "No More Tears", are great, but this was horrible.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #262 –
Has anyone "Back to Black" by Amy Winehouse? I've heard "Tears Dry on Their Own" and the piano(!) chords, drums, orchestra all sound very very distorted. It's really painful to listen to.
 

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #263 –
Here's the album gains for what of my music collection I've scanned. It might clue you in as to the mastering on some of the more mainstream stuff there.

http://oceanbase.org/data/files/albumgains.txt

Any smart people fancy writing a foobar plugin or something, so "the masses" can produce lists like this?

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #264 –
Quote from: graue on
Any smart people fancy writing a foobar plugin or something, so "the masses" can produce lists like this?
Use this as your "copy command" (browse foobar2000 prefs):
Code: [Select]
$ifequal(%tracknumber%,01,%__replaygain_album_gain%' '%album artist%' - '%album%' ['%date%']',)
...and select all your tracks then press Ctrl-C in foobar2000 and Ctrl-V in your favorite text editor.

Unfortunately there's no way to stop foobar2000 from adding a newline for each selected track. So your favorite editor better support search&replace of control characters! If that's the case you only have to replace double linefeeds(+carriage returns) with single ones until there are no blank lines left.

Oh and it helps when you sort the tracks within foobar2000 first, using the "album list" generator (browse foobar2000 prefs):
The album list generator doesn't sort very well either...  it treats the replaygain album gain values as strings!!! As an alternative you can sort the albums by replaygain album peak:
Code: [Select]
%__replaygain_album_peak%|%album%[ '['%album artist%']']|[[%discnumber%. ]%tracknumber%. ][%track artist - ]%title%


Well, although this isn't perfect, I doubt that writing a plugin for this is really necessary...  I mean what's the use? To post the worst/best mastered album at HA.org? Come on! "The masses" don't know HA.org anyway.

EDIT: I just found out that UltraEdit-32's numeric sort can deal with this list just well. Good luck with your favorite text editor.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #265 –
Once got a chinese art CD that also had a SACD layer and the 16kHz sweep was that annoying on every track it made me wonder how this 16KHz sweep may sound on SACD
It was of this cheap souvenirs you bring back from holiday.
Huang Quin or something like this.
Is troll-adiposity coming from feederism?
With 24bit music you can listen to silence much louder!

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #266 –
Quote from: Fandango on
Has anyone "Back to Black" by Amy Winehouse? I've heard "Tears Dry on Their Own" and the piano(!) chords, drums, orchestra all sound very very distorted. It's really painful to listen to.


Agreed. I really like the album, it is a fun bit of retro production, powerful singing and good songwriting. But the amount of clipping on the tracks is egregious.

Too bad. I also hope that Ms. Winehouse survives her twenties; she might really become something.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #267 –
Quote from: BradPDX on
I also hope that Ms. Winehouse survives her twenties;
Cruel but true. I liked her better when her skin wasn't inked and she wasn't skinny and drunky.


PPS:
Quote from: graue on
Any smart people fancy writing a foobar plugin or something, so "the masses" can produce lists like this?

Actually not such a bad idea after all... what if we wanted to know the RG values of a certain album? An online database where you can submit these values to would be neat! BUT because albums can be re-issued by the musicians and record companies, there must be a way to clearly identifiy the album issue or else we will get very different results for the same set of tracks of many albums.

But a rough and fast implementation could be done by sharing text files of one's music collection created by scripts like the ones above... they only have to be maintained "by hand" and merged into one single text file which can be posted in a forum thread. People replying to that thread can post their albums lists there.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #268 –
Quote from: rudefyet on
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

Man, I remember listening to that album, and all it seemed to me were buzzing and the lady singing.  No melody, no drums, just buzzing.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #269 –
Weird. Fallen didn't seem that bad to me. I rarely got past the first track, though ("Going Under", which I used to like a lot).

It's not scandalously loud, either. 1.5 dB below Linkin Park's Meteora, 3 dB below Californication (which is still the loudest commercially released album in my collection that isn't of the "harsh noise" genre). As a counterexample to this thread, Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero is about the same loudness as Fallen and actually sounds pretty good.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #270 –
The worst in my collection has to be:
Hypocrisy "Virus" the 2005 release.

The clipping is so bad throughout the whole album that it had to have been f'd up during mastering, I just can't accept the sound as a "feature" of the album. I haven't heard clipping this bad before, and I've heard some bad mastering done before on the verge of being rated unlistenable and annoying do to the clipping - but nothing before where it's been so obvious in headphones, computer speakers, and home stereo.

The RG values (track-based) of the encoded mp3's:
01. XVI = -5.45 dB
02. Warpath = -13.37 dB
03. Scrutinized = -15.14 dB
04. Fearless = -14.18 dB
05. Carving For Another Killing = -13.61 dB
06. Let The Knife Do The Talking = -13.88 dB
07. A Thousand Lies = -13.69 dB
08. Incised Before I've Ceased = -12.48 dB
09. Blooddrenched = -12.45 dB
10. Compulsive Psychosis = -13.69 dB
11. Living To Die = -14.26 dB
------------------------
Total RG value Album-based:
-14.07 dB

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #271 –
Just got the new F. R. David (yes, who sang "Words" 25 (!) years ago) album called "The Wheel" and it already looks *very* squashed at first glance. I can also hear some clipping throughout the songs, but slighter...(yet I might have been too used to all this)

Dynamics (almost) equal 0. 

Album gain -9.58 dB
RG values: (track)
(1) -10.66 dB (2) -9.18 dB (3) -8.74 dB (4) -9.42 dB (5) -8.92 dB (6) -9.49 dB (7) -8.02 dB (8) -7.88 dB (9) -9.65 dB (10) -8.74 dB (11) -8.99 dB (12) -10.47 dB

1 and 12 contain the new "Words" versions; so it looks this has been mastered with the aim (??!) of getting near-zero dynamics to be friendly to some AC radio stations which rarely have big jumps in dynamics because it would (allegedly) irritate car drivers while driving...

Graphically it looks that the album has both been squashed to death by digital stuff AND limited because the 0 dB peaks are rare, so the music (or what has been left of it  ) has been lowered in gain again.
It's the same static "block" you can see with really squashed albums; but the height is not aligned to digital zero. Beyond the block (upper/lower edge), there IS some space - but no dynamics!
Kudos to all dev's not going like "Upgrade OS or f$%# off!"

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #272 –
Saosin - Saosin
My Chemical Romance - Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge

Compression ruins a CD much more than clipping ever will. These two albums are barely clipped, but are so compressed that your ears tire out after just 10-15 minutes of listening to them because of all the boosted mids. Add radio station compressors into the mix, and it sounds like pure static over the airwaves.

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #273 –
Iron Maiden - Dance Of Death (Copy Protected Version)
Iron Maiden - Somewhere In Time (Remastered Version)

They are compressed so much, the dynamics, ehh what dynamics!

Lots of clipping also, I could never make a good MP3 rip from them using LAME!

It just sounds Awful!
Do your ever wonder about your soul?
Can it be saved...

Whats is the worst mastered CD [your opinions] ?

Reply #274 –
The Cult 'Beyond Good and Evil'.  Everything is so squashed.  And the drums have zero punch, they might as well not even be there.