Current CD mastering practices, And why I now buy so few new CD's. Options

[RockFan]

Although I've been aware of the ever more destructive levels of compression/limiting used over the last 5-10 years (and taken part in discussions here and other places), it only dawned on me recently that I had unconciously practically stopped buying CD's the last year or two..

By that I'm referring to largely rock, indie, jazz etc, incuding so-called 'remasters'.

There are recent releases out there which I would like to own, but with what I've come to expect from modern CD's, I know that an album which I might have 'played to death' over weeks or months in years gone by will simply get boring after a few plays. So I don't buy them. Dynamics, soft/loud contrasts, drama - squashed out of existence.

New Queens Of The Stone Age? Probably a great album - but once bitten .....

I'm increasingly going to exchanges to try and find older releases of albums I want, or even buying vinyl versions of new albums where they're released, as they tend not to be afflicted as badly.

Obviously there are a proportion of buyers who only lsiten to CD's in the car or on personals in noisy environments who couldn't care less and will keep buying, but there must be a lot of others who, like me, are completely disillusioned with this 'loudness fetish' crap and have simply lost interest.

In fact I wonder how much this has contributed to the stagnancy in sales over the last few years that the 'industry' whines about so frequently?

R.

[Erukian]

I sorted foobar's playlist by album gain, and i found a lot of my techno records at top. Early Underworld has a postive gain, up to +4, although that doesn't mean the samples used havent clipped prior to being used, but the dynamics are definately left in there. I just listened to their cd dubnobasswithmyheadman, lots of faint background harmonies start to whisper at 70dB, at 80dB it's like i'm hearing a different recording, tons more detail that i never thought existed.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of techno pre-2000 was recorded and mastered by the small indie-techno labels without the use of any compressor/limiter. The DJ's probably had it cranked so loud anways they heard all the details.

-Joe