Big-label mastering engineers don’t understand lossy formats, Article about Mastered for iTunes Options

[Kohlrabi]

Just found this article via twitter, circled among mastering "engineers" (in fact Heba Kadry reposted it, the girl who mastered the latest Mars Volta album, which reaches -12.79 dB on my RG scans, and is generally mastered in a horrible fashion).

This further backs my impression that most of them don't have a single clue of what they are doing. The section about the mastering practices of Rubin and Meller are especially eye-opening to me. Masterdisk "engineers" also apparently are now out to rape the Rush back catalogue. Further down they cite phase-reverse tests to prove AAC files are different from the original (wow, REALLY?).

The good thing is, I can use this article to decide which releases to avoid in the future. But I'm really at a loss what we can do beside that. I'm really fed up with mastering "engineers" destroying music releases.

This post has been edited by Kohlrabi: Mar 27 2012, 09:17

[stephan_g]

^Agreed. A "decent stereo", btw, includes a DAP and some good headphones these days and probably is more affordable than ever.

He's arguing,

Somewhere along the way, “loud” has morphed to become more than a level — It’s now an aesthetic choice of its own, and has even transcended perceived volume.

...which I don't think anyone seriously has issues with. (Though one could also argue that younger people's hearing is seriously f'd up.)

But what if, for the same material, there's a CD release with DR6 and a vinyl release with DR10 (or even DR12)? This is not at all uncommon these days. Good for vinylphiles, but not exactly fitting my definition of "unified artistic vision". Plus, I like CDs and I know that they could live up to the promise of "perfect sound forever" nowadays. There certainly is no technical reason to make CDs hotter than LPs.

Normally you would expect the artist to be creating their vision in the studio, when then serves as a reference for whatever media are created.
"The medium is not the message."
Which gets us back to the start of this thread and the unfortunate attempts to compensate for differences in lossy formats that may not even be real. For CDs, this feedback loop seems to be broken in many cases.

Justin again:

In fact, I had trouble finding many pop albums that should be worth listening to according to the Dynamic Range Database. Any rating in their system under 9DR is marked “bad”, and even Dark Side of the Moon with its album average of 10DR is labeled “transitional”.

Actually "bad" is DR7 and under. (Ahem.) But as with any single-number indicators, keeping the salt shaker handy is not a bad idea. A metal album at DR6 can actually still be quite listenable, while a pop record would be sounding like Cyprinus carpio at this point. (Florence and the Machine's Ceremonials is only DR5. Ugh. Lana Del Rey's debut is no different, but the vinyl is DR11.) It's the guitars that skew the DR reading. Reverb tends to do the same - Enya's Watermark sure sounds a lot more dynamic to these ears than DR12, which would seem to be an average value for a production from the olden days (which are usually DR11-12).

Not sure why DSOTM (overrated, overrated album btw) is only DR10, WYWH is DR12. Old versions of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours are DR14 or DR15, respectively. (Those are pretty "dry".) Most of Chris Rea's '80s albums are DR13-14. The Cars' Heartbeat City is DR14. Same for Peter Gabriel's eponymous 4th a.k.a. "Security" (pre-remastering) - now that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you masterfully use dynamics. The people involved presumably cut their teeth on prog-rock in the '70s and possibly classical before that.

Justin further argues

I’ll admit that Aja is good for what it is, but if you find an engineer who wants to make your record sound just like it, he probably arrives at the studio wearing a gray, thinning pony-tail and a polyester polo-shirt proudly embroidered with the words “Out-of-Touch”.

(That sort of argument really screams hipster, but that's another story.)
He's got a point in that quality apparently became a matter of fashion. Being the old quality geek that I am, this strikes me as problematic. Sure enough, I've heard plenty of innovative, "bleeding edge" material with dynamics approaching the flatness of a postage stamp. If my ears are any sort of indication, nowadays it is easily possible to make recordings so unnaturally dense that they result in nausea on the part of the listener. (I might be more sensitive to this than most, I don't know. Putting on some classical or whatever, it sure feels nice to listen to music that's not screaming "LISTEN TO ME!11" at the top of its lungs all the time.)

Why don't people in the industry listen to listeners anyway? It's the end user who ultimately has to put up with whatever they're putting out after all. AFAIK, artists commonly are sick and tired of hearing their own stuff at the point it's mastered, so they usually aren't of much help.