You may like it or not but Bathory's Hammerheart is a masterpiece of Black Metal. Do you imagine it to be lacquered and smooth like Mozart or Chris de Burgh? However I don't think it is mastered that way due short cash. That sounding is inherent atmosphere of that genre.

this is an easy question: the remastered version of "Einstürzende Neubautens" Kollaps

it really ruins the album completely

There are lots of bad ones, but the worst I think are the two latest System of A Down cd's. I just can't listen to either one all the way through. You know what we need? A database of cd replaygain values. Just replaygains, nothing else (well, you'd need to know exactly what cd you're referring to).

Worst mastered...hmm..

Therapy? Albums are all quite loud, the loudest one i own is the newest one, 'Never Apologse, Never Explain', Albumpeak 11,32, loudest song: Rock you Monkeys, peak 12.21

There's only a single song in my whole therapy?-collection that's below 89 db, 0,65 below...

Ok, it's not the kind of music you usually listen quietly but hell, there's no need to produce music that loud...

There overall peak and track peak of the Album 'suicide pact, you first' is at 1.0, no headroom, not a bit.

I don't think that it's the band's fault but I think it's a hard piece to bite

Thats a very cool idea. Something similar to accurate rip.

Well, I dont like latest Bob Marley`s delux editions.. Sounds kinda thin to me...

is that 'Diane'? it's the only therapy song i know, and i can't imagine it to sound as loud. although nothing surprises me anymore...

Hammerhart is still black metal? I don't know that album, but it's folower 'Twilight of the Gods', was pretty far from anything called black metal and such a brutal album as 'Return...' was.
i've heard 'Twilight' from some poor 128k mp3's but the songs sounded so bad, that it had to be several times transcoded or an extremely poor mix, i can't decide. (and i can't decide if i didn't liked it because of the bad sound, or is it just simply boring)

AFAIK 'Twilight...' is considered to be a well produced Bathory album, but again i didn't have the opportunity to hear the original. But 'Return...' sounded quite horrible

(yeah, i listen to a lot of music)

@molnart
Funny thing i see your avatar here. I have many "The Mission" CDs and they are partial painfully bright mastered!
Children has that much high highs it bursts your ears listening on a hifi system with live characteristics.

Hmm. To be accurate, I have to say it is a 'waypoint' between 'Return' and 'Twilight...' with lot of scandinavian mythology included. By the way, it seems to me 'Twilight...' you talk wasn't transcoded. While it is not Black Metal it still have coars sound.

i just simply love the cover art of that album. it's a really nice picture, nothing more.

in fact i don't really remember the mastering now, but i know 'carved in sand' sounded too quiet. and i haven't heard their other albums, so you may be right

Has anyone heard the new Flaming Lips? Yikes! Is that bad mastering or an intention (both?)? Anyone have comments on it as well? They are considered Pop, so maybe that's why the mastering is so overbearingly loud to the point of in-your-face distortion?

I can excuse the mastering of the new Flaming Lips album. Even though I'm sure the loudness race had something to do with the -11 dB Replaygain values, it doesn't completely ruin the sound as it would, say, a classical album. The Flaming Lips have used distortion artistically before, as in Slow Nerve Action:
http://beta.yousendit.com/transfer.php?act...D3DF7FD0A78BAE4

So the distortion doesn't worry me too much, but the dynamic range compression is excessive. Even the quiet tracks get a -8 dB Replaygain value. The compression is especially apparent in introduction of The W.A.N.D.. It's just clapping and guitar until 0:24, when the bass and drums come in, and you can hear the level of the guitar drop way down, an effect of the dynamic range compression.

When I saw this thread bumped to the first page I thought, bingo! I'll post about the new Flaming Lips album. Seems I don't need to but I'll add my two penneth anyway.

It sounds awful and I'm absoloutely gutted. Yoshimi was such a great album. Not perfect sonically but nowhere near as bad as Mystics. Too loud, too much distortion due to bad engineering.

Yoshimi and the new album's loudness are actually quite similar:



The Soft Bulletin wasn't much better, either.

Oh, Flaming Lips' Dave Fridmann did it again. He also clippressed S-K's The Woods to death before. This man's a threat! LOL

LOL! Yoshimi was actually tolerable in it's mastering (as a whole) since there were a few songs where not all of the song was clipped to death; this resulted in the mastering seeming very intentional and actually artful, especially since many songs dealt with machines (etc.). But now, with the new one....sigh.... Every song is painfully distorted, not only with the low end, but in almost all places. I listen to music where mastering gets a quite a few complaints often, from Glitch (but I love most mastering in the genre) to Industrial to old Jazz and Pop, and this is one that I just can't get through because of the mastering!

Look at The WAND!!

Here is a small sample from the album for your displeasure:
Yeah Yeah Yeah Song, sample

@komplexnous: Omg, what are those spikes at the beginning of the song?!?!

@evereux: sounds like their instruments are broken...

Some of the worst are:

The Be Good Tanyas: Chinatown
Sarah McLahlan: Afterglow
Beth Orton: Comfort Of Strangers

They are not only subject copy protection damaged audio track but also have naff cd mastering/pressing by EMI. Run them through EAC on maximum repair settings then burn it back onto a CD-R to hear them like they should have been.

The bad mastering/pressing was confirmed to me when Nettwerk posted me a replacement non-CP CD of Chinatown which revealed to me that many of the errors on the disc were just down to poor mastering/pressing.

As for "Comfort Of Strangers" even after restorting it with EAC it sounds like you are listening to it with ear plugs in!, Califonication by the Chillis is awful you can hear clipping throughout most of the tracks and many Iron Maiden recordings have a tinny speaker sound. Did they really have to use a school kid who was on work experience to man the recording decks? Egad.


David

Going back in time a bit here, but the first (AAD) CD release of "Foxtrot" by Genesis is an absolute horror. Virtually no dynamic range, horrendous tape hiss, a general "muddy" quality with mushy distorted treble in fact it sounds like the CD was made from a badly recorded worn-out cassette. It's so bad as to be un-listenable - thankfully I still have my LP copy.

Other AAD CDs I've heard have no such problems - the AAD release of "Argus" by Wishbone Ash and early Tangerine Dream CD releases all have excellent mastering including live concert recordings like "Richochet" by TD.

The current fashion of "digitally remastering" older analog recordings for CD release just seems to compound the problem - most I've heard degrade rather than improve the original. Just like many new CD releases, far too much compression, overuse of latest "kewl" effects plug-ins etc. Very disappointing.

BRILLIANT THREAD!

Gotta agree here... ... most digitally resquashed ... eh remastered stuff sounds awful and the original album is lots better. I too paid about 10 bucks more for the Swedish original release of Bjorks Icelandic-language "Gling glo" album, and I must say I do not regret it! Soothing RGs ... (ok it's jazz and cannot be compared with "half deadly compressed" mainstream pop wares...)

My warmest thanks also go to that guy who showed me that I should consider buying a turntable again!! I was almost giving up that thought, because I regarded it as "old fashioned, " but recent album releases have shown that there CAN be a change in dynamics, by using vinyl!
Cool! The new DM album track has about the same spectrum like some song recorded back in 1993 - that's how it should be!

Something else:
No one who does not own the original CD or non-encoded rips [WAV] of a CD should EVER judge about replay gains!!
That's serious folks! With a good (!)(no, not winamp) audio playing and cataloging software like Foobar2000, you are able to MODIFY a replay gain to your own wishes! So that guy who just gets the album as a torrent or downloading it as a .rar/.zip archive might already get a version with *other* replay gains!
Moreover, do not forget that there is a less known option called --noreplaygain in LAME.

Virtually nothing supports LAME's replaygain info anyhow.

That's nice to know - thanks for the heads-up!

very bad masters are
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication and Stadium Arcadium

Labels should put a warning sticker on albums mastered by Vlado Meller.

No, Vlado Meller should put a warning sticker on the CD that the label forced him to destroy the dynamics.

I recently managed to 'acquire' 192kbps mp3s of a pre-master version of Californication. It has better dynamics and resultant lower RG values, and much less clipping. However, I still think it was mixed/EQ'd a bit odd.

Keep in mind that those MP3s are transcodes. The 'unmastered' (rather, it's just better mastered) version leaked from Warner Bros. as 160 Kbps MP3 files. The files you have were converted to CD for distribution, then re-ripped at 192 Kbps.

But I agree, it is a lot better, which just makes the CD sound even worse.

Two immediately come to mind:

Feist - Let It Die
Smashing Pumpkins - MACHINA/The Machines of God

The Feist album has some pretty bad clipping on the singer's voice, and this is not that kind of music. The Pumpkins album might be more intentional, but I remember right after buying it listening to it and immediately ejecting it to see that it was in fact the real CD.

Two CDs by GIGI D'Agostino:

Tecno Fes vol. 2 (many tracks have audible annoying clipping, looks like they were just amplified to "200%")
L'Amour Tojours [spelling]

ah, sorry for the little late reply, haven't seen the quote

I have two (Therapy?) versions of diane:

the 4:59 long from 'Infernal love' (1995) has -4.47 dB trackgain with foobar (89 dB as reference)

the 4:00 long from 'so much for the ten year plan' (2000) which is something like a 'best of', -1,10 dB trackgain and the peak at 0,67 (which is a surprise for me now..)

and it's damn surprising for me that the album gain is around 7 at both albums the 1995 and the 2000.

well, others, especialy the latest ones have album gains of -9 to -11, so I can't say that they haven't taken part at the loudness race.


The mastering itself... well, i would say it's Therapy?-style

Edit:
I didn't listen too much to the quality-aspects until now but it's obvious thatsome if not many of theire song's are awfully mixed or mastered. I just listened to 'theme from Delorean' from the album Shameless. Hell, it makes me cry. At first I heard very obvious clipping at around 1:40 to about 1:50, especially at the vocals, but after listening closer and looking at the wave I recognised that the whole damn song is clipping. Shame on those studios for 'Shameless'.

Just my opinion, but Stadium Arcadium is mastered alot better than Californication or By The Way. While I haven't looked at it in an editor yet, there's alot less audible distortion.

It is better that Californication and By The Way I agree, but that isn't saying much at all, because those CDs are varying degrees of terrible.

I think one problem that perhaps doesn't receive much attention is the excessive limiting that really stuffs the high frequencies. Any cymbal crashes are harshly limited which makes them sound splashy and hissy high frequency distortion.

I encourage anyone interested in Stadium Arcadium to purchase a vinyl copy. It has been mastered by Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray who normally master reissues of Jazz and rock albums.

The transfer was performed all analog from the 30 I.P.S. master tapes.

Anything by Beyonce, for example "Check on it".

Yes, the song sucks to begin with, but it's mastering is even worse.



The song goes crunch-crunch from beginning to end, but clips even more towards the end. Kick drum just slaughters everything else, although the voice clips all by itself in some places.

Now why bother pointing out a mainstream R&B track, which we could have guessed would be this poorly mastered?

Because this track went 5x platinum, and there's a whole generation of kids growing up listening to this, liking it, and thinking this is what music is supposed to sound like!

///Leif

The problem is that kids are growing up thinking that Beyonce is music. This is exactly the case where bad mastering is deserved. The ideal mastering for Beyonce would be however no mastering (constant hiss)

It seems to just be a standard procedure for R&B albums that the bass drum is clipped. I guess it sounds "C00L" on cheap boom boxes, and car stereos with waytoobigthannecessary sub woofers.

Wow... I've never seen anything like this.
album: Gillan's Inn by Ian Gillan (2006).
Apparently they squashed it and replaygained it afterwards.

Oh, i forgot to mention that it sounds awful.

Remixed and remastered "Enemies of Reality" came out in march 2005.

Virgin Prunes - If I die, I die - 2004 Remaster

Album peak is 1.542267... it sounds really horrible.

The "Very Best" of Prince.

A lot of tracks clip, not only in bass regions but in voices as well (for example Get Off...)

Wanted to return the CD to the store, starting babbling about "how it clips" and the store clerk watched me with a face just short of open-mouthed drooling...





Maybe some guys in the states should start a class action lawsuit in the states, claiming they destroyed their precious B&W Nautilus (or equivalent) speakers playing this record, for lets say $1 million per person, because their speakers aren't made anymore...

Think that would invert the trend?

Is that a recently remastered compilation?

I think the company (is it Warner Bros.?) are currently remastering all his albums. That compilation could be an example of what's to come...

It was in the "cheap price" basket, released 2001.

Just checked per-file gain on Track 14: -4.07db, track peak 0.774933

Don't have a wave editor to look at it though.

Just messing around w/ some cds I have that sound funky and found this one

Adema - Unstable...the song is Betrayed Me has a -11.2 track gain



sad thing is I could pick out hundreds of songs from my cd collection that are just as bad, if not worse

I just bought another copy of Ozzy Osbourne's blizzard of oz, not noticing it was remastered. Oh God its awful. I needed to replace a skipping copy but I would rather listen to skips than this. The drums are horribly clipping. Makes my decent infinity speakers sound like a boombox. Don't ever buy that cd!

oh yeah californication is really bad too but I'm just the 100th person to say that

...not to mention that the original bass and drum tracks by Daisley and Kerslake were replaced with recordings by Trujillo and Bordin.

The worst one for me is Rage Against The Machine -- Renegades. Most of the kick drums are all squashed, especially on track number 4, Renegades of Funk. It's brutal. What really sucks is that the songs are awesome, and they're ruined.

That's another CD mastered by Vlado Meller.

He has completely destroyed what is excellent music. I can't fathom how or why studio executives allow CDs like that to be released, it obviously demonstrates that they don't care about the quality of the product that they sell.

oasis - whats the story morning glory

just listen to "champagne supernova" and you know what i mean.
track gain -13.52db

Nightwish - Once (2004)
Not so clipped (by Audacity graph) and album RG "just" -8.82 dB but sound (especially of drums) impossible distorted.
I can't listen more 3 songs in headphones.

I think that is another album mastered by Vlado Meller.

My copy doesn't have a mastering credit, but I know on Meller's webpage that he is listed as mastering the SACD.