I divided the length in samples of all tracks by 588. All results were whole numbers.

By the way, I just cancelled the order and ordered the vinyl version instead.

Tell me it's not true... I cannot stand this f...in' loudness war

I doubt the vinyl is better. I wouldn't be surprised if it is mastered from the CD.

Hypothetically, what does this point to?

I'm assuming the worst case is that it was a transcode from a lossy format, but that's not the only reason this would occur, correct?

-brendan

I've been thinking recently that perhaps the best way to stop the loudness war is for CDs to continue to get more and more clipressed until the distortion is so bad that everyone notices it. So when Metallica releases an album which is virtually unlistenable to, they are raising the profile of the problem of poor mastering.

Just a more positive way of looking things!

Vinyl cannot be mastered as hot as CDs. Even -9 dB is nigh impossible. The latest Slayer album has an album gain of about -7 dB. The CD has -12.5 dB. So at least there will be better preserved transients and less distortion compared to the CD.

It simply means that it is highly probable that the initial source is a CD. Apart from that there is no reason to believe that the source for the MP3 encoder is not a CD because the frequency spectrum is not crippled in any way. All frequencies that LAME preserves at the V2 quality preset are there.

nice ideal but i doubt it. clipression is the norm. the average joe is used to it and even expects it.

Wrong. There are diverse examples of CD masters being cut to LP. It may require some waveform tweaking or a lowering of levels, but it is quite straightforward from what I understand. (Also, dB means something completely different on LP; +6db is quite possible.)

Note that because of distortion effects and perhaps the occasional pop/tick, the dynamic range may appear superior on a waveform plot, but a quasi-peak-to-average measurement (or pfpf) can tease out if the overall loudness range is the same or if it is greater.

IMHO, you can thank all the subjectivist audiophiles (JA and Mikey particularly) for promulgating the myth that vinyl as a format is superior to CD, thus giving producers the justified false belief that putting a CD cut on vinyl automatically makes it sound better.

LP's can be cut from CD masters, but isn't there a physical limitation (in terms of the depth of the groove of the record) as to how loud an LP can be?

If there is, as you say there may be, a lowering of the levels in order to put out a recording on LP, doesn't that validate part of what was proposed in the initial post, e.g. that the LP will not sound as distorted/clipped as the CD? Not that the said LP will have a more elastic dynamic range, but that clipping and distortion will be reduced or non-existent?

Words like "superior" carry loaded meanings. LP's were (are) superior to CD's, for example, when it comes to cover art! Otherwise, I think that is too subjective of a term to use in such a discussion.

No. All that means is that you have quiet music that's clipping instead of loud music that's clipping.

So you're stating that such a CD master is clipped. Wouldn't one make a separate LP master most of the time? Or are you saying that companies do not do that?

That's exactly what I'm saying. A vinyl remaster is an added expense that, let's face it, hardly anybody is going to care about anyway. If most people can't identify hypercompression on a CD, the vinyl buyers sure as hell aren't going to spot it on their vinyl. Correctly identifying a hypercompressed vinyl master is dreadfully complicated business - you can't just throw it up on Audacity; you get a lot of false negatives that way.

When the label pays the extra money for a vinyl master, like with Icky Thump, you can bet your ass that they are going to let you know about it. If they don't, they clearly don't think highly enough of the vinyl mastering to promote it to audiophiles.

All of the recent new vinyl I've bought has, to my ears & my analyses, the same master as exists on CD.

I've prepared a comparison image between the CD and vinyl version of Slayer's Christ Illusion (using the last track "Supremist"). Both files have been normalized to the same volume using ReplayGain. You can see several things:
- Quiet parts don't differ (much), which shows that it's not the turntable that "magically" adds non-existent peaks.
- Loud parts are obviously extremely peak-limited in the CD version while the vinyl version looks quite okay (considering the style of music).
- Whereas the CD version's waveform doesn't indicate a fade-out before 03:25, the vinyl version shows a fade-out about 10 seconds earlier, which also indicates that the peaks aren't added by the turntable.

If Death Magnetic is mastered similarly on vinyl, then it should be quite an improvement over the CD version. The most annoying effect, the heavy distortion, should not exist because the peaks aren't limited to such an extreme extent. Christ Illusion is by the way also produced by Rick Rubin.

What does the track look like when it's zoomed in around a clipped waveform?

Excellent image though. I do wonder if the fades contain any loud percussion like the body of the song does - I would believe that if vinyl distortion does artificially raise the peaks, it would do so for high-acceleration parts (ie loud high frequency stuff like transients).

I'll probably need to prep a few images myself to illustrate what I think are the same masters.

Hancoque, maybe we should split this topic off into a separate discussion of identifying CD/vinyl masters?

Speaking of Metal albums, I have a album called Total Brutal by Austrian Death Machine. So far the mastering on it seems very questionable. Since there's alot of hi-hat and audio clips that sounds like its come from a lossy source. Also looking at the spectrum gram on foobar2000 makes it look it was mastered from a lossy source. Since it looks it has a been through a lowpass filter.

Here is a shoot of a freq analysis on a track from my flac rip, I did with Audacity.



I have uploaded a couple of sample tracks from the album.

Some of the tracks seem to be very easy to ABX at V2 on LAME like if it was a transcode and also easy to ABX at q 55 on Nero AAC.



A popping noise, just over on 0:13. The artifact is also present on Nero AAC at q 55.

Yes, this is getting kinda off-topic here. Can you start a new thread?

Those comparison images alone (with no close ups) don't prove much.
example:


to



...with a filter in Audition which shifts the wave form around but causes no audible difference. Here is a close up from the second wave form. You still see the clipping.

Worst mastered album I listened to so far has to be the new Dragonforce album.

The peakmeter almost never moved in it, Replaygain was something like -13db. They really did sound like something like an old Nintendo.

I'll throw in a +1 on Metallica's Death Magnetic album.

After a while, it becomes immensely tiring to listen to. Its ear torture to try to listen to the album more than once in a row, even at moderate volume levels.

A sad way to showcase some of the best material Metallica have written in the last 20 years.

I have the Death Magnetic CD in APE+CUE, RG scan below.

So you own the actual CD? The leak has an album-gain of -13.50db.

Each track on your version seems to be around 2db "cooler" than the leak. Hopefully it's not as fatiguing.

IIRC, one physical limitation was in the ability of TTs to track very loud parts of LPs (e.g., the infamous cannon shots of the "1812 Overture"). I presume this is less of an issue with today's TT/cart combos, but couldn't say definitively, as I rarely use that technology these days.

I've just analyzed the same version... and same results

Even if TDTNC still sounds distorted at the end, is better than preovious leaked version

Well, then, that means, as Hancoque said, that vinyl cannot be mastered as hot as CDs -- i.e., the hottest CDs will be hotter than any LP can handle, unless the waveforms are tweaked or level is lowered...in which case the LP is still not as 'hot' as the CD!

I don't think he meant 'you can never master an LP at the level of a CD'. As long as the CD is mastered within the level range that LP can do, you can do a 'straightforward' transfer.

i just put on death magnetic in lossless. it's horrible.

It's still an issue for a lot of carts, but it was more or less alleviated by never hitting that level again



Well, yeah, but more fundamentally, "level" means something completely different here. Apples and oranges. CD "heat" means how close the signal gets to 0dbFS, and almost always is modulated through compression and limiting; vinyl "heat" means how high the modulation peaks are relative to NAB 0db (5cm/s?), and is almost always modulated through straight up gain.

As a matter of comparison, though, saying that a CD is "hotter" than the vinyl implicitly means that compression/limiting is being compared here, and not gain. The differences in gain between all the different components of the vinyl system are such that saying that the vinyl sounds louder/softer than the CD is sort of meaningless.

I listen to it more carefully... It sounds like pure s..t hopefully is a promo cd

To sum it up: There are now three versions of Death Magnetic that don't seem to be a transcode:

• LAME 3.97 V2, album gain -13.38 dB
• LAME 3.97 CBR 320 kbps, album gain -12.49 dB
• APE/CUE, album gain -11.16 dB

I have compared them via ABX and could differentiate between them (ReplayGain enabled). The first version has the most distortion and it's very annoying. The second version sounds much better in this regard. The third version is a slight improvement over the second version. The production itself seems to be the same on all three versions, only the amount of compression/limiting varies. Even the third version has audible distortion, but it's much less annoying than the first version, but still too much in my opinion.

Granted, but digital 'heat' is not just whether 0dB is reached, but how often peaks are at or near 0dB. You know, like Iggy Pop remastering his CD to be always 'in the red'

This is certainly going to impact how easily a digital master can be transferred to LP, with playability intact.

Lars has got to be f*cking with us. He's punishing file sharers for their transgressions. I'm sure of it.

Nope! That's what I'm saying in my vinyl mastering thread. It very well may not.

That came to my mind as well, but I don't see how this would benefit the band or label. If people complain about the bad mastering before release and tell others to not buy the album because it sucks quality-wise it would mean less sales.

Unless people keep dissing LAME's sound quality at high bitrates, which is done astonishingly often, especially with this album.

Christ, I just heard a lossless copy of The Day That Never Comes, its still painfully awfull to hear. The track gain was -13.84. Jesus t***y f***ing christ, thats just plain bad and unprofessional mastering, if it was the offical release. And this Ted Jensen, won a grammy award for mastering ..................why?.

Anyway the offical music video of the song is on youtube, along with bad acting to go with the piss poor sound. Am shocked that alot of youtubers have bitched about the sound quality, instead of having a flame war with Megadeth fans .

Well, at least your glass is half full, and I give you props for that. But you're wrong. I've read some things here and there on the internet, and I see a lot of Metallica fans mocking "audiophiles" and telling them to, essentially, 'shut up and listen' to the album and forget about the sound quality (which, incidentally, they think is pretty good). And I've read some favorable reviews by large publications (e.g. Rolling Stone) gushing with praise over the music, with absolutely zero mention of sound quality.

I do my computer listening with Logitech Z-2300's which tend to sweeten the sound of very compressed music for some reason (compared to my "real" amp + speaker setups), and even then, I found Death Magnetic to be completely unlistenable. Shrill, no dynamics, and just like every other Metallica album, you still wouldn't know there's a bassist by listening to the songs.

The only good news that I can see is that we can put this album right up there next to Californication under "famous Rick Rubin produced albums with ear destroying mastering." Ted Jensen, YOU SUCK and you deserve to lose your job and have your Grammy rescinded. My dog is deaf and retarded and she could master Metallica better than you.

As you yourself have said, it will require changing level, or 'tweaking' EQ. I call that an 'impact on how easily a digital master can be transferred".

"Shoot 'em! Shoot 'em!" (edit: Metallica, of course. I should have watched the whole video before posting. Makes note to self: "Never watch Metallica videos in the first place.")

The new Metallica album's mastering pisses me off to no end. They finally had a shot of doing an album right, and they failed, again.

LOL

Oh god, i miss Beavis and Butthead. Seeing them watching and making fun of music videos was just funny. Espesaly when they were watching Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun music video and Pantera's This Love music video.

It would kinda funny if Beavis and Butthead was still running, and they could re-use the that joke when Beavis (Metallica fan) did not know that it was Metallica on the One music video. And use it on any mordern Metallica video music video.

And -13.38 dB it is. So, the retail release is actually the worst sounding of the three versions that leaked during the last days.

P.S.: And don't be fooled by the ReplayGain values of the MP3 release. The tracks have just been attenuated by 2 dB.

I just easily ABXed the Promo version from the retail version and my ears are far from golden. I'm not sure whether these differences are caused by dynamic compression only.

Ditto. The differences I found are that the promo version has more treble and less distortion. Overall I found no weaknesses in the promo version compared to the retail version.

That's unbelievably stupid. As if someone had requested it on the last minute: "Man, the promo wasn't loud enough."

Its a offical, Death Magnetic is the worst mastered CD i have ever own. I just brought the offical retail CD and the album gain is -13.38. It makes Hypotize's mastering on pair with RATM's debut album.



It sounds like it was recorded from Bono's stereo . The music on the album is or would be awesome and alot better then some of their modern stuff, but the sound on it is just piss poor.

Yeah shame. Bad for the band, bad for everybody else now there is a new 'standard' (read: low) in loudness to live up to. Its all because of you industry people. Your lack of standards and bad tastes. When I got into audio coding in 2003 there first challenge was normalising audio - not to bully the softer tracks ! . Replaygain was quick and easy. Industry people : What have you done ? Its all your fault at the end of the day blame mp3, this and that .. Its all your fault. To those in other forums still denying this problem and like 'artistic' freedom of volume - you are just as guilty.

I heard a rumor about the digital download version from missionmetallica having a slightly better RG value than the CD. Anyone here bought it?

There are definitely two different masterings around.

This is from the first two minutes of Cyanide.

http://i37.tinypic.com/2vuwwtu.jpg

From what I understand, the bottom one is from the European promo CD. The top is the retail U.S. Both are from lossless sources.

Death Magnetic mastering engineer passes the buck!

http://www.metallicabb.com/index.php?showtopic=85317



Probably means the vinyl is hosed too.

Yes, the promo version is definitely the better one. But the download version does not equal the promo version, not that somebody thinks that because of the "better" ReplayGain values.


Oh jeez, if I'm paying 70 € for nothing, I'm really pissed off! But at least Ted Jensen is admitting the problem. That is *the* argument against all those people who say "we audiophiles" are only imagining things. I really hope that the resistance against the album will be high enough to convince someone to issue a re-release or even a release targeted at audiophiles like a DVD-A release.

Edit: There's a petition for a re-mix or remaster.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have vinyl clipping on Death Magnetic.

http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showpost...p;postcount=531