Evening all,

I'm wondering if any of you have ever seen / heard a noticeable difference in mastering quality between the US and UK (or any other release) versions of a given album. I remember reading somewhere on this forum that there was a requirement for albums in the UK to be released with "headroom" - that is, (and forgive my inexperienced description) albums in the UK are required to have a certain amount of unused "space" between the peak gain levels and the maximum gain levels supported by the CD format.

I'm becoming something of an audiophile, and i've noticed some of my favorite albums are suffering from a bad case of "loudness war" (Gorrillaz - Demon Days, and The White Stripes - Icky Thump). Of course, i have no hard evidence of this, only my perception of the quality, which is getting better. My hope is that these albums would have had superior mastering in the UK, but i have a hunch that the levels were simply taken down globally, rather than mastered appropriately.

I would love any insight you have to offer.

-Brian

I've never heard this. The CDs available in the UK don't seem to support this theory either!

Cheers,
David.

Never heard this before and I live in the UK and it certainly doesn't seem to be applied to anything.

I've heard a lot of talk about people saying that CDs are mastered or made different for other countries...for example when Tool's 10,000 Days came out, they had a Japanese pressing (made in Japan) that cost 3x as much, etc, and there was a big fuss over the US version sounding different than Japanese versions sounding different than Australian versions, etc. I checked rips from various regions around the world, they were all mastered exactly the same.

From all the examples I've seen, CDs are mastered the same for all regions. Although it would be interesting to actually see an example of this being proven true.

Even if that requirement were the case, it would not matter in the loudness war. What "we" are missing, is headroom FOR the peaks.... so, reserving a reasonable amount of space for the peaks...... but what you are describing seems to besomething different... namely it is about reserving space ABOVE the peaks.... its basically just reserving a bit of blank space.... space which isnt used. And this space most probably isnt much - probably less than 0.5db. If it is there, then its because of technical reasons, not because of soundquality.

- Lyx