Why do new albums sound like crap?

Pitch Black · Post by **Pitch Black** » Mon Jun 26, 2006 6:48 am

^^^^^SHUDDER^^^^^^

guys guys i have this idea! you know its so stupid it may. just. work.

lets all go out and do some kickass live gigs down the road then.

try mp3'ing that

ahh....... i dunno, this is an internet forum dedicated to digital music performance software. where on earth could we find a bunch of guys who . . . no, wait . . . hey . . .

håkan bråkan · Post by **håkan bråkan** » Mon Jun 26, 2006 10:58 am

For those who did not know, this avoids the problem of having to manually adjust volume levels of songs that have been mastered at different levels (but no hardware support yet I think):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replay_Gain

this does not help getting over compressed songs sounding better, but if it would be a common used system, there would be no benifit to over compress, no loudness war.

SubFunk · Post by **SubFunk** » Mon Jun 26, 2006 12:45 pm

twjett wrote:

the next song that came on was a Steely Dan tune and it truly made the previous song sound like a steaming heap of freshly-shitted shit. way more alive, full, open. all that good stuff.

jeez... how could i forgot about that, of course the steely dan stuff counts under many, many audio engineers and mastering engineers with a little age

as a milestone of good sounding, supremely recorded, produced and mastered piece of music. and i also agree, it's superb sounding.

hambone1 · Post by **hambone1** » Mon Jun 26, 2006 3:52 pm

Cuz all that seems to be left is remix/rehash/electronic construction-kit cut-n-paste same ol' shit music... doesn't matter whether it's rock, country, indie, pop, metal, dance... it's all been done to death...

Robert Henke · Post by **Robert Henke** » Mon Jun 26, 2006 4:57 pm

oh yeah, compression can do lots of harm. for those of you performing live: each time I try a compressor in the master ( which sounds great under headphones in the hotel room ) I end up turning it off during soundcheck since it just adds another layer of mud before the signal gets further compressed by the all-red dJ mixer before the all-red behringer maximizer ( agrrrrrrrrr ) and the all-red speaker crossover. Or what ever the signal chain is usually in a club...

... but to come back to the initial question of that thread, I believe it is the abundance of tools combied with the lack of experience which makes bad sound. Producers in the golden age of pop / rock did know their tools extremly well and where highly specialised people. Putting an eight band EQ plus compressor plus limiter in each of the 64 channels of your mix is the best way to ruin it all unless you are a super mixing guru. But all these magazines tell you how to make the mix perfect, how to master at home etc. and make you believe you just need to have yet another plug in to make the perfect record.

Robert

SubFunk · Post by **SubFunk** » Mon Jun 26, 2006 5:34 pm

robert wrote:

... but to come back to the initial question of that thread, I believe it is the abundance of tools combied with the lack of experience which makes bad sound.
Producers in the golden age of pop / rock did know their tools extremly well and where highly specialised people.
Putting an eight band EQ plus compressor plus limiter in each of the 64 channels of your mix is the best way to ruin it all unless you are a super mixing guru. But all these magazines tell you how to make the mix perfect, how to master at home etc. and make you believe you just need to have yet another plug in to make the perfect record.

amen, yupp spezialised people! in our days most people think, oh i can create music so i can mix and engineer as well and ahhh... you know what why not mastering the whole lot as well cause' i have the tools! T-racks for cheap $$$s but saddly actually no clue how to apply them... nor what mastering really is. i agree a good for that matter "whatever" part / person in the chain KNOWS his stuff inside out and if it is only a very few tools he uses since decades... using a EQ is or can be a skill in itself which some people dedicade their entire lives to!!!
but today it all has to be quick and cheap, as someone mentioned here once, all it counts is writing "fat rockin' beats" to hell with all that art of mixing, producing, mastering dispossible music makes the money right???

LOL.

Sales Dude McBoob · Post by **Sales Dude McBoob** » Mon Jun 26, 2006 6:40 pm

In a way, the DAW is partially to blame. Musical trends usually move along with the available technology. Remember what happened when people first started experimenting with the TB-303? After cassette 4-tracks were around for a few years lo-fi indie rock took form. When the Beatles were presented with 4 tracks as opposed to 2 a universe of creativity opened up.

I think what's happened in popular music is that amateur producers now have the capability to produce studio quality music from their desktops, and in their inexperience they are slamming the dymanics out of their work because the presets on their plug-ins are more instantly gratifying to their ears. The problem is that the artists hear what can be done from the desktop, and when they end up in a real studio the professional producer has to compete with the inexperienced producer's mixes. A squashing war takes place and eventually becomes the standard way to mix.

gomi · Post by **gomi** » Mon Jun 26, 2006 7:11 pm

nebulae wrote:I just listened to the latests offerings from Oakenfold and Nelly Furtado (ok, let's not joke about my selection of music for a second), and my first impression was that these albums were over-comressed/limited to within an inch of their lives. If you do a spectrum analysis on them, there are no dymanics left AT ALL. Every frequency hits digital zero, all the time.

Basically, we're getting closer and closer to white noise. Thanks, ClearChannel. Really appreciate it. (insert sarcasm here...)

http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.n ... 2E005DAF1C

http://www.digido.com/portal/pmodule_id ... age_id=33/

stew · Post by **stew** » Mon Jun 26, 2006 8:27 pm

Well, after I wrote thing called iSpazz I got emails from several people like this nice example:

how do i lower the intensity, or the reaction to the music.
when i am listening and it gets to the good part of the song the light
just stays solid.

...how about: Listen to good music for a change?

ethios4 · Post by **ethios4** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 12:51 am

I have a hard time getting fellow producers to understand that Mastering is a highly developed art that requires excellent acoustic space, excellent tools, excellent ears, and above all....massive experience. They think "Just slap an Ozone on it and it's mastered", or "I should be able to accomplish every part of the production process in my bedroom right now!".

I even have people offering me money to "master" their tracks based on hearing the difference between my "unmastered" tracks and what they sound like after a 15 minute session with Ozone (eg. exciters, EQ, multi-comp, and limiter). I have to explain that an Ozone is not real mastering, and that just because it sounds good for a few minutes doesn't mean it's going to sound good over 50,000 watts, or sound good after listening to it over and over. Hardly anyone believes me, but still, I will not take money to participate in the degradation of good sound going around these days.

On another note, I was at an outdoor psytrance party over the weekend....man, that stuff was killing my ears! Perfect example of waaay over-compressed music with way too much exciter on the high end....no breath to the music just undifferentiated noise coming out. And I love hard psytrance don't get me wrong....it's just the state of most music these days. louder, Louder, LOUDER, XXXXXXXXXXXX!!!!!!!!!!!

As stated above, I think it's young kids with all the tools in the world, but little experience in using them properly (properly=with respect to dynamics, musicality, balanced sound). And that's not a dis to young kids, just an awareness that with age usually comes an appreciation for subtlety, ebb and flow, and an awareness that there is more to life than full-on-all-the-time. To me, this trend in audio is a reflection of a trend in global culture towards superficially pleasing experiences at the cost of longevity, depth, and quality.

$.02

SubFunk · Post by **SubFunk** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 10:04 am

ethios4 wrote:

As stated above, I think it's young kids with all the tools in the world, but little experience in using them properly (properly=with respect to dynamics, musicality, balanced sound).
And that's not a dis to young kids, just an awareness that with age usually comes an appreciation for subtlety, ebb and flow, and an awareness that there is more to life than full-on-all-the-time.
To me, this trend in audio is a reflection of a trend in global culture towards superficially pleasing experiences at the cost of longevity, depth, and quality.

i couldn't have said it any better.

pilcrow · Post by **pilcrow** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 5:39 pm

ethios4 wrote:I will not take money to participate in the degradation of good sound going around these days.

I will, but so far no one's offering.

deva · Post by **deva** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 6:25 pm

SubFunk wrote:
ethios4 wrote:

To me, this trend in audio is a reflection of a trend in global culture towards superficially pleasing experiences at the cost of longevity, depth, and quality.

i couldn't have said it any better.

yeah... hopefully the trend will start swinging the other way cause it is hard to imagine that it could become even more shallow... surely we are reaching the extreme where it must turn

hambone1 · Post by **hambone1** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 6:45 pm

IMO, it's not brickwall mastering that's killed music.

It's content.

I'm hoping it REALLY hits a brick wall, and something new and exciting rises from the dust...

Sales Dude McBoob · Post by **Sales Dude McBoob** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 7:15 pm

deva wrote:
yeah... hopefully the trend will start swinging the other way cause it is hard to imagine that it could become even more shallow... surely we are reaching the extreme where it must turn

Hammy wrote:
IMO, it's not brickwall mastering that's killed music.

It's content.

I'm hoping it REALLY hits a brick wall, and something new and exciting rises from the dust...

I don't want to come off as negative, but I think you guys have a little too much faith in humanity. During any period where there was a particularly good musical trend happening, if you examine that period more closely you will find that the biggest things happening in popular culture are usually the worst pedestrian dreck imagineable.

Things are no different today, except that when you hear it now you hear the abused plug-ins and a disregard for dynamics. It's still shit music.

There is always quality music being written, performed, and recorded. There are just times where you have to dig a little more to find it.

Why do new albums sound like crap?

Re: Why do new albums sound like crap?