[MerlinTKD]

Ear fatigue is my thought. They probably don't spend a lot of time really listening to other bands' production, and then spend months in-studio hearing the same tracks over and over with only tiny, subtle changes. You get used to hearing it a certain way, it sounds fine.

That's the producer's job, to see the big picture and keep it from getting ridiculous. I seriously fault Rick Rubin for this.


Re: that SYL waveform... now I understand why I could never get into them. Love those live YouTube videos, but the actual recordings...

[MF_Kitten]

i´m all for albums being loud, but removing dynamics in order to achieve loudness? no thanks! :P

i like it when it´s loud because the production is great, and the compressor only keeps it from clipping, and nothing else. i always hated it when you listened to an intro obviously hinting at something heavy as fuck, and then the song kicks in, and it´s the same colume as the intro... that totally ruins the point! :P

like when i was listening to Korn´s Here To Stay off the Untouchables album on my dad´s stereo... grim-sounding intro, and then there´s the little stop to allow some silence before it all KICKS in. the problem is, it doesen´t KICK in, it just... starts :P

i was disappointed when i noticed that. and ever since, i´ve been annoyed by quiet intros leaving to parts that should have been loud and hard-hitting, only to be ruined by being the same damned level! :P

[yellowv]

Not to try and defend Metallica on this issue at all, but perhaps they did this intentionally trying to make it sound amaturish? You would think Rick Rubin would know how to properly produce and mix an album. Especially with a budget like this.

[oompa]

Originally Posted by MF_Kitten

i like it when it´s loud because the production is great, and the compressor only keeps it from clipping, and nothing else. i always hated it when you listened to an intro obviously hinting at something heavy as fuck, and then the song kicks in, and it´s the same colume as the intro... that totally ruins the point! :P

^

a perfect example from the same album i took the Syl wavegraph from: if you own the Strapping Young Lad album The New Black, check out track #9, "almost again". the first minute or so its basically clean vocals and average drums and guitars. then at about 1:07 when the push comes, Devin sounds off and Gene starts beating skins, it sounds like someone lowers the volume

but it could be reverse as well. a perfect example of that is Mr. Bungle's "Chemical Marriage", Track #2 on Disco Volante. this is a track that is on very, very low volume, even compared to the rest of the album. its alot of sneaky melodies while Mike whispers and plays around, then towards the end, at about 2:48 a big fill comes with organ and shit, and the wavegraph on this track is very very tight up until that push, where it peaks to the level of distortion. this makes this song impossible to have on a mixtape cus you barely hear it on normal volume (except for that 3-4 second thing towards the end), but if you edit the file to crank the volume it will distort your ears beyond reparation at the end instead. not even RG fixes the problem :/

[TomAwesome]

SYL and Mr. Bungle rock.

[ChaNce]

From About the Mastering from metallicabb.com

RE: Death Magnetic mastering job
mailed-by sterling-sound.com

hide details 10:34 AM (44 minutes ago)


Reply



Thanks for writing.



I’m certainly sympathetic to your reaction, I get to slam my head against that brick wall every day. In this case the mixes were already brick walled before they arrived at my place. Suffice it to say I would never be pushed to overdrive things as far as they are here. Believe me I’m not proud to be associated with this one, and we can only hope that some good will come from this in some form of backlash against volume above all else.

Wasn't crushed in mastering, came to Sterling like that.

[Vision]

Ok, I am listening to The Day That Never Comes and I can hear what you guys are talking about, especially towards the end of the song. It is like my stereo is on full volume, but it is only a quarter of the way up.

Wow, the last 30 seconds are baaaaadddd. I apologize for any comments in any other threads that I made about this album. Still kicks ass, but in an "80's boom box turned all the way up" kinda way.

[jacksonplayer]

Also, check out anytime there's heavy palm muting going on. You get this horrible flubbing sound on the low end as it clips. Really annoying. My first attempts at mastering metal tracks loudly turned out like this, and I'm just some guy. No excuse for a major-label release to sound this way. I'm almost done with my first listen, and I like the album quite a bit. Too bad about the sound quality.

The only comparison I can find is Rush's album "Vapor Trails". It was their strongest music in years, but it had the same atrocious over-compression that rendered it almost unlistenable.

[Zepp88]

Originally Posted by MerlinTKD

Re: that SYL waveform... now I understand why I could never get into them. Love those live YouTube videos, but the actual recordings...

This is why I can't stand listening to SYL and find Devin Townsends production highly over rated.

It's rediculous how home recordings can sound fuller and more natural than these modern studio productions, we're recording our album in a fucking basement with a PC, Cubase, and cheap mics etc. A full blown modern studio should be able to produce gold, why they feel the need to ruin it by compressing everything ten fold I'll never know.

[playstopause]

Originally Posted by ChaNce

From About the Mastering from metallicabb.com

Interesting read.

[ChaNce]

Originally Posted by Zepp88

...why they feel the need to ruin it by compressing everything ten fold I'll never know.

So that it sounds the best on the radio. Louder = more exciting to the average listener, who will never listen to the album start to end.

The bad thing is (well, the next bad thing) that radio stations add their own compression so that everything is the same volume song to song to song (in order to deal with variance across albums (ironically).

[jacksonplayer]

Originally Posted by ChaNce

The bad thing is (well, the next bad thing) that radio stations add their own compression so that everything is the same volume song to song to song (in order to deal with variance across albums (ironically).

That's one sad thing about this. Metallica doesn't need to yell louder to get attention. The entire world of heavy music listeners knows about them and will give any song of theirs full attention when it comes on the radio.

Double the amount of compression is simply going to make it sound worse on the radio.

I'd like to think that the amount of negative attention this is getting will change industry practices, but that's probably optimistic.

[All_¥our_Bass]

Ugh... I hate, HATE this!!
I'd rather have something sound good and be mixed well while being slightly quieter.
In fact dynamics used to be a big part of music. The Rite Of Spring goes from ppp(play very very quiet) to fff(play as loud as possible). I don't expect most metal to do this, but dynamics make a track breathe. I can hardly listen to Slayer's 'Christ Illusion' cause it's soo compressed, granted it's not THIS bad but it tires my ears out really fast.

[damigu]

what do you expect when rick rubin is involved?
the guy isn't even qualified to use the light switch in a studio, let alone anything sound related. he should have been a promoter and not a producer (seriously, all of the accomplishments he's hailed for are A&R/promotional things).
if not for him, slayer's guitar tone would probably be good instead of that sloppy midrange crap (i'm a huge fan of slayer's music, but their overall recorded sound is just terrible and ear numbing).

[abyssalservant]

Ohhh . . . ewww . . . I don't even mix fucking NOISE like that.
Eww.
Ewww.
Good-sounding Suffocation (from Despise the Sun) and bad-sounding Suffocation (from the Reincremation demo) below. The bad sound is lack of funding, I know, but look how it shows up without even the loudness wars issue: less dynamics. And when you take the dynamics out of something it makes it sound bad even if you had quality recordings to start with! It makes it sound like that lacking-in-dynamics shitty recording in spirit if not in actual tone.


Edit: I'm doing really well today! I accidentally posted this as AYB (he'd been on SS with this computer last) and then I accidentally doubleposted it when I reposted it! Wow.

[stuh84]

I wish everyone would stop blaming Rubin. Rubin does nothing except sit there and say "make this better" or "change this".

The producers role is to make music more commercially viable, or filter out the crap that bands throw in sometimes for self serving interests. Its the sound/mix engineers who are to blame here.

[Zepp88]

Originally Posted by stuh84

I wish everyone would stop blaming Rubin. Rubin does nothing except sit there and say "make this better" or "change this".

The producers role is to make music more commercially viable, or filter out the crap that bands throw in sometimes for self serving interests. Its the sound/mix engineers who are to blame here.

[damigu]

Originally Posted by stuh84

I wish everyone would stop blaming Rubin. Rubin does nothing except sit there and say "make this better" or "change this".

The producers role is to make music more commercially viable, or filter out the crap that bands throw in sometimes for self serving interests. Its the sound/mix engineers who are to blame here.

oh, there's no doubt that other people (the mix as well as mastering engineers) are also responsible for this travesty.

but i get the impression that rick rubin must be a hands-on producer, because i can't explain why SO MUCH with his name on it sounds badly recorded. it's an awfully huge coincidence if it's not directly attributable to him.

[Zepp88]

Rick Rubin is actually notoriously hands off, it's probably the people he surrounds himself with. I do think that he should have stepped in and said "Yo, wtf you guys doin?"

[forelander]

I just looked at a bunch of songs from many bands and many years in Adobe, they pretty much all looked like that.

[stuh84]

Originally Posted by damigu

oh, there's no doubt that other people (the mix as well as mastering engineers) are also responsible for this travesty.

but i get the impression that rick rubin must be a hands-on producer, because i can't explain why SO MUCH with his name on it sounds badly recorded. it's an awfully huge coincidence if it's not directly attributable to him.

BLABBERMOUTH.NET - KIRK HAMMETT: The Great Thing About Working With Producer RICK RUBIN Is He's Never Around

Also, as mentioned in this thread, it was already brickwalled before it reached the mastering engineers, so they can't be blamed in this case either.

Someone obviously just went MOAR when it came to adding a limiter to every single track by the sounds of it.

[abyssalservant]

Remembering James' glee in his triple-tracked guitars on Metallica, I can't IMAGINE who I might point at . . .
*ahem*
And I've been looking at all sorts of stuff for the waveforms since I first looked at the thread and NOTHING that sounds good looks like that. This is not a difficult concept.

[damigu]

Originally Posted by Zepp88

Rick Rubin is actually notoriously hands off, it's probably the people he surrounds himself with. I do think that he should have stepped in and said "Yo, wtf you guys doin?"

well, then i still blame him for the terrible (and for slayer's terrible guitar tone).

maybe if he'd show up then he could say "it sounds like ass! fix it!"

as i said, he should have been an A&R guy or promoter. that's what he does best.

[Harry]

On some other forums I go on, some dude mentioned he encoded his copy of Death Magnetic to 192kbps mp3, and he said that even at moderate volumes it was clipping to the point where he couldn't bear to listen to it.

[Uber Mega]

Originally Posted by HughesJB4

On some other forums I go on, some dude mentioned he encoded his copy of Death Magnetic to 192kbps mp3, and he said that even at moderate volumes it was clipping to the point where he couldn't bear to listen to it.

Yeah, it doesn't really mater about the volume level, even at a barely audible volume level you'll hear it because the clipping is actually present in the stereo mastered file. It's beyond belief really.