Help me out here, Nancy Matter..you're the digital one..I know the digital you do isn't lacking..I just recorded the Lion King soundtrack for my daughter..and that is splendid. For those that don't know..Nancy had a hand in the digital mastering of that soundtrack. Is it the way digital is mass produced that wanks me out? Or is there an actual loss of depth (lack of a better term)?
It's these idiot mastering engineers (obviously not all of them, but many) that compress the living hell out of music when they master it for cd. Steve Hoffman, one of the worlds most respected mastering engineers, has been preaching this for years but it's an extreme uphill battle with the music companies. It's being called the
Loudness War because eveyone wants their cd to sound louder than the next guys and to make it sound louder they just compress the hell out of the music so there's no longer any dynamic range (difference between loud and soft parts). That's just the problem with today's releases.
Watch this video:
YouTube - The Loudness War
That vid explains the situation perfectly and in a way that anyone can understand. If you think that video is an exaggeration I can assure you it's not.
Many of the early cd releases had problems because the tape vaults were a mess and nobody knew where the original master tape was at. A couple months ago I had the pleasure of listening to Steve Hoffman speak and he told several stories about working with artists such as Ray Charles and many others and the problems he's had over the years with getting the correct master tapes for his projects. In almost every case he said that the true master tape was the one labeled "Do Not Use", so nobody used it. What they were using instead were safety dupes, eq'd copies, LP cutting masters tapes(with cutting curve EQ applied) or who knows what. Take a printed page and run it through a copier. Then take that copy and copy it. Then copy that copy. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. You have more and more loss from every copy generation and it's no wonder so many of these remaster cd's sound like ass.
Steve told about the problems with trying to track down the master tape for Jethro Tull's Aqualung. That's probably one of the most well-known albums of all time yet when Steve went to remaster it for the company he was working for at the time, DCC, nobody could find the tape. Turns out the master tape was sitting in Ian Anderson's
garage the entire time. Steve said it was almost 7 years from the time he started the project until the proper tape showed up at his studio. And then when it did show up it had a nice section right in the middle of Aqualung with severe tape stretch because somebody screwed up and hit the wrong button on the tape machine when they were rewinding it. I won't let out his secret as to how he worked around that problem, but it was brilliant.
Almost everyone else wouldn't have cared and just used whatever tape they could find.
Now you take many of these remastered cd's and the problems can be even worse. Not only do many of them have the same kind of idiotic compression they also might not even be using the correct master tape to begin with so you end up with a double-wammy, terrible compression and the wrong master tape(s).
And then there's other situations where the original master tape just vanished like in the case of Whos' Next by The Who. The tape just disappeared and the only thing left is safety copies. The best sounding version of this available on cd is the
Canadian MCA release which uses Steve Hoffman's mastering and was the last mastering to use the correct tape before it disappeared. I have the Mobile Fidelity 24k gold remaster, the MCA 24k gold remaster, the original US release and Steve's Canadian version of Who's Next and there's no comparison, Steve's mastering wins hands down!
I've done plenty of comparisons with my own system and in the program Gold Wave of some of my old cd's and the 'remaster' versions and most of the time it isn't pretty. Most of the time the originals sound better because they haven't been molested with unnecessary compression and EQ.
Here's a few good articles to read if you're interested:
Over The Limit
By Rip Rowan
Rip Rowan: Over the Limit
The best quote from his article:
WHY IS THE LOUDER IS BETTER APPROACH THE WRONG APPROACH? BECAUSE WHEN ALL OF THE SIGNAL IS AT THE MAXIMUM LEVEL, THEN THERE IS NO WAY FOR THE SIGNAL TO HAVE ANY PUNCH. THE WHOLE THING COMES SCREAMING AT YOU LIKE A MESSAGE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. AS WE ALL KNOW, WHEN YOU TYPE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS THERE ARE NO CUES TO HELP THE BRAIN MAKE SENSE OF THE SIGNAL, AND THE MIND TIRES QUICKLY OF TRYING TO PROCESS WHAT IS, BASICALLY, WHITE NOISE. LIKEWISE, A SIGNAL THAT JUST PEGS THE METERS CAUSES THE BRAIN TO REACT AS THOUGH IT IS BEING FED WHITE NOISE. WE SIMPLY FILTER IT OUT AND QUIT TRYING TO PROCESS IT.
A Recording Engineer's Plea for Dynamic Range
Whatever Happened to Dynamic Range on Compact Discs?
By George Graham
A Recording Engineer's Plea for Dynamic Range
Declaring an end to the loudness wars
by Barry Diament
Declaring an end to the loudness wars
