Understanding the mastering wars..........

From what I can gather the mastering process has taken a turn for the worse............ actually......I dunno if I can call it a "mastering" at all.

In the final stages of making a recording (i.e. LP, Cassette, CD ET AL.....) generally the artist(s) will sit down w/ the producer(s) & go over all the different mixes of the songs & first decide which ones they like best. Then they choose how to mix the song....... "Do I want the guitar the most prominent in the mix or do I want the vocals?"........ "Put more echo on the bass." ............. "MORE COWBELL!!!" Stuff like that. They then mix the track to their preference. Now comes the final step. Mastering. Mastering the mix means you've taken all the elements & put them together to make a song. Your vocal track along w/ your bass track along w/ your kazoo track.......... you get the idea. Now here comes the final bit that I don't understand. It sounds like the producer is taking the final track & boosting the lows of the song & in the process burying the highs........... here.........watch this............



It sounds like that they are taking the track & applying a sort of normalization process. But instead of making a track sound even keeled this process is jacking up the volume on the track & in the process losing the low end feel.......... sort of like a loud MP3. the only difference is an MP3 cuts the unused information off the left & right sides of the track (unfortunately killing off the "feel" of the track) this new method of mastering a track is squashing away the top end of a track.

Thankfully this only seems to apply to CD's that have come out in the past couple of years. I've heard complaints of the latest Eagles CD suffering from this. Also heard complaints of the last batch of Iron Maiden re-issues being re-issued like this. (Which means this also extends to remasters as well.........more on that in a bit.) The worst case right now seems to be the latest CD by Metallica. Death Magnetic. When it first came out there were tons of returns by fans who thought their CD's were somehow defective. They were not. This is actually how thew band wanted to put out their music. See, before their CD came out they released a version of the mix offer to the lovely folks who put together the audio for Guitar Hero. This mix of the CD sounds great! So great in fact there are people out there capturing the audio from the game & mixing their own versions of the CD & posting them to Bit Torrent sites.

Demonoid

Pirate's Bay

You've got tons of people offering their version of the mix. There's the Moderus Remaster (2 different versions by this person), DeathMagnetic, DECEiFER, There's the Covax version, the Original Bamboozy version, Darksound.............. the list goes on & on for a total of 46 separate torrents............ & Pirate's Bay was worse........... it showed 8 pages of the stuff!!!!!!!!!!! & this is just one side of the coin......... some even got so pissed they started a online petition about it.

Here's the info on the petition.

& here's the petition itself.

Now.......... after all that here is an audio comparison of the audio CD & the Guitar Here rip.



If you watch the waveforms in the examples you can see there is a huge difference in them. The CD waveform is flat. (No hills & valleys. No peaks. No ebb & flow.) The Guitar Hero version has ups & downs thus allowing the music to have subtle nuances that the CD version can not. There's (once again) to me more feeling in the G.H. version for that single reason. NOT EVERYTHING IS BLASTED IN MY FACE. I can control the volume at which I want to hear the music at. Which is preferably a volume at which I can hear everything........ not just the blaring loud but the soft as well. Imaging hearing Ouverture Solennelle, L'Année 1812, Op. 49 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. You would blow your speakers every time a cannon went off! & folks....there are 16 cannon shots written into this piece.

Now back to Iron Maiden. It seems that the Reissue department of CD's are suffering from the same effect. Claiming on the package that they have gone back to the original masters, cleaned them up & now here they are in all their glory when this statement fails to be true on so many levels. Remastering a reissue is very tricky. Paul McCartney & Wings Band On The Run failed. George Harrison's All Things Must Pass is a mess. Pink Floyd's remaster of the Mono mix of Piper's At The Gates Of Dawn sounds wonderful! But they remixed the CD for Mono. It in essence is a new Mono mix. Not the original Mono mix. (They cheated as you'll read below. They made a digital master of a new mono mix thus eliminating the analogue to digital realm on a master level altogether.) It is hard to get right. The Hawkwind reissues from 8 years ago got it right! 25 years has parts of the song brought out in such a clarity that now I can hear that it's a voice in the background not guitar manipulation as once suspected. Now the process in which most CD plants fail. You are talking about making a new analogue master. Not a new digital master. From the dawn of studio recording to the mid nineties the recording method of choice was tape. TAPE, TAPE, TAPE!!!! Tape is an analogue source. No "0's" & "1's" but a waveform. The proper way would be to make a new analogue to digital mix from the tapes & master that. It seems that when they say they went back to the original tapes they are referring to the first analogue mix. Not the original tapes. The original tapes would be the mulit-tracks. Pre-mixed tapes............. bass on one track. Guitar on another........... they would need to go back to those & re-mix it for the CD realm. Instead they are taking a mix designed to sound optimal on analogue equipment & adding emphasis on the entire disc to "clean" it up & there you go folks. In my opinion they even may be taking the above mastering process & just applying that theory across the board to encompass ALL releases..........old or new. If this is the case they are in for a big surprise.

There is a growing desire out there for some of the original mixes on the first wave of CD's. Led Zeppelin on the Warner Bros./ Swan Song target CD. Sony plain silver tops w/ the "One Eye". Black Triangle Japanese issue Pink Floyd. These prime examples are being posted & downloaded at a high rate due to one huge factor. They were transferred at a flat setting. No high, no low, no emphasis, no normalization. Just Equalizer set to "0" across the board. Meaning you, the purchaser could take said disc home........ put it on........& judge for yourself how you want to hear the song. Just by playing w/ your equalizer settings you could make it bass heavy........... or make it as trebly as a pre-pubescent boy's voice.

Even The Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab mixes are making a comeback. While these have never really sounded all that great to me there is a resurgence in popularity on these titles for the same reason as above. The master tapes were cleaned up & a flat transfer was made. The only difference between these & the first generation CD is once the initial transfer was made another transfer was made from that transfer. One utilizing deepend bass & cleaner highs. Not to the extent that CD's are issued in now............. we'll call M.F.S.L. discs the middle of the road if you will.............

In the long run the majors need to clean up their act............. loud is not better. What would be better is to be given a choice on how I want to hear the music I purchase. Not the way the producer(s) do(es).