Disillusioned -- piss-poor masters

Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2006 10:09 am

Okay, so I haven't really bought too many commercially released pop/rock CDs lately, much less listened to them in a real environment other than my car.

So, in an attempt to familiarize myself with a few of the newer artists or some returning favorites, I bought the two following discs this past weekend:

Keane - Hopes and Dreams
Liz Phair - Somebody's Miracle

It turns out that both of these discs were mastered by the same ME at Sterling.

I HATE them both.

Don't get me wrong. I think the artists did a fine job as did the engineers, but the mastering makes me want to shove an ice pick through my ear drums!!!

I always set my system to monitor at K-14 (unless I'm doing classical, then I'll occassionally do K-20 (unless it's like Mahler or Bruckner - then ouch!)) So, at K-14, the amplitude is sheer painful. EVERYTHING was at Full Scale ALL THE TIME on both albums (well, not all the time, but I would say a good 70% or more of both albums!!!)

Get this, RMS levels are consistently at -9 to -10 dBFS and occassionally, for 10-20 second passages reach as high as -6 to -7 dBFS.

While I really was hoping to enjoy these discs, I found that I couldn't listen for even a moderate amount of time before my ears got seriously fatigued. I had heard them on the radio (albeit XM, which if I'm not mistaken doesn't limit NEAR as hard as many other radio stations) and thought that the uber-compressed dynamic range was courtesy of Mr. Orban, but it turns out they don't even have to use the Orban.

Is this really the new trend? This is sickening and disgusting!

Furthermore, do you think the studio reps or the artists went to Sterling and said "Crank my sh*t so loud that your ears bleed and so that you need to replace the rubber surrounds on your monitors when I'm done!" or do you think the guys at Sterling (who, let's face it, do a huge chunk of today's pop/rock music) are just in the business of smashing the SH*T out of tunes?

AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

j

Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2006 11:53 am

cucco wrote:

Quote:

Furthermore, do you think the studio reps or the artists went to Sterling and said "Crank my sh*t so loud that your ears bleed and so that you need to replace the rubber surrounds on your monitors when I'm done!" or do you think the guys at Sterling (who, let's face it, do a huge chunk of today's pop/rock music) are just in the business of smashing the SH*T out of tunes?

AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

j

i don not know any of the albums you mentioned, but my experience is similar*...

SADLY i know many, many artists and managers who ask just for sheer overkill volume, and it's sometimes the hardest work to make 'em realise that this is not at all what it is about!

axel

*i am not a pro ME!!!, but many clients ask me after the production to recommend them ME's who gurantee to acomplish to push the hell out of my work, and i have to jump in to make 'em realise that they with this request are on the highway of destruction of all of my work and efforts...

cheers

Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2006 12:05 pm

Being more of a lurker and not much of a poster, i feel i should chime in with a very similar experience.

I've recently put together a new home/project studio and have had my control room properly treated and tuned through much trial and error. I'm using Mackie HR824's as my main monitors (not the best but not bad either... Will be upgrading as money permits)

I decided to go through some listening sessions of some of my favorite albums, and try and get a feel for my new room. i'm very pleased with how my mixes are translating and must say that for a home studio, I'm pretty damned accurate.

I never realised how bad things had gotten until; last week.

I popped in Def Leppard's Hysteria album and was absolutely loving how silky the high end is. The low end was warm and fat, without being muddy and I'd never realized just how great it actually sounds.

Next, without much thought, I popped in Matchbox Twenty's latest album.

Before turning up the speakers, i made sure to set the input of the cd player so that it matched the output of the Def Leppard album.

My jaw dropped.

It sounded god awful. Honky, squashed and thin. Since then, i'm making a concious effort to maintain as much dynamics and tone in my mixes as possible.

i really wish we could all go back to making great sounding albums, instead of loud sounding albums. And, I'm only 27yrs old..... i've had the misfortune of going through my developmental stages as the loudness wars began.

to the older guys who remeber what good sound really was, i can't imagine what some of you think about all this.

There's certainly a disservice being done to the artist's music, these days.

Moderator Joined: Sep 12, 2002 Posts: 1880 Location: NYC

to be fair, you are comparing one of the best over produced albums of our time to one of the mediocre albums of our time. There are plenty of older records that were very popular that sound terrible. Maybe terrible for different reasons but still terrible.

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2006 12:20 am

I gotta admit, I love the way Hysteria sounds, too. Wink

BUT, I was listening to some Hendrix earlier, thinking, "Man, who gives a crap about 'sound quality', this is where it's at!"

(doesn't stop me from loving Hysteria, still... you know, it was one of those "hell ya" moments that you still don't entirely buy into, but you WANT to. Wink

)

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2006 5:11 am

Personally, I think 'Hopes and Fears' by Keane is a well mixed and mastered piece of work, and between them Mark Stent (mixing) and Ted Jensen (mastering) have preserved more of the music than others do at lower levels.

Certainly it's loud, but then it has the space to be so and there's surprisingly little sense of major compromise going on, surely part of the art. Anastacia's 'Not That Kind' track has similar loudness, also has a spacious mix, sounds great and was mastered a few years ago by Bob Ludwig, not an obvious member of the mastering Mafia.

Did the Keane album need to be that loud? Maybe not, but as it stands it's one of the better examples of 'loud and clear' around, one of very few loud albums that holds up to any extent on my monitoring - I use tracks 1 and 5 as a reference among twenty or so others in my Masterlink when mastering, but then I also have 'Isa Lei' from Ry Cooder's 'Meeting By The River' album, a gentle acoustic piece where four musicians have been recorded by a single stereo mic to 1" tape, and the loudest peaks go to about -8 dBFS.

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2006 10:45 am

Michael Fossenkemper wrote:

to be fair, you are comparing one of the best over produced albums of our time to one of the mediocre albums of our time. There are plenty of older records that were very popular that sound terrible. Maybe terrible for different reasons but still terrible.

Of course it's not a good/accurate comparison, production-wise (or from a scientific standpoint) but it was a jaw dropping experience.

But it isn't just in the production. you CAN hear how smashed the newer cd is. Hysteria just breathes and sparkles.

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2006 11:02 am

lowland wrote:

Personally, I think 'Hopes and Fears' by Keane is a well mixed and mastered piece of work, and between them Mark Stent (mixing) and Ted Jensen (mastering) have preserved more of the music than others do at lower levels.

Certainly it's loud, but then it has the space to be so and there's surprisingly little sense of major compromise going on, surely part of the art. Anastacia's 'Not That Kind' track has similar loudness, also has a spacious mix, sounds great and was mastered a few years ago by Bob Ludwig, not an obvious member of the mastering Mafia.

Did the Keane album need to be that loud? Maybe not, but as it stands it's one of the better examples of 'loud and clear' around, one of very few loud albums that holds up to any extent on my monitoring - I use tracks 1 and 5 as a reference among twenty or so others in my Masterlink when mastering, but then I also have 'Isa Lei' from Ry Cooder's 'Meeting By The River' album, a gentle acoustic piece where four musicians have been recorded by a single stereo mic to 1" tape, and the loudest peaks go to about -8 dBFS.

I respectfully disagree.

I think, subjectively, that when the peaks come in at -8 to -7 dBFS on this album, the mix collapses like crazy.

I'll agree that, on the whole the album has some very good, open sounding moments, but you must search for them. Simply as an example, the end of the first track (Somewhere only we know) reaches these ear splitting levels and instead of dynamic impact of increased amplitude or even subjective volume due to the increase of intensity and quantity of instruments, you instead hear a mush of cymbals, distressed vocals and a homogenous soup of noise. Yet, strangely, it doesn't sound any louder, simply more confused and painful.

Of course, all of this is subjective, but I find the album difficult to listen to after no more than 3 tracks. That to me is a pity.

J.

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2006 12:43 pm

TheBadAssCanadian wrote:

Quote:

But it isn't just in the production. you CAN hear how smashed the newer cd is. Hysteria just breathes and sparkles.

once agin i personally don't know the album you refer to, but i agree on the smashed up sound in general in lots of newer productions also discribed from cucco...

the problem i see, and i CLEARLY DON"T MEAN THAT ANY OF THE RO MEMBER MEs ARE LIKE THAT!!! because i have never worked or conciously heard any of your work, but from what i read here you are not that way...
however back to the problem, that is that a lot of modern productions "lost" the attention and mostly the UNDERSTANDING of good mastering, so they go to some el cheapos with a fat compressor / limiter setup to just squash the hell out of it, it's a shame! but happens far to much in reality, i guess that the whole developement of electronic music plays a big role in it, what i mean is that modern synths / drum mashines and production methods of electronica do produce by nature a higher allover volume level... electronic music in our days is big and mainstream and has influenced a lot of music in general, so there is a new "milestone" (in volume) and it's harder and costs more effort to achieve the same with oldskool mic / band recordings... whilst remaining the quality, but i don't think that it has to be like that, why the hell on earth should a band recording be equal in volume to techno anyway??? that's why i have the volume knob on my personel stereo for, when i want it just loud...

i blame the artist / mangement who is not willing to spend the dough on a decent ME anymore!

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2006 1:30 pm

axel wrote:

TheBadAssCanadian wrote:

Quote:

But it isn't just in the production. you CAN hear how smashed the newer cd is. Hysteria just breathes and sparkles.

once agin i personally don't know the album you refer to, but i agree on the smashed up sound in general in lots of newer productions also discribed from cucco...

the problem i see, and i CLEARLY DON"T MEAN THAT ANY OF THE RO MEMBER MEs ARE LIKE THAT!!! because i have never worked or conciously heard any of your work, but from what i read here you are not that way...
however back to the problem, that is that a lot of modern productions "lost" the attention and mostly the UNDERSTANDING of good mastering, so they go to some el cheapos with a fat compressor / limiter setup to just squash the hell out of it, it's a shame! but happens far to much in reality, i guess that the whole developement of electronic music plays a big role in it, what i mean is that modern synths / drum mashines and production methods of electronica do produce by nature a higher allover volume level... electronic music in our days is big and mainstream and has influenced a lot of music in general, so there is a new "milestone" (in volume) and it's harder and costs more effort to achieve the same with oldskool mic / band recordings... whilst remaining the quality, but i don't think that it has to be like that, why the hell on earth should a band recording be equal in volume to techno anyway??? that's why i have the volume knob on my personel stereo for, when i want it just loud...

i blame the artist / mangement who is not willing to spend the dough on a decent ME anymore!

Well, on many projects, I'll agree. Often, people go with an ME as an afterthought and they don't understand what is required. But, in this case, Sterling Sound ain't cheap. They're supposed to be good.

j.

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2006 1:44 pm

Same experience here. I bought the Evanescence album recently and ran it through my Wharfedales... Not THE most revealing monitors out there, but I had to skip ahead track by track because I couldn't find a song I could listen to all the way through. A couple were easier on the ears, but even those had parts that got so harsh that I had to skip ahead. Ended up sticking to my Labtec computer speakers and could at least listen to the album.

Like the original poster, I figured they were just squashed on the radio because that's what happens on the radio, but when I opened them up to take a peek at the waveform, I saw a perfectly filled in rectangle, as if an obsessive child had colored in my screen. The perp? Ted Jensen, Sterling Sound.

I remember seeing a table in Katz that showed a Ricky Martin song squashed to -6 db RMS and thought that was just stereotypical pop and not a proper example of modern music. Turns out I hadn't bought an album in 6 or 7 years and just didn't realize how widespread it was. Of the handful of albums I bought last year (spanning rock, rap, classical, trance), the only one I can enjoy musically without also focusing on how bad it is -technically- is Brahms.

I keep thinking there's got to be a backlash at some point, but it looks less and less likely.

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2006 2:48 pm

cucco wrote:

Quote:

Well, on many projects, I'll agree. Often, people go with an ME as an afterthought and they don't understand what is required. But, in this case, Sterling Sound ain't cheap. They're supposed to be good.

yupp you're totally right, from a 'brand' like that you should be able to expect the 'best'.

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2006 4:34 pm

beachhunt wrote:

I remember seeing a table in Katz that showed a Ricky Martin song squashed to -6 db RMS and thought that was just stereotypical pop and not a proper example of modern music. Turns out I hadn't bought an album in 6 or 7 years and just didn't realize how widespread it was. Of the handful of albums I bought last year (spanning rock, rap, classical, trance), the only one I can enjoy musically without also focusing on how bad it is -technically- is Brahms.

I keep thinking there's got to be a backlash at some point, but it looks less and less likely.

I try to do my own mastering unless the client has the big bucks to send it out. Some of the stuff I have sent out is, to be fair, squashed so flat the meters never even flicker when you play it back. It seems everyone wants their record to be louder than everyone else's, or at least as loud!

What is that all about?

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2006 5:30 pm

Jeremy,

I had a Hard Rock band last week for a Mastering job for their 3rd CD. They brought a NickelBack CD as well for reference. First, I have listened to 2 tracks of their ref cd then I started to work on their tracks which were very good sounding, you know when you hear a mix like this that it will be a great session and fun.

At the end of the session we have put the NB cd back again and it sounded like....crap compared to their tracks (anyways, they sounded better that cd before the Mastering them ). They were in shock and at the same time they were so happy and proud that their stuff sounded so much better (again, I have no credit since the mix was already top). They have noticed the volume difference and ask for the same volume as NB cd. I told them the consequences of cranking this up and they did not want at first to proceed for the volume thing. After 15 minutes consulting each other , they said : well, let just crank it up!! I did, they heard and did not like it really much but thats what they wanted.

They knew and heard it sucked after pushing this almost 5 dB RMS but they felt they were in the league. The mix Engineer called me (ask them to ask him to call me) and told him that I have put his work in a junk state and he betternot listen to this .

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2006 9:18 pm

I'm glad to see a healthy discussion going on about mastering & loudness, etc. It's one of my favorite topics to complain about, and some of the most upsetting problems out there, iMHO. We have the best production gear going nowadays, and sadly all too much of it is being used for just loudness. Crappy loudness at that.

There's a GREAT article on this topic, written back in 2002; and it's about the changes in taste & volume in our industry. When not working on my clients projects, I still try to listen to a wide variety of music lot of artists, two of them in question are Sting and Rush. For years I've been hearing Sting's mixes deteriorate due to squashing and overproduction. Same with Rush; I bought their "Vapor Trails" CD and although I liked the music per se, I found I couldn't listen to it at any kind of level without ear fatigue. It's awful, sonically.

Take a read here and find out more. The waveforms don't lie, and neither do your ears:

http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.nsf/files/8A133F52D0FD71AB86256C2E005DAF1C

I'm avoiding the temptation to become overly militant and speaking out about what the term "Mastering" has de-volved in some circles. It's pretty disgusting with some releases. (I've said it before: mastering USED to be the art of fitting a tape recording onto vinyl. It's come a long - and not always better - way since then.)

Jeremy, you can laugh at me all you want, but my eye-pod gadget has allowed me to compare all kinds of my favorite music, from orchestral to folk to pop to prog rock to god knows what else, and it gives you and almost INSTANT ability to time-travel sonically, and hear things done decades ago, and compare them to things done last month. It's pretty startling, actually, no; it's ASTOUNDING. People used to make GREAT music with their hands, from the playing in the first place in front of the mics, to the hands-on engineering, to the lovingly crafted final masters. (NO computers then, and NO ridiculous uber-compressors.)

The good stuff is still VERY VERY good, and the bad stuff is worse than ever. (And doesn't last long on my playlist, either).

Although the rock & pop genres are the worst examples of the loudness wars, they're not the only ones doing it. Perhaps they're the worst offenders, though. Sadly, there are still many people out there who can put up with out of focus movie screens, overly squashed audio, and bad tv content. Still, I think there's hope for good music, and it's still out there, still being made. We just have to look harder to find it, or work harder to create it.

I've heard some good "loud" music, it's out there, and in the right hands, it's still dynamic as hell.

Wouldn't it be AMAZING to hear a record - even a rock record - that went from a true whisper to a roar (and not just STAY at a roar) and REALLY took advantage of 119 db range??? God, that would be awsome.

One can dream......

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