cucco wrote:

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

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.

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.

I gotta admit, I love the way Hysteria sounds, too. ;) 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. ;) )

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.

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.

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.

TheBadAssCanadian wrote:

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!

axel wrote: TheBadAssCanadian wrote:

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.

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.

cucco wrote:

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'.

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?

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 .

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......

Hey fellow audio enthusiast,
I'm curious how you know at what point the music was crushed and destroyed. In my admitidly short 10 years of mastering, I've received many a project that was munched to death before I ever touched it. The good folks at sterling are careful with their work and are responsive to client needs and preferences. Also, many artists are looking for a rawness that requires the abuse of dynamic range and clearity. I have no idea where the CDs you refer to went wrong, but the view is quite different from behind the mastering console.

Today I mastered a project that had a great deal of plugin generated distortion and a load of crush. I fear some will wonder if I know what the heck I'm doing. I also fear this music that took months to record will have the shelf life of a McDonalds Big Mac. On the other hand, there is some serious magic in many CDs that have 12-18 db of good solid dynamic range.

Thanks for reminding us that vigilance is needed at every step in the process.

unless you were listing in a car, or off a computer, or vacuming while listening to music. 119 db range would be a bit dynamic.

unless you were listing in a car, or off a computer, or vacuming while listening to music. 119 db range would be a bit dynamic.

Just a bit of hyperbole to make a point, Mike! ;-)

I realize that realworld dynamics are vastly less than that, but come on....what we've got right now is just "pressed ham under glass" in most rock recordings. And don't get me wrong, I'm not looking for insane specs or things that can't be heard in even the quiestest of real-world listening. (Say, the average living room.)

All I'd like to hear is loud AND soft passages, with rise times for peaks that sound like a real person hitting a cymbal or drum or strumming a guitar. THe same-ness and numbing quality of most of today's recordings - at maximum,constant, endless peak - is just horrible.

I'm fortunate in that most of my clients don't want (or would not accept) this kind of compression and limiting. I urge more people to take some time recording real, acoustic instruments, and get a feel for how natural dynamics and interplay between musicians works. I'm not knocking the electronic portion of this industry, but whenever things get as far out of hand as they are now, sometimes the best thing to do is to step off the merry go round and listen to some timeless music and remember what it is we're all trying to do, regardless of genre.

I'm old enough to remember how things used to sound, and I'm not going to accept some of the overprocessed junk that's being cranked out now.

Not with MY dollars, nossir.

Wow - Lots to reply to here...

RoadWeary -
I understand your desire to keep work in-house for the sake of ensuring a good product and for client affordability, but one of my golden rules as an "All-in-one house" (meaning I do recording, editing, mastering, duplication, packaging, etc...) is - I will NEVER master a project I recorded. Edited? Sure. Engineered/Recorded? Nope. There's just too much room for error there. My recommendation is to find a good ME who is affordable that will work in a manner similar to what you are looking for. They do exist (I know, I try to be one of those guys...)

Joe -
I won't laugh at you too much. Much as it is with anything, those who mock others for their belongings or their personal traits are usually covering up issues of their own. My issue - I lust for an IPod. I know I shouldn't but I do.

As for the dynamics, I get the hyperbole - and I agree. I do enjoy a dynamic mix. Of course, when referring to dynamics, there is so much more than macro and micro dynamics. On the whole, for an orchestral work, I judge the dynamic range on many factors. The two most prominent are RMS level and more importantly, the level at which I can subjectively hear the softest passage without it being absorbed into the noise floor.

As such, I have had a couple good classical recordings which, by my subject rating described above, reach an impressive 92 dB of dynamic range (just a tad shy of the CD's limitations). The quiet part happened to be the natural reverb tails which faded to black (not digital black, just ambient noise) which I could easily determine occured at the -92dBFS point. Boy was I happy.

As for rock or pop mixes, I don't need such dramatic range (BTW - on the whole, the RMS for the above mix - measured using WL 4's tools, was -19 dBFS and was a recording of Tchaikovsky's Symphony #4 as performed by the Richmond Philharmonic - radio broadcast on WCVU/NPR on Thanksgiving 05.) However, for rock or pop, I expect to hear the subtle dynamics (microdynamics) such as "pick-ups" into phrases and such. Most pop/rock music simply doesn't possess this.

Speaking of Sting - check out any of the Police's albums. Friggin awesome. Dynamic range, natural sound and heaven forbid - EXPRESSION and PHRASING.

Check out some of Queen's stuff - also amazingly expressive.

I just did another session last night where, a girl needed to submit a vocal track for a competition. She decided she wanted to overlay her voice on a track by Fantasia (of American Idol fame...). Well, she didn't have the karaoke version, so I M/S encoded it and filtered the voice. Moral of the story, the song was smashed. Flat out awful smashed! There were average RMS levels higher than -10dBFS. And here's the awful thing - the whole thing peaked at -1dBFS. There was no content above the -1dB point!!! Just think, that whole space could have been used to add dynamic content - it just wasn't touched.

Barry - I think Richard's example is a key answer to your question - where does it all go wrong?

In many cases, good mixes are served up as lambs to the slaughter. I don't think it IS the ME in many cases, but in some, I have to wonder. Often, it's the client or the label that is responsible for saying "Make it louder!!!" Rarely would it be the ME. I shudder to think that a good ME is sitting there in his room listening to a mix and saying..."Hmmm, I think this mix sounds great, how's about I smash the shit out of it and then it will sound better....."

Here's my experience, both personal and from sitting in on a few others' sessions.

ME's don't need meters. They are there to make sure they don't overshoot, but that's really about it. Of course, they're good at the end as kind of a sanity check. (I mean, if you master a track that you think sounds glorious, but then see an RMS of -4dBFS, then you might want to retire... :lol: )

ME's use their ears first. They mix at a constant level and if it sounds good, it sounds good. Only ME's that WANT to smash a mix stare at the meters whilst mastering.

If you're finding your mixes are happening like this, find a different ME.

Just some more thoughts...

J.

cucco wrote:

If you're finding your mixes are happening like this, find a different ME.

yes, yes, yes and again YES.

barry4audio wrote:

I've received many a project that was munched to death before I ever touched it.

refuse it! if your work really means something to you, or you are just pussy hunting for dollars.

simply because you can't do any magic on a source which is already fucked up by a bad producer / engineer. sent it back!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

that's pretty funny. Send it back. What if that's they way they want it, but just louder.

I find that when something is smashed to hell, that's the way they want it. What I will do is ask them if there is a way to get it without all that stuff on there so I can smash it to hell. Why should they have all of the fun.

For every smashed to hell record I do, there are 3 or 4 that aren't. So I know there are records out there with a decent amount of dynamic range.

Michael Fossenkemper wrote: that's pretty funny. Send it back. What if that's they way they want it, but just louder.

I agree!

I had a friend whose father was, literally, a billionaire. He built a million dollar Westlake design studio, filled it with fabulous gear and went out of business after about 5 years.....

He's the kind of guy who would just "send it back".....

Aah, to be rich so you can turn down the bread and butter gigs and just gorge yourself on dessert all the time!

:shock:

dollars.

sorry to be sooo... shocked, but i am truly shocked, michael...

is it not the job of a good ME to make things sounding good / better, to create the icing on the cake, so to speak on an already good recording / production??? to get the absolut uncompromising best out of a recording???

just louder, that is something that any half decent producer or bad to middle class ME can achieve easy... about what level (quality) of mastering do we speak here...??? or excuse me, my mothertounge is not english do i missunderstand here something essentially??? please help me out i am still shocked.

and if something (a real bad recording) is already destroyed (squashed to hell!), before the mastering process, ok maybee i have not made myself clear enough... but i mean destroyed!!
what can a good, really good ME do??? magic???
actually i know that a really good one actually can do magic to tracks, but from an already destroyed source???

WE do mastering for everything from Bach to Rock. A lot of my classical clients are now wanting their material to sound "louder" or more "commercial" the same with jazz and acoustical clients.

One of my really good acoustical clients told me that he wants his stuff to get noticed on the radio and "the only way I know to do so is to turn up the volume" I told him that there are other ways to do what he wants but the main thing is to have good songs, well recorded and played and to have them mastered by someone who know what he or she is doing. He is still not convinced.

Most people today do not, for some unknown reason, want to touch their volume controls on their car stereos or IPODs and I really don't understand that reasoning. Is it because we have things like remote controls for our TVs and VCRs that we have gotten so lazy that everything must be set to a certain level and never changed? Does everything have to fit into some narrow band of acceptable loudness and if it does not it will be "taken off the playlist"? I know most people don't listen to music in their living rooms as they did in the past. They tend to listen to it in their cars or on their personal listening devices (IPODs) and they are listening to the music in places where it must compete against the sound of traffic and the sounds of everyday life so they want it to be pre digested and leveled and ready for their listening pleasure so they don't have to do any work to "enjoy" it.

One thing that is amazing about classical music is the dynamic range from PPP to FFF and it is what makes the music exciting. Much of what I hear on the radio today is so totally squashed that there are NO dynamics at all and after a while is sounds like back ground noise and not music at all. Maybe that is what people are looking for. The "white noise masking" that was so popular in offices a few years back. Something to create a noise source to shut out the rest of the world.

If you listen to music that was recorded back in the 50s 60s and 70s it was well done, well recorded, and was very listenable. Much of today's music is sloppily done, is badly recorded and mixed and sounds like it was a 10 pound bag of (insert your favorite swear word) crammed into a 5 pound bag.

Maybe things will change but I somehow am growing more and more convinced that it will not given the increased popularity of the IPOD and MP3s. To my ear MP3 can be likened to looking at a Xerox copy of a famous masterpiece of art instead of the art itself. Yes it is still a repoduction of the art but not all of it makes it through the copy process.

FWIW and MTCW

axel wrote: sorry to be sooo... shocked, but i am truly shocked, michael...

is it not the job of a good ME to make things sounding good / better, to create the icing on the cake, so to speak on an already good recording / production??? to get the absolut uncompromising best out of a recording???

just louder, that is something that any half decent producer or bad to middle class ME can achieve easy... about what level (quality) of mastering do we speak here...??? or excuse me, my mothertounge is not english do i missunderstand here something essentially??? please help me out i am still shocked.

and if something (a real bad recording) is already destroyed (squashed to hell!), before the mastering process, ok maybee i have not made myself clear enough... but i mean destroyed!!
what can a good, really good ME do??? magic???
actually i know that a really good one actually can do magic to tracks, but from an already destroyed source???

It was a little tongue and cheek humor.

hi tom, i totally agree with you.

that's why i wonder, cause i think that we the people who are involved in the process of making the music have a (the) power to do better, even if this involves in the worst or for that matter hardest case to reject something... (really bad!)
maybee i am an idealist (my girlfriend always says so :D, but i still make my living from it) but fact is that if we all just always do what is expected from some morons (excuse!) then we ending up, making it even worse than it already is... i could listen to radio, pretty much any station, about 15-20 years back (yes i am that old.) but today switching on the radio with some real rare exceptions... makes me puke, really puke.

and that includes the bad production and for that matter mastering as well... or actually to a great extend, thinking of all that super bad / cheap produced so called "urban" stuff. (and yes i know that the 'radio sound' is always squashed... due to all to often the abuse of limiters...)

i love to take my time actually really listening to something demanding... at home on my stereo... with 'new' music this is hardly possible anymore to make it an enjoyable experience... (exceptions apply here, but sadly it's only exceptions)

just my state of mind.

oh, that make me thinking of my old tchaikowsky 1812 vinyl recording from lowest whisper, so that the crackles of the record are actually louder, to the fear that my cones will pop out! and that on a medium, which has technically a lower dynamic range then a CD...

and there all sorts of progressive music from the 60s 70s too which has the same impact, too.

and i hate saying that because i am not into... oh, in the old days everything has been so much better.... i am pretty much since the beginning of the ninetees into all sorts of electronic underground stuff, but sadly when it comes to the major amount of todays sound, it's that why, or at least i feel that way... reason, there is by far to much money involved in our days, and there are to many people doing it for the wrong reason!!!

JMSOM

One of my really good acoustical clients told me that he wants his stuff to get noticed on the radio and "the only way I know to do so is to turn up the volume"

That is such a backwards view that people have. Their stuff will end up just as loud as the other stuff on the radio. It is the overall quality of the performance that will make them stick out on the radio. I also wonder how many people who complain about all the smashed music are really only listening to them on the radio, where they of course are rediculously pumped and smashed....

And I seriously doubt the mastering engineers are to blame. They provide a service to the client, and if the clients are please then they have a business. If they are just mastering to please themselves then they better have a day job to feed their mastering hobby. At least until the mooks stop telling the mastering engineers what they want to hear and just let them do their thing. If the mooks knock it off, then the indies will find it uncool to still do the "smashed mix" thing, and then people can go back to making things sound good. Can you imagine: "Man you used an L2 on that? Dood, that is SO 2002. I want my s*#% to sound good and dynamic, like this latest (fictitious future band name) CD-HD."

hi michael, just saw your post after pressing send my last post.

i did not meant to be cheek in tounge...

that's just honestly how i feel about it!, see above what i wrote...

reggie wrote:

And I seriously doubt the mastering engineers are to blame.

you are right, certainly not. (at least the majority)

i think it's the artist and the management, who demands... well, just loud.
for the sake of it. or to mask what is missing, as you stated a good song or track does stand out because of it's musical content not because of the loudness.

but that is just what i think, what do i actually know???

Wow, this topic keeps growing... :D

The funny thing is, it seems as though all the ME's agree that it's getting too loud, but we are obviously the ones in the position to do something about it. However, we can't. If we send it back or say "No" to the request of turning it up louder, they'll simply find someone who will.

None of us here are in the business of losing money or clients.

I'm just gonna stop saving up my hard earned money to buy that really nice sounding gear (Weiss EQs, Millennia Comps, and so on) and buy the Behringer AutoComp. It will smash the HELL out of everything for me just fine. And hey, instead of dropping $8900, I can spend $89!!!! What a friggin bargain.

Tom - I know exactly where you're coming from. I have some classical clients that say they want it louder too!!! :-?

One of the clients said "What about that loud sound Telarc gets? It's got to be compressed and processed!"

I took out one of Telarc's "Loudest" discs - The Film Music of Jerry Goldsmith and dropped it into Sequoia. I turned off the monitor (PC monitor that is) and turned up the volume to my reference level and let the dude listen. His response was "YEAH!!! That's the sound I want!!!"

Then I showed him the waveform and he saw just how *NOT* loud it really was. In reality, it was a great performance with a well-balanced orchestra. This in turn makes it sound louder. The sad reality this guy had to face is that, his mediocre community orchestra was not up to that task.

We ended up compromising and I did process it a little, but my solution, instead of compressing it was to externally sum it and feed it through my Summit line amps in the 2BA-221. They are naturally a little slower and a tad compressed to begin with. It ended up with a thicker, slightly more compressed sound.

He wound up happy.

Oh well, on to my next task.

I just picked up a cherry contract!! I've been trying to land this group for a long time. It's a choral ensemble who gives excellent live performances with full orchestra. They've had the local "ProTools" Rock studio doing their recordings for the past few years and they simply suck!

So, first phase of the job - remaster all of the pre-existing recordings to a higher quality to be used for a compilation disc. (This is going to be a mighty challenge as many of the recordings peak at -16dBFS (not RMS - peak) and the noise on the recordings is unbearable. (It appears that they used a poorly calibrated analog tape deck - there is massive hiss)

In one case, there is far more reflected sound than direct, which will be a completely different challenge.

The second phase is a live recording and the third phase is a produced recording (8 hour session, multiple takes, fully mastered).

I think I'll be spending the next day or two solid on the mastering. I'll check back into RO on breaks or when my ears are tired.

J.

cucco wrote:

The funny thing is, it seems as though all the ME's agree that it's getting too loud, but we are obviously the ones in the position to do something about it. However, we can't. If we send it back or say "No" to the request of turning it up louder, they'll simply find someone who will.

this is to a certain point very true, but i still disagree that it is a reason to not reject something, and i don't mean rejecting just for the sake of it, but when a basic material is that bad that you can't make it any, i mean any better then just loud... you might think that what i say now / bring up as a thorn in my eye about this kind of behaviour... might be totally screwed to you, or even seem totally off topic, but for me it's NOT.

i am very sensible, out of my countries past (germany that is) there was a time people did not rejected or had their own mind because of money / food... you know the result!!! i don't have to give you a lesson in history, ok, it really might seem a bit to drastic and off topic and yes clearly we or anyone else will ever be able to harm in the same way with music as my example stated, but the principal of human behaviour stays the same... because if no one is able to say NO, we will earlier or later end up in shit, as you said, even modern classical music demands already: turn the volume up.

just turn it all a little louder.

and i am not blaming just one specific job genre... (even i think the root is in the beginning) for me it's about raising the conciousness of how much influence and power each and everyone of us actually has... it is just something that got kinda triggered through your start of this topic, sorry if it went all pear shaped and off topic.

by the way i don't expect anyone to be able to understand my example / point of view.

sorry to waste your time.
happy music making.
axel junkuhn.

Reggie wrote: That is such a backwards view that people have. Their stuff will end up just as loud as the other stuff on the radio. It is the overall quality of the performance that will make them stick out on the radio.

Sure, you and I and most of the others in this forum know this, but most of the clients don't. That's a sad reality.

Reggie wrote:
I also wonder how many people who complain about all the smashed music are really only listening to them on the radio, where they of course are rediculously pumped and smashed....

Not here. I understand how it gets smashed on the radio and I don't complain so much about that. I just don't listen that much to the radio. (Though I've started to do so more lately as I'm expanding my client base from strictly classiclal or acoustic projects/clients to rock, pop, country and so on...)

I'm specifically referring to CDs which I've purchased and examined (and listened to in bitter amazement).

Reggie wrote:
And I seriously doubt the mastering engineers are to blame.

Well, I agree and disagree both. Many mastering engineers ARE to blame. They make their business by smashing records and clients go to them specifically because they know that's what ME 'X' is good at. In many cases, this isn't true, but there are 4 other "Mastering Engineers" in my town alone. If you look at their work and their gear, they are in the business of smashing the shit out of records.

Granted, many MEs are not this way and I suspect that in the case of the two CDs to which I referred, they were pushed to do this by the label.

My REAL question is - do you think the artist is happy in either of these cases?

Reggie wrote:
They provide a service to the client, and if the clients are please then they have a business. If they are just mastering to please themselves then they better have a day job to feed their mastering hobby. At least until the mooks stop telling the mastering engineers what they want to hear and just let them do their thing.

Yup. But again, who is it telling the MEs to smash it? In my case, it's the artists 9 times out of 10.

So, do they need to be educated? (I try with each one I work with. Sometimes I'm successful, sometimes I'm not...)

Reggie wrote:
If the mooks knock it off, then the indies will find it uncool to still do the "smashed mix" thing, and then people can go back to making things sound good. Can you imagine: "Man you used an L2 on that? Dood, that is SO 2002. I want my s*#% to sound good and dynamic, like this latest (fictitious future band name) CD-HD."

That would ROCK! I don't think it will ever happen though. :cry:

J.

axel wrote:
this is to a certain point very true, but i still disagree that it is a reason to not reject something, and i don't mean rejecting just for the sake of it, but when a basic material is that bad that you can't make it any, i mean any better then just loud... you might think that what i say now / bring up as a thorn in my eye about this kind of behaviour... might be totally screwed to you, or even seem totally off topic, but for me it's NOT.

No, I agree with you.

I think maybe there is a slight misunderstanding.

First, some MEs do have enough work coming their way that they can afford to turn bad work away. It makes their lives easier and they're not hurting for doing it.

I have turned work "back" before. Meaning - I have sent the work back to the mixer or artist and said that I needed it remixed. Most the time, I get no flack about this. Sometimes, I lose the business.

The fact is, you can't always polish a turd. Sometimes it's better not to even waste one's time trying.

J

i think we do understand each other in the main point, that is: at least try to make a difference if you can.

but jeeeeez... cucco, you got there really a stone rolling with your initial post :D :D :D , i love this forum.

I'm enjoying the hell out of reading this thread!

Let's assume and agree that that 99% of the people reading and posting on this forum are NOT part of the problem, as it were. There are simply too many mastering houses and busy record labels out there, and I seriously doubt we've got the market cornered on ME's. So that's cool, no one need feel targeted personally about this subject.

Speaking freely, then....I agree more ME's should turn back work that's already been ruined, or at least make the client sign an agreement form stating the condition of the pre-mastered material. (That COULD fall into the catergory of "Professional Integrity", but who am "I" do say, eh?) If a project has been well recorded and well mixed in the first place, then a good ME can do wonders, and even have the best of both worlds: Great sounding stuff, and LOUD at that. (You guys who do rock all the time know what I"m talking about.)

What really makes me crazy is reading about "one size fits all" extreme EQ'ing (and compression) done to final masters by people who think this is actually fixing something. Has it not occured to these guys that something done to a 2-track stereo master alters ALL of the mix in question? Over-tweaking the low, mid or hi end of any stereo recording not only "Fixes" the subjective problem, but it affects (adversely) the sound of any other instrument in the mix that's also residing at those frequencies. IMHO, it's putting a band aid on a broken limb, instead of x-raying and setting the fracture properly, or punishing the whole class when it's just the kid in the back row acting up.

In other words, if it's imply too much kick drum and everything else is ok; SEND IT BACK and have it remixed for that problem, instead of ruining the rest of the bandwidth of the material. Esp with today's DAWs, that's really not such a tough thing to ask for anymore. (I get this all the time when someone brings in a stereo-only mix, and wants a trumpet or voice lowered, but not the rest of the music. I then try to explain this same technique to them - you may narrow-band EQ it to remove the instrument in question, but your'e also ruining the sound of the rest of the instruments around it.)

As for clients - esp. classical and jazz - who want it Loud, I can empathize. It's at that point I get out my AUdio 101 book and begin (gently, politely) explaining to them why compression and limiting is a baaaad thing with classical music. (most get it, a few don't, and I can live with the ratio.) Sitting them down in my own mixing/mastering suite also opens their ears to what I'm talking about. Sometimes you do need a really good system to show them - with good audio - just what you're talking about with overcompression, etc. Nowadays, waveform views on screen help even more; the 2x4 view of rock/pop records wav's never fails to elicit a gasp of horror and disbelief when you show it to a client for the first time. "Where's the dynamics??!?!?" ...is usually their first question.

Of course, as I move from client to client - pop, jazz, folk, rock, the boundaries and acceptable levels change through the genres. But bad (and obvious) compression is just that. And hopefully, it's a dated process that may someday be considered tacky and undesirable.

For those that wonder if anyone still listens to un-ruined, er..."processed" music, take heart. They are still out there, and they do listen.

I am lucky in that I get to hear a lot of my stuff almost immediately on our local Public Radio station, WRTI - Temple Univ. here in Phila. I have always checked in with the engineering staff there, discussing their optimod settings (they have one setting during the day for Classical, and another one when they switch over to Jazz in the evening). One year, during daylight savings time, we found out it was switching to the Jazz setting (and hurting our classical music broadcast) an hour earlier.

So, we do mix and master our broadcast CDs with an ear towards broadcast, but only to the extent that we're aware SOME (albiet minimal) comp/limiting is going on. Once in a while I'll still get a complaint from a client about how their stuff sounds on the air (Too squashed, usually), but it's gotten less and less of a problem now because of several things going on: I reluctantly create a broadcast master with just a little LESS dynamic range for a radio (not much, but we do bring up some of the down-in-the-dirt quietest passeges if we think it's going to fool their "Dead-air" alarm.)

The other thing going now is the state of digital broadcasting equipment. If you don't kill the mix ahead of time, let the on air gear do it; it's gotten much much better, and the faster, less obvious comp/limiting going on is much more gentle and less obvious to even trained classical ears. Between my production attitude and the stations better gear in the last few years, everyone's been quite happy for a while now.

But of course that's classical and jazz; recordings done in the rock genre's are still going through this all the time. The listeners are a different breed altogether, and want their car radios slamming all the time. (The advertising staff is usually the culprit here: Louder signal, to sell more airtime to clients who's ads will SCREAM at listeners.)

I still think it can be done, and I am firmly convinced that someday, hopefully in our lifetime, there will be yet another trend out there (You read it here first). When the record labels run out of things to sell, and have done all the boxed-set re-re-re-releases they can muster, a new genre will emerge, perhaps for audiophiles only, but maybe even mainstream: "Newly Remastered, UNCOMPRESSED Versions of your favorite artists. Hear them as they were MEANT to be heard, with all the dynamics restored!"

It'll happen....someday, when people get sick of the crap they're being fed now.

I agree a lot with your statements Joe.

In general, compressors are a no go for me in classical.

However, limiting is a different story. If I go with my highest peak as my reference for -.1 dBFS, then the cymbals or timp will always get the glory and the orchestra tends to be as much as 3 or 6 dB too low. So, for that reason, I'll ride the limiter just enough to push those quick transient peaks down (or in some cases, isolate those using the object based editing module in Sequoia and gain ride them down.)

That's really all the limiting I'll do there. It can squeeze a good 3-6 dB "volume" out of the mix without sacrificing any real dynamic range. (Sometimes more if there are overzealous percussionists - and trumpeters...)

j.

Cucco wrote: I agree a lot with your statements Joe.

In general, compressors are a no go for me in classical.

However, limiting is a different story. If I go with my highest peak as my reference for -.1 dBFS, then the cymbals or timp will always get the glory and the orchestra tends to be as much as 3 or 6 dB too low. So, for that reason, I'll ride the limiter just enough to push those quick transient peaks down (or in some cases, isolate those using the object based editing module in Sequoia and gain ride them down.)

That's really all the limiting I'll do there. It can squeeze a good 3-6 dB "volume" out of the mix without sacrificing any real dynamic range. (Sometimes more if there are overzealous percussionists - and trumpeters...)

j.

Yep, absolutely! No argument there. In the right hands, a little bit of limiting goes a long way. And with a DAW's visiual capability, it's easy enough to "See" what you're doing, and the results are often totally harmless. I've done that many time in order to "buy-back" some otherwise lost dynamic range.

But I'm always checking & testing it to make sure I can't hear the results. I'll toggle back and forth to make sure that the change isn't audible. (And I'll often go as far as putting the original, untouched version away as well.)

As you know in Samplitude/Sequoia, if you're doing this sort of thing in the VIP mode (non-destructive editing), it will actually APPEND the new changes to the waveform, and keep your original stuff untouched. So, you can always go back to the original, or simply leave it alone when you put it away for safekeeping. Options are always good to have.

wow, joe! you speak from my heart.

and:

If a project has been well recorded and well mixed in the first place, then a good ME can do wonders, and even have the best of both worlds: Great sounding stuff, and LOUD at that. (You guys who do rock all the time know what I"m talking about.)

ecactly, spot on. i have heard often enough litterally wonders done from good source material... i have great respect for those skills.

and this is what i (me being 'the dreamer') hope, too... so much:

It'll happen....someday, when people get sick of the crap they're being fed now.

and as you pointed out, there is a possibility of good influence / education.

cheers
axel

p.s. by the way how do you spell excactly, ecactly correct in english???

JoeH wrote: But I'm always checking & testing it to make sure I can't hear the results. I'll toggle back and forth to make sure that the change isn't audible. (And I'll often go as far as putting the original, untouched version away as well.)

As you know in Samplitude/Sequoia, if you're doing this sort of thing in the VIP mode (non-destructive editing), it will actually APPEND the new changes to the waveform, and keep your original stuff untouched. So, you can always go back to the original, or simply leave it alone when you put it away for safekeeping. Options are always good to have.

Here here!!

This is what I do to A/B - it's instantaneous.

I'll put the two versions on seperate tracks. One track (the original) is bused out to AES output 1/2, the edited/limited version is bused to AES output 3/4 and both are converted to analog. If I do hardware limiting, I sample it in real time.

Then I patch one into input A on the Central Station and the other into input B. Both inputs are correctly calibrated to ensure output is identical within .5 dB (actually, it's closer than that, but I only measure pink noise at C weighting/slow for both channels at 1 minute. I don't think that, with that kind of measurement I can state a better tolerance.)

Then of course, I select input 'A' or 'B' at will and listen for the difference. If possible, I will (by ear) calibrate the inputs of both (thanks to the trim on the unit) so that regardless of limiting/gain boosting the amplitude on "unaffected" material is the same. Therefore, I'm not choosing one over the other based on amplitude differences.

Does all of that make sense? Or am I babbling??

J.

Does all of that make sense? Or am I babbling??

Yes! No! (And when did that ever stop ME, eh? :twisted: )