Loudness War: Albums you've listened to that really suffer

Floral Shoppe by Vektroid Macintosh Plus. Listen to this:

Now, this is Vaporwave we're talking about, so there's not a lot of thought put into it already (aside from its loudness possibly being intentional), but listen to how loud this is. I think the only track that isn't speaker-shakingly loud is track 8.

edited 25th Aug '14 1:06:58 PM by PhysicalStamina

I believe I've now understood the term better. From what I can tell it's not so much how loud the track is that's necessarily the problem, but the loss of lower frequencies, leftover vibrations and subtle artifacts from live instruments being played, and the balance of volume throughout the instrument mix.

Recently I've acquired a flac conversion of a vinyl of Dragonforce's Inhuman Rampage. So far from the first track Through the Fire and Flames, I can hear a subtle but very noticeable difference compared with a standard cd mp3.

The instruments in the vinyl mix have more room to breathe and it doesn't feel crammed together in your headphones. The little accents of base on the edge of hearing are only audible hear, the drums are a lot crisper, and the electronic work put in places also sounds a little warmer.

It's hard to tell if the vinyl's a better listening experience. I think it is, but there's so many subtle differences it's hard to quantify, and I'm not totally sure if the normal mix is just confirmation bias as if I think it'll sound worse, it might if I think it does.

There's a new country singer named Cole Swindell. Most of his album was produced by Luke Bryan's guitarist Michael Carter, who has never produced before. My God does it show.

"Hope You Get Lonely Tonight" is a very good song, too, but it's very amateurishly produced. I have no idea how they made the drum machine make that machine gun noise about six seconds in. And that's all I hear too — drum machine and very loud guitar.

edited 10th Sep '14 2:23:59 PM by Twentington

For a second there I thought they were going to bust out some trap. You don't use that kind of snare, I know vsts that have a more convincing beat than that.

Lol, the FL Studio-ness is hilarious to me.

I know, I can get better sounding stuff in Melody Assistant. But I still like the song in spite of the terrible production.

@darkabomination: vinyl is just a medium; it's all about the mixing, and the limitations of the medium does not allow the bad evil people to mix badly (otherwise the needle will start skipping).

It's why I'm now looking for vinyl rips if possible. I've heard that Itunes does a good job with minimizing production problems if possible, though not quite sure.

My Electric Wizard and Janelle Monae releases are in M 4 A, not sure about EW, but Monae mixes her work well at a minimum dr of 12, which is particularly good for rap/hip hop. Though it could just be the higher production is just more noticeable if their releases use uncompressed file formats.

Compressed and uncompressed formats have zero to do with mixing. There is nothing wrong with CDs either; for example, I recently hunted down a 2 disk set by Men At Work (their first two albums). Those two were made from the original masters (not re-masters), and so are mixed perfectly, with the loudest parts not even touching the peak. Mew's 4th album was also mixed perfectly, and it sounds amazing.

edited 11th Sep '14 6:43:01 PM by KlarkKentThe3rd

True. Not saying that it's because of a cd, but that it's a problem with music practices in general, and unless you want to spend time cleaning up the tracks with a daw, consulting the Dynamic Range Database, or know who produced it, vinyl's the only sure way of knowing it has a clean sound.

Again none of these are dealbreakers, I'd just like to have the warmer sound if possible.

Honestly, if you're looking for older music that was originally released in the post-CD era (as in after CDs first came to be), your best bet there is probably looking for its initial CD release if you want it in a digital format. Not quite the case with music originally released on vinyl, since not all of those got good CD releases at first. The Beatles' original CD releases are particularly infamous for this—the loudness is fine, but the mixes are really shoddy, especially the first four albums (all released in mono, so muddy sound there means good luck trying to discern any individual instruments).

@Twentington While that song is certainly produced badly, the Loudness War is a post-production issue, not a production issue. From what I can tell, compression is implemented during the mastering phase, which is the last step in the whole production process (though the mastering engineer of the infamous Death Magnetic claims that the tapes were already compressed when they were given to him).

Apparently that song made it into the Country Charts Top 10 anyway. The "Country" audience seems to have very low standards these days. Even with better production I can't imagine that song being anything better than mediocre.

edited 15th Sep '14 8:15:53 AM by djbj

I think it's pretty good lyrically, and at least a big step up from his debut, "Chillin' It". That one just sounded like a watered-down "Cruise".

Metallica have been abusing compression in really hideous ways since the late '90s. It seems to have coincided with the overall decline in their songwriting quality, although even where that has marginally recovered their sound has just gotten more overbearing.

Weren't two of their albums produced by Dann Huff? He's usually a country producer, and a lot of his country production is very hamfisted because he likes to drench everything in electric guitar and strings. Listen to any of Rascal Flatts' whiny Power Ballads from a few years ago.

No, I'm pretty sure that was Megadeth. Far as I can tell, that guy never produced a Metallica album.

Recently got into Fleshgod Apocalypse. I love the sound, but unfortunately their last album in particular has the drums and orchestral effects drown out a lot of the guitar work.

Actually, the practice is so heavily common in death metal it'd be better to list exceptions to the rule. Any examples? It's so common I actually want to hear a dynamically clean release just to see how different it is.

Can't really speak for all of their Chris Barnes-era albums, but I know for a fact that Cannibal Corpse's The Bleeding was mastered very well. Even the remaster is pretty good.

Earache Records (the label specializing in all sorts of extreme metal, including death and grind) has released some Full Dynamic Range remasters of their various catalog releases. I own one of them (Napalm Death's Scum) and it sounds fantastic. I suspect their other FDR releases are around the same level.

RE: Metallica - For me, Death Magnetic is the only thing from them that's really suffered compression-wise...I've been happy with everything else from them production-wise that I've heard.

I need to listen to them in the car to make my final judgment, but Bastille's Bad Blood and Kongos' self-titled debut sounded pretty badly compressed through my headphones.

edited 21st Sep '14 4:54:15 PM by Willbyr

I was expecting to hear "The Lady in Red" by Chris de Burgh when I first heard that Cole Swindell song.

Not an album, but related: I swear my local "alternative" radio station uses much worse compression than any other stations I've heard. Sometimes I've thought there's something wrong with the car radio signal, but I think what I'm hearing is actually distortion caused by the compression. They just played "Meant to Live" and it sounded like a fuzzy mess, but the advertisement that came after sounded fine.

I once heard "What I've Done" on this station and it sounded very strange because the piano intro came in blaring out and then the guitars came in at the same volume as the piano. I'm pretty sure the original recording wasn't exactly dynamic to begin with, so they must have really compressed it for me to notice something was off.

I think another issue is that the compression is made more noticeable given the type of music this station plays. Specifically, they play a lot of those "quiet-loud-quiet" style rock songs (like the previous two I mentioned), which would be more noticeably affected by compression.

edited 3rd Oct '14 12:51:42 PM by djbj

Anyone know the status on the various Rush remasters?

I've checked the database and it's not looking too good. The vinyl's up until the mid 90s never went lower than an 11, but some remasters bring the dynamics down to a 6 and a 9 at most. That doesn't sound encouraging.

I've mentioned Frank Liddell's sucky production a lot, but here's some actual proof:

Speaking of Miranda Lambert, "Mama's Broken Heart" also suffers from terrible mastering. And that's sad, as I stand strongly by my opinion that it's one of the greatest modern country songs ever made.

The song starts out with not-so-terrible mastering. Then the chorus hits...have you ever heard PJ Harvey's "Rid of Me", the way the song EXPLODES on you after a quiet two minutes? That's exactly how this song feels.

Maddie & Tae's "Girl in a Country Song" also has terrible mastering...on a great song satirizing the various "bro-country" songs out there, but it's a Dann Huff-produced song, so I'm not at all surprised.

Also, how can I sign up to become a country music reviewer? I'd like to earn some free C Ds...

edited 31st Oct '14 7:02:12 PM by FromtheWordsofBR