Why modern music sounds rubbish A few year ago Bob Dylan echoed a complaint that many of you share with me from time to time: music sounds rubbish. Dylan hates recording these days, because the outcome is too loud and it's too bright. As he said: "You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of …
I think you might be suffering from perception bias.
90% of US music falls into either the 'urban' 'country' category, or is badly produced Nu Metal / Punk that also suffers from poor production. The bands you cite are not mainstream, and as soon as you depart from the mainstream in this country you'll also find plenty of decent music.
Genre has no bearing on it, generally. I don't listen to chart music either, but the likes of Within Temptation and Nightwish are just as guilty as chart acts in turning it up to 11 in the studio. Compare Nightwish's production values with a quality recording of some classical music and it's blatant.
If anything, metal acts are just as guilty as the purveyors of drum and bass.
Production values were poor in the 80s, and then everything was looking up for a while. Now; things have slumped again. Badly. I can't help but think that maybe the industry realises that most of the time people listen through headphones and computer speakers or in the car, so figure that good production isn't worth bothering with.
Seriously though, I think the trend is already shifting. My main music of choice is technical metal, and the production values have gone through the roof over the last 10 or so years. Compare Gojira’s ‘The Way of All Flesh’ to Meshuggah’s ‘Destroy, Erase, Improve’ for a prime example of that. What I don’t quite get is where/when the sound is getting mushed. The CD of Slayer’s ‘Reign in Blood’ I bought in the early 90s seems to have way better production value that the copy I bought a couple of years ago (someone spilt wine on the inlay of my original, I’m not normally that anal but this is Slayer). That just makes no sense to me.
That is, it wasn't an exact copy, even though the digital nature of CDs makes this trivial.
"The CD of Slayer’s ‘Reign in Blood’ I bought in the early 90s seems to have way better production value that the copy I bought a couple of years ago"
That's because somewhere in between the first purchase and the second somebody "remastered" the album, i.e., ran it through compressors and limiters and reduced the dynamic range to nothing.
While I'm not a huge fan of "modern" metal -- though I really dug Black Sabbath and Uriah Heep as a teenager -- I'm definitely of the "If It's Too Loud, You're Too Old" school.
The key here is quality (see my previous comment re: Slade vs. Aerosmith). Compare, say, the mix on Blue Cheer's "Vincebus Eruptum" vs. The Who's "Who's Next". Now, I think "Vincebus Eruptum" is a helluvan album, but the mix is totally hamburger, whereas on "Who's Next", they're loud enough to peel the paint off the walls, but every instrument can be heard clearly and cleanly, so that when I go to crank it up a notch or two for the big finish on "Won't Get Fooled Again", the sound doesn't turn to hamburger.
Most of the dance music scene is about big fat beats and bass.
Over the years everyone has been trying to push it that little bit further to have 'the fattest beats EVER' because when a DJ plays your track to a floor full of dancers, the last thing you want is that your song sounds a little limper than the last one he played.
On the plus side, I've noticed a few tracks coming out which don't prescribe completely to the loudness war -- like Roisin's Boadicea. Maybe there's hope.
DJs keep an eye on the levels and don't like it when songs are recorded at wildly different levels. If a DJ can't check the levels before mixing in a track in order to see that it's not going to drown the last one and blow the limiter, then they shouldn't be DJing.
I'll probably be 'disliked' out of existence for this.
I listened to the video clip repeatedly and could barely tell the difference between the two. And if I was listening on my iPod, on a busy noisy train (which is where I listen to 99% of my music), I would prefer the 'louder' lower quality version, as I'd be able to hear the rhythm and tune better. The 'quieter' original would be drowned out, and I'd only hear the drum beats and stand-out chords.
I appreciate that audiophiles will prefer the 'quieter' version, but - for good or for worse - the way the majority of people listen to music has changed.
Perhaps you are listening to the wrong part.
Listen again and concentrate on the sound of the drums just when they come in.
It is "snappier" and there is a slight reverberation that gives it a feeling of "space" that is totally missing from the compressed version. Even with my sh*t headphones on a laptop that I have at work here, I can hear a sense of stereo "position" of the drums different to the other instruments when they come in that the compressed version lacks.
I don't know what others think, but my perception of the stereo altogether is reduced in the compressed version.
Wouldn't you prefer the option to choose for yourself? To get the "loud" version from the original, one of your iPods many equaliser settings would be able to do it for you. You can't get back to the original that way though.
You claim to barely be able to tell the difference, but in the same breath state why you'd prefer the loud one - you can clearly hear the difference in that case and even manage to explain what it is. I'd suggest getting even a semi-decent pair of earphones to block out surrounding sounds. That way you can protect your ears by listening at a lower volume and hear all the nuances of the music.
I use a £350 pair of noise cancelling Sennheisers, but still find I have to boost loudness to be able to hear what song I'm listening to in a noisy bus or ferry. I bought them for exactly the reason you say.
My point is, we don't all have standardised ears. Audiophiles tend to forget that just because they might be able to hear all the nuances, the majority (including me) can't.
"I use a £350 pair of noise cancelling Sennheisers"
You spend £350 on a pair of cans and use the term audiophile at other people?? Sheesh... I'd suggest taking them back though. I've got a cheaper set of Bose noise cancellers and they completely remove the noise on a plane, train or busy tube. Heck, I've even tested them in a busy pub with music blaring with success. Even noise-isolating earbuds do a good enough job.
My point still stands though - you can boost the original's "quiet parts" yourself with the equaliser, you can't do the reverse.
And if you *really* can't tell the difference, why does it even matter to you? Surely the original "audiophile approved" version is just as good?
"I'd suggest getting even a semi-decent pair of earphones"
I wonder if that isn't actually the driving force behind the trend identified here. 30 years ago, headphones were an exotic piece of kit used by professional sound engineers. 20 years ago plenty of people had a Walkman but they also did a lot of listening through conventional speakers. Nowadays, huge numbers of people do almost all of their listening through the crappiest earpieces money can buy and "dynamic range" just isn't technically possible. Even if the device can manage it, the listener is half-deaf from headphone abuse and so *they* can't manage it. Unsurprisingly, then, recordings no longer have any dynamic range.
Against that line of argument, I'd have to concede that most (all?) MP3 players have the ability to apply their own loudness and so there's no technical reason to bugger up the recordings just because the majority of playback devices (and ears) are rubbish.
Back in halcyon days we (a bunch of students) dabbled with web/net/multicasting audio over the university network and of course that was a great excuse for an excursion or two to the local "real" radio station. It was interesting for everyone involved.
One of the things we were shown was a Very Expensive Magic Soundbox that was basically a bunch of companders and graphic equalisers and such. I forget the details but what was really interesting was this difference: The "sound makers" explained that the thing put their "station fingerprint" on the sound. The techies explained that the thing folded the sound so as to most efficiently fit on an FM carrier, sound the loudest, and so on.
Maybe both had it right, in fact I think it's likely both are true at least to some extent. The interesting thing to me was the wildly different explanations. Anyhow, I think it's a somewhat relevant data point. And as mentioned already, loudness sells.
Another dot to connect is that music quality has come down, not so much because in yon days of yore everything was just better (which is indubitably true but not relevant here) but because Big Music doesn't appear to want, or at least it fails to bother with investing in and nurturing new actual talent into becoming the new Rolling Stones or David Bowie twenty years down the road.
What they want is more stuff to push out on airwaves and into sales channels as quickly as possible, in as large amounts as they can get people to pony up for any way they can.
Point in case: Bad Candy. You probably will never have heard from them, but I was a hand at their first performance as the primary and in fact only item on the lineup.
Picture this: Some five 15-something girls that yabber somewhat uncertainly into the mike they've been training really really hard (in a villa somewhere, for half a year or so), honest, at being a punk band. Why yes, that's how you start a punk band of course.
Right under a really big, custom made electric banner flashing the band name, amidst a sack of equipment even seasoned musicians likely can't afford, and with some of the best session musicians in the country for roadies and guitar tuners.
This was a project by one of the names behind that big name of yore, The Golden Earring. It didn't work out so was abandoned, and rightly so, no offense implied to the cute girls. And, well, the big guy wanted to know if it could be done and didn't mind footing the bill, more power to him. But it illustrates the thinking.
The point with this is that according to big music, music doesn't need to be good. It only needs to sell, in large quantities. If it's not quality, and feh they'd rather not have that for it's something of a hindrance to cranking up the quantity, then something's got to make up for it. Well, loudness helps, meshes well with that other great marketeering trick, hype.
A few years back the problem of endless rehashing of old things on a snappier beat did come up on industry conferences. There it was recognised as a problem, a lack of input of fresh new ideas and talent, a lack of investment and so on. I haven't much paid attention lately as I stopped listening to top of the pops type stuff entirely, so I don't know whether they're still doing that. Maybe they've found new ways to "create music" out of no talent and no investment that isn't quite as blatantly copycat ripoffs. It was quite cynical in that the then-current generation hadn't hear that much abba and contemporaries. I could imagine that the only reason they stopped being so blatant was that the execs themselves got fed up with hearing the same thing rehashed over and over again. Anyhow.
And as long as that quantity sales thing remains the goal, unchecked by massive customer walkout that can't be handwaved away with mumbling about piracy and backed with made-up numbers, well, they'll keep right on trucking of course.
If that's indeed the thinking and the industry is still stuck believing their own bullshit it's easy to see how they won't turn around and go back to a more thoughtful, artistic, sustainable, and less obnoxiously loud route to making large amounts of money.
And now if you'll excuse me, I have an urgent appointment with a The KLF collection that needs listening to.
Wall Of Sound was more about using lots of similar instruments, rather than pushing the sliders all the way up, though. Today's music is attempt at getting that "AM and analog" sound on FM and digital ... and it fails miserably. The only thing I listen to on the radio anymore is Baseball.
Current tunage: Charlie Daniel's "Devil Went Down To Georgia", last track was The Stranglers "Peaches", next track (according to the computer) is going to be Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues"[1], followed by both versions of Robert Johnson's "Crossroads"[2]. Eclectic? Moi?
[1] One of the first "rap" songs, BTW ...
[2] No, Clapton didn't write Crossroads, as much as I like his cover of it :-)
And before that there was Stock Aitkin and Waterman, and before that there was disco.
Music has been dominated by mainstream pop acts for the last 50 years. This is nothing new. I'm a fan of 80s music, but if I were to remove my rose tinted glasses and listen to everything released in the 80s, I would be reminded that 90% of it was awful chart-orientated commercial poppy crud, by people who disappeared after a career spanning the whole of a year.
Cowell is just the latest king of pop. Removing him from the scene just makes room for another.
Even Audacity has the ability to compress and make louder the most banal of inputs, and since everything is done on computer these days it's just too easy to do. With analogue, the engineer was forced to keep the sounds within the dynamic range of the tape, so they did.
AM radio stations used to use vacuum tubes limiters and compressors to be the loudest thing as you manually tuned across the dial, so it was possible long before digital.
It's not a matter of staying within the dynamic range of any particular medium, it's only using the very top part of that range.
most analog tape recordings were heavily compressed deliberately using tape compression.
The technique is still used in mastering. Some engineers run a track off to an expensive analog two-track with heavy compression and re-record the output digitally.
A lot of people like that sound.
But lest we forget - most people's experience of vinyl was utterly crappy. Vinyl has a maximum dynamic range of 60dB, and most recordings had to be compressed to minimise needle jumping. So a good digital re-recording of an analog master tape is vastly better than the sound most people got to hear in the 50s to 80s - and that's not counting crackles, pops and record wear, all of which turned a typical plastic platter into an audio horror within ten or twenty spins.
I suppose pristine vinyl cleaned with the angelic breath of demure virgins and played on five figure hardware may sound better, but I've never had that experience, so I don't know - and given some of the raving nonsense printed in the exclusive upmarket hifi glossies, I rather doubt it.
Then digital recording and CDs happened, and the sound was crap in a different way. A lot of late 80s and early 90s recordings are almost unlistenable because digital technology was so raw you lost all of the nuance and detail. The sound was flat, tinny and edgy.
Digital didn't really get its act together until the late 90s after a couple of magic techniques - dither, jitter reduction - made it sound smooth and listenable and not a splashy mess.
Now good digital is at least as smooth as old analog was. Audiophiles can get high bit rate recordings that sound pretty damn close to the original master.
Consumer music remains pants, but that's always been true. Take a look at a typical chart from the 70s and 80s to see who was making the hits of the day. There was almost as much disposable bubble gum as there is now.
Seriously, this is all so pointless and sad. It would be so easy to have a sound format that had large dynamic range (better quality), but that as part of the standard, defaulted to dynamic compression (making it louder) for the ignorant, with an option on the playback to enable the full dynamic range.
That way you can please everyone!
Seriously, why hasn't this been done already?
It has been done on radio - DAB can transmit Dynamic Range Control information. Turn it on in the car, off on the hi-fi.
The first analogue radio station that bought a compressor to 'be the loudest on the dial' was only the loudest until everyone else bought their own compressors. So now they are all equally loud, and all CTF (a well-known technical term).
I read in a HiFi mag a couple of years ago that the DAB standard supports this by allowing the broadcasters to specify how much (or little) the receiver is to compress the audio. Audiophiles can then just disable the compression.
Of course the broadcasters just transmit everything compressed anyway and completely ignore the compression flags.
Dig out a CD produced sometime around 1988 and then listen to the exact same "Re-Mastered" version released within the last year or two. The later version is almost always unlistenable due to the huge compression and "loudness" that's put in to boost it up. Re-mastering can add some benefit but most of the time it simply seems to be an excuse to "push the loundness button" and send it off for printing and distribution.
There are some bands fighting back and demanding to have the music sound they way they want, better range and less loudness and compression but very few have the cachet to demand it from their record company's.
One of the great potential virtues of digital recording is the incredible dynamic range it can afford, particularly on a hi-fi designed for maximum fidelity. Indeed, one of the primary selling points originally in CDDA's favor (and digital recording/playback in general) was the 90dB of dynamic range afforded by CDDA's 16-bit resolution. When you consider that a 3dB change in level requires double (or half) the power output of the associated equipment, this resolution can result in tremendous dynamic range. A premium audiophile cassette deck (with decent tape) might approach 50-60dB of dynamic range, once the noise floor was factored in. Today's best phono cartridges (I'm talking $5k-$10k) might just approach that, with many "mortal" carts getting only the better of 30-50dB.
So, while HD audio formats like SACD and DVD-A have in excess of 100dB of dynamic resolution, the horrible recordings only make use of 3-9dB, never mind MP3's or what not.
Indeed, audiophile LP recordings, on appropriately high-end equipment, wipe the floor with today's "HD" digital formats for just that reason. Many analog houses realize that their range is limited and do their best to maximize what they have. Some publishers like Telarc, BIS, Mobile Fidelity, and other's (mostly out of Japan) do take digital seriously and release material that can more fully utilize the capabilities of digital formats. One piece in particular that comes to mind is the (in)famous Telarc recording of the 1812 Overture that actually came with a warning label because of its dynamic range- people would turn up the volume during quieter passages, but when the canons sounded, speakers would hyper-extend, amps would blow up or go into protection mode. Recorded without compression, it took advantage of nearly all of the nascent CD's resolution and dynamic range. Sadly, many publishers like Telarc feature catalogs limited to classical and Jazz recordings, or rather obscure indie artists. Much popular music would not benefit much from such careful mastering in any event, but there is a good deal of it that would.
Audiophiles for years have been lamenting the degradation of recording quality, and the acceptance of just-good-enough releases. Stereophile has had many articles and papers on the subject.
But, as long as Joe-Sixpack feel's his 256k MP3 is good enough, the loudness wars, regardless of who is involved, will be one of attrition.
... on the dynamic range of phono cartridges.
A decent MM cartridge with a decent preamp would be capable of about 65dB of dynamic range, the limiting factor being the thermal noise from the cartridge's high-ish impedance.
MC cartridges on the other hand have very low impedance so the thermal noise generated by the cartridge usually isn't the issue. They have much lower output levels than MM cartridges so they require up to 20dB more gain from the preamp to get them up to line level. Which means that the noise floor issue (and thus dynamic range) is very much determined by the cartridge preamp's input stage.
Anyway note that a very good MM preamp does not necessarily cost a fortune. Regrettably, in "audiophile" territory there's very little correlation between a given piece of gear's actual performance, and its cost.
Of course, the performance of even a common garden variety MM cartridge can be heavily compromised by the quality of the vinyl. Virgin vinyl was (still is) costly, and in the early eighties, many labels used part recycled vinyl which included the paper labels and the occasional rodent. Brand new, full price LPs would sound like they'd been played a few hundred times with a rusty nail standing in for the stylus. Pressing waaaay to much records from a single set of matrices didn't improve things either.
On the other hand, I do have a few LPs from labels such as Windham Hill and ECM, and an OMR copy of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" that sound absolutely lovely.
Constant volume is very fatiguing. In the first place your brain regards constant sound as noise and starts to ignore it, but tries to pick out 'meaningful' information. Also your ears will physically stiffen up as a protection mechanism. Your average iPodder will then turn up the volume.
Rinse, repeat.
Not to mention stressful.
So your body starts producing adrenalin, leaving you feeling a bit pumped.
After a while you can't deal with all the adrenalin and you end up adrenochrome, which is a mild psychodelic.
Or so I've heard. It could be all wrong of course, but if correct, we're back to good old sex, drugs & rock 'n' roll.
Nothing's changed really.
Interesting that the article mentions Bob Dylan, a man who for years moaned and dripped about compression ruining his music (and this complaining went way back before CDs) but who led the stampede to get his catalog into MPsquash format where compression is orders of magnitude worse than in the old vinyl days. Mr Z doesn't let his aesthetics get in the way of his dollar fountain any more than the next man.
That said The Marching Moron Syndrome is always with us. I happen to agree that modern recordings sound crappy, but it wasn't until I saw this article that I understood why.
Don't mind me. I'm still recovering from two attempts to find an acceptable digital conversion of 10cc's Sheet Music. Buggered master (by the sound of it) and a remaster that did little to fix the problems and introduced some of its own. Bah, and double bah. Thank Azathoth I have the original vinyl version. Maybe I'll convert it myself, crackles and all.
mainly because finding CDs (and perish the thought, MP3s) of some of my older vinyl is almost impossible.
I leave all of the compression and tone altering filters out, and only turn on the digital scratch filters on if the amount of noise is very bad.
The CDs I produce like this sound very good (to my ears), even using the commodity A-D converters on generic mobos. Even though these cannot do the highest dynamic range, I suspect that my turntable and cartridge combination (good budget equipment - Pro-Ject Debut II with Ortofon OM-5e) is probably more of a limit on the dynamic range than the sound chip in the computer.
Being very interested and active with sound myself I have to concur that he's right. And there are many reasons for it to come up with. My personal stake here is "home studios and scared studios".
First the home studio.. I think the wonder of modern times is that anyone interested in sound, or music, can setup a home studio without that much of an investment. Of course the more you want, the more you pay, but hardware and software quality have risen so great that a mere laptop can be enough to power your studio. Think of such an audio program (a 'DAW': Digital Audio Workstation) as a multitrack sound recorder and editor, which often comes with its own load of synthesizers too.
And so we have many people recording their own work and trying to come up with a good sounding music score. So far, so good... The downside here is that there is a huge difference between making music and processing it. First there is the "mix down". Basically making sure that all your tracks will come together and sound good. If you mix your own music chances are high that something goes 'wrong'. Not wrong perse but not as optimal as could be.
The main problem IMO is /mastering/. Many people out there believe that mastering a music score is required for it to sound good. Here a lot of things go wrong. For non-techies: you watch TV, commercials come up and suddenly the sound is twice as loud? That can be achieved by mastering. Carefully processing the sound spectrum to make all / certain frequency ranges work well together.
Unfortunately this often goes wrong because many people believe that a "mix down" should have a volume level around 0dB, just as if you were recording something on your home stereo. While in fact the optimal range lies around -6 to -4 (/ 3) dB instead thus leaving less room for an audio technician to play with. Resulting in....
"So why not tell the home artist to do it again?". If you pay $600 up to $1800 (say around E 1400) to get your work processed, would you accept a "Sorry, but please mix it again" from a studio? (note: this is an assumption on my part).
Scared studios...
Copyright protection can come in many different ways. I've ripped tracks for the sake of it (on different computers, so a 1 on 1 copy) and analyzed the sound material using my own studio equipment, often resulting in the picture in the article. Distorted, clipped and way too loud. I then took the same CD to a friend who is more into hardware than software and analyzed the cd while it was playing in a regular CD player. Suddenly we got totally different results; often still quite loud and leaving much headroom, but still nothing so loud that the sound was clipping.
But still; applying copyright protection onto a CD will influence the music. And as the article states, most people don't even really hear it because many music players (mp3, home stereo, etc.) apply a massive battery of filters before the music even leaves the speakers.
All in all a rather sad development IMO.
Excellent illustration and an intelligent article with thoughtful comments. The effect is even worse on commercial radio where the recording is further compressed. Not listening to music on the radio much, my gripe is often the opposite with the BBC. I listen a lot in the car, which, despite being better than 20 years ago, it still not a quiet environment. The dynamic range for speech much loved by many BBC engineers has me constantly twiddling the volume as the presenter is too loud when I turn up the guest to hear what they are saying and vice versa. It would sound lovely at home but a huge percentage of radio is consumed in vehicles.
Forgot to add, years ago every production desk had a little mono speaker, which was used to check that the mix sounded at least something like the intended track, because hundreds of thousands of potential purchasers of the record would get their first exposure to it on one of the new fangles transistor radios. Often under the blankets, after official "lights out."
... present on most Studer 2-track decks such as the A-80 is eminently suitable for this purpose.
Anyway, most recording studios had a set of small full-range speakers (known by their brand name as "Auratones") perched on the console's meter bridge, these were used to get a reasonable impression of how a mix would sound on an average compact stereo.
Also, I have modded a number of small ghetto blasters - fitted them with line inputs such that they could be used for similar purposes. Sometimes the mod cost more than the market value of the ghetto blaster.
One big problem that has emerged over the last 15 years or so is the technology becoming too clever and affordable for its own good. Too many effects processors and digital mixing desks do important things automatically to make life easier and make production and recording processes more accessible. All good stuff, supposedly. It facilitated MySpace and its impoverished, unconnected artists who simply would never have their fame & fortune in the old days, apparently. You know, people like Lily Allen.
But imagine everyone having access to Photoshop and only ever using the auto-fix buttons or plug-ins that allow you to point and click in order to perform complicated tasks. The outcome would be lots of identikit images with the same skin tones, tonemapping, lack of wrinkles and blemishes, the same noise reduction artifacts in the hair, over-white teeth & eyes, and striking blue skies, greenish water and green grass.
Al very nice, but the whole notion of capturing a moment or atmosphere has been lost. Even the notion that a picture paints a thousand words has been compromised because every picture's words follow a template more ridged than a chick flick.
This is what's happened to music, through clever virtual effects processors, mixers and even affordable outboard effects such as domestic finalisers etc. The music they produce by most workmen using these tools is so polished that it's DOA.
Setting Sun by the Chemical Brothers was one of many frustrating records in the mid-late 90s, because it was so technically 'perfect' that it had no dynamic range. It starts off quietly and builds up until the very loud drums and bass kick in - Except it doesn't. The solo acoustic guitar loop at the start is almost as 'powerful' acoustically as when everything is playing. There kick when the big drums and bass finally drop is simply unrewarding straight off the CD. I'm sure whoever mastered that one thought they were the god of all sound engineers as they watched all the bars remain level right across the spectrum on their fancy colour screens, and read the digital noise level indicators etc, but what popped out of that desk was a McVities biscuit, devoid of any organic element.
And being electronic music has nothing to do with it. Earlier artists, such as 808 State, LFO and even Stock Aitken & Waterman never had these mastering problems, even if what was on the master tapes sounds a bid dated these days.
In much the same way that the arrival of (proper) home computing (not BBC Micros, even Vince Clarke's) spelled the end of a century's pursuit of Hi-Fi, it would appear music production has also thrown a lot away as it's gone solid state. I reckon we'll have another decade or two of this and then a new generation will begin to 'discover' high fidelity music production and playback, looking back on today's methods as a musical dark age, and priding themselves in how much better their modern sound is.
Some historian will try to point out they already had Hi-Fi sound in the 20th century, but no one will listen, with people explaining away the quality of 70s/80s records they still listen to as some kind of modern remastering process that must have massively enhanced the original sound or sommat.
Mark Ronson's son will probably win an award for remastering a Who/Zep/Queen album and 'giving it' such incredible dynamic range and punch, something that simply wasn't possible back in the day... apparently.
And just as builders want to get the job done quickly and get paid, using the cheapest stock in the Screwfix catalogue customers will put up with, modern producers and mastering bods can't be arsed to make an effort for an audience who'll only end up listening over 112kbps joint stereo DAB radio or 128kbps MP3s on their phones - managed by 'clever' Sony software on their laptop that cleverly 'optimises' and 'enhances' their tracks for 'improved' sound...
Mine's the one standing by Camden Lock playing Stairway to Heaven on the spoons.
"Setting Sun by the Chemical Brothers was one of many frustrating records in the mid-late 90s, because it was so technically 'perfect' that it had no dynamic range. It starts off quietly and builds up until the very loud drums and bass kick in - Except it doesn't. The solo acoustic guitar loop at the start is almost as 'powerful' acoustically as when everything is playing. There kick when the big drums and bass finally drop is simply unrewarding straight off the CD. I'm sure whoever mastered that one thought they were the god of all sound engineers as they watched all the bars remain level right across the spectrum on their fancy colour screens, and read the digital noise level indicators etc, but what popped out of that desk was a McVities biscuit, devoid of any organic element."
I happened to work on this "back in the day". I say worked on it. I did the PQ encoding on the final prod masters as well as various 1610/dat clones and cassette dupes @ chop em out in ladbroke grove. Classic record ruined by the compression.
As sgtrock said, Phil Specter had a wall of sound. In fact, Robert Johnson's records might have had a similar effect; apparently Vocalion Records was notorious for this, so those classic blues tracks, so gritty and raw, may be uptempo, more exciting [sic] versions of what Robert Johnson really recorded. Just don't tell Keith Richards, it might kill him. Well, okay, nothing could do that, but it wouldn't do him any good.
... was an excellent piece of kit. Especially the old (analogue) Optimod FM. It gave a station's sound *punch*, but it was the smoothest and sweetest punch I've heard yet.
Orban still makes makes Optimods, of course nowadays they're digital.
As a sidenote, building good compressor/limiters is a high art. Nowadays one can buy a two channel analogue compressor/limiter for a few bucks and they sound, well, reasonable... But top flight analogue gear (Drawmer, BSS) is still in production and commands premium prices, as do second hand units.
That's why the little music I still buy tends to be SACD versions of older recordings. It's not necessarily the medium that allows for better sound (it does, to a point) but the better mastering that goes into making a "better" SACD disc. Luckily there are much more good recordings than I ever have time to listen to. Nevertheless, it's a shame in terms of art and craft.
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