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Why does no one mix or master worth a shit anymore?


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Posted

I'm listening to Born to Run for maybe the 50th time and it continues to blow me away how amazing it sounds. 

I don't get what happened to this art. Is it too expensive? Does no one know how to do it? 

Please educate me. 

Posted

I'm not sure where you are getting that from, mixing is at a higher level now than it's ever been.

 

You are probably talking more about stylistic choices, though I believe that the peak loudness war has probably passed.

 

Just off the top of my head, go listen to the latest Chris Stapleton album. Vance Powell did an amazing job.

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Posted

I was listening to a mix of Van Halen songs and I always think on how different each album sounds between Van Halen thorough F.U.C.K.   There's just such a different crispness from the first few albums that isn't there by that last one.   Poundcake is a great "loud" song but there's a ton of noise in the background.  These are 30-40 years old with a huge difference in how they sound with Ted Templeman producing the first 6 VH albums and FUCK.  Then you go listen to OU812 and 5150 and those have completely different sounds.   Sure, Donn Landee produced those two.

My point is that music, even from the same musicians just sounds different at different times.    

Posted

Engineering and production techniques are just so different now.  If you liked the sound of "back then" (whenever that was), then you might be turned off by what's going on now.  If you like what's going on now, you might be turned off by what was going on "back then".

There are certain differences that are almost inarguable, even if they don't necessarily imply a quality issue.  Analog vs digital.  A few tracks vs a near-infinite number of tracks.  Personally, I think digital sounds fine when used properly.  I think certain plugins sound fine.  As far as the near-infinite number of tracks go, that's an interesting topic.  "Back in the day" limited resources forced the artists and engineers and producers to make quick calls in the heat of the moment -- "should we erase this and try again or just keep it?".  There is some beauty in that.  It definitely unclogs the mixing process, BUT there is risk that the best take might have been erased.  Artists understood this and learned to compromise.  Now, it's almost impossible to mix some songs because there are just too many choices to weed through.  (At least it's hard for me.)

The other thing that I don't hear as much chatter about is signal chain choice along with things like mic placement.  Multiple flavors abound.  For awhile there was an obsession over a studio having a dozen or more fantastic mic preamps, EQs and compressors, multiple copies of a dozen great microphones, etc.  Ironically, a huge number of great records have been made by using the console preamps almost exclusively, especially if they are classics like Neves and APIs and even SSLs (hey to Paul W).  The same goes for relying on a couple of great compressors and maybe one or two great reverb units.  Shit, we've all heard HUGE classic hits that used a Shure SM57 for almost everything, a mic that is still available for $90.  That philosophy can be carried forward into the modern world, even in the mix regime.  I rely almost exclusively on two EQs -- one that comes with my DAW (Reaper), and one that emulates a Neve 1073 extremely well.  I use maybe two compressor plugins.  Two reverbs.  I just can't stand a shootout of a dozen plugins when I'm trying to mix a fucking song, AND I'm a nobody.

Back to then vs now -- a huge number of classic records were recorded mostly live in the studio.  There can be an organic vibe that results, and microphone bleed can actually help "glue" the sound.  Plenty of current artists still try to work that way; for instance, Wilco.  They are less concerned with "mistakes" making it to the mix than they are with art, and I think it works, at least for them.

Last thing:  we were listening to a Teddy Swims song in the car today.  I pointed out to my wife the overreliance on autotune, and said I felt he is a good enough singer not to need it.  THEN it hit part of the song where he started reaching up into his higher register and it was clearly NOT autotuned, and it sounded fantastic.  Two lines later, he's back in his mid-voice and the pitches are not only perfect but robotic.  Just fucking infuriating.

So, a lot of words with probably very little insight.  SOP for me.

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Posted
2 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Ironically, a huge number of great records have been made by using the console preamps almost exclusively, especially if they are classics like Neves and APIs and even SSLs (hey to Paul W). 

I was actually having this conversation a few weeks ago, maybe on Gear Page, maybe gearspace, can't remember, but either way, it used to be you recorded with "the" console. Which to me gives a unified sound. I am sympathetic to the argument that you can use different flavors for different things, but it's just not my preferred way of working. That said, I do have a few 1073s, 4 Daking, 4 API 512s myself, so I guess I'm not immune. IIRC Paul had a rack of outboard 1073s? 

 

Anyhoo, you forgot the greatest, the Trident A Range.

 

images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ-ST8fT4vUlILY2HDDQnm

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Posted
4 minutes ago, G650 said:

Anyhoo, you forgot the greatest, the Trident A Range.

Yeah, I got to work on one of those once.  Not as the engineer, just an old band of mine.  Holy shit that thing sounded great even when the "artist" didn't!

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Posted
7 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Yeah, I got to work on one of those once.  Not as the engineer, just an old band of mine.  Holy shit that thing sounded great even when the "artist" didn't!

It's funny, because this actually raises a point that is always in the back of my mind when these discussion invariably arise, that of what is pleasing to the ear. Fidelity has increased measurably, but that isn't what makes something pleasing necessarily. The way in which a lot of old gear distorted the sound was actually what made it so appealing (I realize you know this, this is just talking to the group), old Neve saturation, how tape knocked of the highs, etc.. I find delicious irony in the proliferation of saturation plugins to mimic the shortcomings of old gear. Of course the ease of working digital is a big selling point, but I still get a chuckle when I think about it.

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Posted

The thing I can appreciate as a math guy is the use of convolution processes to actually sample the sonic fingerprint of certain spaces, etc.  My ability to stick a band in Abbey Road Studios -- not just approximately, but accurately in a mathematic sense -- it blows my mind, and I understand the science.  It doesn't work in all worlds, it's not as good (yet) for say a guitar amp but it will get there.  Still gotta play well, still have to put the mic in the right spots on the kit and avoid shitty room acoustics printing to "tape", etc. but I believe the world is almost wide open for those who want to honor the past in a modern way.

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Posted
10 hours ago, G650 said:

I'm not sure where you are getting that from, mixing is at a higher level now than it's ever been.

When it's done well - sure.

It's consistently done very poorly. 

Posted
On 2/8/2025 at 5:42 AM, ztejas said:

I'm listening to Born to Run for maybe the 50th time and it continues to blow me away how amazing it sounds. 

I don't get what happened to this art. Is it too expensive? Does no one know how to do it? 

Please educate me. 

There are definitely a lot of great mix engineers out there.  It's not that.

My short answer:  Real music - like real life - has to have a lot of moment-to-moment variation in volume.  That's dynamic range:  the difference between the quiet instant and the loud moment (like a drum hit).  Great mixes have a lot of dynamic range.  

But here's the tension:  What you perceive as "volume" or "loudness" isn't the volume of those quick, transient moments (like a drum hit).  Instead, it's sort of the *average* across time of how much power/energy the music has.

So if you were scrolling through Apple Music or Spotify, and one song kept a lot more dynamic range than the rest, it would instantly sound really weak/soft/quiet compared to everything else.

An artist can make his song louder by giving *all* of the moments more volume/energy.  But when you do that, it's at the expense of dynamic range.  And here's the important thing:  music without dynamic range takes on a harsh, constant, buzz.  And squashing the dynamic range MUST introduce some level of distortion, where the sound waves get clipped or squared-off instead of their natural sine shape.  Music without dynamic range is fatiguing... like a chain saw.  This phenomenon is exactly why commercials are both 1) louder, and 2) sonically obnoxious and annoying.

Anyway, it's been hard to stop.  Since dynamic range compression (a big part of mastering) will change the way something sounds, mix engineers will preemptively squash their mixes before the mastering engineers even get it.  Mastering engineers complain that they can't "master" something that already has no dynamic range.  Artists who get their mix back and then audition it against all the modern music out there will complain that their song is way too quiet and needs to be louder.  

The problem has saturated pretty much every form of music consumption with the exception of vinyl.  Streaming services use algorithms to level off everyone's music to the same loudness, so even artists who fight to keep dynamic range in their mixes will get their shit SQUASHED in the final step of consumption, and there's nothing they can do about it.  Terrestrial radio is the worst.  Radio stations want to be LOUDER than the next one on the dial, so they add insane amounts of leveling that sounds absolutely awful.  

I would argue that all of this is one of the major reasons why music has fallen off the map of importance.  It's consumed in ways (no dynamic range) where it has no chance to deliver a powerful, transcendent experience with an emotional punch.  

Sorry for the long response.  I'm sure the engineers can take issue with my use of words like "power, volume, level, loudness" - those words each have very precise scientific definitions that aren't interchangeable... but you get the idea.  

This quick video gives a pretty good visual representation:

 

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Posted
24 minutes ago, Paul Wesley said:

There are definitely a lot of great mix engineers out there.  It's not that.

My short answer:  Real music - like real life - has to have a lot of moment-to-moment variation in volume.  That's dynamic range:  the difference between the quiet instant and the loud moment (like a drum hit).  Great mixes have a lot of dynamic range.  

But here's the tension:  What you perceive as "volume" or "loudness" isn't the volume of those quick, transient moments (like a drum hit).  Instead, it's sort of the *average* across time of how much power/energy the music has.

So if you were scrolling through Apple Music or Spotify, and one song kept a lot more dynamic range than the rest, it would instantly sound really weak/soft/quiet compared to everything else.

An artist can make his song louder by giving *all* of the moments more volume/energy.  But when you do that, it's at the expense of dynamic range.  And here's the important thing:  music without dynamic range takes on a harsh, constant, buzz.  And squashing the dynamic range MUST introduce some level of distortion, where the sound waves get clipped or squared-off instead of their natural sine shape.  Music without dynamic range is fatiguing... like a chain saw.  This phenomenon is exactly why commercials are both 1) louder, and 2) sonically obnoxious and annoying.

Anyway, it's been hard to stop.  Since dynamic range compression (a big part of mastering) will change the way something sounds, mix engineers will preemptively squash their mixes before the mastering engineers even get it.  Mastering engineers complain that they can't "master" something that already has no dynamic range.  Artists who get their mix back and then audition it against all the modern music out there will complain that their song is way too quiet and needs to be louder.  

The problem has saturated pretty much every form of music consumption with the exception of vinyl.  Streaming services use algorithms to level off everyone's music to the same loudness, so even artists who fight to keep dynamic range in their mixes will get their shit SQUASHED in the final step of consumption, and there's nothing they can do about it.  Terrestrial radio is the worst.  Radio stations want to be LOUDER than the next one on the dial, so they add insane amounts of leveling that sounds absolutely awful.  

I would argue that all of this is one of the major reasons why music has fallen off the map of importance.  It's consumed in ways (no dynamic range) where it has no chance to deliver a powerful, transcendent experience with an emotional punch.  

Sorry for the long response.  I'm sure the engineers can take issue with my use of words like "power, volume, level, loudness" - those words each have very precise scientific definitions that aren't interchangeable... but you get the idea.  

This quick video gives a pretty good visual representation:

 

And I think this is where digital rears its head.

In analog days, most recording engineers wouldn't have dreamed of doing this because "leveling up" would have required analog amplification by tube or transistor, which would in addition to the squashed sound, would introduce yet another layer of non-linearity and other distortion.

Nowadays, that can be done without such traditional amplification and the associated distortion.  But that doesn't mean it doesn't sound like shit.  And, digital signal processing is not without audible penalty, entirely, but it's not measured in terms like "THD," usually.

I think digital signal processing enables a lot of things that you "can" do, but probably "shouldn't" do most of the time.

 

Posted
9 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

And I think this is where digital rears its head.

In analog days, most recording engineers wouldn't have dreamed of doing this because "leveling up" would have required analog amplification by tube or transistor, which would in addition to the squashed sound, would introduce yet another layer of non-linearity and other distortion.

Nowadays, that can be done without such traditional amplification and the associated distortion.  But that doesn't mean it doesn't sound like shit.  And, digital signal processing is not without audible penalty, entirely, but it's not measured in terms like "THD," usually.

I think digital signal processing enables a lot of things that you "can" do, but probably "shouldn't" do most of the time.

 

 

Actually no. Digital has given us tools to mangle sound in easier ways, and different storage media (vinyl did have physical limitations) but as Paul alluded to, this has roots in terrestrial radio. Specifically in New York in the 70s. Multiband compression, which was invented by a guy named Mike Dorrough, allowed stations to really compress the sound without pumping, which is an artifact of heavy compression. Without getting to in the weeds, different frequencies have different energies, low frequency carrying more, so dividing the frequency band into smaller slices you can compression them more even and achieve a higher average level.

So why this is important is people perceive louder as better, for a time, due to Fletcher Munson. Like Paul said, a band will come back and cry if their song isn't as loud as the next guy because they perceive it as worse. Also why commercials are so loud. other side of the coin is its ultimately fatiguing.

The real start of this is by a guy named Larry Berger who was a program director at a NY station back in the day. He was the first to apply multiband compression to broadcast radio because he knew being louder would get listeners. And it just spiraled from there. The RHCP album Californication is really recognized as album that went over the top, and Death Magnetic as the loudest ever.

 

As I said though in the second post of the thread people have backed off it quite a bit, it's been pretty well recognized as not good. Not that its great now by any stretch, but at least the problem has been recognized. I honestly wasn't 100% sure where ztejas was going with this, but I suspected the brickwall limiting may have been it, which is why I brought that up initially.

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Posted

Another issue with early digital was the sampling rate, which was initially set at 44.1 kHz.  Nyquist theory demands that there be no signal content above half the sampling frequency, as otherwise spurious noise will alias back into the audible frequency range (20 Hz - 20 kHz).  Thus, extreme filtering had to be performed to remove content at or above 22.05 kHz, BUT not below 20 kHz.  There was just no room to work and those filters sounded like shit.  Bumping that sampling rate to 48 kHz helped a bit, and 96 kHz alleviated the problem.

CDs are still printed at a 44.1 Hz sampling rate, but oversampling and other tricks resulted in near elimination of those harsh EQ filters.  Still, they put "digital" in a bad light early on and led to all sorts of silly and incorrect explanations for bad sound (stairstepping, etc.).

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Posted
On 2/8/2025 at 4:04 PM, jimmyjazz said:

Engineering and production techniques are just so different now.  If you liked the sound of "back then" (whenever that was), then you might be turned off by what's going on now.  If you like what's going on now, you might be turned off by what was going on "back then".

There are certain differences that are almost inarguable, even if they don't necessarily imply a quality issue.  Analog vs digital.  A few tracks vs a near-infinite number of tracks.  Personally, I think digital sounds fine when used properly.  I think certain plugins sound fine.  As far as the near-infinite number of tracks go, that's an interesting topic.  "Back in the day" limited resources forced the artists and engineers and producers to make quick calls in the heat of the moment -- "should we erase this and try again or just keep it?".  There is some beauty in that.  It definitely unclogs the mixing process, BUT there is risk that the best take might have been erased.  Artists understood this and learned to compromise.  Now, it's almost impossible to mix some songs because there are just too many choices to weed through.  (At least it's hard for me.)

The other thing that I don't hear as much chatter about is signal chain choice along with things like mic placement.  Multiple flavors abound.  For awhile there was an obsession over a studio having a dozen or more fantastic mic preamps, EQs and compressors, multiple copies of a dozen great microphones, etc.  Ironically, a huge number of great records have been made by using the console preamps almost exclusively, especially if they are classics like Neves and APIs and even SSLs (hey to Paul W).  The same goes for relying on a couple of great compressors and maybe one or two great reverb units.  Shit, we've all heard HUGE classic hits that used a Shure SM57 for almost everything, a mic that is still available for $90.  That philosophy can be carried forward into the modern world, even in the mix regime.  I rely almost exclusively on two EQs -- one that comes with my DAW (Reaper), and one that emulates a Neve 1073 extremely well.  I use maybe two compressor plugins.  Two reverbs.  I just can't stand a shootout of a dozen plugins when I'm trying to mix a fucking song, AND I'm a nobody.

Back to then vs now -- a huge number of classic records were recorded mostly live in the studio.  There can be an organic vibe that results, and microphone bleed can actually help "glue" the sound.  Plenty of current artists still try to work that way; for instance, Wilco.  They are less concerned with "mistakes" making it to the mix than they are with art, and I think it works, at least for them.

Last thing:  we were listening to a Teddy Swims song in the car today.  I pointed out to my wife the overreliance on autotune, and said I felt he is a good enough singer not to need it.  THEN it hit part of the song where he started reaching up into his higher register and it was clearly NOT autotuned, and it sounded fantastic.  Two lines later, he's back in his mid-voice and the pitches are not only perfect but robotic.  Just fucking infuriating.

So, a lot of words with probably very little insight.  SOP for me.

I was watching a clip from one of the Alice in Chains documentaries the other day and Layne Staley talked about Dave Jerden trying "dozens" of mics before tracking the vocals for Facelift. Wish I could remember the one he said they settled on. 

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Posted
6 minutes ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

I was watching a clip from one of the Alice in Chains documentaries the other day and Layne Staley talked about Dave Jerden trying "dozens" of mics before tracking the vocals for Facelift. Wish I could remember the one he said they settled on. 

M49.

 

Dave Jerden just passed btw, was a great dude.

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Posted

they're dead, diego....

guys like lincoln mayorga, doug sax.

replaced by generation iphone / airpods.  (there's a bit of a time gap there, but....)

hence, .... el crappo sonico.

 

 

Posted
6 minutes ago, Litig8r said:

I watched the making of Dark Side of the Moon and thought to myself, how the fuck did they (or Alan)  think to do that///

The stories behind that album are terrifying.  Hundreds of bits of 2" tape stuck to the walls, waiting to be reassembled into a new arrangement/mix/etc.  Oh hell no.

Posted
16 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

The stories behind that album are terrifying.  Hundreds of bits of 2" tape stuck to the walls, waiting to be reassembled into a new arrangement/mix/etc.  Oh hell no.

By far my favorite bit from Dark Side is how they got the loop for Money correct. They had to setup 4 machines in a circle, and move them while cutting tape until it was the right length lol.

Posted (edited)

has there ever been a discussion of recording/engineering/mixing/mastering amongst white dudes that has not ultimately turned to alan parsons, chris thomas, and willy trauggot working with pink floyd?

On 2/8/2025 at 5:42 AM, ztejas said:

I'm listening to Born to Run for maybe the 50th time and it continues to blow me away how amazing it sounds. 

I don't get what happened to this art. Is it too expensive? Does no one know how to do it? 

Please educate me. 

in what manner do you consume music? how do you typically listen?

your premise is highly flawed. there is still an incredible amount of talent in the recording, mixing, and mastering engineering ranks. but it is very likely highly related to some of what paul was discussing, and a lot of what jimmyjazz was talking about regarding pre-digital preferences, a bunch to do with the love affair with compression, and likely something to do with the specific artists with whom you are engaged.

also, give some examples of songs you think are so inferior in their post-production.

Edited by sidis
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Posted
19 hours ago, Paul Wesley said:

There are definitely a lot of great mix engineers out there.  It's not that.

My short answer:  Real music - like real life - has to have a lot of moment-to-moment variation in volume.  That's dynamic range:  the difference between the quiet instant and the loud moment (like a drum hit).  Great mixes have a lot of dynamic range.  

But here's the tension:  What you perceive as "volume" or "loudness" isn't the volume of those quick, transient moments (like a drum hit).  Instead, it's sort of the *average* across time of how much power/energy the music has.

So if you were scrolling through Apple Music or Spotify, and one song kept a lot more dynamic range than the rest, it would instantly sound really weak/soft/quiet compared to everything else.

An artist can make his song louder by giving *all* of the moments more volume/energy.  But when you do that, it's at the expense of dynamic range.  And here's the important thing:  music without dynamic range takes on a harsh, constant, buzz.  And squashing the dynamic range MUST introduce some level of distortion, where the sound waves get clipped or squared-off instead of their natural sine shape.  Music without dynamic range is fatiguing... like a chain saw.  This phenomenon is exactly why commercials are both 1) louder, and 2) sonically obnoxious and annoying.

Anyway, it's been hard to stop.  Since dynamic range compression (a big part of mastering) will change the way something sounds, mix engineers will preemptively squash their mixes before the mastering engineers even get it.  Mastering engineers complain that they can't "master" something that already has no dynamic range.  Artists who get their mix back and then audition it against all the modern music out there will complain that their song is way too quiet and needs to be louder.  

The problem has saturated pretty much every form of music consumption with the exception of vinyl.  Streaming services use algorithms to level off everyone's music to the same loudness, so even artists who fight to keep dynamic range in their mixes will get their shit SQUASHED in the final step of consumption, and there's nothing they can do about it.  Terrestrial radio is the worst.  Radio stations want to be LOUDER than the next one on the dial, so they add insane amounts of leveling that sounds absolutely awful.  

I would argue that all of this is one of the major reasons why music has fallen off the map of importance.  It's consumed in ways (no dynamic range) where it has no chance to deliver a powerful, transcendent experience with an emotional punch.  

Sorry for the long response.  I'm sure the engineers can take issue with my use of words like "power, volume, level, loudness" - those words each have very precise scientific definitions that aren't interchangeable... but you get the idea.  

This quick video gives a pretty good visual representation:

 

There's another factor involved - the switch to digital. Analog noise is relatively constant, and is easily filtered out/ignored by our ears; digital quantization noise is a function of the waveform, and stands out more.

To make a (very) long story short, the quieter the audio, the more quantization noise you get, and it only takes a little bit of quantization noise to make things sound harsh and terrible.

Posted
9 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

Another issue with early digital was the sampling rate, which was initially set at 44.1 kHz.  Nyquist theory demands that there be no signal content above half the sampling frequency, as otherwise spurious noise will alias back into the audible frequency range (20 Hz - 20 kHz).  Thus, extreme filtering had to be performed to remove content at or above 22.05 kHz, BUT not below 20 kHz.  There was just no room to work and those filters sounded like shit.  Bumping that sampling rate to 48 kHz helped a bit, and 96 kHz alleviated the problem.

CDs are still printed at a 44.1 Hz sampling rate, but oversampling and other tricks resulted in near elimination of those harsh EQ filters.  Still, they put "digital" in a bad light early on and led to all sorts of silly and incorrect explanations for bad sound (stairstepping, etc.).

OR, add another 8 bits to your sample depth to 24. Nyquist doesn't even apply at 16 bits; the theorem assumes a continuous axis, and 16 bits is only 65,536 discrete points TOTAL -- again, assuming you've brickwalled the loudness.

Posted (edited)
32 minutes ago, sidis said:

has there ever been a discussion of recording/engineering/mixing/mastering amongst white dudes that has not ultimately turned to alan parsons, chris thomas, and willy trauggot working with pink floyd?

 

I lol'd.

 

I will say that even though PF is one of my top 4, I would not have steered it that way.

 

Edit: And going back to the premise of the thread I don't think Born to Run is a top example of a well mixed album, even among Bruce albums. FWIW

Edited by G650
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Posted
6 minutes ago, G650 said:

Edit: And going back to the premise of the thread I don't think Born to Run is a top example of a well mixed album, even among Bruce albums. FWIW

it didn't hurt that it featured a bunch of incredibly skilled musicians at the top of their games performing pretty high quality music.

but yes, it was certainly a production accomplishment. but to say that there are not albums in which the production and post-production are not of the same quality is silly.

i would recommend the immersive "in-side" mix version of i/o by peter gabriel from last year (which you will need binaural headphones to actually experience), dark matter by pearl jam, the dune 2 soundtrack by hz, bob clearmountain's work on the immersive release of roxy music's avalon as just a couple of examples.

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Posted
5 minutes ago, sidis said:

bob clearmountain

To me, Born in the USA and Tunnel of Love are head and shoulders above Born to Run sonically.

 

Bob>>>>>>Jimmy

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Posted
2 minutes ago, Rip76 said:

Cutting tape always fascinated me.

and if you talk to every mother fucker who actually did it (including the best of the best) if they want to go back to that and abandon digital, not one of them will give you a truthful yes.

the people that romanticize it today are the ones that were not in the room cutting and piecing it together at 3am.

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Posted (edited)
9 minutes ago, G650 said:

To me, Born in the USA and Tunnel of Love are head and shoulders above Born to Run sonically.

 

Bob>>>>>>Jimmy

bob is on mt. rushmore along with alan meyerson and....me.

Edited by sidis
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Posted
6 minutes ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:

You can go down one helluva YouTube wormhole of Bob Clearmountain at his MixThis! studio. Fascinating stuff.

my vintageking and sweetwater reps can tell and absolutely love it whenever i watch a few of those vids...

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Posted
12 hours ago, G650 said:

 

Actually no. Digital has given us tools to mangle sound in easier ways, and different storage media (vinyl did have physical limitations) but as Paul alluded to, this has roots in terrestrial radio. Specifically in New York in the 70s. Multiband compression, which was invented by a guy named Mike Dorrough, allowed stations to really compress the sound without pumping, which is an artifact of heavy compression. Without getting to in the weeds, different frequencies have different energies, low frequency carrying more, so dividing the frequency band into smaller slices you can compression them more even and achieve a higher average level.

So why this is important is people perceive louder as better, for a time, due to Fletcher Munson. Like Paul said, a band will come back and cry if their song isn't as loud as the next guy because they perceive it as worse. Also why commercials are so loud. other side of the coin is its ultimately fatiguing.

The real start of this is by a guy named Larry Berger who was a program director at a NY station back in the day. He was the first to apply multiband compression to broadcast radio because he knew being louder would get listeners. And it just spiraled from there. The RHCP album Californication is really recognized as album that went over the top, and Death Magnetic as the loudest ever.

 

As I said though in the second post of the thread people have backed off it quite a bit, it's been pretty well recognized as not good. Not that its great now by any stretch, but at least the problem has been recognized. I honestly wasn't 100% sure where ztejas was going with this, but I suspected the brickwall limiting may have been it, which is why I brought that up initially.

Was this Rubin's idea?   That sounds waaaay above his usual interest.

 

And by "Rubin", I mean this guy:

RickRubinSept09.jpg

 

Not this guy: 

 

dave-madden-300-913fd03e9c444e10a161e133

 

Posted
7 minutes ago, Gil Bang said:

Was this Rubin's idea?   That sounds waaaay above his usual interest.

 

And by "Rubin", I mean this guy:

RickRubinSept09.jpg

 

Not this guy: 

 

dave-madden-300-913fd03e9c444e10a161e133

 

Partly, yes. It was compressed heavily during tracking as well, before it ever got to mastering. A guy named Vlado Meller mastered the original release, he was known as a loudness savant. It was eventually remixed and remastered about 10 years ago.

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