Death Magnetic sounds better on Guitar Hero than CD!!!

[Traditional_Ale]

Lol...stupid Metallica...

According to mastering engineer Ian Shepherd, Metallica's new Death Magnetic album has a serious sonic problem: it has been compressed (in the audio sense of the word, not the file size sense) just about as much as it's possible to compress audio.

...audiophiles would be better off recording the songs from the videogame than buying the album because the Guitar Hero version has far more dynamic range than the hyper-compressed CD version.

http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/09/...etallicas.html

[missdpuck]

Hmm that's why it sounds alot like their cassettes from a looooong time ago.......Hi Trad.

[habernac]

the petition to have it remastered:

http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/...-magnetic.html

[Russic]

I think I read something about somebody blaming ipod headphones for the downgrade in cd sound.

[Azure]

Meh, it sounds good on CD too.

[habernac]

Originally Posted by Azure

Meh, it sounds good on CD too.

not the one I bought.

[Inferno]

Originally Posted by Azure

Meh, it sounds good on CD too.

Yep, I have the GH3 version and will admit it sounds cleaner but how it sounds on CD is nothing I'm going to complain about. Haters will cream their pants over it though cause they need any type of fuel they can get to add to the fire.

[Ozy_Flame]

I got the CD off torrent; it sounds great. What's the freakin' mystery?

[habernac]

Originally Posted by Inferno

Yep, I have the GH3 version and will admit it sounds cleaner but how it sounds on CD is nothing I'm going to complain about. Haters will cream their pants over it though cause they need any type of fuel they can get to add to the fire.

why am I a "hater" when I'm disappointed I didn't get a quality product?

[Inferno]

Originally Posted by habernac

why am I a "hater" when I'm disappointed I didn't get a quality product?

I'm not calling you a hater. I'm just saying that haters will eat something like this up cause the album isnt the flop they thought it would be.

[Traditional_Ale]

Originally Posted by Inferno

Yep, I have the GH3 version and will admit it sounds cleaner but how it sounds on CD is nothing I'm going to complain about.

Why not? It sounds like crap.

Haters will cream their pants over it though cause they need any type of fuel they can get to add to the fire.

And lovers will be willfully blind.

[Itse]

Death Magnetic is mostly pretty boring to listen to, so it's nice that at least Metallica found some way to attract attention. It's such a shame they can't seem to produce a single song worth listening to these days, they still have a sound that's pretty kickass. (It wouldn't also hurt if their albums were mixed properly.)

[Inferno]

Originally Posted by Traditional_Ale

Why not? It sounds like crap.

Cause I dont find anything wrong with it ok. I guess I'm just not as picky as you are about how an album is mixed.

And lovers will be willfully blind.

It's got nothing to do with being blind. Hell, there's people who said they would never listen to Metallica ever again after the black album that like it. I wanted them to go back to their roots and bring back their 80s sound without completely copying it and that's what they did so I'm happy.

[Traditional_Ale]

Originally Posted by Inferno

Cause I dont find anything wrong with it ok. I guess I'm just not as picky as you are about how an album is mixed.

Fair enough. Its just a lot of people have made comments "about the mix" who normally couldn't hear the difference between Beethoven and a food processor.

It's got nothing to do with being blind. Hell, there's people who said they would never listen to Metallica ever again after the black album that like it. I wanted them to go back to their roots and bring back their 80s sound without completely copying it and that's what they did so I'm happy.

The problem I have with Metallica is that at one time they seemed to have integrity and passion. Now they have loads of money and no will. Thats why there will never be another Lightning or Puppets. They can't even perform to the proficiency level of S&M anymore.

Not even being there for the mixing process shows how lazy they have become. If the albums and music meant anything to them anymore, they'd care a little more than that I think.

Just my two coppers.

[photon]

I've read that this is a pretty pervasive thing in the music industry right now, loudness wars or something. So this isn't that unique, just odd that they'd have a different mix in GH.

I'm not a huge Metallica fan so I don't care about this particular instance, but I can clearly hear the difference in this and have heard other songs with similar mixing to produce the maximum perceived loudness at the expense of definition or clarity, and I think it sucks.

[FanIn80]

I bought the CD, but the only place I can listen to it is in my car. My car deck is a cheap factory POS (just like the speakers), so it masks everything just fine.

My iPod, iPhone, iMac, Apple TV... my headphones, my living room speakers, my computer speakers... can't listen to it. It's complete garbage. Every song makes my speakers sound like they're blown.


So... naturally... even though I bought the CD, I still had to download a bittorrented, re-mastered copy of it that I could listen to on real speakers.

How ironic is that? Doubly so, knowing that it's Metallica.

(...and yeah, I'm old-school. I don't own the black album or anything they've done since then... except for Death Magnetic. I love the album, and it's sitting on my shelf right next to Kill Em All, Lightning, Puppets and Justice.)

[RougeUnderoos]

Originally Posted by photon

I've read that this is a pretty pervasive thing in the music industry right now, loudness wars or something. So this isn't that unique, just odd that they'd have a different mix in GH.

I'm not a huge Metallica fan so I don't care about this particular instance, but I can clearly hear the difference in this and have heard other songs with similar mixing to produce the maximum perceived loudness at the expense of definition or clarity, and I think it sucks.

Weird. Seems to me that "loudness" is going to be defined by the listener anyway, so you'd want it to sound good at any level. Can anyone explain why they would do this?

It sounds like a strategy Spinal Tap would use.

[Traditional_Ale]

Originally Posted by RougeUnderoos

Weird. Seems to me that "loudness" is going to be defined by the listener anyway, so you'd want it to sound good at any level. Can anyone explain why they would do this?

Metal acts want their album to "bang the hardest" which is achieved by reducing the dynamic range of the album. This means that wether all the instruments are playing together at once, or one lone instrument, there will be very little difference in the dB-SPL (sound pressure level) of what is coming out of your speakers.

Led Zeppelin rule because their albums have as much dynamic range as orchestra music. Stairway to Heaven would not be as cool if the intro guitar and flute came right out of the speaker front and center, so when Bonham finally enters on drums there is no impact (because we've already been at that SPL for 5 minutes by then...).

Actually, come to think of it, Zeppelin just does not work if it was produced using todays asthetics.

Maybe thats why most new recordings suck ass, because bands are not writing their songs to use changes in dynamics as a musical device. Its not more important to bang the hardest. Percieved bang would be much greater if the album was allowed to breathe/grow/change as opposed to just going BBBBBBBLLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH through each track.

[missdpuck]

When they play it on the system at the gym it's terrible. On my walkman it's fine. Everything else they play at the gym sounds fine...

[jammies]

Originally Posted by RougeUnderoos

Weird. Seems to me that "loudness" is going to be defined by the listener anyway, so you'd want it to sound good at any level. Can anyone explain why they would do this?

The original reason was so that singles on the radio would stand out; compression makes the music sound louder, and louder is perceived by the unsophisticated ear as "better", so if Artist A's songs were compressed more than Artist B, then Artist A had a built-in advantage. Then some engineers and producers figured out that on lo-fi equipment (like, for an example, old-school Walkmans or the newfangled iPod) compression added to the perceived quality of the music as well, and entire albums were compressed to make them sound better, and the process repeated itself a few times until today almost every mainstream artist's music is squished down into the loudest and flattest form possible, despite this sounding like absolute crap.

On older analog equipment over-compression just added a bit of fuzz or even (desirable) warmth to the sound, whereas too much modern digital compression causes clipping, which is cutting off the waveform of the sound by pushing its peak past 0 db - very very bad. This is separate from the issue of the highly compressed and "flat" sound; not only do many modern albums keep nearly the same level of sound throughout, but they also have clipping issues which make them, in my opinion, unlistenable.

To see what the effect is like, take an old 60's album (preferably one with decent production like the Beatles, but not remastered if you want to get the full effect), play a couple songs and crank the volume to a level you think is reasonably loud but not painfully so. Then, take an album like the last Rush one, or this new Metallica, or really anything pop, rock or rap, and play at the same volume level. You should immediately notice that it seems MUCH louder and in your face.

This is supposedly "good", but since one of the tools used in making interesting music is using both soft and loud (not just loud and louder), it is, in my opinion, badly misused. I personally have experimented with using no compression when recording songs, but haven't even been able to wean myself off it despite knowing better; now that a couple decades have gone by with this sound being the norm, other approaches sound strange and weak to my ear.

PS - this is also what is done with commericials on TV; they are highly compressed in post-production so that when played, they seem to jump out at you much louder than the program you are watching.