Michael Tibes said:
The mastering trend of the last decade or even longer seems to be driven by the idea to create the ultimate listening experience at moderate levels on mediocre equipment - like laptops or kitchen speakers.
Yes, that's exactly it.
Also a lot of music playing devices have a limit in the output like the European iPod, so if the sound of the file is not squashed you barely have a decent volume. I'm a professional Engineer and I care, so I bought and external headphone preamp so I could have the volume I want, but a normal consumer will just ditch in a pinch an album that he can't hear on the iPod while listening on headphones on a train.
The Market doesn't care about quality, and to be honest unfortunately most people don't care, they want more songs, fast streaming, less cost, the smallest ever speakers.
It's all wrong for an enjoyable listening experience but we have to be real the people that care like us are a minority.
Michael Tibes said:
Anyway, recording digitally and mixing in DAWs certainly doesn't make the sound more enjoyable either...
Sorry that's simply not true.
Recording Digitally and Mixing in the DAW is not inferior to any other method, but can be superior in a lot of different aspects.
As always will depend on how it's used and the person that is behind the wheel.
Listen to any Tchad Blake mixed record of the last 8 years.
It has also nothing to do with the ear fatigue you get from Over-Limited Squashed music, mp3, listening from tiny frequency limited speakers.
Over the years I recorded to tape and to digital, I mixed with an analog console or in the DAW, the workflow of course is different but I can achieve the same results in terms of the final sound quality, none is better than the other.
Well with Tape what you put in is rarely what comes out, so that can be good or bad depending on the situation.
But I never found Mixing in the DAW making my mixes more fatinguing than mixing in the SSL console,
what I found is that after mastering and when people listen them on laptop speakers everything is fatiguing.
Seeker said:
There is of course mangling that goes on in mastering, but these days most of the volume is coming from parallel compression during mixing.
Not really, parallel compression is used for punch, tone, timbre and not for volume.
As the peaks already reached 0dbs digital a long time ago, volume is achieved only 1 way, by Limiting of some sort.
Normally achieved by the use of different methods of Limiting and not resorting to just one limiter.
Clipping the AD input converters and the use of a chain of several Brickwall Lookahead Limiters (instead of just having one doing all the work) is commonly used.
Mastering Engineers are not the culprits normally, Musicians, Bands, Record Labels, Radio Producers are always demanding that, it's not new , people are trying to have their record louder than their neighbour for the last 50 years, although nowadays it's just over the top.
Like I said before, it's important to realize that we and other people that care are a minority worldwide, the majority doesn't care.
General consumers don't research or just don't mind, they react on trends and marketing hype, like the general ideia that was sold to them at the present time that Vinyl sounds better, it's good for record labels as their revenues decreased so much they had to find ways other ways to profit, now they are able to re-realease Vinyls of the old catalog, also CDs are dead so let's convince them they have to buy the Vinyl.
What a general consumer that says "Vinyl sounds better" will never do is a listening test. They will never compare.
They also don't know is that most Vinyl pressing places nowadays use inferior materials for the compound.
They don't know that mastering to vinyl is not really done, or it's done without cutting manually the master.
Also test pressings are not really done nowadays because of cost saving and because everything is made in an hurry and rushed.
They don't know that although they bought the expensive 180gram Vinyl that the information that was printed there was not prepared for the format, or it was not cut into the format properly, or that the extra 60grams of are just some cheap plastic that was mixed in the compound to give weight.
It's a business, it's entertainment they look for profit.
It's an Art for us we look for quality.
Seeker said:
For what its worth... Andrew Scheps mixed both the chili peppers and the metalica albums you're referring too, and hes said many times he does not check on anything other than his main speakers, he mixed it that way because he liked it like that....
Personally, its over the line for me, but I do love some of the sounds that are achievable with modern mixing techniques... I just think it tends to go a bit too far....
Yes I like old technics/tools, and also like you I like modern technics/tools. For me it's just more tools being it old or new, digital or analog.
I also have to be honest, for some types of music, I like it with a degree of limiting, but not to the level of most records nowadays.
It's a completely different thing you achieve when the limiter threshold is set so that recovers back to zero and when it's pushed is a way it never really recovers, everything gets squashed and no dynamics are left.
I don't think the over-limiting in the Metallica's Death Magnetic album was due to Andrew Scheps.
The controversy on that album came when people started to listen to the song in the Guitar Hero game because they found it sounded better than the Album version. The difference was that the Guitar hero song was not mastered, or not mastered in the same way as the Album tracks.
But the Andrew Scheps mix is the same, the only difference was mastering.
Once again I really think that could have been a request from the band and not a mastering decision.