Today, BBC 4 Radio in the UK aired a report by Joel Moors on the Consumer Affairs’ programme – You and Yours.
The show interviewed some Metallica fans and also Mastering Engineer Ian Shepherd [Visit Blog]
Joel and Ian dicussed the fundamental problems on the Death Magnetic CD and how it affects the music when played, and why this is done on the CD and not on the version of the album downloaded via the Guitar Hero III Game on the Playstation 3 & XBox 360 consoles, including a direct comparison between the CD version and the GHIII version.
Justice For Audio would like to thank Joel for picking up on the issue and contacting us prior to the programme looking for the views of real metallica fans about the CD.
For an MP3 recording of the report – Grab It Here and for the youtube videos, just press play on each part below.
Part One
Part Two
Great segment. They haven’t mentioned the reason much of this happens is to maintain a loud sound when the track is converted to mp3 for a portable device.
That may be an excuse that gets proffered now, but the practice has been ongoing for a lot longer than the iTunes store (prior to which download sales were but a blip and hence not an issue). If anything, the kickstarter was an attempt to get music to sound punchier on the radio where dynamic range is quite narrow.
It’s not even a valid excuse for radio. Crushing the dynamics of tracks to get a greater percieved loudness is completely unneccessary for radio broadcast – the reason being that radio has it’s own inbuilt compressors, which will raise or lower the peaks and lows of the source-sound automatically, according to the settings of the station in question. In fact, compressing an original recording to be entirely at peak level for the whole track will actually result in the music coming out QUIETER on the radio, as the stations processors will treat the song as one big maximum-peak, and therefore automatically adjust it to broadcast at a LOWER volume than it would be if it were mastered with natural dynamics. Plus it will also sound horribly flat and distorted.