You may think some sound good, but chances are they have been butchered & destroyed.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video should be worth more.

For your viewing pleasure;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

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I'm not sure, But I also think he's hinting at the old Tube Vs IC war. But mostly, when I listen to a lot of the current stuff that mainstream is shoving down my ears. he's hit the nail on the head. This loudness is what drives the fatigue when listening for long periods of time.

I had a dream about Miles Davis and Johnny Coltrane. They are playing with Charlie Parker and being recorder with todays fantastic gear and those eternally great Ribbon mics and Tubey preamps. Bob Thiele is sitting behind a mackie board.

Another good read;
http://www.austin360.com/music/conte...9/28cover.html

I have been complaining about this for years. I do some mastering for a small recording studio and I was getting complaints from artists that it wasn't LOUD enough. They were doing just what the video shows. They would look at a track recorded by a major artist and compare it to theirs and ask why the waveform was so empty. I said it's called dynamic range and it's what music really sounds like. They all want it at it's loudest. It sounds like crap!!!
I always liked the production quality of Def Leppard. Then they released Euphoria and it sounded like garbage. Completely compressed. You couldn't do this with vinyl, it is definitely a product of the digital age.
New isn't always better.
Just my opinion.

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I def agree, but some new music embraces the upper limits of what digital can do, such as music dvd's and SACD. I listen to alot of electronic/ambient music from small labels, and usually their music sounds very pure and not "sutdio-ized" as I call it. I think what we are seeing is a product of the "pop age" and corporate music.

They have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static."

Sounds like Bob is listening to his own music.


Mitch

A friend of mine has quite a stereo--Audio Research tube amps and Magnaplanar speakers. CDs sound good through this system but vinyl blows digital away. I don't know the technical reasons for this but listening is believing. I have been to audio shops and have heard various Theta, Krell, you name it set ups. I am suppose to be dazzled but I never am. Audiophiles have been saying this since digital came out and over twenty years later it is still true. I am not saying that there are not some really good sounding digital music but analogue still wins. This is no rant as all my own music is on CD or MP3.

I won't say ALL new stuff is bad. I have many cd's that sound great. Like anything else a lot has to do on the content. Some music lends itself to this new way. I used the Def Leppard reference because they have music from both
"era's" of medium we can compare against each other.
A lot depends on the producer and mastering engineer as well. If the talent has too much of a say, sometimes the end result can suffer.

Great stuff. Thanks everyone. The example on youtube of that McCartney song was pretty amazing. I'm brand new to the high-end sound thing, but dang was that eye-opening.

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Any mainstream crap will have these problems, along with some newer CDs and really popular artists. Older CDs and many analog to digital CDs do not suffer from overgaining the CDs causing horrible dynamics. if you use EAC you can see exactly what CDs suffer from this by reading each track's peak levels.

I had this published in May of last year at Stylus; http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articl...nd-forever.htm

That must be why im in love with the drum track from that ultrasone cd. [ http://www.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=209012 ]

it looks like this

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SickMouthy, I just wonder how do your Sennheiser HD595 sound on your Corda Headfive amp....isn't it too warm?

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That depends how warm you like things! The 595s are for when I want to lay back and relax, and MS-1s are for when I want to sit up.

Nice pic of Audacity! That's a cool program, even running in Windows.

I kind of disagree with some of this guys. Compression is as old as the hills, and was used on FM radio way, way back.

I can recall always reading the record reviews in High Fidelity magazine - strictly because they always included a second measure of "recording quality." More often than not, it had to do with compression or the lack of it - resulting in a good quality LP.

The quality of the vinyl pressing sometimes entered into it, but most of the time, that wasn't the problem. The original tape had much more quality than the production versions, but the degradation was not completely because of copying. There was a conscious effort by some to compress it into a smaller range of frequencies in the post-processing work.

Speeding up the mastering needle, copying to another tape and pushing it well into/over saturation were some of the tricks, I believe. Certainly, these days it's much easier - therefore, it happens more often.