Recording quality? - Page 3

Quote:

Originally Posted by jaddie 

Prod
Producers are not generally audiophiles, and neither are musicians. If their record comes up in rotation on the radio, in background music in a bar, in a venue with a DJ, or on somebody's iPod they want it as loud or louder than the previous song. It's partly a ego thing, partly marketing, and complete fallacy. Each of those play situations has a final volume control run by a human that will undo your best loud mastering if it seems too loud. Radio play is even worse because stations have their own, quite aggressive, audio processing that not only squashes everything to death but adds to the distortion present in a loud master. It's all over zealous fanaticism, and part of life in audio. Google "loudness war".

So true!

Quote:

Originally Posted by jiminy 

When I first got fairly good headphones it made quite a lot of my music sound boring, queen, Metallica, portishead, nivarna to name but a few don't sound as good as they should.

Nirvana's recordings are actually VERY dynamic. Too bad the mastering ruined them.

Not all of Nirvana's stuff is dynamic, and the newest remastered releases are terrible.

http://www.dr.loudness-war.info/index.php?search_artist=Nirvana&search_album=

Quote:

Originally Posted by jiminy 

I don't know the differance between a bad recording and bad mastering, could you explain?
I do know that when listening on headphones, I listen to what sounds good throught them but not what I would prefer to listen to.

Thanks for asking that, it had just struck me that I don't know the difference myself.

Probably, the bad recording has a lot of distortions/artifacts, but bad mastering has bad dynamics?

Also, while we're in this subject, is Adele's album 21 badly recorded or badly mastered? Her voice sounded somewhat detached than the rest of the track.

Quote:

Originally Posted by penmarker 

Thanks for asking that, it had just struck me that I don't know the difference myself.

 

Probably, the bad recording has a lot of distortions/artifacts, but bad mastering has bad dynamics?

Also, while we're in this subject, is Adele's album 21 badly recorded or badly mastered? Her voice sounded somewhat detached than the rest of the track.

A good recording would present to the listener a believable and acceptable sonic reality, even though it may be completely fabricated.  It would be a presentation that would convey the performance without distraction.  A bad recording would contain qualities that would call attention to the fact that it is a recording and not a believable reality, things like distortions, noises, or unnatural tambre.  

A master is also a recording, so "bad mastering" is simply a attempt to assign responsibility to the mastering stage for the detracting characteristics.  That assignment may or may not be valid, distortions can happen anywhere between mic and release copy, and it's pretty hard if not impossible to tell where to put the blame.

Quote:

Originally Posted by LFF 

Quote:

Originally Posted by khaos974 

 

Have you ever gotten mixes/recordings that were so bad that you went "no amount of mastering can save that, re-record and redo the mix please!".

Yes...

 

Aside from some really bad recordings made by amateurs, I had one audiophile from Japan request I remaster his copy of "Death Magnetic". When I told him there was NO fixing it, he then asked about "Californication".

I feel your pain, Californication and Death Magnetic?

BUt more seriously, for records you are asked to master (and not re-master), how often do you have wonder if the guy who mixed had an idea of sound quality?

For me it depends...

- on the kind of quality issue: pop & crackle, thin-sounding old recording etc. I can live with (ex.: Django Reinhardt) Brickwalled recordings, hardly. And while DR is not the be-all and end-all, a quick check at the DR Database or running the checker will give me a pretty good indication how it will sound to me during actual listening....

- on the level of the quality issue: for example a 7-8 on the DR range doesn't bother me, I'll tolerate even 6 or so if I like the music, but after that... For some vinyl rips, if the person didn't clean the record and didn't bother with even a basic de-crackle, it can get pretty distracting.

- on how much I like the music... duh. But actually I find that "old" CDs I bought during my youth (which coincided with its beginnings) sound better now (on the fanciest equipment I have owned since those days) than most modern "remasters" : p

A specific example of going over the edge: I quite like Florence + The Machine ever since a friend made me discover Lungs at that time. Now her style has a bit of bombast, and the album wasn't the greatest in terms of DR. But it was perfectly OK, wouldn't stop me from listening to it many times.

Then Ceremonials came out, was looking forward to it, listened to it and thought yeesh. But I really wanted to like it and gave it a couple more listens. And haven't listened to it since then apart from rarely 1-2 songs. I cannot bring myself to listen to the whole album... it's already all bombast without the variation present in Lungs, but then the total brickwall mastering took it far over the edge, intentional or not. Interestingly, even "non-audiphile" reviewers who liked it commented on how some of it was almost too much for prolonged listening (without framing it in terms of another Loudness War victim)

In a similar vein, NZ singer Kimbra's somewhat over-produced studio album is actually borderline OK, but some of the "live" in-studio tracks (and an outdoor one) so much more compliment her talent that I'll take the compressed audio extracted from the HD YouTube vids (and background noise), warts and all, any day over the same songs on the lossless CD-rip...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nirvana Woman 

How about narrow sound stage, and a total lack of definition and articulation on instruments?

 

That's not sarcasm, by the way... i seriously wonder sometimes when stuff sounds bad whether I just have some kind of software setting wrong or if stuff is seriously that bad-sounding. It happens to me with so many EDM mixes... you're enjoying a track, great instrument separation and a bass that you can feel as well as hear clearly... and then it mixes into something aweful and you feel the need to sort of zone out for the next five minutes...

The problem with (deep) house music is that most commercial releases aren't really that great... You find the best music by listening to mixes compiled by dj's who share your taste.

Some of them consistently only seem to publish (free!) mixes that are technically great sounding... others not so much. It's really weird to me how that can be so variable.

I wondered the same about deep house abd EDM in general.
 Some are amazing and others I'm like "WTF".

I'm a noob when it comes to audio production....I always assumed the musicians and producers would do the mastering themselves or learned the craft well as an amatuer.

BTW, where do these producers come from? Do some believe people like these compressed, messed up records...or perhaps they actually do? Wouldn't surprised me if they ran some double blind test and people liked them.

I remember on Reddit a radio exec and former DJ explained why radio sucked; marketing research indicated the only market listening and worth advertising to was 30-40 year old soccer moms shuttling kids around. Hence the repetitive hits to keep them locked on one dial. The market asked for crappy radio more or less.