Worst recorded/Mastered Albums
Nov 27, 2010 at 8:40 PM Post #61 of 125
I bought a copy of Chris Duarte Group's Texas Sugar Strat Magik even though I saw plenty of folks say that it was poorly recorded.  I thought..."How bad could it be?" 
 
REALLY bad.  
mad.gif

 
Such a shame because the music itself is excellent....if you can hear it through the crappiness.
 
Nov 27, 2010 at 9:35 PM Post #62 of 125

Quote:
I bought a copy of Chris Duarte Group's Texas Sugar Strat Magik even though I saw plenty of folks say that it was poorly recorded.  I thought..."How bad could it be?" 
 
REALLY bad.  
mad.gif

 
Such a shame because the music itself is excellent....if you can hear it through the crappiness.


Didn't He switch labels and producers? That's a shame because he does sound unreal live, AND LOUD!!
 
 
Nov 27, 2010 at 10:08 PM Post #63 of 125
God, I hope so, tube.  I haven't heard any of his other albums yet but there's no excuse for even a debut indie album to sound like TSSM.  I think even Nirvana's Bleach sounds miles better and it cost $600 or something like that.
 
Sep 8, 2012 at 12:00 AM Post #64 of 125
Quote:
RHCP - Californication. Poster child of poster children.

That gets a +1 from me.
 
It's a shame, really, since I actually like RHCP, and Californication is one of my favourite albums. The songs are good on the whole, while Scar Tissue and the eponymous song Californication are among my all-time favourite rock songs.
 
Ever since becoming obsessed with hi-fi audio though, I've found that I've been listening to this album less and less. I wish they'd come out with a remastered version one of these days :/
 
Sep 9, 2012 at 2:42 PM Post #65 of 125
ANDREW W.K. - I Get Wet cd
 
i even put it in my sound editing program and it pretty much stays in the red
ya, it may be loud and stuff, but it's like OUCH! TURN IT OFF!!
glad when i saw him live it wasn't like that or else i would've walked out
 
Sep 10, 2012 at 12:25 AM Post #68 of 125
Quote:
Deathspell Omega's Drought ep is horribly mastered. Distorts like nothing else I have ever heard.

I hear you, Paracletus was similarly just as clipped and brickwalled. Really annoying.
 
I could show you a plethora of albums that suffer from the same, being a metalhead who puts a huge stake on sound quality. The new Evoken was absolutely ruined.
 
Oct 10, 2012 at 3:13 AM Post #71 of 125
what's with all the death magnetic hate?
 
...And Justice For All is one of the best metal albums ever recorded (my personal favorite metal album ever)...except it has one of the worst recordings ever.  if justice had even half the mastering of death magnetic than more people would likely agree with my opinion of the album :)
 
Oct 12, 2012 at 10:56 AM Post #72 of 125
Quote:
what's with all the death magnetic hate?
 
...And Justice For All is one of the best metal albums ever recorded (my personal favorite metal album ever)...except it has one of the worst recordings ever.  if justice had even half the mastering of death magnetic than more people would likely agree with my opinion of the album :)

 
DM is an incredibly loud, distorted mess.  I guess they decided to dial the volume to 11.  The Guitar Heroes rip of DM sounds a lot better.  
 
Oct 12, 2012 at 1:01 PM Post #73 of 125
Almost any track from the Brian Jonestown Massacre sounds like it was recorded in a modern studio, then re-recorded on a $18 Radio Shack cassette recorder before being mastered.  Like the music, but the phony lo-fi sound is awful.  Nelly Furtado has a brilliant first album, but in a foreshadowing of the awful pop mess she's become--the producer turned the compression up to "11".
 
Oct 19, 2012 at 8:50 AM Post #74 of 125
Staind: Break The Cycle
 
May 12, 2013 at 12:52 PM Post #75 of 125
The most disappointing album I have in terms of sound quality is Jimi Hendrix's First Rays Of The New Rising Sun. For those who don't know, this was released (very) posthumously in 1997 but is what Hendrix was working on when he died in 1970. All the tracks on it had already appeared on different posthumous compilations but finally we were going to get, as close as possible, what the artist actually intended.

But it sounds worse than anything Jimi Hendrix put his name to in his lifetime. His performances are brilliant but the remaster is so bad it beggars belief.

Example: the first track "Freedom"

Here's the Audacity waveform from the album The Cry of Love, an album released in 1971 and very nicely produced. This is from a Japanese Polydor CD from 1989. The 80s Japanese CDs were remastered for CD from original masters.



and the exact same performance remastered, from the CD First Rays..
Red means clipping is detected. It isn't always audible clipping, so a barrage of red isn't necessarily a showstopper.



Unfortunately that clipping is not some inaudible artefact or an aberration that only shows in measurements or graphs. It's horribly audible. At about second 7.5 your right speaker/'phone spits out a burst of distortion that was never present in the performance or earlier LPs or CDs. The entire album is mastered the same way, as are most (maybe all?) of the Experience Hendrix LLC remasters (Experience Hendrix LLC are the owners of most of Jimi Hendrix's legacy).

These are not ripping or encoding artefacts (I wish they were). The above waveforms are from flacs from the CDs. When I play the CDs in a normal home CD player it's the same. The 1997 remastered tracks are STUPIDLYLOUD and the sound distorts.

There are several tragedies here:

I spent my own good money on this bad experience. Ouch.

The work of a truly brilliant performer and innovator, widely held to be a genius, is being butchered and misrepresented. By the time Experience Hendrix have finished their mission to monetize ..err..remaster the entire Jimi Hendrix catalogue it will be impossible to buy new any official Jimi Hendrix album that doesn't sound like this. It will all be much worse than the LPs you could buy in Hendrix's lifetime or the Polydor CDs from the late 80s (especially the Japanese market remasters).

One depressing result of this is already apparent: I coudn't find even one professional reviewer or music journalist who identified that the ugly distortion is not part of the music! There are a handful of customer reviewers on amazon and similar who notice (because they also have the originals) but they are in a minority. Most people who buy Hendrix's albums don't know how they ought to sound and what is worse is that they may never get the chance to find out.

s_h1t != shinola

and that's why I made this album my contribution to "Worst recorded/Mastered Albums"
 

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