Asking a favor

[trains are bad]

I just ripped my freshly aquired CD and one of the songs I immediately listened to, it sounds like the vocals are distorting unpleasantly. It's as if a buzz is riding on the vocals.

I'm not sure if this caused by poor recording/mastering, my equipment, or if it's deliberate, but it sounds terrible to me. An illicit mp3 download exhibited the dirt but I was hoping it wouldn't be on the CD.

Would someone with good ears care to listen and tell me what it sounds like to them? It could be merely deliberate but I'd like to know what you think. If you happen to have it, the track is All Heads Down by Hot Water Music. It's especially irritating at :40 and 2:11.

 

[ricardo diaz]

The iTunes music store doesn't have any distortion from what I can hear.


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But I'm listening to it straight out of my laptop's speakers.

 

[hciman77]

In general terms I have found an alarming amount of distortion on some relatively recently released CDS. My "The Doors" CD has tons of distortion as does "Strange Days" - similarly some Led Zeppelin CDs have a lot of distortion. I sometimes have a sort of existential panic about iffy kit but unless your setup is seriously dodgy i.e a 1970s Rigonda radiogram I would be inclined to put most of it down to recording/mastering/pressing.

 

[trains are bad]

Quote:

But I'm listening to it straight out of my laptop's speakers.

It's something you wouldn't be able to hear out of laptop speakers.

I have flac->Total bithead->HF-1s and turn it up pretty loud to hear it.

Only if you really listen to it can you hear it, but then it bugs the crap out of you because you know it's there.

 

[ricardo diaz]

Give me your setup and I'll confirm it for you.

 

[Jahn]

You know what made me sad? Listening to Neutral Milk Hotel because folks said a lot of good things about it, so I downloaded a few tracks from eMusic - and they were recorded horribly - I couldn't listen to anything off the newest album (The aeroplane over the sea one). So I went to the library and borrowed that CD. Same deal on the CD, it's just mastered horribly. That's a darn shame. That's the only suggestion from the 2005 indie pop list in the music subforum that was like that tho - all the rest was recorded just fine, like Spoon and The New Pornographers and The Decemberists and Arcade Fire, etc.

 

[Teerawit]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jahn You know what made me sad? Listening to Neutral Milk Hotel because folks said a lot of good things about it, so I downloaded a few tracks from eMusic - and they were recorded horribly - I couldn't listen to anything off the newest album (The aeroplane over the sea one). So I went to the library and borrowed that CD. Same deal on the CD, it's just mastered horribly. That's a darn shame. That's the only suggestion from the 2005 indie pop list in the music subforum that was like that tho - all the rest was recorded just fine, like Spoon and The New Pornographers and The Decemberists and Arcade Fire, etc.

The recording quality was intentional. That album is intended to be "raw."

 

[trains are bad]

I don't have any problem with ITAOTS. In fact it's one of my very best albums.

 

[Jahn]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Teerawit The recording quality was intentional. That album is intended to be "raw."

The White Stripes and The Strokes recording their stuff edgy and raw is cool. The way the engineer mastered Neutral Milk Hotel to try to be raw just made it unlistenable. There's Good Raw and Bad Raw.

 

[trains are bad]

Please elaborate, because I'm interested in how you make that distinction; it's something I wrestle with.

On track 2, or the beginning of 1945, the fuzzy and dirty distortion I assumed was clearly intentional. Are you saying that you know it's intentional, but you think it's dumb, or are you saying that it's due to (very) poor recording/mastering?

If you think there are other parts of the CD that are nondeliberately distorted/poorly mastered, which parts would they be?

 

[Jahn]

Quote:

Originally Posted by trains are bad Please elaborate, because I'm interested in how you make that distinction; it's something I wrestle with. On track 2, or the beginning of 1945, the fuzzy and dirty distortion I assumed was clearly intentional. Are you saying that you know it's intentional, but you think it's dumb, or are you saying that it's due to (very) poor recording/mastering? If you think there are other parts of the CD that are nondeliberately distorted/poorly mastered, which parts would they be?

1945? I dont' think I have that album/track? Well anyhow for Neutral Milk Hotel, the part in The King of Carrot Flowers Part 2 that goes "Jesus I Love You" is totally acceptable intentional vocal distortion - a "Good Raw." But when Part III kicks in and both the electric guitar and drums obviously clip so hard that the compression doesn't let you get that nice kind of Kinks raw growl, but rather the annoying Redline compression cutoff clipping - hell, that's not a nice Raw sound - it just sounds like a crappy studio job. In other words, if you heard Neutral Milk Hotel live, they'd have their distortion boxes for guitar and vocals, but the overall presentation would be alive and kicking and raw and dangerous - but the half assed studio work to try to process "Raw" by redlining is just silly and sounds horrible.

 

[trains are bad]

Quote:

In other words, if you heard Neutral Milk Hotel live, they'd have their distortion boxes for guitar and vocals, but the overall presentation would be alive and kicking and raw and dangerous - but the half assed studio work to try to process "Raw" by redlining is just silly and sounds horrible.

So you think it's deliberate, but gross/silly. I kind of agree. Also, I was talking about track 6, Holland 1945.

Anyway the I'm still interested in what exactly is going on with the original topic song, because it doesn't sound like anything that would be added for effect, it's very subtle which makes me think it's a recording artifact or something. It could also be as spike in my notoriously harsh Grados.

 

[discord]

Neutral Milk Hotel sucks anyways. Yeah, I just said it.

 

[bobeau]

I haven't listened to anything by NMH yet, but is this 'rawness' like the last Sleater-Kinney album?

I have a feeling a new era has dawned in the recording industry... just like intentionally relic'ed new guitars we have intentionally relic'ed new recordings.