[taymat]

I got this and it's ridiculously low-fi and over-compressed, I mean where are the real dynamics or emotions? The band have great talent (I heard them first live on Later with Jools Holland) and individual parts like drums/vocals/guitars at the beginning of a song sound ok, but as soon as the instruments play together they blend into a mess and on headphones there's audible digital distortion.

I'm dissapointed, there are many modern bands that sound natural and less processed without being low-fi, like The White Stripes, and IMO Jimmy Eat World prove you can compress highly without muddiness. Note to the record industry: are 'hot' cds and low-fi recordings going to make people buy more cds, or download more mp3s? Ok rant over!

 

[Davey]

Yeah, definitely agree. Love the music but the mastering is awful. The White Stripes used to be the same way too. Remember White Blood Cells? At the time that was one of the loudest CDs I'd heard, but they started to go a little retro after that and it payed off with much better sound. The biggest problem as I see it, is that this trend of shitty sound with constant digital clipping and tons of compression is often driven by the artists themselves and is in effect self perpetuating. New artists think that is the sound they want because that is now what they've been growing up with. Kind of scary, but it has even rubbed off on many of the older artists too. And the engineers for the most part seem to just be going along with the trend. Looks like we're heading for a whole generation of "lost" recordings, although some of them do sound a lot better on vinyl which means in many cases the problem is confined to the CD mastering stage and not so much the recording. All we can do is keep complaining and try to get more people to say "enough already!" If you hear a bad one that makes your ears bleed, call em out here in public like they do sometimes over on the Steve Hoffman board and list the engineer and whoever else is involved so people can take that into account if they are thinking of buying it.

And conversely, praise those that stand up against the stupidity. Heads up - check out the new Electrelane Axes CD (or 2-LP set)tomorrow and hear some great recording/engineering/mastering (and music too!). Most will hear it and say that's way too quiet, but it has tons of dynamic range and sounds great. Recorded by Steve Albini in Chicago and mastered by Steve Rooke at Abbey Road, just like last year's great sounding The Power Out.