This is from Simply Red's latest album, Stay. I haven't seen a waveform like this before, so I'm a little confused. On the one hand, it's certainly not clipped (!) but on the other, it still looks quite compressed when compared with some older, quiet recordings. What do you think about it?
It looks like a rather undynamic recording that is 'well' mastered. The flaming lips and MBV look similar. It was (over?) compressed earlier in the chain than at mastering.
Can't tell unless you know what kind of music it is, but I'd say its fairly well mastered. There's enough headroom to let the dynamics 'breathe', I don't think engineers would purposely compress the sound, yet not bother boosting it to make it louder.
The undynamic look of the sound, as above poster said, could be the sound/music that the band is playing, or is the type of sound (e.g. "wall of sound" a la Phil Spector) that the band is trying to achieve.
Looks compressed! Unless the music is all one dynamic level all the way through (that would just plain suck), I'd say that's a pretty poorly-mastered recording (but not untypical).
It might look compressed, but rock/pop music in general is fairly un-dynamic compared to say, classical or jazz.
This is why a lot of classical is/was released in 45's rather than the 33 1/3's that rock albums used, as classical music could make use of the additional dynamic range that 45's provided, where it would just be wasted on rock music.
The only way a waveform like that would make sense would be on a contemporary album where the mixing had already been done and the band (or whomever) wanted this particular track to be quiet relative to other sections.
Otherwise, there's so much unused headroom that some normalization is probably in order.
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