greg is a little too passionate for headfi's carebear atmosphere, and someday I'm afraid it will indeed cost him. now just by the way you talk, I'd bet you're an old member with a new account. those damn gut feelings... no objective proof, but they can feel so reliable sometimes ^_^.
back on topic, we all know of some famous mastering engineers with really crappy habits, but that doesn't make it a standard. I've seen bass clipping being abused to push the loudness war even further, at some point it was using the brain to rebuild the rest of the tone(it's surprisingly effective). of course that works up to a point and only with low freqs, and soon enough that too was abused to the point that it's now like another typical sound for some rap albums. but those stuff are malpractice not standards IMO. no professional should ever be ok with clipping an album, and if too many may have disregarded intersampling peaks when downsampling to CD or making a mp3 version, I'd still call that incompetence and not a standard.
I never talked to greg before, but his comment reminds me of another guy online on a different forum that does more of his British sarcasm than he did contributing to the forum.
I have ways to respond to people like that virtuously.
I agree, its not mastering, and because of this, I spoke out and got fired. My old boss got mad at me when I told him they are mutilating the cd, not mastering it.
Oh well, them keeping me quiet about it is over. so I decided to air it.
They actually ruined the cd format for the consumer.
Plus ruining the depth of the mixes of my Audio engineering mentors that I interned for them.
they clip it just enough so that the dac will rebuilds it.
It was the only way they can get a dac to produce a signal hotter than it came in.
so if anyone makes a cd they have to either break the rules or it won't be a loud recording.
I think I mentioned they modified an ADC to do this wile capturing.
I posted this info on a recording forum and a mastering guy that trolls that site pm me and said: Hey, they already revealed it to the students. (that is fine and dandy, but not to any one else)
of course he replied differently on the post: " Yes it was revealed a long time ago
"