Within the recording community, and to a lesser extent the audiophile community, the “loudness wars” have been a prime topic of conversation for a number of years.
Summing up these respective communities thoughts on the hyper amounts of compression prevalent on today’s popular recordings, audiophiles claim the loudness wars are robbing the public of experiencing the full potential of recorded music. Meanwhile, the recording community has tried to distance itself from the practice by saying it has no choice in how music is mixed and mastered, because it’s the record labels that are calling the shots.
A recent blog by the British mastering engineer Ian Shepherd, owner of Mastering Media, says that with the release of the latest Red Hot Chili Peppers’ (RHCP) album the music industry may be handling the format of vinyl differently than the more popular CD format.
According to Shepherd, who posted his comparative analysis of the song “Monarchy of Roses” from the RHCP’s I’m with You album using a clip from the track taken from the vinyl and CD releases as the basis of his opinion, it’s the mastering process and not the format that’s to blame for the loudness wars controversy.
Shepherd points out the Chili Peppers and their producer Rick Rubin were early loudness war offenders, and he also suggests as a conspiracy theory that perhaps the vinyl version, which was released a few months after the CD’s release, was mastered with more dynamic range to quiet critics who complained the album was too compressed.
This isn’t the first time the veteran engineer has spoken out against the practice of squashing down popular recordings. A few years ago Shepherd made waves with his criticism of Metallica’s Death Magnetic album by pointing out that the Guitar Hero version of the record actually sounded better than the CD version because it was mastered with less compression.
A CD that’s been mastered with a lot of compression won’t sound good on a revealing system, and that mastering will prevent you from experiencing the thump of a kick drum or the impact of a double bass solo. Put more simply, tons of mastering compression basically ruins the fidelity of the music, which is something we want our high-end systems to help us enjoy.
Thankfully with vinyl sales surging to 20-year highs there’s plenty of new music available to satisfy the tastes of a range of consumers, and now it’s even possible to integrate the best of analog and the best of today’s digital media into a single system to meet the needs of a diverse household.
Related: CD, Chili Peppers, Death Magnetic, Guitar Hero, Ian Shepherd, industry, Mastering Media, music, RHCP, Rick Rubin bad mastering, bad mastering music, bad mastered cds, mastered bad, ian shepherd guitar tech, examples badly mastered songs, compression ruins music, compression loudness cd controversy, Bad mastred song, bad mastering practices
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