Why is a lot of music so badly mastered nowadays? Not an audiophile

>>72328368
it's just """""""""lo-fi"""""""""""""

radio

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>>72328368
to accommodate for the norm, the ones listening to music on their apple earpods

>>72328482
>>72328498
??????????

I dunno how those are factors. Albums from the 70s and 80s, especially stuff like soul, jazz and prog, wouldn't suddenly sound like shit on radios and bad headphones. The shitty cassette player headphones are way worse than earpods. for example.

>>72328368
Brickwalling doesn't equate to clipping or distortion.

And it's actually getting much better. Since streaming services have implemented that new algorithm that puts everything at the same dB level, engineers are now mastering at an overall lower vu level but with comparitively louder peaks, in order to make their tracks stand out more compared to something totally brickwalled.

>>72328574
this, we're already past the loudness war, yesterday's news

>>72328368
There's nothing wrong with brickwalling.

>>72328557
People try to make their songs as loud as possible so that they catch people's attention and jump out at you on the radio when you're browsing stations

Also, radio used to be (I don't know if it still is) quite lossy/quiet, so making the music loud as fuck helped cover for this

Most people don't know about dynamic range etc and just listen to music on the radio and in clubs so it doesn't really matter to normies

Obviously once you've made something that is very loud, you competitor will want to make something even louder, so it's gotten worse over the years

>>72328644
See >>72328574

You're talking about 15 years ago.

>>72328498
So you're saying poorly mastered music sounds better on a shitty sound system? How does that work?

>>72328644
I dunno, unless your some white trash fag bumping trap and hitting on 14 year olds, I doubt anyone plays their car radio at max.

>>72328644
That's pretty fucking gay. They should just make a radio edit different from the studio release if it's such a big deal.

>>72328368
>Why is a lot of music so badly mastered nowadays?
It's because bands send their stuff off to someone else to master that are "professionals" and they fuck up the masters.

>>72328687
Less than 15 years ago and the problem doesn't go away overnight, people still listen to music from 15 years ago

>>72328691
It sounds (((better)))

>>72328692
Nothing to do with the volume your speakers are set at, it's the relative volume of the tracks

>>72328703
Radio edits are a thing but they usually just make songs shorter. HDTracks has quite a few albums that are remixed from the masters for better sound quality, not for radio, look them up

>>72328691
It's louder, nuances don't matter on earpads, people don't care they wanna hear the song because they're listening to music with a bunch of ambiance outside noise on the go.

>>72328691
That's not what he's saying. His point was that DR doesn't matter to your average listener.

And again, brickwalling is not "poor mastering" and does not imply clipping or distortion. I'm not sure you understand how compression works.

>>72328737
It's pretty much gone now anyway. Brickwalling was a response to consumer habit and technology, and for all intents and purposes it was largely a success. Because of streaming this has changed and ""mainstream"" mastering engineers have already adapted.

>>72328803
I haven't listened to many recent mainstream releases so I wouldn't know, that's good though. It truly was an awful time.

It's not so much brickwalling anymore as it is that most people these days fucking suck at recording and/or mixing shit.

Especially pop music.

I have a 12 inch single of Madonna's Material Girl, and it sounds fucking beautiful. Everything is perfectly sculpted, her voice sounds like she's right in my living room. Now listen to Side To Side by Ariana. Everything is fucking sterile, shrill, vocals are too loud and sound like they've been completely filtered out below 700 Hz. Cheap digital-ass reverb.

Soulless corporate suits tell autistic mastering engineers who do nothing but punch buttons in ProTools to shift product to plebeian trash mongoloids

brainless "artists" don't know shit about technology and think mastering engineers are magic wizards and go along with it because they all have tinnitus anyways

Meanwhile you can use a free VST called Bittersweet from Flux to unbrickwall your files ... not perfect but works surprisingly well http://www.fluxhome.com/products/freewares/bittersweet-v3

>>72328909
You seem to know your shit so I'll ask you. You can make a $50 USB mic sound pretty good if you make the vocals sound fuller and equalising in post. Let's say you set up a recording booth with sound isolation and you use that same mic to recorda song and you make it sound good. How does that compare to a pop songs recording quality?

>>72328954
Yeah.

Pitchfork had some long ass article about "the dark art of mastering".

Mastering isn't fucking rocket science. It's knowledge of getting shit to translate across most listening environments, boosting loudness, getting the "album" to sound uniform sonically, and MAYBE exporting the audio into files for CD duplication, iTunes, prepping it for vinyl pressing, etc.

Maybe back when music wasn't such a soulless and corporatized fucking machine, mastering was more of an artform.

But the three big mastering engineers out there won't admit to that. God forbid they stop charging 1000 bucks a track or whatever it is.

>>72329014
When it comes to recording, it's all about capturing the source in the best possible way relative to the song.

It's hard for me to explain right now but, in general, the goal is to always capture (a vocal for example) in the best possible way. You can't polish a turd and expect it to not still look like a piece of shit.

just pan dead center, turn the volume to 10%, and try to make a frowny face with the spectrum

>>72328909
Hell yes this, it even sounds good on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfgaU5Rfsfs

I think the issue is that even though you can get a perfect digital copy of an analog waveform, the more post-processing is done, the more the sound is degraded; it was true back in the tape era but now people think they can get away with so much fliltering that it turns into a digital slurry

The thing is that as a musician and producer I know mixing, but I don't know mastering very well, and even a lot of the musicians and producers I know don't know shit about mastering.

>>72328368
>Not an audiophile
Then stop discussing it.

>>72329105
I've worked with engineers who'll send me Pro Tools sessions and the amount of processing done on the vocals is fucking astonishing. Like, easily dozens and dozens of EQs, compressors, de-essers, multiband compressors, limiters, autotune, etc. All of that degrades the audio on down the line.

"Over-processed", in an of itself, is a fucking signature sound now. Some do it better than others.

>>72329014
Not him but it won't be as good.

These pop songs are generally recorded with really great state-of-the-art gear in treated studios. There's no way you will get the same sound from a $50 USB mic as you would a U47 at Sound City or whatever.

>>72329264
B-But the mixing ;_;

>>72329349
Well, that's a whole nother thing. The mixing is probably bad--or at least, it's not something I like anyways--but the quality of the recording isn't, if that makes any sense.

>>72329129
throw a limiter on that bitch

>>72329264
That might be true 20 years ago or so.

But nowadays, most records are being recorded in hotel rooms or cheap home/mobile studios; albeit still with expensive mics and A/D converters.

>>72329418
Wasn't Watch the Throne done in a hotel because Ye didn't wanna risk it leaking?

I don't know what you guys are listening to but everything I've downloaded recently has still been brickwalled, just not as badly as the worst shit from the late '90s.

>>72329469
this

It's not WTSMG or Californication levels anymore, but 99% of major releases (including "indie" artists) are brickwalled still.

>>72329449
Yeah. One of them was also on tour or something.

I mean, the shitty ads showing Skrillex chilling on a hotel bed with headphones on making beats isn't fictitious.

Most record companies just don't have the budgets to afford most of their artists going into massive recording studios just to cut vocals since most songs are made on laptops anyway.

>>72329508
>>72329449
Is Skrillex and Kanye really representative of the whole?

>>72329414
>throw a limiter on that bitch
I know limiters and EQing, and compression. I'm just not well versed in it enough as a professional mastering engineer.

At the very least I try to keep my mixes sounding as close to live performance as possible, which means minimal compression and mainly relying on the sound engineering side of recording, i.e. levels.

>>72329508
A friend of mine is an indie dubstep prod. in PA. He told me Skrillex lost his laptop with an album worth of beats in a hotel or something like that.

>>72329549
They're certainly representative of what most top artists are doing these days.

They are undeniably two of the biggest mainstream acts out there.

Large format studios these days are dead/dying. Most spaces are selling out huge amounts of gear, going mostly digital, and downsizing. They can't afford the operating costs of a huge 96 channel SSL, racks of hardware, and huge tape machines. Not to mention the frustrating amount of maintenance they require.

>>72329556
>At the very least I try to keep my mixes sounding as close to live performance as possible, which means minimal compression and mainly relying on the sound engineering side of recording, i.e. levels.
The problem is that compression is generally needed to reproduce this sound of a "live performance" you are striving for because the way albums are recorded are not how you hear live music anyways. Compression can congeal a mix.

>>72329621
OK fair enough. You pretty much called it when you said "That might be true 20 years ago or so" because I haven't paid attention to pop music in 20 years.

I will admit the last two pro studios I recorded at in the last 5 years don't exist anymore. I myself am just a basement Scarlett 18i20 into my laptop kinda guy.

>>72328368
Go back to your Steely Dan records fag

>>72329686
>I myself am just a basement Scarlett 18i20 into my laptop kinda guy.

Fair enough. That's how most people, including myself, are making records.

The democratization of recording technology is a whole other debate I don't wanna get into, but it's pretty awesome to be able to get a pretty-close-to-pro-level of recording quality for less than $1000 these days.

>>72329644
>The problem is that compression is generally needed to reproduce this sound of a "live performance" you are striving for because the way albums are recorded are not how you hear live music anyways. Compression can congeal a mix.

Yes, this is a problem I've run into, and I'm basically solving it using overdubs and multiple mics on the same recordings.

Funny thing was that I listened to an interview with Kurt Cobain where he mentioned something like this, using multiple microphones, some close, some around the room, and mixing using them, which he said that no producer wanted to do, but Steve Albini used it very well on In Utero.

I figured out how to get more of a "room" sound out of mixing close mics with distant room mics and effects, and just adjusting the levels on tracks.

I learned some stuff about mastering on my last album, but I haven't even gotten into that stage yet, since I'd rather wait until I have the entire thing done and then master it uniformly as a whole.

>>72329739
Yes, I completely agree. In some ways it's sad the Age of The Studio is ending, but in other ways more artists who could not afford to record now have that opportunity. This is essentially the audio equivalent of the Gutenberg press
>>72329826
Nice. I've actually switched from close micing drums to doing the Glyn Johns method. I hear ya.


>Funny thing was that I listened to an interview with Kurt Cobain where he mentioned something like this, using multiple microphones, some close, some around the room, and mixing using them, which he said that no producer wanted to do, but Steve Albini used it very well on In Utero.
Albini is great. Cobain is right, he would set up an insane amount of mics alla round the room the get a "real" sounding drum sound. There's a cool youtube video with him running down the specs of his studio, Electrical Audio. Like all the surfaces are like hand-baked adobe bricks imported from the Southwest, and the different tracking rooms have their own support structures, so there are absolutely no reverberation through the structures of the building, since it's actually many buildings.

>>72329898
>Nice. I've actually switched from close micing drums to doing the Glyn Johns method. I hear ya.

Yeah, that is best method to record drums. I tend to mix room mic'd guitar and vox with close mic'd guitar in vox with panning to make them appear as if they occupy auditory space.