Is he right?

 

So is BAD audio a sound desing aesthetic trend going from 1995 to nowadays?

 

IMO he's right. The loudness war and the commercial demands of having your tracks playing as loud as possible have made 'loudness' more important than the quality of the music and the audio itself.

 

He have good points, but question is really, what do you want to hear, having nice hi-fi system isn't really window to truth, especially in setup where folks invest more into cables, than actual room treatment, anyone really investing to hear flaws from that records or to enjoy in them. Engineers always worried about how their music will sound on domestic sound sources, music was mixed for public, not for few who would invest huge amount of bucks to have same experience as sitting in front of band, stereo reproduction of that never sounded like that anyways, ever. Maybe today with Atmos you can really get down to that road, but music recording was always flawed in every era.

 

Define bad. What he finds bad, I might find very good...
For instance, I happen to like some tasteful distortion. Sometimes even when it is over the top, that really depends on the song.

Anyway, I miss some nuance. How loud a song is, has also a lot to do with the genre.

Sure there are examples where I find songs are too loud, but to call them bad...
And then claiming that ALL audio is bad, come on, I find that a bridge too far.

Just my two cents

 

David Mellor is rarely wrong, if ever. So is Ian Shepherd.

Damn, I shouldn't have watched this video. I've made peace with myself and embraced whatever is necessary to survive approach instead of being a stubborn audiophile.

Oh well, a comforting thought - money/profit and greed is destroying everything around us, not just music. :P Artists should be the ones who set standards, but we don't, we just go along with the destructive forces...

 

Okay boomer

First of all, what even is "good audio"? As a 90's kid, i consider loud AF masters to be desireable sometimes (even as just a listener), wether it's a good or bad thing depends only in the type of music we're talking about. I personally prefer more quiet music, but calling something bad just because it's pushed to hell and beyond makes no sense to me.

Now, let's consider for a moment that "good music" for this vid's purposes means "something that sounds as it was intended musically" (based on what he says). Well what if crushing the hell out of it in the mix/mastering stage was the intent all along? It's not rare to be handed sessions that already have some processing going on (even limiting) by the musicians, sometimes distastefully but it is the initial intent anyway.

Also, yes people can reach for a volume control, but i'll be fucked if i have to turn the volume up each time a song goes a little quieter in intensity (within the song, not compared to others) because i'm in a noisy enviroment where i can already barely hear the loud parts properly and turning up the volume is too distracting. In such cases, loud sausages are desireable. That's not to say that all music should be a brick in waveform, but you know, context and all.

 

Last edited: May 1, 2023

Right. Says the man with an Waves L2 limiter on the screen behind.

 

I dunno. I mean BAD worked for Michael Jackson!

 

I agree if having it as loud a possible and distorted comes from an artistic point of view.

But lots of music with a more acoustic nature is nowadays also pushed to the level where dynamics are lost and most life has been squeezed out of it. I can't believe that's an artistic decision but more one to comply to commercial interests. Like he said, record companies often demand that it must sound 'like this or that' just to make sure it will follows the bulldozed paths that give them the most certainty of generating as much money as possible.

 

Truly audiophiles don't listen to music in expensive equipements, they perfrom all the instruments of the song one by one and then remember the exquisite untreated, not degraded waveforms in their minds.

 

No. Loads of classical or jazz, music which is human-acoustic, is carefully recorded/produced to mitigate the effect of compression/distortion and perceived loudness. But at 16 bit (96db dynamic range) a 110db (Symphony Orchestra) will need to be compressed.

I agree with a lot of what he is saying, most of his science and tech is spot on. EG warmth = distortion. I also probably agree that there is too much "loudness" which is the presumed fashion. but I think this is down to the modern listner not caring about speakers/audio/realism. The lowest common denominator is a shitty phone or tablet. In and of itself this is perhaps responsible for more than meets the eye. EG over compressed vocal tracks in an attempt to make a quite track "loud".

However, I don't think anyone is going to argue wax-cylinder, vynyl or even 2inch tape for that matter, is a more effective storage medium than digital. I mean I could well be wrong, hard-drives don't last forever but 0's and 1's can move between physical mediums.

 

My audio isn't bad, it's good. And as long as I (or my clients) like it the rest of the world's opinions can fk off right back up the butts they fell out of. Brickwalling abd distortion will kill some music, and save others. The Beatles, gods of the golden age of tubes and tape, were accused of heresy and blasphemy against studio equipment every day, abusing compression and jamming mics down the bells of horns to make them harsh. You have to use ears and judgment.

 

Last edited: May 1, 2023

"We would never intentionally clip the mixer!!!"
Well, except for all the guitars on Revolution, which were DI into redlined channels on the mixer. And every song that copied that sound (10cc did it a lot).

Btw, I don't fundamentally disagree with him. Music should be mastered to sound RIGHT. If that's loud and in your face, great. If it's natural with maximum dynamic range, great. There's no such things as labels any more anyway. The only people now who want it to sound like "that" are artists.

 

Last edited: May 1, 2023

in the long long ago, before i had a decent distortion pedal, i recorded a track with my awesome machinedrum that needed some very very harsh distortion/overdrive. i achieved this by turning to gain up to 11 on my spirit M12, in true spinal tap style. it resulted in a very nice distorted sound and after sending 25 cdr's with the track to the guy that ran a dj-pool over here it actually became a small underground dancefloor filler much to my amazement. one night i went to an underground club in amsterdam and a friend of mine there got this rather weird smile on her face and told me to not move while standing next to the dancefloor, she disappeared for a few, came back, still telling me not to move when suddenly i heard the intro of my track and saw people running to the dancefloor.

point being, fuck everything and it can still work wonders

 

He's too busy patting himself on the back to realise some people might like distortion compared to clinical-clean audio. He seems to think that because things used to be done a certain way then they must be the right way. Traditionalist much?

 

...says a person who uses ProTools and Waves....no thanks, it's time to move on

 

To me, modern mastering is like autotuning; it has a sound, and imho it's often abused and I don't like it. Modern vocals often remind me of car horns. I like the vocals on old albums where voices just sounded like voices. But hey, that's me, I'm almost 60. People today buy songs with voices that sound like that because, guess what, they like it! And that's cool. Every generation has had its own idea of how popular music should be produced. That's why you can usually instantly tell what decade a recorded song is from. Heck, the very nature of music is evolving. In a lot of music chords and melody are taking a total back seat to sound and tambour. If heavy distortion and lack of dynamics (or at least, traditional dynamics) is part if that vibe, fine.
He might have a point with loud remasters of old albums, but I often find those pretty good. I like the punch. If he and his audiophile buddies don't, don't buy them. There's a lifetime's worth of music out there to buy on older cds, vinyl, or whatever they want.

 

Oh, and when Rush released their apology remix of Vapor Trails with new un-loud mastering it wasn't one bit better. It was just a less in-your-face version of a mediocre (for them) album and it didn't even have in-your-face going for it.

 

Good feedback (and distortion!) folks!!
Thanks for playing along!
Happy mixing & mastering to the beat of your own drum !