The year is near the end, and I guess it's time for us to start sharing views on the best of your findings in newly published music. I'm asking for best sounding albums from a mixing and mastering viewpoint (not from an aestethical view), so that they can serve as references of fresh, great sounding mixes in rock music (I mean, guitar-based, riffy rock music).

Or do you think some classics or contemporary mixes of yore haven't been beaten yet?

What's your take?

 

Thank you. I'll search for them. Maybe we can collect a nice assortment of albums in danger of extintion.

 

2018s
rock:
A Perfect Circle, Eat the Elephant
Joe Satriani, What Happens Next
Shinedown, Attention Attention

metal:
Amorphis, Queen of Time
Epica, vs Attack on Titan
Five Finger Death Punch, And Justice for None
Tesseract, Sonder
Judas Priest, Firepower

I really like the sound of "Symphony X, Underworld". It is the one that I always reference. Man! That sounds fucking awesome!

I don't consider that "rock" anyway!

 

Last edited: Oct 25, 2018

This thread IS about best engineered album, not folks favorite albums, right? The engineer I guess needs to be mentioned as well as the album itself in order to perhaps explore other work that she or he has worked on. Many times there won't be only one person but rather many as sometimes records are recorded in different studios or there was just a bunch who worked together including the mastering engineer as on the latest Bruno Mars record. Check this crew out from his 24K album...Brent Arrowood, Miles Comaskey, JT Daly, Tommy English, Kristine Flaherty, Adam Hawkins, Chad Howat & Tony Maserati, engineers; Joe LaPorta, mastering engineer (K.Flay).

See what I mean!

 

Are you speaking about "Raise Vibration" ? Or is there a more recent album?

 

I found Disturbed's Evolution Album, which was released three days ago, pretty well engineered. It was mixed by Kevin Churko who also produced it. He did quite some stuff for Ozzy in the past. Haven't listened to a lot of other projects he was involved, because I'm not very well versed in that kind of music. Nonetheless, I liked to listen to Evolution, and am in the 3rd round now, which is an unusual high repeat rate for me listening to electric guitars in three days. Probably interesting to me because it contains lots of different styles to pay tribute to some dead heavy-metal musicians.
The Album was mastered by Ted Jensen from Sterling-Sound.

If you want to give that one a spin make sure you grab the deluxe edition which contains 4 extra tracks.

 

Yap amorphis has great sound on their last album!

 

coldplay is a joke now., poor guys. and by the way.. coldplay is not even "britrock" is more like BEYONCE with a band.. what a joke.

 

Last edited: Oct 23, 2018

2 words: Big Wreck

 

I think it's pretty well mixed but horribly mastered. It's ridiculously loud, even when normalized down to -1dB, it has a True Peak of -0.1dB and a LUFS of -7.5.

 

New Richard Ashcroft is well recorded

 

Maybe its because of youtube. The original track sounds great. I changed the link to spotify.

 

Last edited: Oct 23, 2018

Thanks for the reply , but nope, YT hasn't done anything to the dynamics and the spotify version has even a lower resolution (I wonder why). But Symphony X is a great band and I love their mixed sound.

 

Anneke adds so much to anyone she works with. With engineering in mind I have to say Brandi Carlile's "By The Way I Forgive You" album has a very distinct 'color' Intimate vocals up front with a huge reverb pushed to the back. It's obvious that a lot of preplanning was done in regard to how the album should sound before recording began.

 

This album is awesome. Thank you for the heads up.

 

I just discovered: Epica, vs Attack on Titan, which sounds good!