Author |
Posted on 2012-05-26 02:45:29 |
|
|
Small-Talker |
|
|
|
Audio mastering, in a nutshell, is basically taking everything the band/producer recorded in the studio and preparing it for CD release. They take all the individual tracks (vocals, guitars, keyboards, drums, etc.), clean them up by removing excessive background noise, perform equalisation correction... basically take all the individual things and put them together into one big master tape.
The only problem is, mastering engineers now feel it's their job to take all of these tracks and make them 5 times louder than they need to be. When a song goes past a certain point of loudness, the track becomes distorted. This distortion (or "clipping") isn't noticeable to most people. Most people instead feel it on a subconscious level. Have you ever listened to a song on headphones, and something about it doesn't feel right? It just doesn't feel good in your ears, for some strange reason, so you feel this urge to skip to the next track, even though you really like the song you're listening to? Chances are it's "clipped."
Look at this image here.
It's the same song twice. The 1992 version is the original. The 2004 version is "remastered." The remastered version is about 4 times louder than the original, and its peaks go beyond the limit of the waveform. This is actual sound information being lost, parts of the song that have been mastered so loudly that your ears can no longer hear them. If you listen to a lot of music like this, you can very easily damage your hearing.
It's such a needless practice. I've been a huge fan of Garbage since 1998, but I won't be buying their next album if I see Emily Lazar has mastered it. I probably won't bother even illegally downloading it. There's no point, when you can't even listen to the record without getting a headache. |
|
|