The OVER Shock

[witzendoz]

Last week I was rehearsing with my Blues band project, it gets me away from the studio and helps me keep my playing up to scratch, plus its great fun. We have a lot of original material based on British Blues of the 60's 70's 80's 90's etc, but we also play blues covers as our gigs are 3 to 4 hours long and we love the old stuff we play as well.

OK now to the story, after the rehearsal (at the studio) we had some CD's of covers we are going to do so I decided to make us up a compilation of the 6 or so songs we needed for the next time we got together. I ripped the tracks from the CDs using Sound forge, the older material / not remastered stuff, ripped in and the waveform was quite low, that later stuff or remastered stuff (name withheld to protect the guilty) actually played back on the computer in the Red with the output over almost all the time, talk about loudness wars, no wonder I don't actually like to sit and listen to albums anymore as it wears out the ears with the digital distortion. How can any mastering engineer worth anything let this go out for production? Before anyone says it must be my metering, well No! You can see the clipped waveforms.

Buy the way I had to bump up the old tracks volume a bit so you could still hear then in the car after the crap loud tracks.

Alan.

[Massive Master]

I gotta admit, I really don't know why some guys (more names protected) that let stuff out that's actively clipping - hundreds and thousands of clipped samples, running top of the scale, etc.

I mean, if it's going to be rammed to the top, why not at least either put a limiter in line (at that point, it isn't going to affect the sound quality that much), or even just drop the volume .2 or .3dB while it's still in 24-bit just to avoid clipping of the playback converters?

Eh... One of these days, people are going to stop this crap... Then, I'll start loving my job again.

(EDIT) Not that I hate my job or anything... Hope that didn't come out wrong. I just wish it was all about "sound quality and translation" again.