bad astronaut - a mastering disaster...

[kristian]

This new cd "Houston: We have a drinking problem" is really good, except for some of the loud parts are sooo heavily compressed at the mastering stage that I can hear distortion. It is a horrible way to ruin such a good cd.

Take a peak at the general waveform.

Now I will zoom in and just hit a random screen capture. I was not even trying to capture such a horrible moment of clipping.

Its really a good song and album, but the clipping kills me sometimes. I'm glad the album has massive dynamics so there is only a couple songs that have this giant brick wall of distortion. Take a listen for yourself.

 

[Uladine]

Dang. I hardly know anything about mastering but I do know that a solid square passage on a wave form is bad news.

 

[Sennheiser]

Ouch! Man, I haven't seen that many square waves since my AF electronics training.

 

[mixsit]

Hmm...that's called mastering...
I thought it was called 'I forget to set the frickn' levels'

 

[mixsit]

How about adding some gain riding and/or slow low ratio comp to get the average in line, befor hitting the flatliner?

 

[Track Rat]

In electronics, we refere to that as DC with a slight AC component. I hope you didn't pay for that.

 

[Abyyss]

Shit! Who "mastered" this?

 

[heinz]

maybe they were going for that "sound".

 

[kristian]

I could dig up the actual mastering house from the CD sleeve but I think that would be a futile gesture. You can see a lot of CDs today with squared out peaks, usually not as much as this one specific screen shot. Its just scary to look at. Have any of you listened to the mp3. To a casual listener I'm not sure most would even realise what they are hearing. But if you are at all into accurate listening and know what distortion sounds like then you will know that sometime is wrong when it gets loud.

Whatever happened to turning the volume knob up when you wanted it louder? It seems that sometimes I'm turning the volume down during the "louder" parts in order to stop the horrible distortion im hearing, but I have to remember its coming off of the CD, not the amp or speakers.

 

[charger]

That is really awful. In the middle of the chorus, I thought it was just a ragged guitar sound, but upon further listening, it's definitely totally distorted.

I swear, it's enough to make me want to switch to LPs. I put up one of those free petitions about this:

http://www.petitiononline.com/cd2loud/petition.html

 

[masteringhouse]

If they did this to the levels I'd hate to hear what they did with the EQ.

This type of thing is what I call the "2X4" effect, essentially when a mastering engineer makes a waveform look like a 2X4 piece of wood. Unfortunately it is all too common. Take a look at a Limp Bizkit CD sometime.

The fact that this is prominent in one section makes me believe that this engineer has no concept of dynamics and probably just ran your mix through a brick-wall limiter to raise the level.

Personally I use as many as 4-5 different compressors when mastering for different types of processing. For example, one for average levels, one for multiband dynamics (controlling frequency balance or to bring an element in the mix up/down), one for de-essing, one (maybe 2) for limiting, etc.