It Goes To 11!

One of my new discoveries in the past year is high quality stereo music. I'm not talking about quality in terms of The Beatles versus The Jonas Brothers. I'm talking about the actual production quality of the music, in terms of the mastering/mixing of the music. Mastering involves setting the loudness of music within the limitations of a CD. If the loudness is set too high, the dynamic range of the music is lost. This loudness war has come about for several reasons. The increased loudness can sound like an improvement for those people listening in less than optimal conditions, such as low quality Ipod headphones and car stereos. Unfortunately it makes the music worse, in some cases horrible, for people with high quality sound systems in their home. Listening to this music can be fatiguing. This topic is recently in the news thanks to the new Metallica release, which is a prime example of the loudness mastering. For most new releases people have nothing better to compare them to, but in this case there is a Guitar Hero version of the album that does NOT have the loudness mastering which everyone seems to prefer. Ironically most people are listening to this superior version through illegal downloading. This article provides a great read on the issue. It makes me wonder if Lars has any hearing left after 25 years of touring. Even the mastering engineer is complaining about this release!