Metallica’s New Album: Audio Disaster!
Friday, September 19th, 2008I think we’re all aware that Metallica released a new album awhile ago. Did you also know that the CD version you buy in stores is plagued by clipping and distortion due to multiple stages of brickwall limiting? Well, it is.
Did you also know that the Guitar Hero version sounds better than the CD version? If you don’t think so, check out the video below:
There’s some great notes on the Mastering Media blog about the waveform anaylsis of Metallica’s new disk (note: keep in mind that, when talking about digital audio, 0dBFS is the end of the road…it’s the ceiling of digital recording and it sounds HORRIBLE when signal reaches this level)
I just skipped through 3 random songs and the highest I saw on the meter was -4,3 dB RMS (-1,3 RMS in AES17 norm), looking at the realtime RMS meter with Wavelab’s default time constants.
Wavelab’s global analysis (with its default time constants) reports -2,93 RMS [+0,07 in AES17] RMS in one of those tracks.
Most of the album (looking at the meters) sits between -7 and -5 (between -4 and -2 in AES17).
You remember that popular myth that mastering will “make your record sound the same across different systems”? I now get the point. Death Magnetic (although apparently not introduced through mastering) sounds thin and distorted on my laptop speakers. And it sounds thin and distorted in my mastering studio. There’s always a silver lining
I’m certainly sympathetic to your reaction, I get to slam my head against that brick wall every day. In this case the mixes were already brick walled before they arrived at my place. Suffice it to say I would never be pushed to overdrive things as far as they are here. Believe me I’m not proud to be associated with this one, and we can only hope that some good will come from this in some form of backlash against volume above all else.
