I used to be an “audio-phile” in that I had friends with too much money and really nice stereos. I can certainly appreciate a well recorded piece of music these days, though I’m not quite such the zealot I once was. That said, I purchased an album a year or so ago and was annoyed because there was a lot of very obvious clipping (static/noise/crackling) during most if not all of the tracks. The album had been poorly mastered. It sounded awful.
Mastering is the process where the final mix of a song or record is taken and “massaged” into something that producers/artists think will sound great when played on almost any hardware (car stereo, radio, PC speakers, super-duper stereo loudspeakers…whatever.) Mastering engineers can be paid major-ching for working the mastering mojo. The process has been around for years and years and it does/can make great recordings sound incredible and mediocre ones sound good.
The problem is that our brains and ears often tell us that louder is better. If you hear two songs on the radio that have relatively equal “musical quality” (say two pop songs) but one has been made a few decibels louder on average by the mastering process, your ears will tell you that the louder one sounds better. This is where the problem started. Record producers and artists starting asking that their music be mastered “hotter” and louder. Well there’s a terrible price to be paid when you over compress a piece of music.
Watch this excellent video on the price your music pays from being “squashed” by the mastering process.
I myself have been guilty of over-compressing my music in an attempt to make it compete with other music, equally mangled. Well no more! From here on out the phrase of the day will be “high dynamic range” because my music revolves around telling a story and who wants to listen to a story when it’s just being shouted at them?
Check out http://turnmeup.org for more information or to get involved, and remember when you listen to my music, turn it up!
Tags: compression, mastering, music, turn me up
You are so right, Luke. I’m with you in every way, except our histories in use of compression are inversely related. When I first began producing my own music, I avoided compression like the plague. Nowadays I do a smidgen of dynamics processing. The degree and type of compression depends upon the piece itself – I don’t have any single rule of thumb. I may process the stems and then do no compression of the final mix. Other times I’ll do both, and yet at times maybe only on the final mix.