[jakepunk]

I love Gwen Stefani's voice.  I recently picked up her 2004 solo album, Love. Angel. Music. Baby.  As soon as I started listening to it, I got a headache.  It felt like a wall of sound with the vocals and instruments hashed together.

I was immediately reminded of another headache inducing album, Rush's Vapor Trails.  There is an excellent article that uses this album as a case study and explains how modern recording engineers use peak limiting to turn music into white noise.  I highly recommend reading this article for understanding why many pop CDs sound terrible.

I decided to examine one of the better songs on Stefani's album, "Cool", using Audacity.  Upon first glance, I see this:

Track 4, Cool, from Love.Angel.Music.Baby.


Whoa!  A wall of sound indeed.  More investigation was needed since peak limiting can be done correctly and still yield a good result.  However, I was disappointed when I saw that the levels had been raised to induce clipping:

clipped at 1:33.893


clipped at 2:31.488


As a comparison, I looked at another recent synth-heavy pop CD, Erasure's Nightbird from 2005.  It raises the level to 0dB, too, but I could not find any clipping.  It doesn't give me a headache when I listen to it, either.  I looked at some early 1990s albums just for kicks, and they exactly match the trends described in the article above.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that a pop CD sounds terrible, but I am certainly disappointed.  Interscope Records took the beautiful voice of a beautiful woman and turned it into crap.  I think this album is unlistenable.  And the record companies wonder why people aren't buying their wares?  Today's CDs almost require us to rip them to lossy formats and listen to them with computer speakers or headphones to make them listenable.  Bah!
 

[nathanm]

Right on, brother.  The only problem is; how does the lonely audiophile fight against the powers that be who create this ugly situation of technology abuse?  I don't know anything about Gwen Stefani but the new Slayer album "Christ Illusion" is even worse than that.  It's a complete slab; flat as a board.  Worst sounding piece of crap from them ever.  Same thing with recent albums I've bought from Candlemass and the Dresden Dolls.  Really makes me angry. 

And I've stopped believing that these awful flat mixes work better in the car.  They don't.  It still sounds relatively shitty (disclaimer: my car audio setup I've created sounds pretty awful on just about everything)  Yes, compression can sound good and make the mix more palatable.  But flattening everything out into one dimension is bad.  It's like applying the "Emboss" filter in Photoshop to a full color image.  Now everything is grey and flat, no contrast.

My current strategy idea is this; the handwritten, mailed letter to the offending record execs.  Maybe if they got enough of these things across their desk something might happen.  I don't know.  Perhaps in this day of the hasty, convenient e-mail a real letter might have more weight.  Maybe write the band's fan club as well and say, hey I love your music but the engineers fucking killed it.  But it's so frustrating because people like us are just  some lone nuts crying out off in the hinterlands, whilst the record company is looking at the account books and saying, "Good sales, whatever you did, let's have more of it!  Louder!".  I just can't figure out how to hurt these people in the pocketbook.

[jakepunk]

Today my local newspaper had an article that describes this problem to the masses.  The online version doesn't show the graphics, but the print version shows the comparison of two tracks, one that looks like a brick and the other which shows the uncompressed original.  The print version also used a visual example similar to the one you described of photoshopping the Mona Lisa and American Gothic to demonstrate the concept.  The article starts off with an excerpt from a memo from an A&R executive about the sad state of today's mixes. 

"Vote with your wallet" may not impact the record industry today, but at least the mainstream media can help let the cat out of the bag.

[nathanm]

Wow, that is fantastic!  Good to see this otherwise niche-geek thing get mainstream coverage.  It's a step in the right direction.

[Soundbitten]

A lot of the new cds sound like crap . It seems like they were getting better in the 90's , now it's generally going in reverse .

[bgewaudio]

I feel the same way I once had a nickelback CD that was ripped by a neighbour of mine, the quality of the recording was crap. So thinking it was the inadequacy of a burnt CD, I went out and bought the actual copy.  The same high frequency smearing I found on the burnt CD, was also apparent on the actual CD.  I was really disappointed. 

I also hear you on the Gwen Stefani CD.  really good music, but not good sounding.

[bprice2]

I am fairly new to the world of better performing audio gear.  But since embarking on this journey, there are a couple of things I've discovered about cd's.  First, some of the cd's that I used to think sounded like crap do in fact sound pretty amazing played on decent gear.  Second, some of those cd's I thought sounded like crap do truly sound even crappier with decent gear. 

I recently purchased a cd from the Talking Heads entitled Remain in Light, brought it home, played it, and instantly turned it off.  It was as if the record company simply burned 64k mp3's on disk and put it up for sale...completely disappointed.  Now this is not the "brick" phenom that jakepunk speaks of, but what the fuck!?  Nobody, including the artist can possibly appreciated what the record companies do to some of these recordings.

Here's my proposal - what if one were to start a new circle dedicated to outing sub-par cd recordings?  If there are others who possess the means to test cd's for the "brick" effect, as well as other recording shenanigans, then maybe there will be an interest in "publishing" those findings.  Just a thought.  What do you think?

Aside:  Jakepunk, noticed you are from Austin.  Do you know of any audio enthusiast groups in the Austin area that I might check out.  I am currently an outcast with friends and family with my new found hobby...nobody really wants talk to me anymore.  Thanks.

[nathanm]

There was an effort to document this stuff a few years ago.  Some guy started up a site called redvu.com if I remember correctly but nothing ever came of it.  I can't blame him really, it's a lot of work.  If there was a way to batch-process it that would be cool.  Hmmm...

[bprice2]

Yeah, its probably too much work.  All the same, it truly pisses me off to come home excited about a new purchase only to find out that some ancillary screwed the pooch.

[nathanm]

It would be great if the waveform representation could be worked into iTunes for instance, with a small thumbnail.  That way you would really be able to see where the loudest troublemaker songs are and compensate accordingly with the song\album track gain feature.  Just like thumbnails for a digital image, just wider instead of square.  There should be a way to do it in software I'd assume, but I'm no programmer.

I checked a message board for a band with a most grossly compressed\clipped recent album to see if anyone had brought the issue up (these people are not audiophiles of course) and to my surprise someone had posted about it.  Although some people did "get it" others were outright hostile and combative, declaring the album to be flawless.  Other people didn't even know what the graph meant.  That much I can understand of course, which is why it would be cool if iTunes had waveform thumbnails.  Although it's a very technical issue which listeners SHOULDN'T have to concern themselves with, I think an educated user is always a good thing.

Wait a minute, that's B.S. - the freaking psychedelic dancing visualization doodads - people do know those are waveforms right?  Maybe this isn't as far-fetched for the average joe as I originally thought.  Hmmm...

As depressing as that other board was to read, it made me think; how far can it go?  How much distortion can joe sixpack truly tolerate until he stands up and says, "Whoah, something's wrong here, this sounds like shit!"  Could the mixes be smashed another 10db and have everyone not bat an eyelash?

[Wayner]

Having experience mastering, I can tell that the digital waveform has been maxed out. All of the blue lines in the top audio pain are clipping. This is an attempt by an uneducated "mastering engineer" to get maximum volume from the digital domain.

To put it in analog terms, it would be like recording music with the VU meters in the +4,5 or 6 db zone constantly. Zero headroom. I would guess the distortion levels to be at 10+ percent.

Headache? Of course! The music is in an unnatural waveform. Have you ever heard thunder real close? That is audio power with zero distortion. That's also why it can shake the house.

W

[Bob in St. Louis]

Ok, explain this one.
I've got a copy of Stevie Ray Vaughan's The Sky is Cryin' My favorite song on it is "Little Wing", it's the only song that has a constant buzz on it, possibly a 60hz buzz. Why only one song? And why, since it's such a glaring flaw, wasn't it caught?

Bob

[Wayner]

Bob,

I too love that song, but I think it was recorded live. Live recordings are very "iffy" at best, not a controlled envirnoment like a recording studio where you can do take after take after take. That recording of Stevie shows what an excellents blues guitarist he was, GRHS.

W

[gitarretyp]

Ok, explain this one.
I've got a copy of Stevie Ray Vaughan's The Sky is Cryin' My favorite song on it is "Little Wing", it's the only song that has a constant buzz on it, possibly a 60hz buzz. Why only one song? And why, since it's such a glaring flaw, wasn't it caught?

Bob

I think that buzz is his guitar/guitar amp. Single coil pick-ups can be a little noisy.

[SET Man]

Having experience mastering, I can tell that the digital waveform has been maxed out. All of the blue lines in the top audio pain are clipping. This is an attempt by an uneducated "mastering engineer" to get maximum volume from the digital domain.

Hey!

  Those mastering engineer must have try to make the master sound like thier 128k MP3 on thier iPod with those crappy white headphone.

 This is sad but ture. Most of CDs today are so compressed that they sound like they were recorded with MP3 file

 Anyway, I just came back from visiting my family in Thailand. I picked up some Thai music CDs with me and all of them sound pretty compressed!

The funny thing is that one of the Thai CD I picked up are music from late '70 to early '80 and it sound pretty good, better than the new release albums! Must because it was full analog recording/mastering and less compression than current new album.

 I just have to put up with it since I like the music... very sad very sad

Take care,
Buddy

[Mathew_M]

That was a good article.  I've read similiar ones in the past but this one really nailed the point to non-technical/non-audiophile readers.  I liked the part about vinyl not necessarily sounding better than cd if the cd is mastered properly.  I have a couple of poorly mastered lp's that compress and distort like they were taken from the redbook.   However there are artists like Radiohead that put out extremely dynamic and listenable cds.  Luckily for me I don't sit down and listen to very much pop and rock music.