Don’t Blame the Format for Bad Sound, Blame the Suits

Within the recording community, and to a lesser extent the audiophile community, the “loudness wars” have been a prime topic of conversation for a number of years.

Summing up these respective communities thoughts on the hyper amounts of compression prevalent on today’s popular recordings, audiophiles claim the loudness wars are robbing the public of experiencing the full potential of recorded music. Meanwhile, the recording community has tried to distance itself from the practice by saying it has no choice in how music is mixed and mastered, because it’s the record labels that are calling the shots.

A recent blog by the British mastering engineer Ian Shepherd, owner of Mastering Media, says that with the release of the latest Red Hot Chili Peppers’ (RHCP) album the music industry may be handling the format of vinyl differently than the more popular CD format.

According to Shepherd, who posted his comparative analysis of the song "Monarchy of Roses" from the RHCP’s I’m with You album using a clip from the track taken from the vinyl and CD releases as the basis of his opinion, it’s the mastering process and not the format that’s to blame for the loudness wars controversy.

Shepherd points out the Chili Peppers and their producer Rick Rubin were early loudness war offenders, and he also suggests as a conspiracy theory that perhaps the vinyl version, which was released a few months after the CD’s release, was mastered with more dynamic range to quiet critics who complained the album was too compressed.

This isn’t the first time the veteran engineer has spoken out against the practice of squashing down popular recordings. A few years ago Shepherd made waves with his criticism of Metallica’s Death Magnetic album by pointing out that the Guitar Hero version of the record actually sounded better than the CD version because it was mastered with less compression.

You may be asking, what does mastering have to do with selling and installing electronics systems? What this means is that electronics professionals may want to think about their choice of content before blindly throwing on a demonstration CD for a client. A CD that’s been mastered with a lot of compression won’t sound good on a revealing system, and that mastering will prevent someone from experiencing the thump of a kick drum or the impact of a double bass solo. Put more simply, tons of mastering compression basically defeats the entire purpose of demoing a system. Installers willing to install a turntable into their demo systems however may be able to accomplish the goal of impressing their clients with a piece of music, albeit on vinyl.

Thankfully with vinyl sales surging to 20-year highs there’s plenty of new music available to satisfy the tastes of a range of consumers, and if installers want to, they can even explain how they have the ability to integrate the best of analog and the best of today’s digital media into a single system to meet the needs of a diverse household.