On Thu, 9 Jun 2005 15:02:19 -0400, "Tocaor"
wrote:

I picked up the latest Coldplay CD and I am so disgusted with the audio
quality. There is absolutely no dynamic range and it's painful to listen to
at even a moderate volume. I know I am beating a dead horse here but have we
become a nation of deaf retards? Why do labels insist on making every
release sound like **** now?

This idiotic practice of pumping up recordings to such ridiculous levels has
to some back down to earth. Lots of great music is greating destroyed. I
really don't understand this **** anymore....

Make it stop....please!!!!

One of the Sound On Sound guys (I think) did a nifty comparison. He's
a big Rush fan, so he reduced each Rush album to one big stereo
envelope and compared them visually. The results were amazing. While
2112 sounded like crap (what an awful recording of some great music!),
its envelope looked like an audio waveform - crests, troughs, runs.
ie, music.

Then he looked at a recent Rush CD - it was one solid block. Just a
big, long rectangle. I realize that a highly-compressed recording can
resemble a ripply block when squeezed visually, but this damn
recording looked like someone made one long swath across the track
with a goddamn paint roller.

I'm guessing that the current "compress the living **** out of
everything all the way to 0dB" trend was an evolutionary thing. Just
as some early producers "juiced up" their 45's so they would sound
louder on the local malt shop jukebox, today's well-heeled vultures
want to squeeze every bit out of 16/44 so when the stuff is played on
radio or cheezbag CD players, it will woof the woofers and "fill the
room".

Feh. I see no end to it, either. When we start migrating to 24/96
media, they'll just pump the Christ out of that, too. Then we can all
hear even MORE of some sampled hi hat going TSISK TSISK TSISK in our
eardrums. Hooray!

- TR