The loudness war - heavily clipped audio CD's

[Kieran XJR]

Any other music fans/audiophiles noticed the distorted crackling on some modern music recording, especially with rock bands? I was interested to see issue raised in this news story:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/sep/17/metall...

I do quite a bit of mixing and mastering and find digital clipping can be useful in moderation in combination with compression, though as highlighted in the story, the latest Metallica is quite extreme!

[qube_TA]

Loads of records like this these days, because few people seem to care about quality and have developed a huge tolerance for distortion, studios can put out any old crap they like.

[koenig999]

Tend to find that the vinyl records don't suffer this compression disease like the CDs do.

Koenig

[telecat]

koenig999 said:

Tend to find that the vinyl records don't suffer this compression disease like the CDs do.

Koenig

They can't the Arm would "jump".

Seventh Tree By Goldfrapp is another one that suffers..

[mrmarkyb]

The levels of compression and clipping used on most modern music is a joke... It annoys the hell out of me that a lot of producers these days (and it's all sorts of music genres, trust me!) just don't seem to respect that there are still a lot of us buying music to listen to on something other than an iPod!

The key to good music production is making the final product sound good on any source. But it seems these days now that 95% of people only ever listen to music on either their laptop or an iPod, most people just go for the "Louder the better" option and clip the finished product ridiculously!

Anyway, rant over...