Clipping on official releases

[TheMamba]

Originally Posted by Rider

You think the Zwan album was bad you should see some other stuff. The Mars Volta have an album where teh entire album clips. The song starts heads straight up to 0db and stays there. I had a gif of it at one time.

Which Mars Volta? Deloused at the Comatorium?

Shit, I've been listening to that thing for a week straight and haven't noticed. Could be because I'm listening in my car vs. home stereo......I'll have to take a closer listen.

[RainDawg]

Originally Posted by Rider

The fact the SACD layer on the Dark Side of the Moon has no clips, proves my theory. The record industry is fucking up the sound on CDs to make SACD sound better. They spent 30 years telling people CD was the highest quality sound and convincing people to "upgrade" to CD. Now they face the problem of trying to get people to make another format change.

This is a point brought up by the Stereophile Magazine review linked from that HA discussion....and I think it's valid. For the pseudoaudiophile, they'll switch between the two layers and say "wow, it's amazing what the differences is" despite the fact that proper ABX testing would reveal, were the audio identical, no difference.

[Five]

I followed those links, this is distressing, I have never seen a cd like this before. I'm going to have to go get a copy of the anniversary DSOTM cd and check it out. Luckily, I've got my remaster (rev2, I think) which I can fall back on. I read that they are also introducing errors as part of some copy protection schemes, I wonder if this is related in any way?

[Rider]

Originally Posted by TheMamba

Which Mars Volta? Deloused at the Comatorium?

Shit, I've been listening to that thing for a week straight and haven't noticed. Could be because I'm listening in my car vs. home stereo......I'll have to take a closer listen.

Deloused, Rip one of the trackes to your PC and take a look it, music should look like a wav with peaks and vallwys not one giant blob.

[RainDawg]

Originally Posted by Five

I read that they are also introducing errors as part of some copy protection schemes, I wonder if this is related in any way?

No, the copy protection schems insert intentionally flawed bits into the disc, but not on the audio portion. It makes it so that a computer drive will fail when trying to read the disc, though, as usual, there are going to be ways around it.

No, this is quite simply either a carelessness or an intentional hijacking of the audio on a certain recording. Read that HA thread again, some interesting comments have been posted about the possibilities of incomptence and/or malice being at issue with some of these recordings.

Either way, I am really upset and pissed off about this...I've bought quite a few jazz classics recently in their remastered form, and I'm afraid that some of them may be flawed. I've yet to find one of these mistakes on my own, but now that I know to look for them, I'm scared that they're going to start popping up everywhere.

[Five]

I'm still shocked especially after looking at this:
http://www.stereophile.com/news/11649/index.html

Of all the studio albums ever released, DSOTM is the audiophile lp. They even remixed the 30th ann. edition strictly from the analog multitrack masters to analog half-track just to be pureists and now this!!!??

[RainDawg]

Well, they can mix from the analog masters all they want, if the production engineer is a cockhead and boosts the amplitude so high that the louder parts of the Money solo get clipped, then give me the old version any day.

Goddamnitassfuck....just the thought that someone could desecrate this album with such incompetence is unthinkable. It really makes you want to piss all over the record companies even more.

Originally Posted by RainDawg

No, this is quite simply either a carelessness or an intentional hijacking of the audio on a certain recording. Read that HA thread again, some interesting comments have been posted about the possibilities of incomptence and/or malice being at issue with some of these recordings.

RainDawg - i know you will appreciate the article link i'm posting here, by Rip Rowan. i read it about 2-3 months after it was posted online, and it's a great read. he delves into some "techie" points in his article, but i suspect you'll enjoy it as much as i did.

Rowan knows his stuff and he has excellent theories as to why the 'remasters' sound, ummm... less than desirable to say the least, and why more and more current recordings are sounding awful, to put it bluntly.

http://www.prorec.com/prorec/article...256C2E005DAF1C


and this crap is really happening. being a big u2 fan, you can even hear it on their albums. if i pop the Joshua Tree disc in the Pioneer cd player in my car, the comfortable listening level (and i dont listen to music loudly on the stereo or in my car) is at #15 to 17. however, if i were to put in a newer disc (All That You Cant Leave Behind or 'Atomic Bomb'), the comfortable listening level is at to #9 to 11 tops. the newer albums are just pumped up to the max levels, and it makes the entire album much LESS enjoyable. there arent any more parts on newly released albums that are "quiet"... the "quiet" parts are still loud, and it destroys the artist's work and aim in the first place of putting a quiet track/part on an album.

with the combined efforts of music labels - the guys in the suits in offices worrying over profit margins and radio play - must be putting the heat on to the mastering engineers to make the "hot new artist's" album as loud as possible so it gets noticed from radio airplay.

over a year ago, i got into an argument over this very thing on a different message board with an audio "engineer." he was all high and mighty, saying he had read articles that "changed his mind" about mastering audio at the maximum levels possible. i posted that article, and he pretty much shut up then. (interestingly enough, he never did post any links as he said he would to those alleged articles that "changed his mind" abut mastering audio. what a douche.)


p.s. sorry for the rant. this is a topic that REALLY rubs me the wrong way. mess with my music, and it's personal then!!

[RainDawg]

Great article...this is something that I honestly didn't realize as pandemic as it was until just the past few days. But it's really got me pissed off....I mean, I have a volume knob on my stereo, and I can turn it up a bit myself if that's what I want. I'm starting to dig through some of my newer CDs, and I starting to take notice at which ones have been clipressed (compressed to remove the dynamic range and then amplified to clipping point) and which ones have not.

It's a very distrubing trend, and just makes me even more willing to download the album from a p2p or usenet to sample it before buying. Honestly, I'd rather have an high bitrate mp3 from a well-mastered release than an original of something that has been ruined with incompetence.....

[Rider]

Originally Posted by RainDawg

Great article...this is something that I honestly didn't realize as pandemic as it was until just the past few days. But it's really got me pissed off....I mean, I have a volume knob on my stereo, and I can turn it up a bit myself if that's what I want. I'm starting to dig through some of my newer CDs, and I starting to take notice at which ones have been clipressed (compressed to remove the dynamic range and then amplified to clipping point) and which ones have not.

It's a very distrubing trend, and just makes me even more willing to download the album from a p2p or usenet to sample it before buying. Honestly, I'd rather have an high bitrate mp3 from a well-mastered release than an original of something that has been ruined with incompetence.....

It's a trend that started in like 98 was when I first noticed it, a few album with little clips here and there, now it is pretty much every album put out.

[oldbrokentapes]

This is almost something I wish I didn't know about. I remember when I transferred System Of A Down's Steal This Album onto MD it managed to nudge the volume meter onto the the "overloaded" final notch, but I've never really worried myself with the issue. I don't listen to music on particularly high fidelity equipment, so I'm fairly immune to the odd speaker crackle. But, now I've read things saying "Hey, those truncated waveforms you've seen? They clip. Audibly. Listen!" I'm hearing it and it's gonna bug me. Just put a couple of bits of De-loused on and yes I'm hearing some feint speaker crackle but I'm definitely also hearing some pops/clips. And it's the label's fault, not that of my equipment, so there's nothing I can do about it. grrr

Cheers for the links though guys - even if it wrecks my listening experience for the rest of my life it still makes very interesting reading!

[oldbrokentapes]

Hey we should have a competition - whoever can find the longest string of 0dB samples "unintentionally" present on an official release wins a CD full of white noise so that they can reassure themself with thoughts of "ah, could be worse"

Anyway, I mentioned this on another forum and someone has brought up QOTSA's (aptly named) Songs For The Deaf as an example. This made me remember I have the leaked demos CD, a couple of songs on which are just unmixed/unmastered versions of the final album releases. Turns out mastering engineers may not be fully to blame. The waveform on the unmastered copies looks much more "true", but there is still the occasional incident of minor clipressing

[Five]

They're lessening the dynamic range of official cd releases as time goes on, just like they did with records in the 70's. The place where they had to draw the line was when the needle would jump out of the groove... I think they had a good sound in the early to mid 90s and I don't even mind the new records sounding louder, it's just when it goes right to the point of digital clipping when I get mad. The new APC cd is very "loud" but never clips once, for example.