Why CD's sound so sh**ty with Hi-Fi equipment

[Jordo]

So I found this very interesting program and youtube video about why CD's lose so much clarity these days, the CD is an excellent medium for audio reproduction, but its the mastering that wrecks it, take a look.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

So after you see that, I found this program that can remove the clipping from CD recordings, and they sound much better, check out the demo, you need a .wav file to run the files in the program.

http://www.cutestudio.net/

This is not a plug to this program, I have no vested interest in this, I just tried out the demo myself and was amazed at how it cleaned up CD tracks, even tells you how many times a song clips, like some new Metallica songs clip 20 to 30 THOUSAND times a song, no wonder it just sounds like a wall of sound. Check it out, neat stuff, I might even buy it.

Also to note, you don't need anything that fancy to notice the difference, I changed out my Logitech comp speakers with an older sony receiver and the BR-1S monitors from parts express, and theres a few songs you should check out as reference. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Californication CD, the song Otherside, before treatment it had this scratchy noise coming from the tweeters at not a very loud volume, after treatment the scratchiness is nearly gone, and thats after turning the volume up 3-4 on the receiver, actually anything on the Californication CD is a clipping disaster, some songs 80000 clips or more.

[littlesaint]

There seems to be some fuzzy math and what I'll call "interesting" interpretations of information theory on that site, which in practice has little to do with why CDs are mastered loud. I don't really see how you can correct clipping without having the original tracks as a reference. You'd have to interpolate the information. While this may sound better, it may not be "correct" with regards to the original track. Slick looking software though. I might give the demo a look.

[Johnloudb]

I've never heard of recording engineers clipping the music signal on purpose. They do use various amounts of dynamic compression, where they increase the level of the quiet sounds the make them louder. This makes CDs sound worse on high end gear. People supposedly by more of records that have increased loudness ... I don't know. But, if the software improves the sound, that's great!!!

[audioqueso]

That's just poor production. Any good sound engineer or even a DJ will know that recording levels are always set to under 0db. You don't go past that. It's the final production that gets the increase in overall levels. And that does not cause clipping. Of course there's going to be clipping from the source if it's recorded improperly to begin with.
I'll give it a try and compare good recorded CDs with something that's improperly recorded. I'll let you know what I find.

[Jordo]

I know that you cant truly bring music back from a bad recording, but the software seems to interpolate what the clipped track should sound like, and it does a pretty good job i think. And about the engineer purposely clipping the song....well there was some forums where people were posting about the new metallica CD and how bad it sounded, and the engineers are forced to do it because the label and the artist wants to "make it loud like all the other songs out there", so they think they sell more CD's. Theres even a wikipedia entry on it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

and the sound engineer commenting on the bad metallica record.
Said by Ted Jensen himself to another forum member....

http://www.metallicabb.com/index.php?showtopic=85317

RE: Death Magnetic mastering job
mailed-by sterling-sound.com

hide details 10:34 AM (44 minutes ago)


Reply



Thanks for writing.



I’m certainly sympathetic to your reaction, I get to slam my head against that brick wall every day. In this case the mixes were already brick walled before they arrived at my place. Suffice it to say I would never be pushed to overdrive things as far as they are here. Believe me I’m not proud to be associated with this one, and we can only hope that some good will come from this in some form of backlash against volume above all else.