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To be short, I'm only going to give one example of this.
There is something in music going on called "the loudness war." I'm not going to go heavy on the details but the quick explanation is that since the biggest demographic of music buyers listen to songs through either cheap earbuds that came with their smartphone or through 200 dollar mini systems bought at wal-mart, music studios are upping the "gain" and other sound properties during mastering so that the music plays louder when it's finally listened to.
While that's fine if you're listen to music using the above mentioned items, it also introduces distortion that really comes through if you play it on a high-end sound system. If you have a nice set of Martin Logans, B&W's or Definitive Technology speakers (You know, ones that are designed to bring out the nuances of music that you didn't get to experience before) a lot of these albums mastered this way are nearly un-listenable! To be frank, on these systems music mastered this way sounds like pure garbage.
The sad part about this, is that you would think that only mass-market artists do this. Joe Bonamassa, who's music caters to a smaller but more discriminating crowd, has his music mastered this way as well on all his recent albums.
I was talking to a person last week about this, and this is what he said:
"Yeah but how many people actually listen to music through speakers that cost 2 to 3 grand a pair, and that's just for the fronts not including any surrounds, center channel or subwoofer? If you're a studio, might as well master the music for the vast majority of devices that people are actually going to use to listen to the stuff on instead of spending money so it sounds better to 5 percent of people who have those type of speakers."
Wow. Talk about POINT. MISSED.
First, not all high-end speakers costs 2-3 grand a pair for the fronts. Second, guess how much it would cost to make the music sound good across ALL platforms? ZERO! All studios would have to do is not up the gain and levels so much, and the worst that would happen is that the people who are listening to the music on el-cheapo systems would have to do is turn the volume up a little more. Oh my, the horror!
There is something in music going on called "the loudness war." I'm not going to go heavy on the details but the quick explanation is that since the biggest demographic of music buyers listen to songs through either cheap earbuds that came with their smartphone or through 200 dollar mini systems bought at wal-mart, music studios are upping the "gain" and other sound properties during mastering so that the music plays louder when it's finally listened to.
While that's fine if you're listen to music using the above mentioned items, it also introduces distortion that really comes through if you play it on a high-end sound system. If you have a nice set of Martin Logans, B&W's or Definitive Technology speakers (You know, ones that are designed to bring out the nuances of music that you didn't get to experience before) a lot of these albums mastered this way are nearly un-listenable! To be frank, on these systems music mastered this way sounds like pure garbage.
The sad part about this, is that you would think that only mass-market artists do this. Joe Bonamassa, who's music caters to a smaller but more discriminating crowd, has his music mastered this way as well on all his recent albums.
I was talking to a person last week about this, and this is what he said:
"Yeah but how many people actually listen to music through speakers that cost 2 to 3 grand a pair, and that's just for the fronts not including any surrounds, center channel or subwoofer? If you're a studio, might as well master the music for the vast majority of devices that people are actually going to use to listen to the stuff on instead of spending money so it sounds better to 5 percent of people who have those type of speakers."
Wow. Talk about POINT. MISSED.
First, not all high-end speakers costs 2-3 grand a pair for the fronts. Second, guess how much it would cost to make the music sound good across ALL platforms? ZERO! All studios would have to do is not up the gain and levels so much, and the worst that would happen is that the people who are listening to the music on el-cheapo systems would have to do is turn the volume up a little more. Oh my, the horror!
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