I was listening to Tedeschi Trucks today and trying to decide if it was classic rock or pop-country.
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You know, I think a lot of the problems these days are down to music being mixed for crappy PC speakers and headphones instead of hifi systems. Everything’s compressed for the extra volume.
It’s gotten truly ridiculous. Even old songs get shitty new mixes for loudness targeting mobile and PC speakers.
bye bye dynamics
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Oy that’s pretty severe.
Also I’m not well up on production techniques but I get the impression that most producers these days just rely on presets to churn out the same sounds all the time. It’s all a consequence of the medium…
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Mostly the production technique here is the equivalent of running the mix up into the master limiter, squashing the crap out of the dynamics but increasing overall loudness and raising relative volume of more subtle parts by the resulting compression.
There’s plugins that do this, and presets on normal mixing/mastering plugins that do a more intelligent job of it, but that’s the gist of it. And there’s tons of mixing “advice” on the internet on how important winning the Loudness War is.
Yuck.
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I suppose it could be said that compression has done about as much damage to pop music as autotune…
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Nice info. I hope the new trend is that people just want music how it was intended/recorded. For example Apple is offering hi-res lossless music now. I just hope all the remastered stuff isn’t remastered for loudness. I do like Death Magnetic tho.
Yup. This is why I despise remasters.
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Before I knew better I used to preferentially buy them, thinking they would be better. I still am replacing them over time.
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My memory is crap, BUT, I can remember a song from my youth to the note.
I know what they sounded like, and hate when I am streaming a song from Apple and I hear all sorts of things that don’t belong. This is why.
I suppose one could say ‘we have better technique now so its better’. - no, it was fine, no reason to mess with hit.
I think the real reason is to optimize for how people listen now. - I don’t think this optimizes anything.
So when people don’t believe that vinyl has a warmth and a quality to it that you can’t get with digital…I suspect this is a major culprit of that.
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Well back then you usually had a radio edit of popular songs. So the concept isn’t really new but it’s just a shame if they don’t make a difference between those two anymore. Altho I can imagine that mainly pop music on streaming services are like this. I really can’t imagine that vinyl or cd’s are all like this. I’m a bit skeptical if that’s really the case. 
Even Vinyl can have remastered versions on them. It’s not a matter of digital or analog but which master was used.
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I don’t see the issue…their catalog, to me at least, is pretty darn complete and amazing as it stands.