the L2 ultramaximiser

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i can't take this anymore. i am sick to the eyeteeth of all these records mastered to fuck and beyond and clipping throughout the entire length thanks to the hideous and evil L2.

something has to give. when are mastering engineers going to stand up and do what's best for the music? when are record companies going to realise that records mastered this way are fucking horrible to listen to?

― the surface noise (electricsound), Saturday, 21 February 2004 03:54 (twenty-two years ago)

can you explain this a bit more jim? in idiots terms to start.

― mullygrubber (gaz), Saturday, 21 February 2004 03:59 (twenty-two years ago)

I'm with you. The reason why so many albums sound subtly annoying after 10 minutes these days is because they've got no dynamic range whatsoever; they've been crushed flat, they sound like someone yelling at you without ever having to take a breath. You load the waveforms into Pro Tools and they look like BRICKS. It's slowly approaching FM broadcast level.

the thing is, in speaker tests, consumers always pick the 'louder' one, even if the sound that's being projected is slightly more distorted & clipped. if they're played at the same volume, people will pick the better sounding, more accurate speaker, but otherwise people just choose 'loud'. and CD mastering is a competitve market. Artists trying to break radio can't afford to have their song be a few dB quieter than the previous track played on the air, everyone's chasing each other over the cliff.

but it's a major reason why I can't listen to major label pop music anymore; any dynamic range that an artist is putting into the flow of his 45 minute album is gone after mastering-to-stun.

― (Jon L), Saturday, 21 February 2004 04:04 (twenty-two years ago)

The whole 'it's got to sound good on the radio' argument is duff though - most commercial FM stations are *already* massively compressed at source, so everything sounds the same anyway. Doing this to the records themselves is superfluous and perhaps even self-defeating.

Maybe we've got to the point now where brick-wall limiting is so much a feature of the sound of contemporary pop that it would be tantamount to a complete shift in production style to skip that step. I somehow doubt that the new Beyonce record feature audiophile-levels of dynamics before the mastering guy gets hold of it - the 0dB-all-the-way approach probably pervades every step of tracking and mixing.

― Michael Jones (MichaelJ), Saturday, 21 February 2004 10:17 (twenty-two years ago)

Yeah, I always think of this as the Tresor records sound. I cannot listen to the stuff anymore because it just sounds totally flat and one-dimensional. It is funny that this started in dance music and migrated into the pop market. I remember when the Swedish records first started getting big in 97-98 and everybody was so impressed by how loud and crisp they were. In hindsight, those records sound like hell now.

― Former Supposed So Called Nihilist Teenage Drug Disco Addiction Counselor (mjt), Saturday, 21 February 2004 19:30 (twenty-two years ago)

most commercial FM stations are *already* massively compressed at source, so everything sounds the same anyway

commercial FM stations all have $10,000 Orban Compressors or the nearest equivalent. the disturbing thing is that the same scale of competition has now reached college radio stations, so it's affecting independently released CDs as well. People are basically just using L2 to turn their levels up until they're 'as loud' as their Outkast or Stereolab disc, without noticing that they've basically just ruined their music.

one tip to musicians; when the mastering engineer is A-Bing the unmastered/mastered recording for you, make sure he's matched the volumes. often he's just trying to demonstrate how much 'louder' he's made your source ('hey I made it 6 dB louder!'), but when volumes are mismatched it's harder for you to tell if the sound's been flattened or distorted in some crucial way.
when they're matched, suddenly you can hear that the drums suddenly sound like garbage noise, and that the bass line is now squashing the vocals, etc.

― (Jon L), Sunday, 22 February 2004 00:04 (twenty-two years ago)

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