Metallica vs Guitar Hero: You Decide

Further to my post the other day about the new Metallica album sounding better on Guitar Hero than the CD comes this easy to hear/see side-by-side comparison of the two (video below).

Ted Jensen, head engineer at Sterling Sound, who mastered the album, allegedly responded to fan concerns, writing "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." Ouch!

Anyway, thanks to NME comes the previously mentioned video where YouTube user florixg has dropped the level of the CD mix to sound about the same volume as the Guitar Hero mix. Florixg switches between the two sources during a rather heavy solo making the horrible mess of the CD (in comparison) quite apparent, most noticeably in the drums. Remember, this is comparing the mixes, not whether you like Metallica or not.

Which mix do you prefer?

New Metallica Album Is Too Loud, Even For Metallica Fans

Metallica's latest album "Death Magnetic" was recently released with praise for the band's return to good ol' Metal being overshadowed by the terrible mess made in the mastering of the album. The beef a lot of fans have with the new album is the volume has been pushed so far that the quality of the recording has been compromised by introducing distortion (not the good kind).

"How can that be so?", I hear you ask. Well, thanks for asking. It's a simple matter of physical limitations of audio recordings. Digital recordings have a volume "ceiling" where if you step over it by a minuscule amount you will "clip" the sound causing harsh distortion. Analog is a little better in this respect as you get a tiny bit of leeway once you go past the physical limitation of the magnetic medium but you will still distort the sound. So the trick when mastering an album these days is to get the maximum volume while staying within these physical limits. There are various methods you can use to help the mix sound louder while remaining under the ceiling like compression (audio compression, not data compression) which reduces the dynamic range of the recording. Check out the video at the bottom of this post to see what I'm rambling on about and how over the past few decades this problem has worsened.

Ian Shepherd, a mastering engineer and general expect in this field goes into great detail on his blog about the history behind this messy Metallica mix giving examples of some reasons people give for doing this (and shoots them down in the process). Basically, the listener has ultimate control of the volume so if they find the mix too loud they'll just turn it down.

The story gets even better with fans saying that the versions of the Metallica tracks available for Guitar Hero sound better than their "proper" album counterparts. Again, Ian Shepherd performed a few simple tests to show without a doubt that the mastering/mixing on the album just takes the "loudness war" too far.

What's even funnier (in my opinion) is that a leaked version of the album that was available to download from your local BitTorrent site weeks before the album came out has a better mix. Now that's a big WTF!