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Nate Lanxon

Nate Lanxon is CNET UK's Senior Editor of News and Features, and covers every aspect of technology for Crave. He also enjoys popular-science books, obscure Japanese animation and plays 'technical metal' on the drums, whatever that is.

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Tuesday 30 September 2008, 9:58am

Death Magnetic: Mastered By Muppets

Two weeks ago, Metallica released Death Magnetic -- their best work since 1991's Black Album or 1986's Master Of Puppets. But I can barely bring myself to listen to it.

The band has taken the 'loudness war' to such an extreme that Death Magnetic has been crippled by cataclysmic distortion, as a result of the insane volume the album has been cranked up to.

The loudness war has been getting gradually worse since the 1990s. Record producers have been forced to make their recordings consistently louder to compete with other labels' releases, in order to better ensnare a listener's attention.

Loudness war: the same song remastered over time (Source: Wikipedia)

Now it has got so intense the only way to get music even louder is to squish the recording into one equally loud block of sound and make the whole lot louder. It's a technique that uses 'dynamic range compression', but to the average listener of Death Magnetic it sounds more like their hi-fi is broken.

At first I thought there must have been a problem when I ripped the CD to my computer. But I tried it on a stand-alone hi-fi and heard the same: distorted drums, horrendous definition, absolutely no dynamic range; just a hideous, relentless destruction of Metallica's talent.

Thousands of other audiophiles and Metallica fans are complaining. There's a petition to have it remastered.

Then I heard the Guitar Hero version of the album. "What the hell?" I exclaimed to the empty room in which I was standing. "This sounds perfect," I continued. "Great dynamics, gorgeous recording, no distortion, no insane volume. Am I going mad?"

Only by talking to myself. You see, it transpires there are two different version of Death Magnetic: one for Guitar Hero, one for the CD. And the difference is outrageous.

Mastered by muppets?
Being an audio nerd, I immediately fired up Audacity to analyse the waveforms of both albums, seen below. The top waveform is taken from the CD version of the track The Day That Never Comes. The waveform below is the same song, but taken from the Guitar Hero release.

The height of the waveform correlates to loudness, and the clearly defined peaks within the Guitar Hero version -- the ones not even present on the CD version due to the intense volume -- are the dynamics that have been stripped away by dynamic compression and loudness.

Click for the full-size image

This problem has been well documented and explained in this YouTube comparison video, too.

The loudness war has to stop. We, the listeners, control the volume of our music, and we control who gets our money. The war on audio quality reached apocalyptic proportions with this release, and if there is any Justice For All, we'll stop letting our albums be Mastered By Muppets.

9 Comments | Post a comment

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Comments on this post

Thats amazing. I had no idea that this was happening. The comparison video really lets you hear the difference and i'd personally be mad as hell if id've payed for a copy and found how shoddy it is. Especially if i had bought a lossless download - what would be the point in lossless noise?

Posted by Andy on Tue 30 September, 2008 10:31 AM

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Well it's significantly better quality noise than the 128Kbps nonsense coming from the iTunes download of the album. It's like hearing someone being slowly crushed to death.

Posted by Nate Lanxon on Tue 30 September, 2008 10:37 AM

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so not pleasant then?

Posted by Andy on Tue 30 September, 2008 10:38 AM

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This record is beyond bad in terms of it's sound - compressed past the point of ridiculous. And it's a real pity too, as some of the songs are outstanding slabs of heavy f**king metal!

Posted by pigchop on Tue 30 September, 2008 1:52 PM

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Nate, "muppet" is a word created and trademarked by Jim Henson. You mean to use the word puppet, and btw, Mastered by Muppets sounds absolutely ridiculously lame compared to Mastered by Puppets, which is a far better, and obviously correct pun. Now then, I do like your article, but everything you've discussed, including images (the example of using Audacity for The Day that Never Comes) are weeks' old news, and a lot of what you've reported has simply been stolen from other sites, including mentioned image. If I weren't about to runoff somewhere in ten minutes, I'd take the time to point out your plagiarisms and lack of original reporting. This is not cool at all. Btw, as of this week, Lars has already denied the sound on DM is any worse than it should be, proof that his hearing is shot. There are YouTube videos of Metallica listening to the final master, none of whom mind the atrocious mixing. Ted Jensen purportedly claims he was not proud of working on the album, namely because the sound was "brickwalled" (his term) by the time he received it. And yeah, all that's old news by now too.

Posted by chris on Wed 1 October, 2008 2:41 AM

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Muppet is a commonly used word in England/UK meaning idiot, so his pun is technically correct, and much better than Puppet. Nice article and I also had no idea that this was happening.

Posted by Tim on Wed 1 October, 2008 8:56 AM

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Thanks for the helpful comment! I'll bear in mind in future that you don't appreciate it when people use public domain images (see image 1), even when they're attributed to their source (see image 1's caption), or when I make my own images at home (see image 2) to illustrate further points. Perhaps while I'm busy bearing things in mind, you can have a think about the fact that half of reporting is talking about things uncovered by other people and other writers. It's customary to attribute your news to its source (see links 1, 4, 5, 7 and 9), and to add some originality (see my comments about how I personally first discovered this sound defect, and how I googled the issue). At no point did I say this was a news article. It's opinion, and it's something I wanted to offer to people who may otherwise not read about it. And at the end of the day, the entire point of this piece was to highlight the 'loudness war' -- something discussed time and time again by site after site, for the last 20 years.

Posted by Nate Lanxon on Wed 1 October, 2008 9:37 AM

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Thanks for the article.Really great stuff.I think this is the first time the pirate,that is flac uploads of the GH3 version sound better than the ACTUAL ALBUM!And even after something like this record companies complain about people not buying CDs.If this is what the CD sounds like,I can't see why I should.

Posted by Deep on Thu 9 October, 2008 8:11 AM

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I bought this CD on faith that Metallica had a great CD ready. What sorts of professional ears decided this was sellable? I produce my band's own CDs (Fresh Red on MySpace) and even I with a fraction of the recording and mastering prowess and budget wouldn't allow this out the door and I am an hobbyist. We appear to have all wasted money on this venture...what a shame.

Posted by Jim Allison on Fri 17 October, 2008 9:24 PM

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