Modern CDs sound terrible?

[LFC_SL]

From this thread Wiki Honour Roll of well mastered CDs

Thoughts? I know it should be 'the music' before whether its been mastered correctly, but my ears have been opened. So apparently
Fleetwood Mac - Greatest Hits 1988 is much better than the
Fleetwood Mac - Greatest Hits 2003

So never buy "remastered" CDs? At least I'm a new classical fan, which are meant to be the last bastion of properly mastered CDs.

P.S. Red Hot Chili Peppers 'Californication' and 'By The Way' are actually just a wall of noise

[Helicon]

Remasters are never guaranteed to sound better.

I remember hearing Californication for the first time and being horrified by the compressed noise i was hearing. I don't mind distortion (Lenny Kravitz's The Circus was his best work), but i hate compression. Another reason this sounded so bad was because i play BloodSugarSexMagik a lot, being one of my favourite albums, and this is much more dynamic, not compressed. It's recorded well and mastered well, courtesy of Rick Rubin.

But then, CD's are quite bad in general anyway. I always remember being used to Tears For Fears Sowing The Seeds Of Love on CD, and after a couple of years picking it up on vinyl....and hearing an almost totally different album.

There are some great sounding CD's out there, shame they can't all sound as good. Hopefully if the majority jump on the HD bandwagon, we'll see higher quality music too, whether it's CD or a new format. Or do something with dts 96/24...that sounds much better.

[FeisalK]

http://www.austin360.com/arts/conten...9/28cover.html

"Let's say you go to the store to buy a CD, a brand-new CD of a popular rock band. The group is your favorite, you've been looking forward to this CD for some time. You have the band's other recordings, you've seen them live, perhaps you've even heard the new songs once or twice at a show.

You buy the CD. You take it home and throw it in the CD player. You couldn't be more excited as it starts to play.

But something weird happens as you listen to it. You like the songs, but you don't really want to listen to it for very long and you're not entirely sure why. You take it off. A few minutes, later you put it back on. Same thing happens: You like the music, but you still want to take the CD off. It's more than a little weird."


what if the loudness wars struck the Art world?

[overkill]

There is already a thread on this somewhere, with a link to an excellent article by a reviewer who makes just these points. That music should be enjoyed not endured, and the vast majority of modern CD's are not, due to the mastering (or re-mastering) enjoyable. As the guy says, think about how awful clipped tape recordings you make are, then think about the fact that all of the producers and engineers are aiming to produce that sound! It makes economic sense, as the guy says, as recordings are now aimed at the 'on the move' listener rather than the audiophile, so compression is the answer for the 'majority'. In particular as probably 70% (or more) of young people, the major market for the music industry, just rip their CD's to their music storage systems nowadays anyway.

I don't think HD will even apply LFC. We've already been down that road with CD, and it made little impact on the majority. As Hi-res has shown, quality audio is becoming a pigeonholed, 'minority' market, and as such I doubt they will, as they've done with hi-res, make more than a 'token' effort. Plus, as with the hi-res re-masters, unless they get the engineering right, who says HD will live up to expectations anyway?

There are great CD's out there, but not in the mass market.

Oh, and Classical recordings are also just as prone to 'over-production' as anything else. I have some DDD masters that are just awful by comparison with standard discs.