Frustrated with the new recordings!!

Ever noticed those drum sounds before the so called "Remastered" recordings?
The sound seem so original.

I think that the drum sounds in remastered recordings so distorted or recorded at high levels of volume!
Even the albums that came out after 2000 have these kind of highly synthetic drum sounds.

I recently purchased Scorpions- Sting in the tail-- the drums were recorded at high decibels or they sound too thrashy.

I wonder any of you audiophile folks have the same opinion with the drum sounds in the albums that come out after 2000.

Loundness war still goes on!! (Turning down the volume doesn't help!)

Turning down the volume can't help a thing after the mix no longer has any dynamic range from compression misuse. The exact same thing applied when I was engineering for multiple rock radio stations in the 70's. Nobody wanted to see their VU meters vary more than two or three decibels with music content. They wanted everything compressed to the max to make their station stand out on the dial in terms of volume. They figured, and they were correct, that the person would automatically stop at the station that sounded the loudest. It is a shame. With recorded music content a lot of times the mastering engineer has his hands tied because of what he is given as the mixed product. Most of the time it is already too heavily compressed.

Dennis

Today's generation seem do not care about the quality but all they need is loudness.

most of Today's albums have Drums recorded like padding on leather!!


wonder how Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody's lead solo would sound if it get remastered again!

With recorded music content a lot of times the mastering engineer has his hands tied because of what he is given as the mixed product. Most of the time it is already too heavily compressed. This is what audio said and i couldn't agree more. The mastering engineer is stuck pretty much with the mix he gets. Back in the day people would always compress the crap out of the drums. Personally, I hate that. Plus you never know on these remixes if the used other sounds for the drums via pro tools or whatever You just never know. I would say though there are some great drum sounds coming out on a few new records. The new John Mayer record with Jordon sounds great. Even if your not into Mayer the drum sounds are pretty sweet. Maybe its different with the remastered harder rock stuff, but there are still some cds out lately that the drums sound really sweet. It all depends on who recorded it and who mixed it. Trust me I have a great sounding drum kit (mine) turned into crap. It happens, but don't lose hope there are some great sounds out there. It's a bit older but my all time favorite cd, especially the DVD is Steely Dan's "Two against Nature" Ricky Lawson kills that gig, who ever mixed it did the best job I have ever heard. Even if your not into this kind of music everydrummer should check it out.

Joe

Mastering can add more compression (and unfortuneately often does) but it can't take it away from individual instruments. Even trying to undo global compression is very difficult unless you know exactly what was used originally and can create an exact reverse frequency/dynamic curve. Otherwise you get mistracking, similar to folks trying to "re-align" their Dolby noise reduction units.

Oftentimes the mastering engineers are forced into the volume wars by the producers and other suits. There are things they can do with eq, frequency selective compression, and decorelation of the stereo image to bring out or hide certain things, but the basic mix is already done.

The original job of the mastering engineers was to equalize the volumes of the various tracks, eq them so that they sounded similar to one another, and do the various things like center the bass frequencies and apply whatever compression or limiting was necessary to cut analog grooves into record masters.

Remastering often means that someone got a lower generation master and gave it to a mastering engineer with newer (presumably better) equipment, and hopefully that person did a better job than the original. Which may have been a time constrained production job that ultimately turned into a classic release, thus warranting putting more effort into a reissue.

Fortuneately folks like Bernie Grundman are out there making their own recordings so that people can see what audio can sound like when it's not compromised by a label exec trying to grab the listener in the first 5 seconds.