Metallica's Death Magnetic Sounds Better in Guitar Hero

timlitton

Compression has gotten out of hand. In an "arms race" to be the loudest, uber-compression has bled from TV commercials into music and dynamic range is the biggest casualty. Here's a prime example:

"According to mastering engineer Ian Shepherd, Metallica's new Death Magnetic album has a serious sonic problem: it has been compressed (in the audio sense of the word, not the file size sense) just about as much as it's possible to compress audio.



...the problem goes beyond compression. He says some parts are actually distorted from digital clipping. "As you can easily see," he writes, "the CD version on the bottom has been heavily compressed, limited and/or clipped, and sounds massively distorted as a result." Later analysis showed that the CD is 10 dB louder than the Guitar Hero version, which sounds about twice as loud to the ear, according to one description. That's some wicked compression.

According to this analysis, audiophiles would be better off recording the songs from the videogame than buying the album because the Guitar Hero version has far more dynamic range than the hyper-compressed CD version."

Taken from the Wired blog, Listening Post.
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/09/does-metallicas.html