Thats why our album sounded like that

When we recorded we spent way too much money on hiring a percussionist and laying down layers of instrument tracks.. and i thought, ok that will sound cool, but when we got the mastered copy back you couldnt hear any of that and it was just this bland generic rock guitar sound on everything... we'll here's why.

The Death of High Fidelity

In the age of MP3s, sound quality is worse than ever

ROBERT LEVINE

Posted Dec 26, 2007 1:27 PM

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David Bendeth, a producer who works with rock bands like Hawthorne Heights and Paramore, knows that the albums he makes are often played through tiny computer speakers by fans who are busy surfing the Internet. So he's not surprised when record labels ask the mastering engineers who work on his CDs to crank up the sound levels so high that even the soft parts sound loud.

Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered — almost always for the worse. "They make it loud to get [listeners'] attention," Bendeth says. Engineers do that by applying dynamic range compression, which reduces the difference between the loudest and softest sounds in a song. Like many of his peers, Bendeth believes that relying too much on this effect can obscure sonic detail, rob music of its emotional power and leave listeners with what engineers call ear fatigue. "I think most everything is mastered a little too loud," Bendeth says. "The industry decided that it's a volume contest."

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