Loudness Magnetic
Posted on Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Last week I gave Metallica’s new album a try and complained about the audio quality. Turns out the album has became the latest star case in the loudness war.
Apparently the Guitar Hero version of the album was mastered separately from CD release and the difference is striking:
The Guitar Hero version is on top and the CD version is on bottom. This comes from engineer Ian Shepherd, who has been blogging about this extensively over the last week. Here’s a video clip comparing the two versions:
So I downloaded the Guitar Hero version and am listening to it now. It is, in fact, much better & more listenable than the CD version.
Jeez, I don’t even like Metallica that much. How did I get sucked into this? Back to work…