My favorite Dream Theater album is Scenes from a Memory, as mentioned in my previous post. But my second favorite would be Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence. I like the grand concept albums/story albums. Anything with an overture and guitars makes me drool.

Scenes has it all… the story element, repeated musical motives, in addition to narration and sound effects that help progress the story and set the mood. It is so so good.

Six Degrees has some of those same elements, though scaled back a bit, along with a second disc of “regular” non-story songs, which are all just as good as the story disc.

I feel they peaked with these two albums. I enjoy their other work, but Scenes and Six Degrees get spun more than any other of their titles.

Oh, and while I don’t usually get into concert albums, Dream Theater recently released a concert CD on which they covered the entire Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon live. It’s great. And talk about combining two of my favorite things. =)

Mostly rock. From 1970 (Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Styx) to today (Foo Fighters, Fall Out Boy, Muse).

I like prog rock as a subgenre quite a bit (Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Rush), including modern prog (Dream Theater, Porcupine Tree).

I grew up in the 90s so I have a soft spot for grunge rock (Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, Bush, Candlebox) and industrial rock (Nine Inch Nails, KMFDM)… which later inspired emo and indie bands, so I’m also a sucker for 2000s emo/indie (My Chemical Romance, Taking Back Sunday, Brand New, Panic!, Death Cab, The Decemberists, Tegan and Sara).

If I had to pick a favorite though, it would be an epic struggle between prog and grunge.

I grew up with grunge. I dreamed of moving to Seattle when I was young. I learned power chords before actual chords when I picked up my first guitar. Not only do I love the radio hits, I also have every import single from the Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails and I love all the dusty forgotten b-sides too.

But I feel prog is more enjoyable overall. I know every note of Pink Floyd’s numerous 20-minute opuses and I love the voice of Rush’s lead singer Getty Lee. Dream Theater’s album Scenes from a Memory is a masterpiece, not a single dull second…

So yeah. How about you?

I promise, this will be my last post on this subject for at least a few days. ;)

First, you should always trust your ears over any numbers, waveform screenshots, or others’ ears. If a song or album sounds good to you, you’re done, enjoy it!

But there are a few ways you can analyze your current collection, or look up albums before you buy them:

The DR Factor - The Dynamic Range (DR) is the range between the loudest parts of a song, and the quietest parts of a song. The higher the DR number, the more dynamic the recording is, and usually, the higher the DR number, the better. BUT, just because a song or album has a low DR number, does not mean it will sound bad. Some music (like hard rock) isn’t meant to have many quiet parts, and so a lower DR number is not an immediate indicator that it will sound bad. You can look up DR values at dr.loudness-war.info (click on that for an example search for Tori Amos albums).

The Waveform - I post screenshots of waveforms from time to time to visually illustrate my points. Waveforms can be viewed in any audio editing software (Audacity is a free audio editor) and in most video editing software (all recent waveform screenshots I’ve posted are from Vegas Pro). Open up your track(s) in an editor and visually inspect the waveform. This will help confirm if something sounds off to you. But again, trust your ears, not your eyes, when it comes to music. I use screenshots to back up an argument, not make an argument.

Mastering Info/Research - Some CDs I’ll buy based solely on who mastered it. Look for the names Steve Hoffman, Barry Diament, Kevin Gray, Doug Sax, James Guthrie… you’d be pretty safe buying anything they’ve done without hearing it first, as they are known for their audiophile standards and usually REFUSE to work on any project that would require them to brickwall the master. (Read Kevin Gray’s “A Note about CD Loudness” on his company’s website)

Of course, mastering engineers aren’t exactly rock stars, so it may be difficult to find out who mastered the album you’re interested in until after you’ve purchased it and can dig in to the liner notes. In this case, I would search for or post a new thread on stevehoffman.tv asking which pressing sounds best for a specific title. Most members there own multiple masterings of their favorite albums (in fact there is an entire thread dedicated to which album each forum member owns the most different masterings of). Steve is one of the mastering engineers I mentioned above. He runs this thriving forum where music fans and audiophiles all hang out and discuss these kinds of details ad nauseum (it’s really quite fun). The forum is very active, I’m typing this at 8am and there are currently over 700 members logged in and browsing the forum.

Remasters - With few exceptions, stay away from “remasters”. The best sounding release of most albums is *usually* the first release. If you want the best sounding copy of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, track down the 35.8P-11 Japanese pressing of the CD from the mid-80s (because of how great this pressing sounds, it is expensive, everyone wants it… for a cheaper, but still GREAT sounding mastering, pick up the HDTracks.com reissue of Thriller, it’s stellar). The Postal Service reissued their only album, Give Up, this year… just buy the original 2003 CD, it’s $7 on Amazon Prime, the new remaster will just be “louder”. If you want the bonus tracks, track down the original CD singles where they were all released as b-sides, again, they will, most likely, be the best masters we’re going to get.

How do you easily find very specific pressings/masterings? Discogs. That website is amazing. I mentioned a specific Japanese CD pressing of MJ’s Thriller above and it can be confusing tracking down the pressing you want as Discogs shows 159 unique pressings of Thriller. But if you scroll through that list of pressings and click on the 35.8P-11 pressing I mentioned above, there is a Marketplace link in the right-hand sidebar where you can buy that specific pressing. Easy-peasy! It’s like eBay for audiophiles.

Finally, a note on the “volume adjusting” program you asked about. I wrote a detailed post about it here, but in short, iVolume simply adjusts the overall volume of each album in your iTunes library so all your albums are relatively the same volume when shuffling. It will NOT make brickwalled albums sound any better, it will simply turn them down, a lot, so they are the same average volume as properly mastered albums. Anyway, read that post for more info…

Glad to see so many people interested in this topic! My Adele post has over 1,000 notes, and my NIN post from a year ago on the same subject got 500 new notes in the last two days as people discuss this topic. Keep passing the info on, maybe there is some hope after all. =)

Currently they do it to keep up with the Joneses. “Label A has loud masters, so we here at Label B we must have LOUDER masters…”

So initially in the late 90s/early 00s, labels started thinking that “louder was better” …they started directing mastering engineers to lay the compression on heavier and heavier. This peaked around 2003-2007 with most commercially released CDs containing MASSIVE amounts of distortion. Not the good tube/guitar distortion, I mean nasty, ear-destroying digital clipping/distortion that happens when your audio signal rides at -0.1 db and occasionally pops above that.

That’s what you’re seeing in my Adele post. That CD rip is brickwalled at the top and bottom, resulting in a lot of distortion in both the top end and bass frequencies.

In addition to the distortion, compressing and hard-limiting sucks the natural dynamics out of the audio. When you go see a concert, you feel the kick drum in your chest. But put on the same band’s CD after the concert, and the audio will sound thin and wimpy by comparison.

This is NOT the fault of the CD, this is the fault of the way the audio on the CD was mastered.

Digital audio can sound just as dynamic and warm and powerful as analog, it just has to be mastered properly. Some audiophile labels excel at this. Check out reissues from Audio Fidelity, Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs, Analogue Productions, or HDTracks.com. These audiophile labels tend to focus on the same old reissues of Pink Floyd and Doors albums, but occasionally “fix” some modern releases too, like the last five Green Day albums, which have all received AMAZING 96kHz/24bit audiophile reissues through HDTracks.

Anyway, uneducated listeners always hear louder as better, and marketing is always aimed at the lowest common denominator. But once you hear a great, dynamic mastering you realize your stereo has a volume knob for a reason, and you don’t need the label to squish the waveform for you. Unfortunately most labels don’t care, they just want to push product. And most consumers don’t care because they don’t know any better. Remember when everyone was happy with VHS quality at home? Then DVDs were “high definition”? Now they’re laughable when compared to 1080p. Which I’m sure we’ll all shake our heads at when 4k video comes into our homes. It’s all about having something to compare it to, hence my sporadic posts of waveforms here. =)

Adele… another victim of the loudness wars. The top track is “Rolling in the Deep” from the commercial CD/iTunes master of 21, the bottom track is from an audiophile reissue.

As you’ll see, when you turn the massively over-compressed master down to match the same volume as the reissue, the audio on the commercial release is hard-limited and has all the dynamics/life choked out of the waveform:

I become a giant squid of anger when I hear/see this.

lifescouts:

Lifescouts: Perform On Stage Badge

If you have this badge, reblog it and share your story! Look through the notes to read other people’s stories.

Click here to buy this badge physically (ships worldwide).

Lifescouts is a badge-collecting community of people who share their real-world experiences.

I’ve told this story before in my personal zine, but I don’t think I’ve shared it here.

I’ve only performed music on stage once before. It was while I was in high school. My band got a gig playing intermission at the show choir concert… so we were playing in front of the entire school. We ran on stage at intermission and got the cue to start playing… I reached into my pocket to grab my pick, but the pick wasn’t there.

I fished around in my pocket frantically, but all I could find was a dime. So I played the show with the dime. It tore up my guitar strings, but it worked! Crisis averted!

Anyway, that’s the only time I ever performed on stage. I’m more of a songwriter, not a performer. So more stories coming with the songwriter badge soon. I can’t wait to get the majority of this month’s music themed Lifescout badges, what a fun month!

There are a few reasons, but let me address two of them…

The Audiophile/Music Lover’s Answer: When people prefer vinyl pressings of albums it is (usually) because they want an all analog production chain. Analog recording -> analog mixing -> analog master. Vinyl is an analog format and keeps the chain analog. When you make a digital master (for CD or download), depending on the resolution, you end up only capturing a portion of the original analog recording.

Standard CDs/downloads are 16bit/44.1kHz. This captures sound frequencies from roughly 20Hz-20kHz, which is the frequency range the average young adult can hear. But most analog recordings have much higher and lower frequencies, mostly sibilance and overtones (and tape hiss). In an all analog chain, these frequencies are passed through each stage and, theoretically, make the end product sound better. Digital though, when any part of the chain is at 16/44.1, will round these frequencies off.

To fix this, you could play hi-res audio (I love hi-res audio) at, say, 24bit/96kHz, or even 24bit/192kHz. But even at those super high resolutions, you’re still only taking snap shots of the audio (granted 192,000 snap shots per second at 192kHz), but you’re not getting a continuous signal like you do with analog.

To that point… Still Got Legs was recorded digitally, mixed digitally, and mastered digitally. Those snapshots are as hi-res as Still Got Legs will ever be. So listening to the CD (or a lossless rip/download) is the best reproduction you are ever going to get. Pressing a vinyl from a digital source will not make the digital source sound any better. In fact, given the inherent problems with the vinyl format (inner groove distortion, incomplete fill, etc), it would probably actually sound worse.

The arguments of “better sound” on vinyl vs CD for most releases are usually due to the mastering, not the format - but that’s an entirely different discussion (one I don’t mind having, but would increase this ask by a number of paragraphs).

So, again, all of DFTBA’s recordings are digital and none would benefit from a vinyl release over a digital release. The best way to hear our releases would be from a 24bit/96kHz lossless download… and maybe with a little less “hot” mastering. But we have to compete in the modern soundscape with all the other labels, so we’ll continue to push our masterings, sadly.

The Businessy/Sales Answer: Vinyl doesn’t sell particularly well, and it costs a lot to press in the limited runs we require. We can’t compete with the bulk discounts the majors get, and we hate having to sell something at prices higher than average simply because the manufacturing costs are so high. The Soup Sessions vinyl was an experiment and proved what we had feared… not enough demand, and too high manufacturing costs.

Time to Save Rock and Roll! Fall Out Boy’s new CD arrived today (early!) with an autographed poster. Been looking forward to this for a while.

Hah. Back in 1996 Ruthless Records had an @aol.com email address. And a Geocities-esque looking website URL (both pictured in the second photo). Still, good Bone Thugs-N-Harmony CD single.

For my international music friends who may have missed this late last night, check this out… The poll for choosing our first featured album ends tomorrow, so vote now, and then follow myrecordclub to join in on the discussion!

myrecordclub:

Like a book club, My Record Club exists to share discussions, reviews, opinions, fan art, and other collaborative postings all related to a weekly featured album. Each week’s featured album is voted on by the followers of the blog, usually under a given topic or theme for the week.

Everyone participating that week is encouraged to listen to the featured album, in its entirety from beginning to end, and then submit reviews, articles, fan art, covers, etc, all relating to that week’s featured album.

Why?

Because music is no longer a communal experience. No one listens to the radio together anymore. MTV and Rolling Stone are shells of the culture-creating giants they once were. We rarely hear artists outside of our comfort zone. We dial up whatever we want to hear on YouTube or Spotify to the detriment of everything else.

I think sharing the listening of an album, like watching a good movie with some good friends, could be a really exciting way to discover new music, rediscover old favorites, and dig in beyond the singles to some deep album cuts.

If the thought of listening to an album in its entirety, as the artist intended, and then discussing it, reviewing it, and maybe making some fan art or recording some covers inspired by that album excites you - then please, follow this blog, submit your thoughts and art when an album speaks to you, and chime in on ideas for future albums for us to listen to together.

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My Record Club is run by Alan Lastufka. Alan is a songwriter and the co-founder of DFTBA Records.