Entertainment For Lively Minds
Here comes the bummer...
Posted by Patrick Crowther on 11 August 2011 - 11:27am.
This morning I bought The Undertones' Teenage Kicks: The Very Best Of (Salvo label) on CD. Listening to it now and it sounds terribly bassy, like all the top end has been squeezed out of it. This is probably due to the familiar problem of over-compression.
Have any of you got this album and noticed the same thing? Or am I imagining all this?
If it is badly remastered then is there a great-sounding Undertones best of that I can get instead?
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Dunno, but
it's certainly a better title than the earlier 'best of', which was entitled 'Cher O' Bowlies'. Shocking.
The first best-of
...was called "All Wrapped Up" and sported a cover featuring a young lady draped in meat. Maybe Lady Gaga or one of her entourage is an Undertones fan?
All Wrapped Up
Not so much a 'Best of', rather a collection of all the single A & B Sides, as I recall?
You could argue that it amounts to much the same thing, I guess...
No you
couldn't.
Yes you
could !
Ok Bisto
Your top ten Undertones tracks that were not singles or b-sides.
Go!
I'd rather not
It'll only start an argument.
I don't argue, you know that.
I nod sagely and keep my counsel.
No you
don't.
I'm sorry
Is this a five minute argument, or the full half hour?
Apology
not accepted.
You're right, of course
I should have said compilation.
I have the 'True Confessions'
A=B sides comp and that sounds ace. Not sure if that hasn't be deleted and repleaced by something similar but tahts record companies for you
The problem now
is that a lot of Rock music is being remastered by Dance and Hip-Hop numpties. And that these numpties do not understand proper dynamic range. And think that compression is a positive thing. "Compression" by the way for anyone who doesn't know, is compressing the loud and soft out of an instrument or vocal performance. Draining the expression out, in other words. Traditionally it was used by bad guitarists to disguise their lack of musicianship and touch. And it's one of the huge problems with most modern digital production.
The original early recordings
Aren't all that great. I just played my old vinyl copy of their first album and the recording sounds like it had a load of analogue compression in the first place. Add digital compression to the mix and things are likely to get a bit muddy.
My 2000 vintage CD of the first lp has all of the problems you point out, so your best bet is to try and find a CD made before the loudness wars started in, I think, the late 1990s.
I listened to my 'My Cousin Kevin' on You Tube...
by way of comparison and it sounded much better to my ears. Punchy and full of dynamic range as opposed to flat and muddy.
"Dance and Hip-Hop numpties"
In the case of the Undertones remaster series this is the person who did the job:
http://www.masterpiece.net/andypearce.php
The remaster series got some good reviews here and there, although I suspect that's more to do with the songs themselves than the sound.
"Dance and hip-hop numpties"
Are you saying that everyone involved in anything dance and hip-hop (including soul music?) are numpties and bad producers (famously those two genres have never ever issued anything well produced, remixed or remastered) or are you saying that in this particular case a hip-hop numpty re-mastered it?
If it is the latter then fair enough, I haven't heard it and don't know who did it (although evidence above suggests a rock kind-of-guy rather than one of those hippity-hop fellows). If it is the former, then I am calling bullshit.
Also, you really think ALL compression is bad? And that all compression means over-compression?
We need to define compression here.
There are two kinds, as I understand it. First, the compression of a stream of data to reduce the amount of file space it occupies. This is not what we are discussing.
The second is compression of the dynamic range of music. Done to an entire track, boosting the quiet bits and damping the loud bits to make the overall thing MUCH LOUDER or doing the same to an individual instrument in the mix to emphasise that particular sound.
We are all familiar with compression. BLOODY LOUD ADVERTS ON TV AND RADIO all have heavy compression applied to make them stand out. Bands such as Elbow dislike compression and don't use it.
Remember twiddling the Rec Volume knob down as the VU needles swung into the red during a loud bit whilst you taped an album? You were applying compression.
Ok, sigh, let me explain ..
No, I wasn't saying that. Some, although not all of it, is beautifully and sensitively produced. But a lot of that type of music depends mainly on Producer in a kind of babysitting role, the musicians not so much.
Is most compression bad in Rock music? yes. Why? because dynamics is natural. One of the unconscious way a musician expresses him or herself is through dynamics. The natural, expressive ebb and flow of a musical performance. If you drain this out it, what are you left with? A filtered, computer generated and cheapened version of the original. If you like, its like Photoshopping a painting. Taking all the variety in brush strokes out, cleaning up all those mistakes. What are you left with? a clean and sterile version of the original. A pointless activity.
People who don't intuitively UNDERSTAND guitar music, are not qualified really to modify it. And sadly there are many, regardless of their digital skills, who fall into this category.
Does this happen a lot now with remastered Rock Music - YES! unless the original musicians are involved. Jimmy Page is a worthy example of someone who has taken it on board to digitally remaster his own stuff. In his own words "before someone else destroys it." To my ears Bowies Spiders From Mars stuff was horrifyingly digitally remastered. They changed all the levels, did all kinds of pointless and soul draining shit, and crushed the guitar. Much much worse in terms of expression than the original recordings.
See it's easy through compression, and limiting, to make a poor musician sound more professional. And because there are many very poor musicians involved with people learning production and mixing skills, they often make this mistake.
Fair enough
It was the phrase I used in my post title that rankled, and made me think that you were blaming dance music for bad re-mastering, which I thought was bizarre.
Your reply clarifies that, and I agree with every word, although I don't have the ear you do.
It's not all about compression
It's not just compression which may be the issue. It could be poor quality master tapes, or even missing ones, 'corrective' eq being applied etc etc. One of the great disappointments of digital versions of music is so many 1960's singles, designed to sound great on juke boxes and so on, sound weak and tinny, and massively underwhelming on cd. Case in point: Tamla Motown and many soul singles, reggae singles, early R&B and so on. No doubt it is partly to do with the sound of juke boxes and other record players, but really, why can't they get close to the wonderful dynamics and crisp exuberant vitality of those mono 45's? With all their techy gizmos and plugins you would think it would be possible, but it just doesn't seem to work. Look how long it took to issue The Beatles stuff in mono - lots of people now have no idea of the rich and exciting sound of those old cuts.