Metal Reviews

There is nothing wrong with the sound on the album. They're like the 3rd richest band ever, obviously if the album is underproduced it's just to give it a raw old school feel. Load was produced greatly, but it was total crap.

So I'm the only one that the compression and loudness of Death Magnetic bothers?
Maybe you all listened to too much music at a too high volume and are now incapable of telling when something's wrong...
With that loud a volume, the music loses all its subtlety and what we're left with is a good album that should have been much better with a reasonable 93 db (mp3gain standards) limit while all the tracks reach a silly 100+...

Just see for yourselves:


(with MP3 gain)


(All Nightmare Long with Audacity)

And just to make certain you understand me, here's Master of Puppets (the song) with Audacity too:


See how the blues lines, with All Nightmare Long, take all the place while they don't with Master of Puppets? Well, I don't want to get too technical on you but that is the difference between a normal and overloud sound.
Now, everything sounds equally loud... The dynamic is lost and what we're having is a crap sound that just destroys the music!

This gif is another clever description of what happened in the past 25 years :
http://i36.tinypic.com/2irasux.gif

See this article for more details.

See also this video (for those too lazy to read through the whole article) that explains it all.

To sum things up, if you want to play it loud, crank up the volume, don't let the recording industries do it for you and kill the music !

haha holy shit the song is one giant blue bar D:

Aargh! Mind changing them to links, please.

yeah, I agree on the loudness. Said the same thing a while ago when i heard one of the songs from the new album. It's too damn loud! and not in a good way



hopefully we'll get a review of the album today .. right?

Since you asked so nicely...

What's the problem?

http://www.metalreviews.com/phpBB2/view ... 99&start=0

The gif is 41,9ko, the jpeg is 264ko...
I don't think it's that big a problem then...

Rules is rules. I appreciate that having links there rather than the actual GIFs will irrevocably damage your argument, so much so that any retard will be able to out-argue it and prove that actually Metallica used Darkthrone's studio and got Trig Palin to master it, but hell, we all make sacrifices sometimes, and this is your time. Heed the call.

That just doesn't make sense but, okay, I changed it...

Thank you!

Your argument is about 7 years old. Everyone is aware of this and nothing has been done to curb it either. Luckily enough we have replay gain technology that can reduce the loud gain of these albums. The only good news is that albums haven't gotten louder. Its been about the same since this started.

Their last 17 years of music were crap, so I'd say this album is certainly come-back. I'd rate it an 88/100

I also agree about the production of the album; WAY too loud. And that snair drum...jeez. Tune that sucker down please. Other than that I like almost everything about it. Hopefully the next album will be even better. Knowing Metallica, we'll have to wait for another 5-10 years, though.

yep im a fanboy.... but i understand the crappiness of st. anger and the boringness of the two loads.... my first metal love was with thrash and metallica.

Is it the same album we are talking about here, damn, I listen to this and I found it to be totally pathetic. I'd say it's as bad as St-Anger, but in another way, like they try to be all thrashy and they fail utterly, the worst part being the drumming, seriously, compare this to any great thrash album and you'll see why it sucks. This album is a fucking parody of thrash. I've never been a Metallica fan, but this one really made me laugh. And Jame's vocals are a real joke.

I agree that there seems to be alot of hi end/digitial clipping and some audio distortion. I played the CD audio rips back on Winamp and the spectrum analyzer goes deep into the red. Also the snare seems a bit distorted. It's hard to get past that aspect of the recroding. It's a shame because this is a really good album!

Have some common sense people and STOP QUOTING THE ENORMOUS IMAGES

I can't imagine this problem was not on purpose. I mean tons of important people must have listened to the album prior to its release, not to mention Metallica themselves. As stupid as it sounds, it must have been made to be that way for whatever reason. Loudness has always been a problem but this is beyond ridiculous.

The good thing about it being this way on a huge album is that it will get some publicity and maybe stop the madness. I mean it's not even possible to make something louder than this without it being scrambled to shit.

Some people were claiming the Guitar Hero 3 versions fixed the loudness issue so I downloaded them to have a listen. There's definitely a big difference, sound is much cleaner.

Here's a waveform comparison some guy did on the metallica forums:
http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d19/i ... 23/Yup.jpg

I think you can guess which ones are GH3 versions and which are album versions.

The week that it came out, every other song was Metallica new and old. I probably heard at least 4 or 5 Death Magentic songs