Metal Reviews

I've got bad news for everyone:

Tape compresses sound, Vinyl compresses sound, tubes compress sound. Anything analog does it basically other than solid state for the most part.

Your Outer, Middle and Inner ear compress sound.

Speakers compress sound, except it is called dampening in that context

It takes a shitload of compression to make a track even useful.

Not compressing sound in the mastering state loses a ton of headroom, introduces noise and causes bit-depth loss.

You can probably figure out that they are trying to take mixes that were meant to be heavily compressed naturally and using pro-tools to do it instead. The fact is on an older album you have to live with tape hiss and overall lean audio quality. This would not even be the case if people still purchased quality audio equipment. A valve pre-amp set to "saturation" will boost all the lows, compress them and add the low-harmonic distortion everyone got used to and was compensated for when those albums came out on their original medium.

Newer albums sound far better than anything ever recorded if they were done with quality in mind, which most metal albums are. What kind of "qualities" the sound has and were chosen is another issue.

You're completely missing the point. I don't think anyone is saying compression is bad because it is necessary, but compressing beyond reason is absolutely absurd and that is the problem. There is no reason to compress the audio as much as it has been in recent years.

Don't mind him, he's crazy!

Btw, I agree with you Sangre. We need more organic production nowadays. For example, think of Lost Horizon. They released two of the best albums in the Metal history but, I have always felt that the production is not the adequate, especially in the second album. The guitar is too buried in the mix. Another band suffering the same problem is Rhapsody (of Fire).

Power Metal productions that I like:

Riot - Thundersteel
Scanner - Hypertrace
Helloween - Walls of Jericho, Keepers I & II

And an excellent album with a bad but fitting production is Edguy's Vain Glory Opera. I just love that warm sound.

The guitar isn't buried in the mix. It's just a thin, tinny guitar tone. That's not a production problem, that's the guitarists' fault. I think modern power metal albums sound terrific and are not overcompressed at all compared to how albums of the past were handled. Everything was mixed thin back then so the productions seemed more airy and spacious than they were. At least now, you get all the instruments in full quality instead of some notched away tone that is nothing like how instruments sound.

Regular people would listen to a album like Transylvanian hunger and say what is this shit. But it's the necro production that provides that disconnected feeling in my opinion. I'm by no means a black metal expert but when you hear a black metal album with crisp production it kind of takes away from the atmosphere that could of been created. But on the other hand bands today that try to go necro just dont sound like the early second wave stuff. It sounds forced. But like I said I'm no expert.

I like the raw feel from early demos such as on Morbid Angel - Abominations of Desolation, but also like the more polished re-recordings of the songs on the later albums.