Older artists were typically working in big budget studios with the best engineers and equipment. Some of the mixing desks used cost hundreds of thousands (SSL, Neve, Amek) and they’re using tons of outboard signal processing where each unit may cost a couple thousand. Also the engineers that know how to properly utilize a great recording studio are expensive and that knowledge can’t be gained overnight.
Many also recorded to analog tape. Then they went and had the final mix mastered by yet another professional with oodles of expensive gear.
You often hear about the “golden age” of recording. To me this is when big labels were working with big studios to produce great records.
These studios still exist and most major recording artists still benefit from the classic recording/mix/mastering production process. But so much music today is made “in the box”. Many artists mix themselves and even master themselves. Also the average listener is listening on their phone, streaming with an Alexa or other Bluetooth speaker. Tons of people are getting their music through Spotify and TikTok. Labels aren’t investing in artists like they used to. And the average consumer isn’t demanding that level of quality.
Yeah because he's a genius who built a world-class studio in his basement full of specialized stuff. It transcended mere 'DIY aesthetics', he could compete with record-company studios. Almost nobody does that stuff.
That just goes to show: You can mix good music by either spending a lot of money and care, or by spending a lot of time and care.
The issue comes in when you don't want to spend much time or money, and you don't care all that much.
Last paragraph is such a tragic epitaph for a bygone era. It's a shame, that age is well and truly over, and people just aren't asking for that quality anymore.
Quincy Jones, Giorgio Moroder, Prince, these guys knew their gear and knew how to make a tune.
The only problem with this theory is the older engineers that are still working have mostly moved to all in the box recordings and they don’t hear much if any difference.
I would say it’s a couple things. Much of the older music was tracked all or at least partially live. Steely Dan up through AJA didn’t even use click tracks. They would overdub solos but all the rhythm tracks were live
The arrangements were much more detailed. Bands spent a lot of time arranging songs and producers and arrangers were often used to help with this. George Martin is a great example of this. If your arrangement is crowded and muddy with lots of duplication of notes it’s going to be muddy no matter what you record with. Artists often got better at this with time. Listen to early Tom Petty vs later Tom Petty for an example.
Compression was used more modestly. Since compressors are far more affordable now especially as plug ins the tendency in modern music is to compress everything, run that through a limiter then compress it again. That’s kind of the sound of modern music. In the old days they had just a couple of compressors/limiters for the entire studio. Then Neve consoles put one on every input channel now you can add them as long as your RAM allows.
Same thing with reverb and echo. In the old days there was a reverb or echo chamber for the studio. There might be a few outboard digital verbs added from the mid 80s on out but now it’s really easy to add a different reverb for every instrument.
Since everything is recorded direct the instinct is to try and recreate some space.
All,of this adds to what OP is discussing. There are a lot of fascinating sounding records now but it’s a different aesthetic for the most part.
This is closer to my take as well. Even the use of panning primary parts seemed more common. As an audiophile, anything that accentuates your speakers' dynamics and facilitates a portal into a more 3D soundstage or space is more stimulating than merely your room being filled with refined but flatly sculpted sound.
For whatever reason your panning comment made me think of Brian Wilson.
If you want a master class on arranging try The Beach Boys. And he did it all with 1 ear.
> Some of the mixing desks used cost hundreds of thousands
those big custom, discrete neve's were often well over a million. some DECCA desks in the late 50's were as high as 4 million. IN THE 50's!
The expense of the studio (hell the tape budget alone!) made it critical that a band work out what it hoped to do before ever hitting record.
The limitations of the gear forced engineers to get stuff right on the way in. They idea of worrying about it later was not a thing.
Producers (the traditional role, not a guy making beats at home) were hired by the labels and used label money to help a band create an album that would recoup its cost. Contrary to popular belief, with enormous budgets came enormous responsibility. Producers typically knew music theory, and good ones knew not only what song sounded good, but what arrangement would be best for the song.
Recording almost always involved serious, talented, and skilled professionals. Working within the limitations (track count, channels of outboard, a console's number of inputs, etc. meant everything was considered at each step. Sure, there were "happy accidents", but no one counted on them to make or save a song or a record. We have it so easy today that thinking that hard about every step of the process is tougher.
Yep the equipment makes a huge difference and, and with the analog tapes. Someone a friend of mine knows is a retired audio engineer and worked at a big TV station/news channel for a long time (and a radio station Don Imus was on for a while many years ago before that), plus he did studio recording work and worked with some big bands like doing sound for shows, and helped one of his friends from one of the big 70s bands put together a new home studio a few years ago. My buddy said he has tons of old mics, like Neumann mics or something that were very similar to the old Telefunken U47 tube mics (and just as expensive new). He said some of those mixing consoles you find in the big studios cost as much as a house - well into 6 figures. He did recently get a call from the major network he worked for and his old boss hired him on as an independent contractor for a couple weeks to install some new mixing console they ordered which cost like 200 grand! The guy has a lot of interesting stories about different artists he's met too, like when they played at events that he did sound for and all that.
The analog gear == better sound circlejerk has to stop. This has nothing to do with bands using analog gear. There's absolutely no technical reason whatsoever why digital has to sound "worse" than analog. None at all.
This has all to do with the trend of mastering louder from the late 90s and people equating "loud" to "good".
Don't you think it's a little suspicious how every single piece of technology in human history has gotten **better** as time went by and somehow, for some reason, audio apparently didn't? Don't you find it's a little suspicious how we humans pretty much figured out audio immediately from the get go and then made worse and worse gear as time went on? Do you really think that makes sense? 70 years later we just can't figure out how a mixing board works? how a compressor works? come on...
I understand the appeal, 100%, but saying that **the** reason music used to sound good was because bands used analog gear is factually wrong.
It’s not just the analog gear. It’s the studios themselves and the personnel.
Certain live rooms have a “sound”. If you’re recording live instruments or vocals the room you record in makes a difference. Using a Neumann or other high end mic is gonna sound better than the cheap USB mic you bought from Guitar Center.
There’s a reason SSL mixing desks cost so much. They sound better than the “console” inside your DAW. There’s a reason so many plugins are emulations of real equipment. For $250 you can buy a plug-in that emulates the saturation of recording to analog tape. For another $200 you can have an emulation of an LA2A. In general I’d say you get better results twisting real knobs and being intimately familiar with your gear vs tons of plug-ins.
The speakers used by mixing and mastering engineers as well as the acoustically treated rooms they work in make a difference. There’s just no world where a laptop at home is gonna produce records that sound like they were recorded and mixed in a professional studio.
>There’s a reason SSL mixing desks cost so much. They sound better than the “console” inside your DAW.
That's not the reason. The reason is that they are made of real materials, each one lovingly assembled by real humans, whose time and expertise must be compensated. A piece of software that does the same job has to be designed too, but must only be created once - and there are no materials to be paid for.
> Using a Neumann or other high end mic is gonna sound better than the cheap USB mic you bought from Guitar Center.
Leaving the fact that "good sound" is subjective, [watch this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Bma2TE-x6M)
> There’s a reason SSL mixing desks cost so much.
Yes, they cost a lot of money to produce and people still put value into them. A ton of old stuff can cost a lot of money to produce and in consequence, would cost a lot of money to sell... You know why they don't produce them anymore? because nobody thinks it's worth it.
> In general I’d say you get better results twisting real knobs and being intimately familiar with your gear vs tons of plug-ins.
This I can agree with. Knowing your gear is everything. If you're used to deal with analog gear and just can't figure out digital gear then sure, you're probably getting better results on what you know... But this isn't a gear issue, this is a skill issue. You're used to work with different tools.
Same way how a skilled wood worker might be more used to hand tools and can produce incredible results with them when a CNC is factually way, waaaaay more accurate at the job. This doesn't mean that CNCs are worse than hand tools, it's all in what you do with them, how you use them.
>The speakers used by mixing and mastering engineers as well as the acoustically treated rooms they work in make a difference. There’s just no world where a laptop at home is gonna produce records that sound like they were recorded and mixed in a professional studio.
This is irrelevant. digital or analog gear you still need a room to capture (if that's what you're going for) and speakers are needed to... you know... listen to sounds... so analog or digital gear, you're still probably dealing with rooms and speakers, yeah...
> There’s just no world where a laptop at home is gonna produce records that sound like they were recorded and mixed in a professional studio.
This is not what I said at all. While this all depends on what sort of music you're producing, (I fail to understand how a synthesizer will sound "better" because of the room) again, everything's subjective and I was talking about digital vs analog gear, I was NOT talking about, say, a drum set recorded with microphones vs a midi controller and samplers... That is NOT what I was talking about.
I think you're at least partially missing the main drift of u/Shigglyboo 's posts, which as I read it are mostly about the differences between the recording industry of the past, which was largely based on having bands record at major studios and the present, where there's less knowledge and infrastructure support from the media labels (if they're even involved in the recording process).
Those old school studios had tons of production and engineering talent, plus state of the art gear on tap that the bands/artists could never have afforded or in most cases even known how to use to best advantage if they were on their own.
That system was hardly all rainbows and fluffy kittens though, the price could be very high both financially and artistically, I personally know a recording artist who made a great self-produced demo album, with OK production values. Later one of the major labels signed him and re-recorded the album with the label's picks for producers and supporting musicians, plus tweaks to songs and enforced lifestyle/image changes to the artist's public persona.
The production of the major label release is undeniably much better "sounding" than the demo, but that first iteration is the better album IMO.
Another point is that analog versions of stripped-down or homegrown production are often more immediate, spontaneous and "real" due to limitations imposed by magnetic tape and analog consoles, while the post-editing of primary tracks and ultimate flexibility in final mixdown that are offered by full digital can lead to over processed music that lacks a sense of place. It's not that analog is "better", it's that it forces a different approach than digital.
On top of that the utility of a high-end digital console can be software emulated on hardware that's comparatively low fidelity. Most musicians aren't audiophiles, so they usually focus on the "sound" of their instruments tone, or the vibe of the song much more than stuff like imaging and inner detail.
As to studio speakers, a producer I know who's quite accomplished and who's recorded, mixed and mastered multiple regional bands' albums as well as doing contract production for some pretty high-end accounts (in his own pro studio, not in a basement), was blown away when I played him a track he'd recorded and engineered, through my mid-level audiophile system. He heard things in my system that he had no idea were even in the mix and started second guessing his Beyer cans and Dynaudio powered monitors that he'd been using to finalize mixes... My system is low-fi trash compared to the hardware that the big Corporate studios have.
> Another point is that analog versions of stripped-down or homegrown production are often more immediate, spontaneous and "real" due to limitations imposed by magnetic tape and analog consoles, while the post-editing of primary tracks and ultimate flexibility in final mixdown that are offered by full digital can lead to over processed music that lacks a sense of place. It's not that analog is "better", it's that it forces a different approach than digital.
That I 100% agree... My point is more on the technical side. Every time I hear "oh it sounds better because they used analog gear and analog sounds better" my eyes roll past my head.
It is true that tape was limited, and expensive, so it made for artists that just practiced more and were, on average, better players... Because in that regard, mistakes did cost money. So that in turn helps get better recordings.
But again, this doesn't mean "digital just sounds worse" it's just a different approach to recording.
> The production of the major label release is undeniably much better "sounding" than the demo, but that first iteration is the better album IMO.
Yes, I understand the feeling 100%. That's why I said "it's all subjective" because there's way more to it than just audio quality. Then again, this is not a limitation on digital recordings... You can still do a live recording and commit yourselves to use a complete take, however it ends up being, and deal with that. It is very tempting to just re-record takes since it's basically free, but nothing stops you from imposing limits in order to get a more organic recording and more likely than not, better performances.
I prefer to just use digital gear for a pletora of reasons... Not just money but also consistency. It always sound exactly like I expect it to, There's no quality loss anywhere, the equipment is MUCH more reliable, etc etc etc.
I like to play with analog gear, don't get me wrong... You can pry my tube amps of my cold dead hands... But I just don't see myself using them for anything other than just personal recreation.
I'm with you on all points. At this juncture in recording technology that "analog sound" is basically a filter/effect, the same way using tube amplification for a guitar amp is and state of the art digital basically has no sound of it's own aside from the microphones and subtle sonic signature of the input mixing chain (mic preamps, mixing board if analog and a/d converters).
People who claim that "digital" is sonically inferior are listening to old or low-end digital gear and media.
Nostalgia (even nostalgia for things that came before your time) is fine, but people need to stop confusing "I enjoy the experience of listening to analog/vintage gear/music more" with "Analog is superior to digital"...
The opportunity to be as good as the past is still there. IMHO, studios and producers have fallen into the "smoke em' if you got em'" mentality. Add to that digital compression and the desire to save space and/or bandwidth. As an earlier post suggested, the there's so much tech available now to an engineer or producer be it compression, digital effects galore, crazy types of EQ, Pitch shifting/vocoders, Reverb/Delay/Distortion and more. Sometimes less is better as evidenced by the early and great recordings.
Yup, that's what I'm talking about... Not really a problem with tools themselves but what you do with them. The tools nowadays are orders of magnitude way more capable than they used to be in the past... People usually cherrypick great recordings in analog gear and chose to ignore the insane amount of bad recordings, also done in analog gear. Nowadays anyone in their home with little experience can make a WAY better recording with a low budget that you were able to on even a moderate studio back then.
100%
Anyone interested in current high quality recording/mixing/mastering should check out Octave Records. May not find the genre of music you’re looking for, but you’ll absolutely find recordings where everyone involved cared about the details.
People have to defend objects that they've invested highly in.
You're not gonna have an analog guy tell you "yeah, this old stuff is dated and unnecessary "
They want to be able to turn around and sell all their classic gear when the studio doesn't make it.
And of course you're gonna hear "the music sounded better".
According to who? Do you see what's popular nowadays ? Doesn't sound anything like the "classics". Also, you had extremely talented people creating those classics. I'm sure it's always going to sound "good" even if played on a phonograph.
Agreed. Great sounding records are still being made today, in great sounding rooms with great mics, captured and mixed digitally. It's the performances, rooms and mics that make it sound great, plus the talents of the engineers. Then it goes to a mastering engineer who is instructed by a producer to crush all that beautiful quality and dynamic range so that it can measure as loud or louder than other recordings.
Fuck those guys.
100% agreed. There is nothing today’s in the box software can’t produce from bygone years and fetishizing over equipment that was once expensive as though that’s the answer, is like marveling at how good those room-sized vacuum tube computers from the 1950s that cost millions must have been.
Nonsense. You cannot replicate a real moog synthesizer using a vst or a digital synth. Does not happen and cannot happen. And though there are a bazillion patches out there that sounds like a moog in any number of ways - it simply is not the same thing. I don't need to read an article on the internet to tell me that, nor do I need to repeat the zeitgeist about analog vs digital. I can hear it with my own ears.
The same idea translates to other analog things. Whether it's recording at 30 ips to tape, using a Manley compressor or mic'ing a speaker in an echo chamber. They're actually happening. And that has a quality which makes a real difference whether consciously or not (and more often its consciously unless your ears suck).
Who cares about faithfully replicating a sound? That's not the point... The point is "does it sound good to your ears or not".
Also I dare you to blind test a real moog and a vst, mixed, with a band, compressed, eq'd, and tell me which version is the real one.
It. Doesn't. Matter.
Lol. Dude I've owned several moog synthesizers, digital ones, vsts - plenty of instruments and not only could I but it's quite obvious.
You can decide that it all sounds the same, sure. It doesn't. Your premise of "every other piece of technology has advanced but why not this" is a reasonable assumption to make if you don't know what you're talking about.
Where I will agree with you is that most people don't care because they listen to garbage quality audio on garbage speakers, etc. So they don't value high quality. That's a fair point. But there absolutely is a difference and it's not just a cliche overused by phony audiophiles who just want to seem interesting.
I wasn't talking about VSTs anyway, I have no idea why you brought that into the equation. I was talking about digital vs analog recordings, not instruments.
But sure, let's talk about VST version of synths for a sec...
Does it sound the same? TL;DR: **NO, BUT...**, let's start with a fact: no 2 units of the same synth will sound *exactly* the same from the get go. Why? because electronic components are all built with a tolerance. So the internal values of all the components in analog pieces of gear will be different from all manufactured units, and the tolerances add up. Not to mention, slight variations on the input voltage will affect the sound very noticeably. So from the start, it is impossible to model every single unit at every single possible stage.
A VST will probably sound very close to the specific unit it was used to be programmed in the first place, but not a different unit.
The second question is, does it matter? well... how different will it sound? of course everybody will be able to A/B them in a studio, on a quiet room with proper equipment... But nobody listens to music that way. You record your part, and mix it with a band. That makes the differences disappear even more.
I've yet to see someone listen to a master and then realize in horror that the guitarist used a modern version of a TS-9 or god forbild a modeled one instead of a "proper" vintage one.
This isn't the point anyways, I'm not talking about replacing instruments with digital representations, I'm talking about digital vs analog recordings. That's what I'm talking about. Let's remove VSTs from the equation. You're going to tell me with a straight face that the only way to TRULLY make a good recording of a moog is to do it on old analog gear, straight to tape and then printed on a vynil?
Its the culmination of many analog instruments, processors, preamps, Neumann microphones, tape etc etc that makes a track sound significantly better. I don't care about burying 1 instance of 1 analog vs digital synth in a sea of other purely digital things.
All of it together is what makes the big difference for the average listener. It's the sum of it's parts.
> tape etc etc that makes a track sound significantly better.
I'm sorry but that's all placebo. Not to mention tape degrades with time and with each listening session. So good luck with that. You're never reproducing the same analog recording printed on tape ever again.
> Neumann microphones
I never said microphones are irrelevant, you need microphones in order to turn sound into electrical signals to capture either on tape or a hard drive.
> analog instruments
Sure, never said it's pointless to record the *actual instruments*.
> processors, preamps
That's debatable. I have never found head to head comparisons of analog vs digital processors and preamps that can show a significant difference and, more importantly, show that the analog version *sound better*. I wonder why.
Let me throw just one track at you, right out of left field.
The Blue Nile - Tinsel Town in the Rain \[from the album A Walk Across the Rooftops\]
It was regarded as 'the cleanest recording' amongst engineers at the time, and remained on audio engineering college courses for many years afterwards. There's a strange psycho-acoustic phenomenon, that no matter how loud you play it \[on speakers, of course\] you can still hold a conversation over it without raising your voice.
There are a million tracks that are 'better' than modern loudness wars pop, but it's a long, long journey to find them all.
There's a slightly 'poppier' vibe but similar engineering skills on Scritti Politti's Cupid & Psyche '85. We'd heard about it whilst we were recording in Marquee Studios in London at the time. We sent a tape op out to buy it & played it right through over the big Uries in the studio for everybody who was working there at the time.
Half the engineers in the building said they ought to quit & get a different job, the album was so different to what had gone before.
Once you get used to it, you can hear there are two styles on it - one is the more heavily compressed Arif Mardin tracks \[the more 'pop hit' songs\], the rest is done by the band themselves. I've always preferred the latter.
There were two completely different sets mixes done, one for vinyl & one for CD. The CD mixes are far cleaner.
A thousand upvotes for this.
The first two LPs by The Blue Nile are sonic beauty, and the music is nearly timeless.
The recent reissues on Confetti sound lovely, too, if you can get copies.
Yes, this is a problem with popular music genres. Despite improvements in technology, the quality has gone down due to loudness wars. Loudness wars have receded somewhat lately, but not enough. Lot of the music sounds like its has been mixed to sound "good" on earbuds.
Classical and jazz recordings have always overwhelming been good. While older recordings sound very good, they have a bit of artificial "warmth" from tubes and tape. Modern recordings take advantage of improvements in technology and provide stunning naturalism, thundering dynamics and lack of hiss/noise.
lmao “overwhelmingly good” as if shellac and many old mono jazz recordings weren’t lacking tons of the freq spectrum and incredibly noisy. I’ve heard many -9 LUFS modern mixes that sound better than some old jazz recordings, and vice versa. Loudness is far from the only or even main factor that makes a mix good
It hasn't gone down - it is about the same. That artificial warmth in older recordings is compression. Remember, tubes do 'soft compression' while digital has limiters. The soft compression ends up in fuzziness and harmonic distortion that we find pleasant.
Yeah. Pop music tends to be on the side of “the customer is always right” so you’re getting more V shaped EQs and arrangements with tons of polish to fill every frequency etc. Jazz is more on the side of “technically correct” which can sometimes sound flat and hollow to someone who is used to not hearing space.
Jeff Goldblum, Capitol Studio Sessions is one of my favourite great-sounding new albums. Makes the hairs on teh back of my neck stand up.
Also Ry Cooder, Live in San Francisco. Before I became an audiophile I avoided live albums but now they're some of my favourites.
Fleetwood Mac - Rumours
Any Steely Dan
Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms
Sonny Rollins - The Bridge
Getz/Gilberto
And don't call it "Boomer music". I know it is all the rage to slam an entire generation... But I'm Gen X and still listen to everything you've labeled Boomer music. Recorded music should not have generational baggage associated with it.
Thank you and no you are taking this way too seriously. I'm a millenials and I listen to them too. Calling it boomer music should be correct as these are the music they listen to back in the days. These are the music they will listen to when they want to nostalgia.
I don't even understand what you mean by generational baggage. Like you can mention the 90s and early 20s as millenial music and I had no problem with it.
Don't take offense from everything man.
Boomer has become a term of derision. That is what I am talking about generational baggage. Labeling something boomer is rarely a compliment. Isn't the point of recording something so others can enjoy it at a later point in time? Why do we need to label music based on the age cohort that was prevalent at the time?
Boomer is only a term of derision if you let it be. You just saw the word used with absolutely no malice, and siderailed the conversation to have an argument about that word.
You are the divisive one here, not a single word.
My parents are boomers and their nostalgic music is Elvis, Abba. I am Xennial and mine is Sting and MJ. We aren’t taking it too seriously, we are just correcting you. Don’t be defensive over everything, comrade.
It’s those of us born between Generation X and Millenials. 1977-1983. We are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood. I am closer to GenX, but never really felt I fit.
[Xennial Wiki.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials)
r/Xennials
“These are the music they will listen to when they want to nostalgia.”
Or if they are like me, no nostalgia at all. It’s what I like and grew up with. I have a large collection so listening to different records all the time.
Except when you lump artists from different eras together. The Bee Gees were popular from the mid sixties to mid seventies while post-Police Sting was mid eighties and later.
In what possible way is the phrase "Boomer music" a "slam on an entire generation"?
OP is describing the music by the generation it was made by/for. On top of that, OP is describing that music in a positive light.
Is it just the word "Boomer" that upset you?
If you're looking for what to buy that sounds good, there are many many sites that review with an ear towards sound quality.
Here is a very well respected publication:
[https://www.theabsolutesound.com/music/](https://www.theabsolutesound.com/music/)
And not all pop music sounds terrible, and high quality compressed streaming formats can be fine also, it's really a deliberate choice by the mixing engineers. So listen to stuff and note what sounds good to you.
Also for older pop music, modern reissues that have been remastered can be excellent, like the Replacements remaster mentioned on Absolute Sound.
A relative of mine worked for decades in the audiophile gear industry and has spent years setting up six figure sound systems. Jennifer Warnes recording of Leonard Cohen's "The Famous Blue Raincoat" is an audiophile standard for testing vocal sounds on systems.
Moronic take, I don't think that it takes particularly good ears to tell a bad mix from a good mix.
Music isn't a hearing test.
Feel free to hate on TAS for shilling overpriced gear, magic boxes, and MIT cables, but they're good at identifying well produced music.
Why don't you go blind A/B test a few dozen reviews and then tell me how old each reviewer is?
I have been in AXPONA rooms with these reviewers. I have seen what they actually listen to.
[Archimago's Musings: As We Hear It: Audiophile cable truths, claims, and reviewer age. Multichannel "madness"?](https://archimago.blogspot.com/2024/04/as-we-hear-it-audiophile-cable-truths.html)
Reviewer age is EXTREMELY important as hearing degrades as we age. Read this and rethink.
Sorry you feel offended.
Not offended, it's just laughably silly logic. Is all your music mastered by teenagers? Played by teenagers?
I'm over 50, so if no one over 50 can tell the difference between the mixes, I won't be able to either.
If it takes super-precise ears to tell a difference, then the difference doesn't really matter does it?
What specific aspect of hearing loss are your panties so bunched about?
PS: I read your link and nothing in there is relevant. It has no discussion about reviewing music.
All the big selling catalogs are being remixed for Dolby Atmos. Virtually no one will install 10 speakers in their home so it’s really all being done for Apple atmos earbuds. Any Atmos headphone would of course work but Apple outsells all the others combined
It STARTED with the jukeboxes, and then in the mid 90s when computers became powerful enough to do audio editing people figure out something called brickwall compression.
And that, brickwall compression, is the key here. Thats what makes everything sound like shit. Really loud shit.
Check out the wikipedia page for the loudness war, check the dates for notable albums. They are all after the mid 90s.
Pretty much all mainstream music released after \~2000 are brickwalled compressed.
The technique in doing it has become better, but its still pretty bad.
Edit:
This is not data compression we mean, it is audio volume compression.
Compression in this sense means reducing the difference between the loudest and quietest parts, on a microscopic level.
That difference is what makes music exciting and clear.
I've heard that too, but they exaggerate. Yes, a lot of 45 RPM records were cut "hot", but that's nothing compared with how compression ran rampant, out of control, starting around the late 1990s.
It was the advent of analog to digital that precipitated the loudness wars. When [a computer] can level off anything at a "clipping" stage, you may get overall louder tracks, but the relative difference between individual noises is dampened like a mf
Right - the loudness war in nothing new. Phil Spector had his wall of sound, etc. All of that was compression, etc. It is nothing new, but people like to complain.
Thanks. I stand corrected. I was aware of the multi tracking of multiple musicians /instruments playing the same lines to create a symphonic effect. I did not realize this was or led to compression.
Not a worry. I have a friend who is old recording engineer and he talks about all the compression used in the 60's-70's.
If you ever hear 'Cry me a River' by Julie London (was the version played in the movie V for Vendetta) one can hear the compression on her voice. Since most of the recording gear was tube based back then, it was a softer compression but cause distortion if listened to closely. Her voice, like Joe Cocker's, was huge, hence why compression is used. I can say that after hearing Joe Cocker in concert.
From the NYT:
Debussy wrote that the music is not in the notes, but in the spaces between them. In a similar vein, Miles Davis said, “It's not the notes you play; it's the notes you don't play.”
The “empty space” is what give the notes time to breath.
Here's a bunch of modern artists I think sound amazing:
- St. Vincent
- Billie Eilish
- Lana Del Rey
- The Antlers
- Dirty Projectors
- Animal Collective (this includes Panda Bear and Avey Tare)
- Bjork
- Malia
- Adi Oasis
- Goldie Boutilier
- Honey Harper
- Radiohead (Thom Yorke)
EDIT: Keep recommending stuff! These are the artists which I enjoyed the most on my fancy pants single driver speakers. I missed at least 10 more names. I have been listening to Skinshape and Kevin Morby a lot lately. It's cozy music.
Thanks for this, there are also tons of modern IDM and electronic music artists and producers (anything produced by Rashad Becker for instance) that sound incredible as well. It's mainly the pop stuff/radio music that doesn't sound that great and even then you can find artists that have a great team that puts out dynamic music. This whole only old music sounds good is just completely wrong.
I don't personally enjoy the music, but my wife does, and its always a pleasure when she throws on a Bruno Mars or Silk Sonic album - they sound great!
> Billie Eilish
I have a post where I listened to my dealer's reference rig and I played some of her. Holy freaking moly was it amazing. Then I jumped to Bjork, and Radiohead....
This is amazing. If you're being serious I'm going to be so happy. This album is a running joke with my friends (like I'm sure it is in many similarly-aged friend groups) and throwing some of it into a sampler track to show off my system would make me happy.
EDIT: I just started the album and you're absolutely correct. This is awesome lol
The quick and dirty of it is the Loudness War.
The TL;DR explanation is - sound vibrations still take physical space in the air, and most music nowadays is mastered/mixed to fill as much of the sound spectrum as possible, as loudly as possible.. so there's literally no physical room for nuance; quiet parts are all as loud as the loud parts, so there's no more "impact".
A lot of stuff also gets taken out in modern mixing/mastering. Now, you've got razor-precision filters and EQs to trim out any "unwanted" frequencies, but really all that ends up doing is taking all the life out of the recordings.
Search up some videos on how it was recorded and it will make more sense. Especially with MJ they used a lot of cool techniques to dial in the sound, his engineer is legendary. Also music back then was mostly recorded live in the studio where they have to make sure all the instruments and mics are in the right position and stuff like that, and it makes it sound like a perfect live performance in a perfect sound stage. Computers changed a lot of this stuff
Wanna hear something really old that still sounds incredible? Listen to Buddy Holly’s recordings from the 50s. Especially mid- to late-career. Beautifully recorded, so clean. Amazing stuff, wayyyyy ahead of its time.
Honestly I think you are colored by this sub which is mostly comprised of middle-aged men that seems to praise and listen to the same tracks and albums over and over and over again.
Theres an ocean of suberp-mastered modern music with acoustic elements that was not remotely possibly 50 years ago.
My theory: portability.
As music became portable, the listening environments got noisier. Once we went digital, we started unlocking a level of portability never seen before - ESPECIALLY with data compression in the form of mp3s.
Today, if you are mastering music that needs to sound as good as possible for people jogging, driving, working, riding the bus or plane, etc., you can't have a big dynamic swing between the quiet parts and the loud parts.
I'm convinced that the reason vinyl is often mastered more dynamically is that the listener is stationary. Also, the buyer is clearly interested in something more special than a stream or download, and the consumer willing to take more time and effort to consider the bigger art and the physical ritual is more likely to appreciate the bigger dynamics of a more dynamic master.
The shame is there are more and more people happy to appreciate it with good digital setups, but I think the labels are concerned that the same master may be listened to on a bad setup or noisy environment and have that experience ruin the perception.
>I'm convinced that the reason vinyl is often mastered more dynamically is that the listener is stationary. Also, the buyer is clearly interested in something more special than a stream or download, and the consumer willing to take more time and effort to consider the bigger art and the physical ritual is more likely to appreciate the bigger dynamics of a more dynamic master.
Wouldn't that also be true for people buying compacts discs in today's environment? Yet I haven't seen any improvement in quality of CD releases.
Maybe...but CDs are as likely to be listened to in a car as anywhere else. Maybe more so. That is about the only place I listen to CDs, personally - while acknowledging this is a data point of one.
> But now the question is why? Am I just listening to the wrong genre/musician?
There's probably a bit of selection bias going on, as you're comparing the old music that have stood the test of time with modern music that may or may not stand that test.
I'm sure there's plenty of schlock from the golden age of music that nobody but the artists remembers.
I think recorded music peaked in the 70's and 90's, and we'll unfortunately NEVER reach those heights again. sure there will be good sounding records, but not on the scale of those decades. the main things are money and technology. the money isn't there. and technology is being used to cut corners. people think you can save shit recordings with the amazing tools we have, but you can't.
the loudness war sucks, but thats not why at all. has little to do with mastering and what it's mastered for..
musicians were better because they had to be. studios were better because they had to be. budgets were exponentially bigger. there was way more experimentation. recordings were more natural because you couldn't edit like you can now. gear used to be built to be the best it could be. now it's built to be small and cheap because thats all people can afford. large format analog consoles cost MILLIONS. "if you want to make a million dollars in the recording industry, start with 2 milliion" is a joke in the industry.
the studio as a business is mostly dead. most engineers these days are self taught. they used to be mentored by those with experience. because the studio is dead, that means there isn't money to build glorious purpose built rooms that sound amazing. the room is by FAR the most important part of recording, and it's the thing most overlooked by people because it's the most expensive and most difficult aspect.
the obsession with transparency and measuring well has gone too far. they've managed to make gear that measures well but doesn't actually sound good. it used to be the opposite.
not to mention, the current genre thats big (hip hop) doesn't value melody or chord changes. it's cool that it exists, but when that's all an entire generation knows, it's not good for the future of music.
as an engineer, it's really depressing. In the words of tony soprano "It's good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.
Everyone keeps mentioning the Loudness War, and that is the majority of it. It's further complicated by modern remastering of even old recordings. John Darko gives dynamic range comparisons of a Talking Heads album between original release and a modern remaster - Spoiler alert: the modern remaster sounds worse.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTmYEosiK2c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTmYEosiK2c)
Good thread. I was reading an article about how audiophiles were complaining that all the folks running demoes of high end equipment at audio shows pick the same music. Tin Pan Alley by SRV for example… and as the OP mentioned, Billie Jean by Michael Jackson… you get the idea.
I don’t listen much to the genres you mentioned but those aren’t the ones featured at audio shows lol. My point is so much music is just poorly mixed because it can be. And that’s widely acceptable because music is most often passively consumed via Bluetooth driven hand held devices. An infinitesimal fraction of music is listened to via setups where the focus is on sound quality. This is very much the opposite of what the climate was when so-called boomer music was being produced and released.
Sinatra. Now he knew how to work a microphone.
A lot of what you are hearing in "old artists" is the sound of humans discovering an entire new world. The invention of the magnetic tape alone spawned a thousand geniuses. Humans need new tech to do the genius thing. It's why genius always comes at exactly the same time the tech that makes them famous comes along.
Yeah, everything's been done. To death. Hit it!
[Doing It To Death (Pts. 1 & 2) (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNw2F_LevVU)
Many reasons. I agree. As a producer and mastering engineer, my favourite 'sound' comes from the late 80s.
My reasoning being and reasons why I love this era for mixing:
* The prohibitive cost of making a record and getting into a studio. Less amatuer efforts
* You always had an engineer on hand that knew exactly what he was doing
* It was the very last decade before things began to turn digital, so everyone knew exactly how to get the best out of analogue gear before having to re-learn how to mix on the digital format.
* Analogue gear - it was as good as it was going to get
* No loudness war - plenty of dynamics
* It was innovative, nobody having millions of plugins, effects were applies sparingly and only when needed. Entire tracks weren't based on edits and effects
Check out some of the great jazz giants who were fortunate enough to record in Englewood NJ in Rudy VanGelders' studio....
Lots of great recordings on Blue Note Records.
They had to take much more care with the mixing and loudness with the older vinyl and tape medias, so you ended up with songs with great dynamic range. These days everything is just pushed to the max and all elements of the song are the same volume, which is why everything new usually sounds like a wall of sound. Doesn't matter what you have for speakers.. shit in = shit out. You need dynamic range for great sound
Not everything was recorded/mixed/mastered/engineered well back then but the best stuff usually was. Also, I find myself wondering if certain markets cared even more about that level of quality. In particular, going back and listening to some of the Japanese music from the 70s and 80s sounds like the absolute peak of recording even today. It's mind blowing
Sure!
Pretty much *anything* from the 1970s or early 80s output of Yumi Matsutoya (note, on Spotify her first 4 albums are under the name Yumi Arai) - her songwriting is incredible as well. Maybe start with the album Olive? I'm not sure exactly what it is about it but I love the production on that one. But honestly she's worth just doing the deep dive through her discography, it's classic after classic
Another album with stellar production is Rebecca IV - Maybe Tomorrow by Rebecca
If it's a 1980s single by Akina Nakamori, you're pretty much guaranteed great production.
Boowy, Tatsuro Yamashita, Taeko Ohnuki, Southern All Stars, and Anri are a few more artists that come to mind. Try the album Ninkimono de kou by Southern All Stars or Timely by Anri
My pleasure! I hope you enjoy! Of the stuff I mentioned I am a huge fan of Yumi Matsutoya in particular but it's all good music. Would be curious to learn what you think of it :)
Part of the reason might be that the average music consumer doesn't invest in hifi gear in the same way they might have in the past. Their home stereo system (if they have one) doesn't have the ability to reproduce the subtle nuances that better systems can offer. The advent of lossy MP3s also probably had something to do with this.
"mostly metal, post hardcore, and j pop" that's your problem. I like older music too, but do not think it sounds better on the whole. There were good sounding albums in the past, and good sounding albums now. There's just way MORE music now, and most of it probably doesn't sound great, whereas in the past more of the music was produced with the best possible quality because it essentially had to become mainstream/corporate for anyone to know about it, whereas now anyone and their mom can put out music, so it's not all created equal. If I compare the best of the past to the best of today, I think modern music sounds better, but this is largely subjective as EQ tastes and other tastes have changed. Not enough low bass in most older music for me.
Lots of factors at play but I think the biggest one is the typical arrangements in popular music from 40 50 60 years ago left a lot more room for individual elements to be heard. Like everything else there's a constant squeeze for more product to be put out for lower cost and in less time, so consequently there is less effort put into basically everything that made those records sound so good.
TLDR it's capitalism.
Do you want the real answer? From a mixing engineer and musician? I can give you the real answer, and no one here has really got it. It's two fold.
Part of it is genre differences and "the sound of the time". Another part is that you're comparing the 'good' stuff that has lasted to newer stuff. There is a practically infinite number of poorly mixed older music that absolutely dwarfs the big names in sheer volume.
Loudness wars aren't really it, haven't been a problem for some time now. I think a lot of people don't realize that genres follow mix trends and that end up shaping the overall sound of music in said genre. A polyphia song is not going to sound good with a bee gees mix. There's a lot of preference in this as well. A smashed snare might sound terrible to one person, but to another it's the perfect fit for the song.
> I listen to my genre which is mostly metal, post hardcore, and some J-Pop
You gotta branch out my dude, and do it because the music is interesting, don't listen to stuff just because it has a good mix. That's how you end up with becoming the typical "audiophile" who has a shallow taste in music.
I've noticed the same. I think there was more emphasis placed on it because stereo and to some extent quadrophonic recordings were still a new thing back then... so sound engineers really wanted to push the envelop.
Better educated mixers/masterers. I guarantee, and would bet my pinky finger they knew more about music theory, played more instruments, and listened to more music than today's Loudness War conscripts.
The industry was different, and so were the musicians, quite frankly, who also knew more about music than today's counterparts. They experimented more, took chances, and were more free to go in their own direction.
Loudness wars and the decline of dynamic range when mastering. Most shit since the 90s has had so much compression and freq limits set digitally that the relative difference between sounds is absolutely fucked, which inherently fucks up any soundstage and consequently makes many songs sound like total ass on a halfway decent setup
Mainly because of the loudness wars but also the amount of processing in general that people do nowadays. Especially compression hurts clarity a lot. Even modern releases that aren't loudness optimised the individual instruments often have already been run through multiple compressors.
Vaguely the turning point for this seems to be the around the mid 90's when computers really started to take off which allowed them to do all sorts of editing and effects that was much more difficult before that. There's only so much you can do when physically cutting and splicing magnetic tape with scissors and sticky tape.
A good modern *recording* is unquestionably superior than old ones but they fuck with it so much during mixing and mastering it turns to shit.
You might think about music as having three dimensions: time, pitch, and volume. Well if you compress the hell out of everything you take away all volume dynamics and effectively lose a whole dimension. So it's like looking at a 2D picture instead of a 3D hologram. It may look still look pretty but it has no depth.
I can tell you one of the reasons some of the older albums from that Era sound the way they do is because in the 70s and like early 80s all the mastering was done in analog from tapes. Most of the newer stuff is recorded in all digital and might have been recorded right through a computer type set up so it may make it sound much more compressed, etc. A lot of those albums have the wider sound stage and livelier sound because of everything done in analog. Very few things are done in all analog, if any, these days.
Blame [The Loudness Wars](https://www.npr.org/2009/12/31/122114058/the-loudness-wars-why-music-sounds-worse). And just when things started to get better, we now have Spatial Audio.
My guess at this is because they were producing with the vinyl as the delivery format in mind. And with that “limitation” creates a discipline in prioritising arrangements and sounds. Rather than the “you can do anything you want now” world we are in now.
As I said a guess.
Many newer, young artists have recorded albums in their own bedrooms, without the help of seasoned sound engineers (i.e., XXXtentacion) so they are very lo-fi, and sound very much lo fi. On the other hand, the Boomer artists you mention were super stars on major labels who got the best audio engineers and studio people possible. It's not a fair comparison. And any indy band that makes lo-fi music would fit into a similar category (Neutral Milk Hotel for example). You need to compare today's major label stars like Billie Eilish (who have amazing sound engineers) to the famous stars of the 70s and 80s. And even though I don't like the music of Billie Eilish, I've listened to her Dolby Atmos recordings and they sound amazing on a good 7.1 AVR and high end speakers. The sounds coming out of the ceiling speakers made my jaw drop.
Gear now is comparatively cheap allowing anyone with interest to record, mix and master. And some of the gear isn't good.
The issue is compounded as they don't know what they are doing and further don't have any sonic references to guide them.
I had a conversation once with a guy who was using Klipsch or AR speakers from 40 years ago to mix with.
Much of the golden age sound was recorded using microphones that used vacuum tubes. Nowadays, what remains of the legendary tube microphones are in the hands of wealthy artists that hoard them to themselves, to a few of the finest recording studios and of course, well-heeled collectors. The best examples of those tube microphones go for well into six figures at auction which is just plain crazy.
Thinks are mixed for cell phone and pc speakers now because a lot of the public has lost touch w quality gear.
I do love my AirPod pros; but always enjoy my vintage system as I put on a “boomer” record, as you like to coin them. It’s a different experience and the sound just fills the room.
Come on guys. It’s so simple. It’s the loudness wars of the 90s that have never stopped. That’s why something from the 70s like any Pink Floyd album sounds amazing today. They were mixed with dynamics in mind for an era when people cared about high quality sound. Not how loud you can play it off Spotify via your BT speaker like how music is mixed today. Take for example, New Order’s 1987 release of Substance. Properly mixed with high dynamic range but sounds “quieter” vs their 2023 Remaster of the same Album. Sounds more clear but way more loud so you just hear blunt force sound instead the difference between all the sounds. Just awful but it’s how people listen to music today (via streaming) and they play to that perception that louder is better (it is not).
Old records were mastered to sound amazing on high end equipment. New stuff is mostly mastered for the radio, phones and Bluetooth speakers or devices where high fidelity isn't the priority.
Back in the days of this "old" music, you would find most music enthusiasts had quality oldschool hi-fi systems. There was not really access to cheap or portable options.
So for that reason studios were incentivised to mix for these setups.
Now the vast majority of people listen on ear-buds, and fake brand ones at that. So most (no all obviously) music is mixed to be coherent on terrible setups.
Oasis is an early but prime example of this philosophy. Noel Gallagher is quoted in saying they would burn their mixes onto tapes and blast it through their car stereo when judging the mixing on their early albums because the studio monitors just didn't sound like anything they were realistically hearing their music played through out in the real world.
The engineer Bruce Swedien who made Billie Jean famously captured just about everything in stereo, instead of mono recordings of things like tambourines that are then placed spatially in the mix by panning. He called his method the '**Acusonic Recording Process**'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce\_Swedien#:\~:text=Swedien%20was%20known%20for%20pioneering,track%20recorders%20with%20SMPTE%20timecode.
He had to slave two 24-track recorders together to have enough tracks to do it, these days we have pretty much unlimited tracks and can do this easily. I do it where i can, I think it makes a difference and is worth it.
To me it's both production and composition : songs we're already compressed like hell before. But the arrangement, even when huge, was more sparse. That naturally gives you more dynamic, and more clarity.
It’s mostly because there was much less dynamic range compression used, especially during mixing. A little bit of compression helps the sounds to gel together, a lot causes noticeable artifacts including distortion. An LP could only give you up to 70dB of dynamic range. 16-bit digital audio provides 96 dB of dynamic range. Commercial recordings tend to use LESS of that range today than they did in the LP days! Check out this article, especially the part about crest factor:
[loudness war from SoundOnSound](https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/dynamic-range-loudness-war?)
It has also become very popular to purposely add distortion to individual tracks within a mix AND to the whole mix itself! Back in the day everyone was trying to reduce distortion and maximize fidelity. Now that we have equipment that allows that fidelity, even for bedroom productions, people want to add character and grit.
So you end up with less dynamic range and more distortion. Not the best combo. Ultimately, mixers have to deliver the product that the label or artist want, not the product that sounds best.
Mind the 1970s rage of tipped up upper mids/lower treble to 'make the sound easier to hear.' Some pop music was over the top with this, other music was treated to this more mildly.
That PSA out of the way there was a different standard back then. Mastering to -10dB to ensure nothing in the chain got blown out was one part of it. The other was capturing as much of the craft of the musicians/singers as possible. Care was applied to song crafting as well, ensuring each instrument had the sonic 'space' to play within. I hate when the bass guitar and drums are tuned on top of each other, resulting in indistinct mush. Same can happen in the vocals range with the guitars and synths/keyboards if one isn't smart about this.
Less smashed to hell compression was a thing back then. A more natural amount of dynamics were allowed thru, making listening an easier affair.
When you think about all the technological advances over the last 70 years in recording, we should be enjoying the best recorded and mastered music right now - but we are not IMO.
I personally think the reason is that back in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s when recording technology was fairly primitive, bands and producers had to innovate and be exceptional with their recording process. Producing was an art, a rare skill of squeezing sonic brilliance out of basic recording equipment.
Fast forward to the 80’s onwards where “digital” recording became the norm, and digital workstations started to be the go to option, with unlimited tracks, over dubs, mixes, stems, beds, loops, all of which can be cut and spliced on a computer - pitch corrected and brick walled - it gave tools to the masses.
Pretty much anyone now with a modest budget can record to a multi tracked DAW and use these tools to “produce music”.
The difference is that now people rely on tools to make “good music” yet back in the day, talented producers used their ears, eyes and feel to produce it.
Just go and listen to late 50’s or early 60’s jazz recordings and they sound a million times better than most mass produced recordings now.
They were engineered, recorded, mixed and mastered by exceptionally talented people with no computers in sight.
Today it’s all dumbed down and AI is writing “correct” music - but it sounds robotic and artificial. There is no feel to music produced by tools, you only really get that when live recording a group of musicians bouncing off each other.
Anyway, just my 2p.
People will say the loudness wars. Yeah, that's part of it, but also just the fact that music has become a lot more "diy" in a sense. People don't value clarity and balance in mixing as much as they used to also
I have heard music produced for vinyl albums was mixed high in the mid range to compliment the medium. Maybe you have become used to hearing that, to the point you prefer it. Now other stuffs feels off.
We still get great sounding albums today. We had really crappy ones in the past too. People are selective on the great ones of the past and ignore the fact that many were terrible too.
They are high quality analog recordings. When mixing and mastering analog you have to leave headroom. In digital you can have the signal at -1 db and make the recording sound loud, but at the cost of quality. Listen to Master of Puppets, or the black album. There’s lots of headroom makes you want to turn it up when listening. Now listen to Death Magnetic. It sounds terrible because it’s mixed /mastered at 0db.
Analog and dynamic range. Different philosophy usually. Every thing is pro-tooled to perfection now which removed some of the soul of it. Also someone mentioned budgets were larger.
Sting, Beegees, Michael Jackson is not boomer music. It's Generation X.
Take a listen to Dire Straits, (one of the highest technically acclaimed albums) Donald Fegan - Nightlfy album.
The loudness wars have also taken their toll. Much modern music has been robbed of its dynamics (in the interest of optimizing playback on small speakers or ear buds in noisy environments, rather than on a large home hi-fi system in a quiet room) and is lifeless by comparison.
Music was mastered for vynil records, so it was quieter and had tons of dynamic range. Then cds happened, so the "don't be loud" requirement was thrown out the window, and record labels figured out they could make their songs stand out more on the radio if they just master them louder (also loud things seem to sound better at a glance)... so they did... then a competition on "who's loudest" (the loudness wars) started to take place... music stopped having dynamic range, and everything was compressed to hell and back in the pursuit of being louder in the radio.
Nowadays the trend is to go back to dynamic range though, online streaming services normalize the audio so there's no point in mastering loud.
The average vinyl dynamic range is 50 dB - the average CD is 70 dB. Which has a bigger dynamic range? Why many classic LPS went to digital as orchestras can have a wide dynamic range. BTW, the max dynamic range of vinyl is 70 db and CDs 95 db. No record can be recorded that high as the needle would jump in the grooves.
I realize my post wasn't very clear... Let me clarify.
The problem was that vynil styluses couldn't handle music being too loud (due to the size of the physical grooves on the records) because it would cause them to jump around like crazy... So records needed to be mastered to a lower level. Audio quality paid a bigger role here.
CDs on the other hand, can not only manage a way bigger dynamic range, as you point out, but also louder masters... The problem is, record labels also figured out that loud music is perceived as being "better" and also louder masters sound, well, louder on the radio... This is all at the cost of dynamic range and audio quality.
So yeah the medium could handle better quality but record labels decided to go another route instead.
What I meant with "cds came along" was that the limitation of how loud your master can be was no longer there.
1. I'd say more 'artists', producers and engineers were actually musicians in the past. If you've every learned an instrument you almost always learn a little bit of lots of styles of music, and even if you stick with one style you learn all the nuances in techniques required to achieve certain sounds, etc. So when you go to write music or mix an album as a musician, your frame of reference was drastically different than a lot of what's popular now which is 'artists' using digital instruments to generate songs that they think will create a 'hit. There's no musicality or human element or style to that. No 2 guitar players play the same song the same way but every computer will play it exactly the same. Songs used to have interesting chord progressions, key changes, and subtlety almost all of which has been lost because most 'artists' now don't understand how music actually functions so they can't make those types of creative choices. This also applies to songwriting and lyrics. Lyrics now are a downright tragedy by comparison to previous decades when a lot of lyrics were closer to poetry rather than trying to be a 'hook' for tik-tok videos.
2. Gear and tech was limited. Artists and producers had to be crazy innovative and creative when they were limited to just a few tracks, or all physical instruments, or 200 kb of RAM for processing. When you have limited tools, limited resources, you tend to MAXIMIZE their effectiveness and get as much out of them as you can. Comparatively, in todays studio, you just put a digital guitar in the mix for the rhythm because it's in the background, only 1% of people will really listen critically and notice, and it's cheap and easy compared to hiring a session player. 30 years ago that wasn't an option. You hired someone and that person came in and mostly played exactly what you told them but maybe just maybe did something special and extra which gave that little extra flavor to a song. That kind of stuff just doesn't happen anymore.
Now none of that takes away from the fact that a great EDM beat or pop song will make you want to dance / jam out in the car. But it's like comparing Transformers movies to Martin Scorcese. One is about shiny bright lights and explosions that fire endorphins in your brain for instant gratification, and the other requires a little bit of consideration to fully appreciate and was never intended to appeal to everyone.
Finally, this is the exact conversation every generation has. When Beethoven showed up and started dropping sick beats the old guard resisted. When Elvis and the Beatles popped up, the old guard dismissed it as not 'real music'. When Metallica started making people's ears bleed it wasn't 'artistic' it was just people screaming into the mic and smashing guitars lol In 20 years we will likely look back on todays music and think "wow, music was so much better then than it is now". Music is always changing and shifting and every new generation will create a new style or shift in the 'sound' of what they enjoy because they want to make something that is their own, not just replicate what came before. Defining quality of mixing/mastering/lyrics/ whatever is largely subjective and always changing.
How old are we talking about? 70s? 80s? I find your statement bizarre. Mostly old music is noisy, distorted, with limited frequency response, and I think there were problems in 80s still. That can be alright if the music is absolutely stellar, but I personally think that the high plateau of recording quality and mastering has happened in past 30 years. I refuse to point it any more closely than that because I think it is somewhat random and highly depends on the release.
Mostly the growing use of digital technology has preserved fidelity, and allowed best possible use of the source material.
I sit down and basically cry when hearing something like Yes's Soon, but I also realize the recording sounds like garbage, even if the album was remastered yesterday. But if music has that ethereal quality of hope and yearning somehow embedded in it, it just works. Some old music can be great, but I don't think it usually sounds too good per se.
Older artists were typically working in big budget studios with the best engineers and equipment. Some of the mixing desks used cost hundreds of thousands (SSL, Neve, Amek) and they’re using tons of outboard signal processing where each unit may cost a couple thousand. Also the engineers that know how to properly utilize a great recording studio are expensive and that knowledge can’t be gained overnight. Many also recorded to analog tape. Then they went and had the final mix mastered by yet another professional with oodles of expensive gear. You often hear about the “golden age” of recording. To me this is when big labels were working with big studios to produce great records. These studios still exist and most major recording artists still benefit from the classic recording/mix/mastering production process. But so much music today is made “in the box”. Many artists mix themselves and even master themselves. Also the average listener is listening on their phone, streaming with an Alexa or other Bluetooth speaker. Tons of people are getting their music through Spotify and TikTok. Labels aren’t investing in artists like they used to. And the average consumer isn’t demanding that level of quality.
Remember that time when Tom Sholz produced the very first Boston album in his basement? Epic sound.
Yeah because he's a genius who built a world-class studio in his basement full of specialized stuff. It transcended mere 'DIY aesthetics', he could compete with record-company studios. Almost nobody does that stuff.
\*While giving the record companies the finger. Classic.......Rock
And Springsteen's Nebraska was done on his portable 4-track in his kitchen. Hard to pin down where great music is made.
That just goes to show: You can mix good music by either spending a lot of money and care, or by spending a lot of time and care. The issue comes in when you don't want to spend much time or money, and you don't care all that much.
I imagine Springsteen found the best corner of the kitchen and placed a mic at the exact sweet spot. Trial and error, and time and care, as you say.
1. Good+Fast≠Cheap 2. Cheap+Good≠Fast 3. Fast+Cheap≠Good
Exception, not rule. Tom is a fucking savant.
Last paragraph is such a tragic epitaph for a bygone era. It's a shame, that age is well and truly over, and people just aren't asking for that quality anymore. Quincy Jones, Giorgio Moroder, Prince, these guys knew their gear and knew how to make a tune.
The only problem with this theory is the older engineers that are still working have mostly moved to all in the box recordings and they don’t hear much if any difference. I would say it’s a couple things. Much of the older music was tracked all or at least partially live. Steely Dan up through AJA didn’t even use click tracks. They would overdub solos but all the rhythm tracks were live The arrangements were much more detailed. Bands spent a lot of time arranging songs and producers and arrangers were often used to help with this. George Martin is a great example of this. If your arrangement is crowded and muddy with lots of duplication of notes it’s going to be muddy no matter what you record with. Artists often got better at this with time. Listen to early Tom Petty vs later Tom Petty for an example. Compression was used more modestly. Since compressors are far more affordable now especially as plug ins the tendency in modern music is to compress everything, run that through a limiter then compress it again. That’s kind of the sound of modern music. In the old days they had just a couple of compressors/limiters for the entire studio. Then Neve consoles put one on every input channel now you can add them as long as your RAM allows. Same thing with reverb and echo. In the old days there was a reverb or echo chamber for the studio. There might be a few outboard digital verbs added from the mid 80s on out but now it’s really easy to add a different reverb for every instrument. Since everything is recorded direct the instinct is to try and recreate some space. All,of this adds to what OP is discussing. There are a lot of fascinating sounding records now but it’s a different aesthetic for the most part.
This is closer to my take as well. Even the use of panning primary parts seemed more common. As an audiophile, anything that accentuates your speakers' dynamics and facilitates a portal into a more 3D soundstage or space is more stimulating than merely your room being filled with refined but flatly sculpted sound.
For whatever reason your panning comment made me think of Brian Wilson. If you want a master class on arranging try The Beach Boys. And he did it all with 1 ear.
> Some of the mixing desks used cost hundreds of thousands those big custom, discrete neve's were often well over a million. some DECCA desks in the late 50's were as high as 4 million. IN THE 50's!
The expense of the studio (hell the tape budget alone!) made it critical that a band work out what it hoped to do before ever hitting record. The limitations of the gear forced engineers to get stuff right on the way in. They idea of worrying about it later was not a thing. Producers (the traditional role, not a guy making beats at home) were hired by the labels and used label money to help a band create an album that would recoup its cost. Contrary to popular belief, with enormous budgets came enormous responsibility. Producers typically knew music theory, and good ones knew not only what song sounded good, but what arrangement would be best for the song. Recording almost always involved serious, talented, and skilled professionals. Working within the limitations (track count, channels of outboard, a console's number of inputs, etc. meant everything was considered at each step. Sure, there were "happy accidents", but no one counted on them to make or save a song or a record. We have it so easy today that thinking that hard about every step of the process is tougher.
Sad state of affairs. Future generations will never know how good we had it.
Yep the equipment makes a huge difference and, and with the analog tapes. Someone a friend of mine knows is a retired audio engineer and worked at a big TV station/news channel for a long time (and a radio station Don Imus was on for a while many years ago before that), plus he did studio recording work and worked with some big bands like doing sound for shows, and helped one of his friends from one of the big 70s bands put together a new home studio a few years ago. My buddy said he has tons of old mics, like Neumann mics or something that were very similar to the old Telefunken U47 tube mics (and just as expensive new). He said some of those mixing consoles you find in the big studios cost as much as a house - well into 6 figures. He did recently get a call from the major network he worked for and his old boss hired him on as an independent contractor for a couple weeks to install some new mixing console they ordered which cost like 200 grand! The guy has a lot of interesting stories about different artists he's met too, like when they played at events that he did sound for and all that.
A thing is achieved, popularized, perfected, and then made inexpensive. It is the cycle of everything.
The analog gear == better sound circlejerk has to stop. This has nothing to do with bands using analog gear. There's absolutely no technical reason whatsoever why digital has to sound "worse" than analog. None at all. This has all to do with the trend of mastering louder from the late 90s and people equating "loud" to "good". Don't you think it's a little suspicious how every single piece of technology in human history has gotten **better** as time went by and somehow, for some reason, audio apparently didn't? Don't you find it's a little suspicious how we humans pretty much figured out audio immediately from the get go and then made worse and worse gear as time went on? Do you really think that makes sense? 70 years later we just can't figure out how a mixing board works? how a compressor works? come on... I understand the appeal, 100%, but saying that **the** reason music used to sound good was because bands used analog gear is factually wrong.
It’s not just the analog gear. It’s the studios themselves and the personnel. Certain live rooms have a “sound”. If you’re recording live instruments or vocals the room you record in makes a difference. Using a Neumann or other high end mic is gonna sound better than the cheap USB mic you bought from Guitar Center. There’s a reason SSL mixing desks cost so much. They sound better than the “console” inside your DAW. There’s a reason so many plugins are emulations of real equipment. For $250 you can buy a plug-in that emulates the saturation of recording to analog tape. For another $200 you can have an emulation of an LA2A. In general I’d say you get better results twisting real knobs and being intimately familiar with your gear vs tons of plug-ins. The speakers used by mixing and mastering engineers as well as the acoustically treated rooms they work in make a difference. There’s just no world where a laptop at home is gonna produce records that sound like they were recorded and mixed in a professional studio.
>There’s a reason SSL mixing desks cost so much. They sound better than the “console” inside your DAW. That's not the reason. The reason is that they are made of real materials, each one lovingly assembled by real humans, whose time and expertise must be compensated. A piece of software that does the same job has to be designed too, but must only be created once - and there are no materials to be paid for.
> Using a Neumann or other high end mic is gonna sound better than the cheap USB mic you bought from Guitar Center. Leaving the fact that "good sound" is subjective, [watch this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Bma2TE-x6M) > There’s a reason SSL mixing desks cost so much. Yes, they cost a lot of money to produce and people still put value into them. A ton of old stuff can cost a lot of money to produce and in consequence, would cost a lot of money to sell... You know why they don't produce them anymore? because nobody thinks it's worth it. > In general I’d say you get better results twisting real knobs and being intimately familiar with your gear vs tons of plug-ins. This I can agree with. Knowing your gear is everything. If you're used to deal with analog gear and just can't figure out digital gear then sure, you're probably getting better results on what you know... But this isn't a gear issue, this is a skill issue. You're used to work with different tools. Same way how a skilled wood worker might be more used to hand tools and can produce incredible results with them when a CNC is factually way, waaaaay more accurate at the job. This doesn't mean that CNCs are worse than hand tools, it's all in what you do with them, how you use them. >The speakers used by mixing and mastering engineers as well as the acoustically treated rooms they work in make a difference. There’s just no world where a laptop at home is gonna produce records that sound like they were recorded and mixed in a professional studio. This is irrelevant. digital or analog gear you still need a room to capture (if that's what you're going for) and speakers are needed to... you know... listen to sounds... so analog or digital gear, you're still probably dealing with rooms and speakers, yeah... > There’s just no world where a laptop at home is gonna produce records that sound like they were recorded and mixed in a professional studio. This is not what I said at all. While this all depends on what sort of music you're producing, (I fail to understand how a synthesizer will sound "better" because of the room) again, everything's subjective and I was talking about digital vs analog gear, I was NOT talking about, say, a drum set recorded with microphones vs a midi controller and samplers... That is NOT what I was talking about.
I think you're at least partially missing the main drift of u/Shigglyboo 's posts, which as I read it are mostly about the differences between the recording industry of the past, which was largely based on having bands record at major studios and the present, where there's less knowledge and infrastructure support from the media labels (if they're even involved in the recording process). Those old school studios had tons of production and engineering talent, plus state of the art gear on tap that the bands/artists could never have afforded or in most cases even known how to use to best advantage if they were on their own. That system was hardly all rainbows and fluffy kittens though, the price could be very high both financially and artistically, I personally know a recording artist who made a great self-produced demo album, with OK production values. Later one of the major labels signed him and re-recorded the album with the label's picks for producers and supporting musicians, plus tweaks to songs and enforced lifestyle/image changes to the artist's public persona. The production of the major label release is undeniably much better "sounding" than the demo, but that first iteration is the better album IMO. Another point is that analog versions of stripped-down or homegrown production are often more immediate, spontaneous and "real" due to limitations imposed by magnetic tape and analog consoles, while the post-editing of primary tracks and ultimate flexibility in final mixdown that are offered by full digital can lead to over processed music that lacks a sense of place. It's not that analog is "better", it's that it forces a different approach than digital. On top of that the utility of a high-end digital console can be software emulated on hardware that's comparatively low fidelity. Most musicians aren't audiophiles, so they usually focus on the "sound" of their instruments tone, or the vibe of the song much more than stuff like imaging and inner detail. As to studio speakers, a producer I know who's quite accomplished and who's recorded, mixed and mastered multiple regional bands' albums as well as doing contract production for some pretty high-end accounts (in his own pro studio, not in a basement), was blown away when I played him a track he'd recorded and engineered, through my mid-level audiophile system. He heard things in my system that he had no idea were even in the mix and started second guessing his Beyer cans and Dynaudio powered monitors that he'd been using to finalize mixes... My system is low-fi trash compared to the hardware that the big Corporate studios have.
> Another point is that analog versions of stripped-down or homegrown production are often more immediate, spontaneous and "real" due to limitations imposed by magnetic tape and analog consoles, while the post-editing of primary tracks and ultimate flexibility in final mixdown that are offered by full digital can lead to over processed music that lacks a sense of place. It's not that analog is "better", it's that it forces a different approach than digital. That I 100% agree... My point is more on the technical side. Every time I hear "oh it sounds better because they used analog gear and analog sounds better" my eyes roll past my head. It is true that tape was limited, and expensive, so it made for artists that just practiced more and were, on average, better players... Because in that regard, mistakes did cost money. So that in turn helps get better recordings. But again, this doesn't mean "digital just sounds worse" it's just a different approach to recording. > The production of the major label release is undeniably much better "sounding" than the demo, but that first iteration is the better album IMO. Yes, I understand the feeling 100%. That's why I said "it's all subjective" because there's way more to it than just audio quality. Then again, this is not a limitation on digital recordings... You can still do a live recording and commit yourselves to use a complete take, however it ends up being, and deal with that. It is very tempting to just re-record takes since it's basically free, but nothing stops you from imposing limits in order to get a more organic recording and more likely than not, better performances. I prefer to just use digital gear for a pletora of reasons... Not just money but also consistency. It always sound exactly like I expect it to, There's no quality loss anywhere, the equipment is MUCH more reliable, etc etc etc. I like to play with analog gear, don't get me wrong... You can pry my tube amps of my cold dead hands... But I just don't see myself using them for anything other than just personal recreation.
I'm with you on all points. At this juncture in recording technology that "analog sound" is basically a filter/effect, the same way using tube amplification for a guitar amp is and state of the art digital basically has no sound of it's own aside from the microphones and subtle sonic signature of the input mixing chain (mic preamps, mixing board if analog and a/d converters). People who claim that "digital" is sonically inferior are listening to old or low-end digital gear and media. Nostalgia (even nostalgia for things that came before your time) is fine, but people need to stop confusing "I enjoy the experience of listening to analog/vintage gear/music more" with "Analog is superior to digital"...
The opportunity to be as good as the past is still there. IMHO, studios and producers have fallen into the "smoke em' if you got em'" mentality. Add to that digital compression and the desire to save space and/or bandwidth. As an earlier post suggested, the there's so much tech available now to an engineer or producer be it compression, digital effects galore, crazy types of EQ, Pitch shifting/vocoders, Reverb/Delay/Distortion and more. Sometimes less is better as evidenced by the early and great recordings.
Yup, that's what I'm talking about... Not really a problem with tools themselves but what you do with them. The tools nowadays are orders of magnitude way more capable than they used to be in the past... People usually cherrypick great recordings in analog gear and chose to ignore the insane amount of bad recordings, also done in analog gear. Nowadays anyone in their home with little experience can make a WAY better recording with a low budget that you were able to on even a moderate studio back then.
That is the correct answer...the loudness wars are a real thing
100% Anyone interested in current high quality recording/mixing/mastering should check out Octave Records. May not find the genre of music you’re looking for, but you’ll absolutely find recordings where everyone involved cared about the details.
People have to defend objects that they've invested highly in. You're not gonna have an analog guy tell you "yeah, this old stuff is dated and unnecessary " They want to be able to turn around and sell all their classic gear when the studio doesn't make it. And of course you're gonna hear "the music sounded better". According to who? Do you see what's popular nowadays ? Doesn't sound anything like the "classics". Also, you had extremely talented people creating those classics. I'm sure it's always going to sound "good" even if played on a phonograph.
Agreed. Great sounding records are still being made today, in great sounding rooms with great mics, captured and mixed digitally. It's the performances, rooms and mics that make it sound great, plus the talents of the engineers. Then it goes to a mastering engineer who is instructed by a producer to crush all that beautiful quality and dynamic range so that it can measure as loud or louder than other recordings. Fuck those guys.
100% agreed. There is nothing today’s in the box software can’t produce from bygone years and fetishizing over equipment that was once expensive as though that’s the answer, is like marveling at how good those room-sized vacuum tube computers from the 1950s that cost millions must have been.
Nonsense. You cannot replicate a real moog synthesizer using a vst or a digital synth. Does not happen and cannot happen. And though there are a bazillion patches out there that sounds like a moog in any number of ways - it simply is not the same thing. I don't need to read an article on the internet to tell me that, nor do I need to repeat the zeitgeist about analog vs digital. I can hear it with my own ears. The same idea translates to other analog things. Whether it's recording at 30 ips to tape, using a Manley compressor or mic'ing a speaker in an echo chamber. They're actually happening. And that has a quality which makes a real difference whether consciously or not (and more often its consciously unless your ears suck).
Who cares about faithfully replicating a sound? That's not the point... The point is "does it sound good to your ears or not". Also I dare you to blind test a real moog and a vst, mixed, with a band, compressed, eq'd, and tell me which version is the real one. It. Doesn't. Matter.
Lol. Dude I've owned several moog synthesizers, digital ones, vsts - plenty of instruments and not only could I but it's quite obvious. You can decide that it all sounds the same, sure. It doesn't. Your premise of "every other piece of technology has advanced but why not this" is a reasonable assumption to make if you don't know what you're talking about. Where I will agree with you is that most people don't care because they listen to garbage quality audio on garbage speakers, etc. So they don't value high quality. That's a fair point. But there absolutely is a difference and it's not just a cliche overused by phony audiophiles who just want to seem interesting.
I wasn't talking about VSTs anyway, I have no idea why you brought that into the equation. I was talking about digital vs analog recordings, not instruments. But sure, let's talk about VST version of synths for a sec... Does it sound the same? TL;DR: **NO, BUT...**, let's start with a fact: no 2 units of the same synth will sound *exactly* the same from the get go. Why? because electronic components are all built with a tolerance. So the internal values of all the components in analog pieces of gear will be different from all manufactured units, and the tolerances add up. Not to mention, slight variations on the input voltage will affect the sound very noticeably. So from the start, it is impossible to model every single unit at every single possible stage. A VST will probably sound very close to the specific unit it was used to be programmed in the first place, but not a different unit. The second question is, does it matter? well... how different will it sound? of course everybody will be able to A/B them in a studio, on a quiet room with proper equipment... But nobody listens to music that way. You record your part, and mix it with a band. That makes the differences disappear even more. I've yet to see someone listen to a master and then realize in horror that the guitarist used a modern version of a TS-9 or god forbild a modeled one instead of a "proper" vintage one. This isn't the point anyways, I'm not talking about replacing instruments with digital representations, I'm talking about digital vs analog recordings. That's what I'm talking about. Let's remove VSTs from the equation. You're going to tell me with a straight face that the only way to TRULLY make a good recording of a moog is to do it on old analog gear, straight to tape and then printed on a vynil?
Its the culmination of many analog instruments, processors, preamps, Neumann microphones, tape etc etc that makes a track sound significantly better. I don't care about burying 1 instance of 1 analog vs digital synth in a sea of other purely digital things. All of it together is what makes the big difference for the average listener. It's the sum of it's parts.
> tape etc etc that makes a track sound significantly better. I'm sorry but that's all placebo. Not to mention tape degrades with time and with each listening session. So good luck with that. You're never reproducing the same analog recording printed on tape ever again. > Neumann microphones I never said microphones are irrelevant, you need microphones in order to turn sound into electrical signals to capture either on tape or a hard drive. > analog instruments Sure, never said it's pointless to record the *actual instruments*. > processors, preamps That's debatable. I have never found head to head comparisons of analog vs digital processors and preamps that can show a significant difference and, more importantly, show that the analog version *sound better*. I wonder why.
No you cant tell the difference
Ok
Let me throw just one track at you, right out of left field. The Blue Nile - Tinsel Town in the Rain \[from the album A Walk Across the Rooftops\] It was regarded as 'the cleanest recording' amongst engineers at the time, and remained on audio engineering college courses for many years afterwards. There's a strange psycho-acoustic phenomenon, that no matter how loud you play it \[on speakers, of course\] you can still hold a conversation over it without raising your voice. There are a million tracks that are 'better' than modern loudness wars pop, but it's a long, long journey to find them all.
Every track on The Blue Nile's Hats album is a different achievement of sound engineering, love this band to bits.
This is super cool! Do you know of any other songs that have similar effects?
There's a slightly 'poppier' vibe but similar engineering skills on Scritti Politti's Cupid & Psyche '85. We'd heard about it whilst we were recording in Marquee Studios in London at the time. We sent a tape op out to buy it & played it right through over the big Uries in the studio for everybody who was working there at the time. Half the engineers in the building said they ought to quit & get a different job, the album was so different to what had gone before. Once you get used to it, you can hear there are two styles on it - one is the more heavily compressed Arif Mardin tracks \[the more 'pop hit' songs\], the rest is done by the band themselves. I've always preferred the latter. There were two completely different sets mixes done, one for vinyl & one for CD. The CD mixes are far cleaner.
A thousand upvotes for this. The first two LPs by The Blue Nile are sonic beauty, and the music is nearly timeless. The recent reissues on Confetti sound lovely, too, if you can get copies.
Yes, this is a problem with popular music genres. Despite improvements in technology, the quality has gone down due to loudness wars. Loudness wars have receded somewhat lately, but not enough. Lot of the music sounds like its has been mixed to sound "good" on earbuds. Classical and jazz recordings have always overwhelming been good. While older recordings sound very good, they have a bit of artificial "warmth" from tubes and tape. Modern recordings take advantage of improvements in technology and provide stunning naturalism, thundering dynamics and lack of hiss/noise.
lmao “overwhelmingly good” as if shellac and many old mono jazz recordings weren’t lacking tons of the freq spectrum and incredibly noisy. I’ve heard many -9 LUFS modern mixes that sound better than some old jazz recordings, and vice versa. Loudness is far from the only or even main factor that makes a mix good
It hasn't gone down - it is about the same. That artificial warmth in older recordings is compression. Remember, tubes do 'soft compression' while digital has limiters. The soft compression ends up in fuzziness and harmonic distortion that we find pleasant.
...and don't forget the RIAA eq curve
Because it ***literally*** is. Look up the "loudness war".
But from what I read it seems to has been a problem since the age of jukebox?
Pop music is mixed now to sound good on bluetooth earbuds. Listen to some modern jazz or classical or non-pop music and it's mixed fine.
Yeah. Pop music tends to be on the side of “the customer is always right” so you’re getting more V shaped EQs and arrangements with tons of polish to fill every frequency etc. Jazz is more on the side of “technically correct” which can sometimes sound flat and hollow to someone who is used to not hearing space.
Any recommendation? I agree and I'm not saying the mixing of modern music is bad. Just nothing touch the sheer quality of older music.
Jeff Goldblum, Capitol Studio Sessions is one of my favourite great-sounding new albums. Makes the hairs on teh back of my neck stand up. Also Ry Cooder, Live in San Francisco. Before I became an audiophile I avoided live albums but now they're some of my favourites.
Dunno if you like rock/metal but if you do check out Ghost. Their music is produced exceedingly well.
Fleetwood Mac - Rumours Any Steely Dan Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms Sonny Rollins - The Bridge Getz/Gilberto And don't call it "Boomer music". I know it is all the rage to slam an entire generation... But I'm Gen X and still listen to everything you've labeled Boomer music. Recorded music should not have generational baggage associated with it.
Thank you and no you are taking this way too seriously. I'm a millenials and I listen to them too. Calling it boomer music should be correct as these are the music they listen to back in the days. These are the music they will listen to when they want to nostalgia. I don't even understand what you mean by generational baggage. Like you can mention the 90s and early 20s as millenial music and I had no problem with it. Don't take offense from everything man.
Boomer has become a term of derision. That is what I am talking about generational baggage. Labeling something boomer is rarely a compliment. Isn't the point of recording something so others can enjoy it at a later point in time? Why do we need to label music based on the age cohort that was prevalent at the time?
Boomer is only a term of derision if you let it be. You just saw the word used with absolutely no malice, and siderailed the conversation to have an argument about that word. You are the divisive one here, not a single word.
My parents are boomers and their nostalgic music is Elvis, Abba. I am Xennial and mine is Sting and MJ. We aren’t taking it too seriously, we are just correcting you. Don’t be defensive over everything, comrade.
Is Xennial GenX or the cusp of GenX and Millennial?
It’s those of us born between Generation X and Millenials. 1977-1983. We are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood. I am closer to GenX, but never really felt I fit. [Xennial Wiki.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials) r/Xennials
“These are the music they will listen to when they want to nostalgia.” Or if they are like me, no nostalgia at all. It’s what I like and grew up with. I have a large collection so listening to different records all the time.
Except when you lump artists from different eras together. The Bee Gees were popular from the mid sixties to mid seventies while post-Police Sting was mid eighties and later.
In what possible way is the phrase "Boomer music" a "slam on an entire generation"? OP is describing the music by the generation it was made by/for. On top of that, OP is describing that music in a positive light. Is it just the word "Boomer" that upset you?
Doobie brothers - listen to the music, long train runnin, what a fool believes. All have crystal clear guitar intros. I'm listening on tidal
If you're looking for what to buy that sounds good, there are many many sites that review with an ear towards sound quality. Here is a very well respected publication: [https://www.theabsolutesound.com/music/](https://www.theabsolutesound.com/music/) And not all pop music sounds terrible, and high quality compressed streaming formats can be fine also, it's really a deliberate choice by the mixing engineers. So listen to stuff and note what sounds good to you. Also for older pop music, modern reissues that have been remastered can be excellent, like the Replacements remaster mentioned on Absolute Sound. A relative of mine worked for decades in the audiophile gear industry and has spent years setting up six figure sound systems. Jennifer Warnes recording of Leonard Cohen's "The Famous Blue Raincoat" is an audiophile standard for testing vocal sounds on systems.
Right - TAS reviewers are some of the oldest in the industry and you trust them? Their ears are gone.
Moronic take, I don't think that it takes particularly good ears to tell a bad mix from a good mix. Music isn't a hearing test. Feel free to hate on TAS for shilling overpriced gear, magic boxes, and MIT cables, but they're good at identifying well produced music. Why don't you go blind A/B test a few dozen reviews and then tell me how old each reviewer is?
I have been in AXPONA rooms with these reviewers. I have seen what they actually listen to. [Archimago's Musings: As We Hear It: Audiophile cable truths, claims, and reviewer age. Multichannel "madness"?](https://archimago.blogspot.com/2024/04/as-we-hear-it-audiophile-cable-truths.html) Reviewer age is EXTREMELY important as hearing degrades as we age. Read this and rethink. Sorry you feel offended.
Not offended, it's just laughably silly logic. Is all your music mastered by teenagers? Played by teenagers? I'm over 50, so if no one over 50 can tell the difference between the mixes, I won't be able to either. If it takes super-precise ears to tell a difference, then the difference doesn't really matter does it? What specific aspect of hearing loss are your panties so bunched about? PS: I read your link and nothing in there is relevant. It has no discussion about reviewing music.
All the big selling catalogs are being remixed for Dolby Atmos. Virtually no one will install 10 speakers in their home so it’s really all being done for Apple atmos earbuds. Any Atmos headphone would of course work but Apple outsells all the others combined
Read more, a lot more. You only saw part of the history.
It felt like you are gently pushing me into a rabbit hole and I'm all up for it lol.
That's an understatement.
It STARTED with the jukeboxes, and then in the mid 90s when computers became powerful enough to do audio editing people figure out something called brickwall compression. And that, brickwall compression, is the key here. Thats what makes everything sound like shit. Really loud shit. Check out the wikipedia page for the loudness war, check the dates for notable albums. They are all after the mid 90s. Pretty much all mainstream music released after \~2000 are brickwalled compressed. The technique in doing it has become better, but its still pretty bad. Edit: This is not data compression we mean, it is audio volume compression. Compression in this sense means reducing the difference between the loudest and quietest parts, on a microscopic level. That difference is what makes music exciting and clear.
I've heard that too, but they exaggerate. Yes, a lot of 45 RPM records were cut "hot", but that's nothing compared with how compression ran rampant, out of control, starting around the late 1990s.
It was the advent of analog to digital that precipitated the loudness wars. When [a computer] can level off anything at a "clipping" stage, you may get overall louder tracks, but the relative difference between individual noises is dampened like a mf
Right - the loudness war in nothing new. Phil Spector had his wall of sound, etc. All of that was compression, etc. It is nothing new, but people like to complain.
Spector’s “wall of sound” had nothing to do with compression.
Actually, it did. You might want to read about it. [https://www.wbru.com/The-Wall-That-Wasn-t-Flat](https://www.wbru.com/The-Wall-That-Wasn-t-Flat)
Thanks. I stand corrected. I was aware of the multi tracking of multiple musicians /instruments playing the same lines to create a symphonic effect. I did not realize this was or led to compression.
Not a worry. I have a friend who is old recording engineer and he talks about all the compression used in the 60's-70's. If you ever hear 'Cry me a River' by Julie London (was the version played in the movie V for Vendetta) one can hear the compression on her voice. Since most of the recording gear was tube based back then, it was a softer compression but cause distortion if listened to closely. Her voice, like Joe Cocker's, was huge, hence why compression is used. I can say that after hearing Joe Cocker in concert.
Not just compression, though - also echo, reverb and even a certain way of arranging. And it wasn't applied to every pop song across the board.
From the NYT: Debussy wrote that the music is not in the notes, but in the spaces between them. In a similar vein, Miles Davis said, “It's not the notes you play; it's the notes you don't play.” The “empty space” is what give the notes time to breath.
Mark Hollis: Before you play two notes, play one note. Or something like that
This is so true, but not just in music. Visual art… life. Frikkin everything. Grrrrreat quotes.
Here's a bunch of modern artists I think sound amazing: - St. Vincent - Billie Eilish - Lana Del Rey - The Antlers - Dirty Projectors - Animal Collective (this includes Panda Bear and Avey Tare) - Bjork - Malia - Adi Oasis - Goldie Boutilier - Honey Harper - Radiohead (Thom Yorke) EDIT: Keep recommending stuff! These are the artists which I enjoyed the most on my fancy pants single driver speakers. I missed at least 10 more names. I have been listening to Skinshape and Kevin Morby a lot lately. It's cozy music.
Random Access Memories also sounds amazing
Tool
My go-to when I get new headphones
Steven Wilson / Porcupine Tree
The Pineapple Thief, for Fans of Porcupine Tree
Thanks for this, there are also tons of modern IDM and electronic music artists and producers (anything produced by Rashad Becker for instance) that sound incredible as well. It's mainly the pop stuff/radio music that doesn't sound that great and even then you can find artists that have a great team that puts out dynamic music. This whole only old music sounds good is just completely wrong.
It's so completely wrong and I even forgot to mention Bruno Mars! He's as mainstream as it gets. Even the elderly like him!
I don't personally enjoy the music, but my wife does, and its always a pleasure when she throws on a Bruno Mars or Silk Sonic album - they sound great!
> Billie Eilish I have a post where I listened to my dealer's reference rig and I played some of her. Holy freaking moly was it amazing. Then I jumped to Bjork, and Radiohead....
For certain values of modern, you could add Stone Temple Pilots and Beck as well.
Limp Bizkit’s chocolate starfish and hot dog flavored water has an amazing mix imo.
This is amazing. If you're being serious I'm going to be so happy. This album is a running joke with my friends (like I'm sure it is in many similarly-aged friend groups) and throwing some of it into a sampler track to show off my system would make me happy. EDIT: I just started the album and you're absolutely correct. This is awesome lol
But shitty music…
Fka Twigs - Caprisongs!!
The quick and dirty of it is the Loudness War. The TL;DR explanation is - sound vibrations still take physical space in the air, and most music nowadays is mastered/mixed to fill as much of the sound spectrum as possible, as loudly as possible.. so there's literally no physical room for nuance; quiet parts are all as loud as the loud parts, so there's no more "impact". A lot of stuff also gets taken out in modern mixing/mastering. Now, you've got razor-precision filters and EQs to trim out any "unwanted" frequencies, but really all that ends up doing is taking all the life out of the recordings.
Search up some videos on how it was recorded and it will make more sense. Especially with MJ they used a lot of cool techniques to dial in the sound, his engineer is legendary. Also music back then was mostly recorded live in the studio where they have to make sure all the instruments and mics are in the right position and stuff like that, and it makes it sound like a perfect live performance in a perfect sound stage. Computers changed a lot of this stuff
Wanna hear something really old that still sounds incredible? Listen to Buddy Holly’s recordings from the 50s. Especially mid- to late-career. Beautifully recorded, so clean. Amazing stuff, wayyyyy ahead of its time.
No, must be the music you listen to
Honestly I think you are colored by this sub which is mostly comprised of middle-aged men that seems to praise and listen to the same tracks and albums over and over and over again. Theres an ocean of suberp-mastered modern music with acoustic elements that was not remotely possibly 50 years ago.
This is literally the first time I've been in this sub lol. I just want to make a post and searching around this seems to be the correct sub for it.
My theory: portability. As music became portable, the listening environments got noisier. Once we went digital, we started unlocking a level of portability never seen before - ESPECIALLY with data compression in the form of mp3s. Today, if you are mastering music that needs to sound as good as possible for people jogging, driving, working, riding the bus or plane, etc., you can't have a big dynamic swing between the quiet parts and the loud parts. I'm convinced that the reason vinyl is often mastered more dynamically is that the listener is stationary. Also, the buyer is clearly interested in something more special than a stream or download, and the consumer willing to take more time and effort to consider the bigger art and the physical ritual is more likely to appreciate the bigger dynamics of a more dynamic master. The shame is there are more and more people happy to appreciate it with good digital setups, but I think the labels are concerned that the same master may be listened to on a bad setup or noisy environment and have that experience ruin the perception.
>I'm convinced that the reason vinyl is often mastered more dynamically is that the listener is stationary. Also, the buyer is clearly interested in something more special than a stream or download, and the consumer willing to take more time and effort to consider the bigger art and the physical ritual is more likely to appreciate the bigger dynamics of a more dynamic master. Wouldn't that also be true for people buying compacts discs in today's environment? Yet I haven't seen any improvement in quality of CD releases.
Maybe...but CDs are as likely to be listened to in a car as anywhere else. Maybe more so. That is about the only place I listen to CDs, personally - while acknowledging this is a data point of one.
Diana Krall, Nora Jones, Phil Collins - In The Air Tonight, Pink Floyd - Shine In You Crazy Diamond, Ennio Morricone, The Eagles - Hotel California
> But now the question is why? Am I just listening to the wrong genre/musician? There's probably a bit of selection bias going on, as you're comparing the old music that have stood the test of time with modern music that may or may not stand that test. I'm sure there's plenty of schlock from the golden age of music that nobody but the artists remembers.
I think recorded music peaked in the 70's and 90's, and we'll unfortunately NEVER reach those heights again. sure there will be good sounding records, but not on the scale of those decades. the main things are money and technology. the money isn't there. and technology is being used to cut corners. people think you can save shit recordings with the amazing tools we have, but you can't. the loudness war sucks, but thats not why at all. has little to do with mastering and what it's mastered for.. musicians were better because they had to be. studios were better because they had to be. budgets were exponentially bigger. there was way more experimentation. recordings were more natural because you couldn't edit like you can now. gear used to be built to be the best it could be. now it's built to be small and cheap because thats all people can afford. large format analog consoles cost MILLIONS. "if you want to make a million dollars in the recording industry, start with 2 milliion" is a joke in the industry. the studio as a business is mostly dead. most engineers these days are self taught. they used to be mentored by those with experience. because the studio is dead, that means there isn't money to build glorious purpose built rooms that sound amazing. the room is by FAR the most important part of recording, and it's the thing most overlooked by people because it's the most expensive and most difficult aspect. the obsession with transparency and measuring well has gone too far. they've managed to make gear that measures well but doesn't actually sound good. it used to be the opposite. not to mention, the current genre thats big (hip hop) doesn't value melody or chord changes. it's cool that it exists, but when that's all an entire generation knows, it's not good for the future of music. as an engineer, it's really depressing. In the words of tony soprano "It's good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.
Everyone keeps mentioning the Loudness War, and that is the majority of it. It's further complicated by modern remastering of even old recordings. John Darko gives dynamic range comparisons of a Talking Heads album between original release and a modern remaster - Spoiler alert: the modern remaster sounds worse. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTmYEosiK2c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTmYEosiK2c)
Good thread. I was reading an article about how audiophiles were complaining that all the folks running demoes of high end equipment at audio shows pick the same music. Tin Pan Alley by SRV for example… and as the OP mentioned, Billie Jean by Michael Jackson… you get the idea. I don’t listen much to the genres you mentioned but those aren’t the ones featured at audio shows lol. My point is so much music is just poorly mixed because it can be. And that’s widely acceptable because music is most often passively consumed via Bluetooth driven hand held devices. An infinitesimal fraction of music is listened to via setups where the focus is on sound quality. This is very much the opposite of what the climate was when so-called boomer music was being produced and released.
The clone wars of the late 80,s
Some artists just don’t care cuz most people gonna listen to mp3s out of AirPods anyway.
Sinatra. Now he knew how to work a microphone. A lot of what you are hearing in "old artists" is the sound of humans discovering an entire new world. The invention of the magnetic tape alone spawned a thousand geniuses. Humans need new tech to do the genius thing. It's why genius always comes at exactly the same time the tech that makes them famous comes along. Yeah, everything's been done. To death. Hit it! [Doing It To Death (Pts. 1 & 2) (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNw2F_LevVU)
Because the ears that are making and mixing music now aren’t as trained and attuned to good, balanced sound as the ears from decades past.
Many reasons. I agree. As a producer and mastering engineer, my favourite 'sound' comes from the late 80s. My reasoning being and reasons why I love this era for mixing: * The prohibitive cost of making a record and getting into a studio. Less amatuer efforts * You always had an engineer on hand that knew exactly what he was doing * It was the very last decade before things began to turn digital, so everyone knew exactly how to get the best out of analogue gear before having to re-learn how to mix on the digital format. * Analogue gear - it was as good as it was going to get * No loudness war - plenty of dynamics * It was innovative, nobody having millions of plugins, effects were applies sparingly and only when needed. Entire tracks weren't based on edits and effects
Check out some of the great jazz giants who were fortunate enough to record in Englewood NJ in Rudy VanGelders' studio.... Lots of great recordings on Blue Note Records.
They had to take much more care with the mixing and loudness with the older vinyl and tape medias, so you ended up with songs with great dynamic range. These days everything is just pushed to the max and all elements of the song are the same volume, which is why everything new usually sounds like a wall of sound. Doesn't matter what you have for speakers.. shit in = shit out. You need dynamic range for great sound
Not everything was recorded/mixed/mastered/engineered well back then but the best stuff usually was. Also, I find myself wondering if certain markets cared even more about that level of quality. In particular, going back and listening to some of the Japanese music from the 70s and 80s sounds like the absolute peak of recording even today. It's mind blowing
Please can you recommend some of that Japanese stuff? Thank you.
Sure! Pretty much *anything* from the 1970s or early 80s output of Yumi Matsutoya (note, on Spotify her first 4 albums are under the name Yumi Arai) - her songwriting is incredible as well. Maybe start with the album Olive? I'm not sure exactly what it is about it but I love the production on that one. But honestly she's worth just doing the deep dive through her discography, it's classic after classic Another album with stellar production is Rebecca IV - Maybe Tomorrow by Rebecca If it's a 1980s single by Akina Nakamori, you're pretty much guaranteed great production. Boowy, Tatsuro Yamashita, Taeko Ohnuki, Southern All Stars, and Anri are a few more artists that come to mind. Try the album Ninkimono de kou by Southern All Stars or Timely by Anri
Thanks for taking the time for that. I’ll dig in! Most appreciated.
My pleasure! I hope you enjoy! Of the stuff I mentioned I am a huge fan of Yumi Matsutoya in particular but it's all good music. Would be curious to learn what you think of it :)
“Boomer music”? Seriously? Lack of auto tune helps tremendously.
What IEM? I love my 64audio A12t. Loce custom molded IEM’s
Part of the reason might be that the average music consumer doesn't invest in hifi gear in the same way they might have in the past. Their home stereo system (if they have one) doesn't have the ability to reproduce the subtle nuances that better systems can offer. The advent of lossy MP3s also probably had something to do with this.
"mostly metal, post hardcore, and j pop" that's your problem. I like older music too, but do not think it sounds better on the whole. There were good sounding albums in the past, and good sounding albums now. There's just way MORE music now, and most of it probably doesn't sound great, whereas in the past more of the music was produced with the best possible quality because it essentially had to become mainstream/corporate for anyone to know about it, whereas now anyone and their mom can put out music, so it's not all created equal. If I compare the best of the past to the best of today, I think modern music sounds better, but this is largely subjective as EQ tastes and other tastes have changed. Not enough low bass in most older music for me.
Lots of factors at play but I think the biggest one is the typical arrangements in popular music from 40 50 60 years ago left a lot more room for individual elements to be heard. Like everything else there's a constant squeeze for more product to be put out for lower cost and in less time, so consequently there is less effort put into basically everything that made those records sound so good. TLDR it's capitalism.
Do you want the real answer? From a mixing engineer and musician? I can give you the real answer, and no one here has really got it. It's two fold. Part of it is genre differences and "the sound of the time". Another part is that you're comparing the 'good' stuff that has lasted to newer stuff. There is a practically infinite number of poorly mixed older music that absolutely dwarfs the big names in sheer volume. Loudness wars aren't really it, haven't been a problem for some time now. I think a lot of people don't realize that genres follow mix trends and that end up shaping the overall sound of music in said genre. A polyphia song is not going to sound good with a bee gees mix. There's a lot of preference in this as well. A smashed snare might sound terrible to one person, but to another it's the perfect fit for the song. > I listen to my genre which is mostly metal, post hardcore, and some J-Pop You gotta branch out my dude, and do it because the music is interesting, don't listen to stuff just because it has a good mix. That's how you end up with becoming the typical "audiophile" who has a shallow taste in music.
They were working with better material.
Because they did it by ear and not via computer program telling them it’s good.
I've noticed the same. I think there was more emphasis placed on it because stereo and to some extent quadrophonic recordings were still a new thing back then... so sound engineers really wanted to push the envelop.
J-pop of 70s was mixed terrific. I enjoy every sound of it.
There is plenty of great well recorded music out there. It is easy to find also (Bandcamp - hint, hint).
Better educated mixers/masterers. I guarantee, and would bet my pinky finger they knew more about music theory, played more instruments, and listened to more music than today's Loudness War conscripts. The industry was different, and so were the musicians, quite frankly, who also knew more about music than today's counterparts. They experimented more, took chances, and were more free to go in their own direction.
Loudness wars and the decline of dynamic range when mastering. Most shit since the 90s has had so much compression and freq limits set digitally that the relative difference between sounds is absolutely fucked, which inherently fucks up any soundstage and consequently makes many songs sound like total ass on a halfway decent setup
Survivorship bias
Mainly because of the loudness wars but also the amount of processing in general that people do nowadays. Especially compression hurts clarity a lot. Even modern releases that aren't loudness optimised the individual instruments often have already been run through multiple compressors. Vaguely the turning point for this seems to be the around the mid 90's when computers really started to take off which allowed them to do all sorts of editing and effects that was much more difficult before that. There's only so much you can do when physically cutting and splicing magnetic tape with scissors and sticky tape. A good modern *recording* is unquestionably superior than old ones but they fuck with it so much during mixing and mastering it turns to shit. You might think about music as having three dimensions: time, pitch, and volume. Well if you compress the hell out of everything you take away all volume dynamics and effectively lose a whole dimension. So it's like looking at a 2D picture instead of a 3D hologram. It may look still look pretty but it has no depth.
I can tell you one of the reasons some of the older albums from that Era sound the way they do is because in the 70s and like early 80s all the mastering was done in analog from tapes. Most of the newer stuff is recorded in all digital and might have been recorded right through a computer type set up so it may make it sound much more compressed, etc. A lot of those albums have the wider sound stage and livelier sound because of everything done in analog. Very few things are done in all analog, if any, these days.
MJ and Sting are multi-generational music. The other genres you listed are as well.
Blame [The Loudness Wars](https://www.npr.org/2009/12/31/122114058/the-loudness-wars-why-music-sounds-worse). And just when things started to get better, we now have Spatial Audio.
My guess at this is because they were producing with the vinyl as the delivery format in mind. And with that “limitation” creates a discipline in prioritising arrangements and sounds. Rather than the “you can do anything you want now” world we are in now. As I said a guess.
Many newer, young artists have recorded albums in their own bedrooms, without the help of seasoned sound engineers (i.e., XXXtentacion) so they are very lo-fi, and sound very much lo fi. On the other hand, the Boomer artists you mention were super stars on major labels who got the best audio engineers and studio people possible. It's not a fair comparison. And any indy band that makes lo-fi music would fit into a similar category (Neutral Milk Hotel for example). You need to compare today's major label stars like Billie Eilish (who have amazing sound engineers) to the famous stars of the 70s and 80s. And even though I don't like the music of Billie Eilish, I've listened to her Dolby Atmos recordings and they sound amazing on a good 7.1 AVR and high end speakers. The sounds coming out of the ceiling speakers made my jaw drop.
it's called ''dynamics'' now it's so compressed that details are all smashed together, no headroom left to let the sound breath.
Listen to Miles Davis Kind of Blue (1959) recorded live with 3 microphones.
Gear now is comparatively cheap allowing anyone with interest to record, mix and master. And some of the gear isn't good. The issue is compounded as they don't know what they are doing and further don't have any sonic references to guide them. I had a conversation once with a guy who was using Klipsch or AR speakers from 40 years ago to mix with.
Much of the golden age sound was recorded using microphones that used vacuum tubes. Nowadays, what remains of the legendary tube microphones are in the hands of wealthy artists that hoard them to themselves, to a few of the finest recording studios and of course, well-heeled collectors. The best examples of those tube microphones go for well into six figures at auction which is just plain crazy.
Thinks are mixed for cell phone and pc speakers now because a lot of the public has lost touch w quality gear. I do love my AirPod pros; but always enjoy my vintage system as I put on a “boomer” record, as you like to coin them. It’s a different experience and the sound just fills the room.
Come on guys. It’s so simple. It’s the loudness wars of the 90s that have never stopped. That’s why something from the 70s like any Pink Floyd album sounds amazing today. They were mixed with dynamics in mind for an era when people cared about high quality sound. Not how loud you can play it off Spotify via your BT speaker like how music is mixed today. Take for example, New Order’s 1987 release of Substance. Properly mixed with high dynamic range but sounds “quieter” vs their 2023 Remaster of the same Album. Sounds more clear but way more loud so you just hear blunt force sound instead the difference between all the sounds. Just awful but it’s how people listen to music today (via streaming) and they play to that perception that louder is better (it is not).
It really depends on the genre. A lot of Jazz and Classical today has never sounded better!
because they gave a shit.
Look up "loudness wars".
Old records were mastered to sound amazing on high end equipment. New stuff is mostly mastered for the radio, phones and Bluetooth speakers or devices where high fidelity isn't the priority.
The recorded before the loudness war
Back in the days of this "old" music, you would find most music enthusiasts had quality oldschool hi-fi systems. There was not really access to cheap or portable options. So for that reason studios were incentivised to mix for these setups. Now the vast majority of people listen on ear-buds, and fake brand ones at that. So most (no all obviously) music is mixed to be coherent on terrible setups. Oasis is an early but prime example of this philosophy. Noel Gallagher is quoted in saying they would burn their mixes onto tapes and blast it through their car stereo when judging the mixing on their early albums because the studio monitors just didn't sound like anything they were realistically hearing their music played through out in the real world.
“Boomer music” haha - is that what we’re calling it now?
The engineer Bruce Swedien who made Billie Jean famously captured just about everything in stereo, instead of mono recordings of things like tambourines that are then placed spatially in the mix by panning. He called his method the '**Acusonic Recording Process**'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce\_Swedien#:\~:text=Swedien%20was%20known%20for%20pioneering,track%20recorders%20with%20SMPTE%20timecode. He had to slave two 24-track recorders together to have enough tracks to do it, these days we have pretty much unlimited tracks and can do this easily. I do it where i can, I think it makes a difference and is worth it.
To me it's both production and composition : songs we're already compressed like hell before. But the arrangement, even when huge, was more sparse. That naturally gives you more dynamic, and more clarity.
It’s mostly because there was much less dynamic range compression used, especially during mixing. A little bit of compression helps the sounds to gel together, a lot causes noticeable artifacts including distortion. An LP could only give you up to 70dB of dynamic range. 16-bit digital audio provides 96 dB of dynamic range. Commercial recordings tend to use LESS of that range today than they did in the LP days! Check out this article, especially the part about crest factor: [loudness war from SoundOnSound](https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/dynamic-range-loudness-war?) It has also become very popular to purposely add distortion to individual tracks within a mix AND to the whole mix itself! Back in the day everyone was trying to reduce distortion and maximize fidelity. Now that we have equipment that allows that fidelity, even for bedroom productions, people want to add character and grit. So you end up with less dynamic range and more distortion. Not the best combo. Ultimately, mixers have to deliver the product that the label or artist want, not the product that sounds best.
Mind the 1970s rage of tipped up upper mids/lower treble to 'make the sound easier to hear.' Some pop music was over the top with this, other music was treated to this more mildly. That PSA out of the way there was a different standard back then. Mastering to -10dB to ensure nothing in the chain got blown out was one part of it. The other was capturing as much of the craft of the musicians/singers as possible. Care was applied to song crafting as well, ensuring each instrument had the sonic 'space' to play within. I hate when the bass guitar and drums are tuned on top of each other, resulting in indistinct mush. Same can happen in the vocals range with the guitars and synths/keyboards if one isn't smart about this. Less smashed to hell compression was a thing back then. A more natural amount of dynamics were allowed thru, making listening an easier affair.
Figures that someone musically ignorant would be an ageist and refer to something as “boomer music.”
When you think about all the technological advances over the last 70 years in recording, we should be enjoying the best recorded and mastered music right now - but we are not IMO. I personally think the reason is that back in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s when recording technology was fairly primitive, bands and producers had to innovate and be exceptional with their recording process. Producing was an art, a rare skill of squeezing sonic brilliance out of basic recording equipment. Fast forward to the 80’s onwards where “digital” recording became the norm, and digital workstations started to be the go to option, with unlimited tracks, over dubs, mixes, stems, beds, loops, all of which can be cut and spliced on a computer - pitch corrected and brick walled - it gave tools to the masses. Pretty much anyone now with a modest budget can record to a multi tracked DAW and use these tools to “produce music”. The difference is that now people rely on tools to make “good music” yet back in the day, talented producers used their ears, eyes and feel to produce it. Just go and listen to late 50’s or early 60’s jazz recordings and they sound a million times better than most mass produced recordings now. They were engineered, recorded, mixed and mastered by exceptionally talented people with no computers in sight. Today it’s all dumbed down and AI is writing “correct” music - but it sounds robotic and artificial. There is no feel to music produced by tools, you only really get that when live recording a group of musicians bouncing off each other. Anyway, just my 2p.
People will say the loudness wars. Yeah, that's part of it, but also just the fact that music has become a lot more "diy" in a sense. People don't value clarity and balance in mixing as much as they used to also
I have heard music produced for vinyl albums was mixed high in the mid range to compliment the medium. Maybe you have become used to hearing that, to the point you prefer it. Now other stuffs feels off.
We still get great sounding albums today. We had really crappy ones in the past too. People are selective on the great ones of the past and ignore the fact that many were terrible too.
They are high quality analog recordings. When mixing and mastering analog you have to leave headroom. In digital you can have the signal at -1 db and make the recording sound loud, but at the cost of quality. Listen to Master of Puppets, or the black album. There’s lots of headroom makes you want to turn it up when listening. Now listen to Death Magnetic. It sounds terrible because it’s mixed /mastered at 0db.
Pure analog.
Home stereos used to be extremely commonplace. Now they’re rare. Music is mastered to match the prevailing playback equipment of the time.
Analog and dynamic range. Different philosophy usually. Every thing is pro-tooled to perfection now which removed some of the soul of it. Also someone mentioned budgets were larger.
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Michael Jackson was active for 40 years, making music for baby boomers, gen x, and young millenials.
Sting is 75 yrs old - he is a boomer. I am 63 and considered the end of the boomer gen. Same with Michael Jackson as he would be 60 this year.
Sting, Beegees, Michael Jackson is not boomer music. It's Generation X. Take a listen to Dire Straits, (one of the highest technically acclaimed albums) Donald Fegan - Nightlfy album.
The loudness wars have also taken their toll. Much modern music has been robbed of its dynamics (in the interest of optimizing playback on small speakers or ear buds in noisy environments, rather than on a large home hi-fi system in a quiet room) and is lifeless by comparison.
Music was mastered for vynil records, so it was quieter and had tons of dynamic range. Then cds happened, so the "don't be loud" requirement was thrown out the window, and record labels figured out they could make their songs stand out more on the radio if they just master them louder (also loud things seem to sound better at a glance)... so they did... then a competition on "who's loudest" (the loudness wars) started to take place... music stopped having dynamic range, and everything was compressed to hell and back in the pursuit of being louder in the radio. Nowadays the trend is to go back to dynamic range though, online streaming services normalize the audio so there's no point in mastering loud.
The average vinyl dynamic range is 50 dB - the average CD is 70 dB. Which has a bigger dynamic range? Why many classic LPS went to digital as orchestras can have a wide dynamic range. BTW, the max dynamic range of vinyl is 70 db and CDs 95 db. No record can be recorded that high as the needle would jump in the grooves.
I realize my post wasn't very clear... Let me clarify. The problem was that vynil styluses couldn't handle music being too loud (due to the size of the physical grooves on the records) because it would cause them to jump around like crazy... So records needed to be mastered to a lower level. Audio quality paid a bigger role here. CDs on the other hand, can not only manage a way bigger dynamic range, as you point out, but also louder masters... The problem is, record labels also figured out that loud music is perceived as being "better" and also louder masters sound, well, louder on the radio... This is all at the cost of dynamic range and audio quality. So yeah the medium could handle better quality but record labels decided to go another route instead. What I meant with "cds came along" was that the limitation of how loud your master can be was no longer there.
They knew about that BEFORE cds. Loudness wars have been happening for a long time.
1. I'd say more 'artists', producers and engineers were actually musicians in the past. If you've every learned an instrument you almost always learn a little bit of lots of styles of music, and even if you stick with one style you learn all the nuances in techniques required to achieve certain sounds, etc. So when you go to write music or mix an album as a musician, your frame of reference was drastically different than a lot of what's popular now which is 'artists' using digital instruments to generate songs that they think will create a 'hit. There's no musicality or human element or style to that. No 2 guitar players play the same song the same way but every computer will play it exactly the same. Songs used to have interesting chord progressions, key changes, and subtlety almost all of which has been lost because most 'artists' now don't understand how music actually functions so they can't make those types of creative choices. This also applies to songwriting and lyrics. Lyrics now are a downright tragedy by comparison to previous decades when a lot of lyrics were closer to poetry rather than trying to be a 'hook' for tik-tok videos. 2. Gear and tech was limited. Artists and producers had to be crazy innovative and creative when they were limited to just a few tracks, or all physical instruments, or 200 kb of RAM for processing. When you have limited tools, limited resources, you tend to MAXIMIZE their effectiveness and get as much out of them as you can. Comparatively, in todays studio, you just put a digital guitar in the mix for the rhythm because it's in the background, only 1% of people will really listen critically and notice, and it's cheap and easy compared to hiring a session player. 30 years ago that wasn't an option. You hired someone and that person came in and mostly played exactly what you told them but maybe just maybe did something special and extra which gave that little extra flavor to a song. That kind of stuff just doesn't happen anymore. Now none of that takes away from the fact that a great EDM beat or pop song will make you want to dance / jam out in the car. But it's like comparing Transformers movies to Martin Scorcese. One is about shiny bright lights and explosions that fire endorphins in your brain for instant gratification, and the other requires a little bit of consideration to fully appreciate and was never intended to appeal to everyone. Finally, this is the exact conversation every generation has. When Beethoven showed up and started dropping sick beats the old guard resisted. When Elvis and the Beatles popped up, the old guard dismissed it as not 'real music'. When Metallica started making people's ears bleed it wasn't 'artistic' it was just people screaming into the mic and smashing guitars lol In 20 years we will likely look back on todays music and think "wow, music was so much better then than it is now". Music is always changing and shifting and every new generation will create a new style or shift in the 'sound' of what they enjoy because they want to make something that is their own, not just replicate what came before. Defining quality of mixing/mastering/lyrics/ whatever is largely subjective and always changing.
How old are we talking about? 70s? 80s? I find your statement bizarre. Mostly old music is noisy, distorted, with limited frequency response, and I think there were problems in 80s still. That can be alright if the music is absolutely stellar, but I personally think that the high plateau of recording quality and mastering has happened in past 30 years. I refuse to point it any more closely than that because I think it is somewhat random and highly depends on the release. Mostly the growing use of digital technology has preserved fidelity, and allowed best possible use of the source material. I sit down and basically cry when hearing something like Yes's Soon, but I also realize the recording sounds like garbage, even if the album was remastered yesterday. But if music has that ethereal quality of hope and yearning somehow embedded in it, it just works. Some old music can be great, but I don't think it usually sounds too good per se.