Drum sound on ADKOT

[neuralfraud]

Well we've already hammered this nail a dozen times...It's not because cd's suck because they're not ANALOG, it's because they deliberately mutilated it in mastering. If anyone wanted a fake ass reason to damn cd's to the same fate as past mediums, I guess they've found it. No; in comparison, anything on vinyl would have to sound better, they wouldn't be physically able to replicate the cd master. This whole line of "mastered for vinyl" is bullshit. If they'd mastered it properly to begin with they wouldn't need a "vinyl version" so to speak

[Terry]

Exactly. Every time a lot is going on in the mix, it gets muddy, and the drums and the whole mix lose transparency. I blame the mastering process for that.



Here's a very interesting documentary from Bob Katz about this subject:

Take Fair Warning, by way of contrast.

Each instrument had space in the mix, and the nuances of each instrument could be heard...even able to distinguish everything reasonably well when the tracks are being played loud.

With ADKOT, the louder I crank it, the more mushy it sounds at times...certainly in comparison to FW.

I'm not quite saying ADKOT sounds shitty...I mean, short of digging up older recording equipment no contemporary album is gonna sound like an old analog recording. Part of the problem could be that the relative ease of digital recording makes it more tempting to overdub and fiddle around because it's easy and cheap to do so. I mean, in some ways the sparseness of ADKOT's production when thinking of the general sound quality of records being made today is refreshing.

Probably just too many years passing between 1984 and ADKOT and too much technology that it's still a bit jarring for me, in terms of what I think of CVH records sounding like...or what they 'should' sound like.