I'm by no means an audio purist and I think digital processing is a great tool to enhance recordings and make the listening experience better.
The Rainbow concerts, mainly the November one, tend to leave me with a headache though. I wanted to try to EQ it a bit to make the sound more pleasing to the ear, so I dragged a sample into Logic Pro.
Now, I knew that Rainbow was fairly brickwalled, but I did not realise it was this bad. The soundwaves literally look like bricks. This is probably the worst looking music sample I've seen, in all categories - house, hip hop, you name it.
To whoever responsible for the mastering: how can you sleep at night?
One might think the March concert should be better. Very marginally, it is - see attached comparison. However, it's the Odeon concert that looks the best of the latest releases.
Your take on this?
brians wig wrote:
Time someone who knew what they were talking about wrote to Brian May.
Seriously, the staff at QPL haven't a clue these days.
I agree - rather than just a message slating the work on the releases though, it needs to be a reasoned set of questions asking why, from a technical point of view, has such 'brickwalled' mastering taken place on most of the recent releases; he could at least have an opportunity to explain why they have actively taken the decision to do that.
it is ironic that as a studio band, one of Queen's huge strengths was always the 'light and shade' in their songs and control of dynamic extremem which has been somewhat eroded by each set of masters being harder EQd and compressed than the last.
That wouldn't be hard, no? Brian and his team usually talk with fans and answer their letters. Whoever send this email, just do it politely and at least they will learn most fans' point of view.
I agree with some of the points of view. Myself, i still prefer the bootleg shared by Sikke of the Rainbow concert.
We should question "Why are they doing it?". There must be a logic explanation - like people's hearing being so fucked up from all the loud music they expose themselves to that Queen are just following the trend to give general people what they like soundwise.
The only flaw with above explanation is that the music industry leaves audio purists (and this is a good thing to be) in the shit! Because we take good care of our ears and we love to listen to music without getting ear fatigue.
On a side note, this is great to Pink Floyd who will keep selling and selling :-)