Marveling at Maroon 5

[IO Composer]

I'm sitting here listening to the much haralded Maroon 5 album "Songs About Jane" and I'm just dumbfounded at how poorly it's mixed. Some really great music, great performances but it's so horribly mashed that it just sounds bad. And the song "she will be loved" has what sounds like a bad guitar volume pot crackling throughout the song. I can't believe that it was intentional because it adds nothing creatively, but I also can't believe that something that glaring could slip through the cracks. Why are so many tunes so overly compressed these days? I can't believe that this is appealing to any kind of discearning listener.
-IO

[kittonian]

It's not appealing at all but neither is MP3 and look at all the people who think that sounds great. Sonic quality is truly going downhill and it's engineers and producers like us who need to bring it back.

[Tiago Silva]

I'm sitting here listening to the much haralded Maroon 5 album "Songs About Jane" and I'm just dumbfounded at how poorly it's mixed. Some really great music, great performances but it's so horribly mashed that it just sounds bad. And the song "she will be loved" has what sounds like a bad guitar volume pot crackling throughout the song. I can't believe that it was intentional because it adds nothing creatively, but I also can't believe that something that glaring could slip through the cracks. Why are so many tunes so overly compressed these days? I can't believe that this is appealing to any kind of discearning listener.
-IO

It's a max volume arm's race and humanity is going collectively deaf, singing in (Auto)tune...

[slangification]

It's a max volume arm's race and humanity is going collectively deaf, singing in (Auto)tune...

Yeah the autotune is pretty obvious on that one.

[DC11]

It's not appealing at all but neither is MP3 and look at all the people who think that sounds great. Sonic quality is truly going downhill and it's engineers and producers like us who need to bring it back.

Nice to hear someone else say that. I try to push that onto everyone I know and work with. The ripple effect needs to happen with this.

[MESH@ZU]

Sorry....but I think it sound great.
Compressed ....hell yeh,nasty...a bit.
But it slams...sounds amazing on radio.

[Natural Sound]

Man, you have opened the can with this topic.
And it's only the tip of the iceberg.
- there are discussions galore about how to achive the highest recording quality- yet very few releases actually achive this quality. and of those, with the rampant downloading of MP3's (legal or otherwise) most of the listeners don't get to hear (or even care) about the higher quality.

- The more we can do, the less artists want to take advantage of it.

- Just because we can do it, does it really need to be done?

- There are discussions here about how we need higher bit depth. We have 144db of dynamic range. Yet everyone only wants about 6db of range. You do the math.

- So will 192K sampling, ultra high quality conversion, surround sound etc go the way of Snake Oil, Oat Bran, Pet Rock and Thigh Master?

- What role does marketing play and is there any similarity between the music market and the pharmisudical market?

discuss

[mpark9000]

- So will 192K sampling, ultra high quality conversion, surround sound etc go the way of Snake Oil, Oat Bran, Pet Rock and Thigh Master?

Of course it won't go away. You have two dynamics here: the artist/producer and the consumer. The artist/producer will want to record their entire project at 192k (or more) sampling rates because "more is better". Never mind it's above the range of human hearing or the monitors can't reproduce it, if it's bigger, it's better. Never mind that it will probably be listened to as an mp3, or for that matter a 16bit 44.1k CD. As long as Digi or MOTU or whoever can sell more units, this will be the reinforced through advertising. If nothing else, the artist/producer will want to "play it safe" and do the whole thing at 192k. It's not happening too much yet, but I really think it's coming, especially when there will be more manufacturers playing the game. It's the way it's always been, and it may not be such a bad thing. As an example, not too long ago people were arguing about 24 bit depths vs. 16 bit depths. Do you see ANY new digital products being released featuring a 16 bit bit depth?

On the consumer side, well, they don't care about sample rates. It's all about convenience. Why else would anybody voluntarily choose a format as bad as an mp3? Convenience. Period. Oh yeah, and free songs...

Its all about marketing, which is all about making money. Reality doesn't really stand a chance against such odds.

My $.02

[IO Composer]

Can of worms, indeed. This is an area that really needs to be discussed...if not here, where?
For me, I've spent every dime I've ever made on the capability to hear recorded sound in it's best possible form, so that I can in turn create it for the productions that I'm hired to work on. To me, opening up a popular CD to have it mashed to bits sonically, is a tremendous disappointment and signifies a very frustrating downturn in the foundations in which audio engineering became an admirable pursuit. It's far too frequent these days. Hell, even Peter Gabriel's latest sounds like garbage and he's produced one of the best sounding recordings of all time (So). To say that a record "sounds great on the radio" is about as effective of an argument to me as how glorious someone's crap looks inside a toilet.

The problem is that to sell albums, quantity is now generally more regarded than quality. Ironic shift in events since we're all buying into the concept that there is demand for the highest quality by buying HD-TDM rigs. On the flip side, when MP3 came out, it was a godsend for us individuals in the game world. Before MP3, we were smashing our music down to 11Khz, 8bit sound so that you could squeeze a decent sized loop into a small RAM footprint. The day the Miles Sound System enabled MP3 playback was a huge one in the game world. That this has become the standard delivery platform for professional music production is an unfortunate side-effect. Economy of scale..

Personally, I hope that Apple's lossless algorithm gains stature and we can get back to the pursuit of sonic excellence.