100% agree....it just sums up whole 'remastering' issue..
I bought few remastered albums, and always thought why this stupidity of destroying something which was beautiful in first place??
Shame, as Nevermind is such a classic album, and so important for music, but honestly - as expected.
I don't buy new CDs, well sometimes something, but I do buy old CDs, almost every week, few albums for 1-2 quid per album (been lucky there's a charity shop round the corner). I got a few very nice albums from there, the ones I borrow to friends and never get back, or lost somewhere...
anyway, I agree buying music today (with small exceptions) is not what it was 15 or 20 years ago.
Still vinyl is the king; shame I sold my 1210:(...both of them actually

Fancy spectrum analyzers didn't exist back in the 80s and yet some of the best sounding masters were produced back then. And if you look at the waveform you can't find any squashed like they are now.

IMHO this is due to the fact that nobody uses good ole VU needle meters. The peak meter is very important for any digital recording, but its only use is to avoid clipping. It says nothing about the sonics or average level on the recording. The same applies to a lot of "RMS" meter plugins, very few of them are actually calibrated to any standard... and worse, they don't even tell you things like window size which is extremely important for you to know to be able to read the meters correctly.

I have an old mixing desk with VU meters. On quite a bit of modern music, or remasters, the VUs almost don't move. They go to whatever level i set the channel to and stick there. Only if i crank the bass up all the way i can get them to swing.

In the past, such material was unacceptable and the engineer would have been fired. I remember a post by someone here who said he was a cutting engineer and if he clipped any he would have lost his job.

Agree that it didn't need remastering, again.

Ya, I consider the mono versions as the preference in dealer's choice...but "Nowhere Man" gives me problems no matter how I listen to it. George's guitar is so overpowering and clips.

Thank you, Steve Albini for recording Nirvana in a way that suited their sound. Serve The Servants & Pennyroyal Tea are simply spectacular.
Love that s/t 1st album. It blew my mind as a teenager.

"Big Me" was a great song!

First FF album is also my fav.

thats funny - more importantly without hands for that matter

I must say though - this album was THE most influential album of my life - hearing this remaster up against (A/B'ing) the original has ignited the light bulb above my head - I am not going to mix through a mix buss comp/limiter from this day forward - just A/B 'In Bloom' old and re-mastered, the old version has your head bobbing, the new version has no head bobbing and instead ears bleeding.

saggsy

Why do you all people mess with history like that? Just put those classics through the best ad converter in the world and f....g advertise that with a sticker in the cd .."Re-digitized with a 50k digital converter". A trick that will also "sell" and will be a genuine attempt on advancing an older classic release.
You can even use the best 2trk in the world for playback before the converter.
Nevermind changed history and shouldn't be treated like the latest gaga/perry release.

Careful... in case you haven't noticed, most mastering engineers HATE the loudness war and will give any opportunity to educate others on the problems associated with it. The people you need to blame are the ones hiring the mastering engineers.

You didn't catch my reference about "stickers on cd". I wouldn't refer that to mastering engineers would i? I'm more up against artists and AR people who make those decisions. I know what a mastering engineer can do for these matters.
But please don't exclude their responsibility completely. They have their (small) percentage on this.

The Drum & Bass music I listen to has more dynamics than that!

What? I bet that this is 10% like you said. And most of this are mastering engineers thinking that "this is the only way to impress them - making it louder and louder". Most AR people don't know RMS issue. They need fresh product, that's it. I bet that if you send them the same CD, 90% of them will say that this is huge improvement..

No, most A & R people DON'T know about the loudness issues. They just play a couple seconds of something without touching the volume and if it doesn't immediately grab their intention, it goes in the trash. That's the way it's always been. You better bet they pick the louder material every time, not caring what's been lost, because louder grabs their attention for the few seconds they hear it. They also don't care about fresh material, just marketable, which means a style that's already shown itself to be successful. Why else haven't we heard anything fresh in years?

Also, I'm talking about mastering engineers, not guys who make music in their bedroom and master it themselves. Trust me when I say I have NEVER had a client ask me to turn down the limiter, only "Can you make it louder?"
"But I've already pushed it as far as it can go without noticeably degrading the sound."
"I understand, but we want it to be as loud as '...'."
I then hit it harder and compare it to the less-nasty version at matched volume.... "Yeah, the lower level one does sound better, but we need to compete."

Compete against what? Take a guess. Never mind there's like a .00001% chance anybody but their existing friends and fans would ever hear it.

Then why not make a special version for the A & R people, bring that to the meeting and release something else? It's not like they'll ever listen to that CD again anyway.

I know what you're thinking. But I worked in THAT major company with THOSE people we're talking about. They don't care, they don't even listen to new product (OK, not everyone, but most of them). THEY DON'T COMPARE.

You're talking about bands which want to sound as loud as X band. This is so true and so common! Agree. But the A/R poeple have mostly nothing to say..

i just brought this 2 CD and was driving home listening in the car...i thought i had blown tweeter cones or something...what a complete BUTCHERING of a special, classic album. Part of what made Nirvana special was the contrast between the verses and the big pounding choruses, now...all same same....flat as a pancake. so predictable.

You would think with all the attention towards the "Loudness War" that this album of all albums would be treated with respect and the mastering engineer should have "treaded carefully" but no.... *sigh* just a slaughtering brickwall lifeless punchless definition-lacking mess. guitars suck in all the top end, hats just disappear to almost demo-sounding quality. what the hell.

Bob Ludwig...Shame on YOU.

As soon as I heard about them remastering I was think ohh no. Because almost every new record or remaster now days is destroyed by the loudness wars.

I am glad to hear the DVD is good because that is one of the few reasons I was thinking of getting it. I just stick with the 90s version of Nevermind that I have from the original CD. Matter of fact I normal avoid any remasters of albums which were done right the first time. I will just download the extra songs via itunes maybe. The DVD is the only thing that may get me to buy this remasters Nevermind.

I did that once. Big trouble.

Fab

I'll just wait for the 40th anniversery re-masters.

Those analog tapes ought to be degraded enough by then.

Sorry to dig up an old thread. Found it while looking up Nirvana's remastering on Google...

Emily Lazar, as there aren't many females in the audio engineering side of things so I Googled her...and look what popped up on her Wikipedia page:

Emily won a Technical Excellence & Creativity (TEC) Awards in the "Record/Production Album" category for her work on Foo Fighters's Wasting Light.

Looks like she also mastered Linkin Park's "The Hunting Party". On top of being crushed to a flat rectangle it sounds like someone put a low pass filter over every song. People seriously get paid to put out work like this? No offense to Emily if that's what her clients demanded. Personally I wouldn't put my name on something like that, famous band or not.

I do believe these bands and producers think crushed music sounds good. Perhaps too much time with inner ear monitoring over the years? Either way, a mastering engineer shouldn't be winning an award for the technical atrocity that is "Wasting Light". Both "Wasting Light" and "The Hunting Party" received a DR score of 05 at Album list - Dynamic Range Database

I foresee big business in remastering "classic new rock" music about 15-20 years from now. Remastering it to the new standards of 2030 when people will go back to their senses when releasing music and discover this thing called the volume knob.

It's too bad that remastering has become synonymous with this kind of destruction. And that music fans over on Steve Hoffman and "End(up to a point) The Loudness War", a Facebook group, remain largely pro-remasters, not really understanding what's being done very likely to their favorite albums. The fools over there will even try to dodge the issue by saying "The DR value is just a number - how does it sound?"


So if we're sure Ludwig was involved with this project, is there a way to find out - even from him - who requested this "remastering", and tell those entities WE'RE NOT BUYING?

This is a golden oppty to start a grass roots movement against this music destruction, while the product is still relatively new.

doom64 wrote: "when people will go back to their senses when releasing music and discover this thing called the volume knob."

Not sure which 'people' you mean here, but for as long as I can remember, the first thing any consumer has reached for when putting on a new vinyl, cassette, or CD has been the volume control - to turn it up or down to their desired preference.

It is the actual recording artists, producers, and labels who have forgotten about volume knobs. LOLOL

The latter is who I'm referring to. They have an obsession with pegging the VU needle to stay in one position. There must be a name for this psychosis.

An irrational fear of their works not being as 'loud' as someone elses. It's a waste to discuss it on Gearslutz: Everyone else who needs to know this are listed on the back of the CD jewel case or in the sleeve.