{"id":5049,"date":"2013-03-30T20:18:40","date_gmt":"2013-03-31T00:18:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aderack.com\/journal\/?p=5049"},"modified":"2013-03-30T20:18:40","modified_gmt":"2013-03-31T00:18:40","slug":"the-only-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aderack.com\/journal\/2013\/03\/the-only-time\/","title":{"rendered":"The Only Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve gone over this before; the remastered Pretty Hate Machine<\/em> is nice, if a little underwhelming after the special edition of The Downward Spiral<\/em>. The lack of any special content aside from NIN’s cover of “Get Down Make Love” (previously available on the “Sin” single) is a little disappointing, but would be fine if the new mix were a clear improvement. The problem is that although its tracks are a little clearer than before, perhaps EQed a little better, the 2010 album comes from the twenty-first century school of mastering — which is to say, “louder is better<\/a>“. Everything is compressed to the upper registers, so we lose all of the old dynamic range and the vocal tracks are now often overwhelmed by the backing.<\/p>\n

This is unfortunate, and you’d think that Trent Reznor would know better, but it’s sort of a fact of modern studio engineering. Whatever. What I’m noticing, which I have noticed before but I’m noticing again now, is the peculiar effect of this new mastering — which is to say, the better tracks get noisy and hard to listen to, but the weaker tracks — some of them runners up for Trent Reznor’s worst ever — come out much improved. And the damnedest thing is that it’s hard for me to narrow down why.<\/p>\n