From what I have heard much of what was lost was original masters while mixdown masters were not stored at that location so we might just be stuck with loudness war albums until stuff like AI is advanced enough to fix it lower generation master.
Excellent demonstration, I would only raise an objection to this one part:
Even the best engineered record from today will have essentially zero dynamic range.
There are a few rogue artists who actually care about sound and don’t crush their recordings despite the impact it might have on radio play and such, for example, Gillian Welch/David Rawlings (a slash is in order since they always record together even when it’s one of their names on the cover). This is the lead single from their upcoming album, out next month:
I don’t doubt that the peaks are maxed out, but within that there are dynamics: the snares sound like snares and not blasts of static, etc. (This isn’t just because we’re in the era of volume normalization now; their stuff from earlier in the streaming era is just as dynamic.)
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I would say broadly Americana and alt country/folk is the last bastion of dynamic recording and production values across the board cause most of the modern artists are emulating older ways of recording and production.
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Agreed. There’s an indie label in my area, Signature Sounds, which focuses on Americana and alt country/folk and has/had some well known artists (Josh Ritter, Lake Street Dive, Erin McKeown) and most of their recordings are mastered very well.
On the opposite side of the spectrum musically, yet still using dynamics, is My Bloody Valentine. The original cut of their magnum opus Loveless is famous for being mastered ridiculously low, not even close to the peaks filling up the box, despite sounding bone-crushingly loud (both of the remasters that were released in 2012 are closer to modern standards). This track from their 2012 comeback album “m b v” is a good example of how they use all that headroom:
(The fade in and out aren’t in the original, just the official YouTube version.)
The fuzz guitar that comes in at 1:20 sounds far more beautifully punishing because the volume of the mix actually goes up instead of everything else ducking down at the same time.
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