Nerdtallica

For all the audiophile nerds out there, this one's for you. The buzz around Metallica's new Death Magnetic album isn't the new songs, but how they sound.

For the layman, the issue many complain is that the album has been compressed just about as much as it's possible to compress audio. Part of the "loudness war," this type of compression is designed to make music sound as loud as possible at the expense of dynamic range. Television advertisers use similar technology to get the most bang for their buck volume-wise, which is why ads often sound so much louder than television programs. Over at MusicRadar, they say the problem goes beyond compression - some parts are actually distorted from digital clipping, explaining, "the kick and snare drum seemed to be audibly clipping, along with some of the palm-muted guitar parts."

Their audio analysis (using the free, open-source audio editor Audacity), demonstrates graphically the severe nature of the audio compression used by Metallica's engineers for the CD version of the album by comparing it to a recording from the Guitar Hero videogame. According to the analysis, which looks solid, audiophiles would be better off recording the songs from the videogame than buying the album because the Guitar Hero version has far more dynamic range than the hyper-compressed CD version.

Then there was the comment on a Metallica forum that appears to contain a note received from head engineer Ted Jensen of Sterling Sound, the company that mastered the album.

"I'm certainly sympathetic to your reaction," read the note, "I get to slam my head against that brick wall every day. In this case, the mixes were already brick-walled before they arrived at my place. Suffice to say I would never be pushed to overdrive things as far as they are here. Believe me I'm not proud to be associated with this one, and we can only hope that some good will come from this in some form of backlash against volume above all else."

If this is true, and Jensen (whom the liner notes identify as having mastered the album) received the mix in such a compressed form, it looks like the engineers who mixed the album before it was sent to the mastering facility -- identified as Greg Fidelman and Andrew Scheps -- are to blame. So far, 2,730 fans have signed a petition asking that the album be re-mixed. Failing that, maybe someone will eventually record themselves playing the song perfectly within the game and distribute it via torrent, and then Metallica will have another thing to get upset about.