Whilst listening to a CD compilation of my own creation the other day I became conscious of the varying signal to noise ration of the various sources I had used. Some tracks were light and filled with subtle bass tones whilst others were harsh, loud and caused the speakers in my car to vibrate annoyingly.
It seemed I had forgotten to master the CD with any sort of ‘normalization’ in the way I normally do. What struck me was the fact that all of the harsh and ‘loud’ tracks were from recent CD’s and the warmer and dynamic tracks were from CD’s created in the 80’s or 90’s.
My recent laments over the inadequacies of remastered CD’s also serve to highlight the decreasing quality of the product record companies present to us. Whilst the majority of people may well be satisfied with the ‘louder is better’ philosophy, I am not.
So I am now re-assessing the majority of the high bit rate files on my hard drive with a view to restoring original recordings in favour of their ‘louder is better’ remastered versions.
In researching this topic I found this very interesting article.
