"Memory Almost Full" medley question
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Yes I guess it is in the mastering process this might happen? McCartney's music is quite detailed, I think it suits more room to breathe. The sound on "Memory Almost Full" is quite in your face. I've played the album a lot and are used to it. It still happens that I think about it, especially if I played a more natural mastered record before it and Memory starts with a very compressed sound turned up to a maximum. Those fads... what can you do.
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Hendrix Ibsen:
Yes I guess it is in the mastering process this might happen? McCartney's music is quite detailed, I think it suits more room to breathe. The sound on "Memory Almost Full" is quite in your face. I've played the album a lot and are used to it. It still happens that I think about it, especially if I played a more natural mastered record before it and Memory starts with a very compressed sound turned up to a maximum. Those fads... what can you do.
It's common with almost every modern release in the last 20 years that the music is mastered very loud, but 'Memory Almost Full' was wrecked beyond repair during mixing AND mastering. From the amateurish and sloppy editing on the songs to the quadruple-layered mush of vocals and guitars to the harsh-sounding and unnatural EQ-ed instruments to the distortion on every peak. Such a shame for such a bunch of great songs.
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Yeah, well, I think it's a great album, plenty of great McCartney moments on it. I have managed to listen to the album without mixing / mastering destroying the musical experience for me thankfully. But I'm not so fond of it, I have other records... I like the sound of music and instruments, I find it distracting if the sound or production is overpowering the music.
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I guess this is another one of those times when I'm grateful that I'm no audiophile. I still don't hear what's so un-listenable about Memory Almost Full.
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audi:
I guess this is another one of those times when I'm grateful that I'm no audiophile. I still don't hear what's so un-listenable about Memory Almost Full.
Same here. There are moments on the album where I don't like the production, and I do detect a difference in sound from, say, "Chaos," but it doesn't ruin the listening experience for me. Over time, MAF has become one of my favorite McCartney albums.
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I'm not an audiophile, I don't let hi-fi control music experience, in which case I'd missed a lot of good music, blues, for example, recordings of Robert Johnson ... It's from 1936 to 1937, long before hi- fi, the dusty sound even helping to make it all a bit mysterious. And 50s' rockabilly, early jazz... plenty of great music recorded in primitive fascilities. But I listen to the production, technology is so central in contemporary music that I consider the recording studio as an instrument. There are more engineers than ever. It's quite like when I listen to a record and maybe wished it was a real drum instead of a drum machine, or vice versa... I'm a big fan of "Memory Almost Full" but if I'm going to be critical, it is on behalf of the compression.
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I'm no expert on musical production either. I listen to a song. I like it or I don't.... a great song will always take precedence over production. I reckon if a song can stand the test of an acoustic guitar, then really, the nuances of musical engineering are superfluous. I'm no expert on the matter, but certainly have never baulked at an album because of variables in sound that only an expert in that field could understand. The album sounds just fine to me. And it's a good album too!
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You don't have to be an expert to hear it. I've played records to people who don't play much records and they can hear it. I'm not a hi-fi person but I'm a vinyl enthusiast and have preferences. I prefer the warm and organic sound of an LP to MP3, and stuff like that. I still collect CD's.. There was a period where the 'loudness war' as the "experts" call it took off but it seems to have calmed down. It topped maybe in the period of 2005-2010. Records I enjoy, besides MAF that I may think is mastered painfully loud might be for example "At War with the Mystics" and "Embryonic" by The Flaming Lips, "Wilco (the Album)" by Wilco, "A Bigger Bang" by The Rolling Stones...
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Well, I have to admit that when I first put on Dwight Yoakam's new album "Second Hand Heart" a couple of weeks ago, I thought oh this is loud... it's not the worst case I've heard and I've gotten used to it. But I guess there's still tendencies... And when I come to think of it, his last album "3 Pears" from 2012 might be the loudest mastered album in his discography. It's still one of my favorites.
