sodamail

Nowadays, Mastering job is just pushing a digital file into a brickwall plug-in like Wave L1/L2 limiter, with a hard threshold value to make it sound LOUD, they don't care about dynamic range...

Very happy to see that i'm not crazy, this "25" album does distort more than usual, it's very obvious to me. Being mylself a former sound mixer for 15 years, it looks like the "sound guy" at the Mastering pushed a little to much the Threshold of the L2 Ultramaximizer, or whatever kind of plug-in used for maximizing the levels of the final mix, and destroying the headroom. That's a shame, someone allowed that at the final stage of the process, even on a crappy sound system you can hear the distortion. It's very odd that with all the tools available today in a sound facility, someone can make a final master distort like this, it's hard to believe. The vinyl sounds a bit less crushed, but it's far to be a good sounding album to me. Happy New Year from Paris :-)