The problem is, it's largely nonsense. It's important to realise that although his qualitative assertion - which I paraphrase as "records with greater dynamic range sound better at the same RMS level" is one that not many serious listeners would take any exception to, that does absolutely nothing to plug up the gaping wounds in his analysis.
He argues that large-contrast records *sell more*, but in fact the metric he's using is hugely biased towards older records - he's ranking according to the product of total sales (itself biased to older records simply because of time available) and years of availability. It's an absurd number to rank on and his justification for it is the most transparent nonsense, but hey ho. What he is then *actually* asserting is that there is a correlation between
(a) old records (that have sold well) (b) records without a large amount of mastering-stage compression
But this is virtually tautological, since pushing-the-meters master-limiting is a recent phenomenon; in other words, he is simply demonstrating that no old records are new. You don't need all the graphs for that.
His assertions about hit-record graph artifacts are interesting, though again (because of his metric) not particularly convincing in any context other than that of classic rock. The later stuff about some modern productions are interesting; maybe this *does* explain why Californication doesn't, to my ears, work that well, though plenty of people (including musicians) I know would disagree with that premise completely.
It's interesting and it's certainly pretty, but it doesn't show anything - much less what he purports to be showing.
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Date: 2005-05-30 07:16 pm (UTC)He argues that large-contrast records *sell more*, but in fact the metric he's using is hugely biased towards older records - he's ranking according to the product of total sales (itself biased to older records simply because of time available) and years of availability. It's an absurd number to rank on and his justification for it is the most transparent nonsense, but hey ho. What he is then *actually* asserting is that there is a correlation between
(a) old records (that have sold well)
(b) records without a large amount of mastering-stage compression
But this is virtually tautological, since pushing-the-meters master-limiting is a recent phenomenon; in other words, he is simply demonstrating that no old records are new. You don't need all the graphs for that.
His assertions about hit-record graph artifacts are interesting, though again (because of his metric) not particularly convincing in any context other than that of classic rock. The later stuff about some modern productions are interesting; maybe this *does* explain why Californication doesn't, to my ears, work that well, though plenty of people (including musicians) I know would disagree with that premise completely.
It's interesting and it's certainly pretty, but it doesn't show anything - much less what he purports to be showing.