Casualty of the Loudness Wars – Metallica’s Death Magnetic

Opinions on the artistic merits of Metallica's new release are somewhat divided, but everyone can agree on one thing, the mix of the retail version sounds absolutely horrible. Blame the "loudness wars" for that, and send your hate mail to the mixing engineers rather than mastering engineer Ted Jensen, who claims that he received the album for mastering already in its "brick walled" state. Jensen was quoted as saying: "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." A Youtube video has been made showing the dynamic contrasts between the CD and Guitar Hero versions.



The loudness wars have been raging in the popular music industry since the late '80s. The push has been to make each new release (or re-mix of a previous release) as loud as absolutely possible, which results in distortion, limited dynamic range, and clipping of the waveform - all of which are evident on Death Magnetic. So far, more than 2,700 fans have signed a petition calling for the album to be re-mixed properly. Fortunately, fans don't have to wait for a re-release, as it's been discovered that the Guitar Hero downloadable version of the album doesn't suffer from the horrible compression of the CD version, and is actually 10dB quieter. In an ironic turn of events, the best quality version of Death Magnetic currently available is the FLAC version digitally ripped from Guitar Hero, available via P2P download.