#Landr review 2016 movie
#Landr review 2016 professional
#Landr review 2016 series

#Landr review 2016 movie

Laptop speakers can’t get very loud, and it doesn’t take much volume on a high or low note for them to start bleating or fuzzing movie theaters, on the other hand, demand huge dynamic range, with big, booming bass levels. But since so few people can listen to a record in such a high-end environment, the music must be adapted to sound as good as possible in all the forms and spaces it will eventually occupy-7' vinyl, MP3 files played from laptop speakers, or movie theater surround-sound, to name a few-and each of these platforms has different requirements and restrictions.

#Landr review 2016 professional

Professional audio engineers operate out of carefully calibrated rooms designed to eradicate odd resonances and echoes, and their speakers cost more than your car. However, in layman’s terms: The equipment used by the people who record and mix music is far more sophisticated than the equipment most listeners own. Much of the work is so technical, so reliant on an obsessive knowledge of gear and acoustics and physics, that to talk about it with any level of detail essentially requires speaking in another language altogether. The mastering engineer’s job breaks down into roughly two parts-a final edit of the music, and preparation of the files for release. “It’s this mysterious process that a lot of musicians don’t understand, including us.” Schmidt, one half of the experimental electronic duo Matmos. If rock stars are the sex gods of music, mastering engineers are its druids, the ones who work methodically and meticulously, and to whom people come for mystical wisdom and blessing. There is the sense that a mastering engineer can save or, occasionally, ruin an album, but even musicians themselves typically know only the vaguest sketches of what’s actually being done.

When the mix is finished, and the album is more or less complete, it’s sent to a mastering engineer-which is the point where general knowledge of what’s happening to the music ends. These individual tracks are then delivered to a mixing engineer who combines the best takes, adds effects, and puts them back together into a coherent song. Some of them you already know about-the musicians, of course, and the producer, who acts as a collaborator and shepherd through the creative process the audio engineers who record songs in multiple takes, usually tracking each sonic element separately. Generally speaking, an album passes through many hands before reaching yours.

#Landr review 2016 series

The whole episode provoked a series of questions, not just about what had gone wrong with Death Magnetic but about the craft in question: What is mastering, exactly? How does it work? Beyond the engineers themselves, almost no one seems to know. Eventually, more than 12,000 fans signed a petition in protest of the “unlistenable” product, and a mass mail-back-a-thon of CDs commenced. That the whole thing was drastically over-compressed, eliminating any sort of dynamic range. The consensus seemed to be that Death Magnetic was a good record that sounded like shit. And these are Metallica fans-people ostensibly undeterred by extremity.

These listeners liked the music and the songwriting, but everything was so loud they couldn’t really hear anything. Upon the album’s release, fan forums exploded in disgust, choked with complaints that the songs sounded shrill, distorted, ear-splitting. According to many Metallica devotees, the official version of the band’s 2008 record Death Magnetic is not the one worth listening to.