HW: Yule Ritual

[Dr _ Technical]

My version of this album is also bass heavy (recently purchased). Even on
cheap monitors, it nearly blows them up with the volume halfway decent!

On Fri, 13 Dec 2002 17:10:42 -0500, Doug Pearson <jasret at MINDSPRING.COM>
wrote:

>On Fri, 13 Dec 2002 07:34:52 +0000, Jonathan Norman <rockypaths at MSN.COM>
>wrote:
>>Hi
>>
>>I need to know if I have a duff copy of this album.  The version I have
is
>>very bass heavy - so bass heavy that you can't turn up the volume as my
>>sub-woofer hates it.
>>
>>Has anyone else had this problem?
>
>Yes, it's a typical newbie mastering engineer mistake to overuse a
favorite
>(or newly-obtained) piece of equipment or (if computer-mastered) plug-in,
>in this case, something along the lines of an Aphex Aural Exciter/Bass
>Enhancer (a web search on the name of the mastering engineer turns up a
guy
>who seems to be very experienced at binaural recording, but has no
>mastering credits mentioned ... no idea whether or not it's actually the
>same person, as those two audio engineering tasks are not at all related).
>So you get a bass sound that sounds "awesome" on cheap equipment (like a
>boom box or car stereo, and maybe even crap monitors that are all treble
no
>bass like NS-10's), but utterly nothing like a real bass guitar when
played
>on a system capable of accurately reproducing the sound of a recording.
>
>I have a bad enough time listening to 'Yule Ritual' through my speakers
>(Vandersteens - http://www.vandersteen.com/ ), which have much more of a
>flat, uncolored, studio-monitor-like response than most home audio
>speakers, so I can only imagine that the sound must be utterly abyssmal
>through a system with a subwoofer.
>
>Which is all too bad, as I like the album quite a bit (although there's
>major room for improvement in other areas, but I've bitched about it
enough
>for one day).  Great contributions by Ron, Simon, Harvey & Keith Kniveton,
>especially (and presumably Jerry, but like I just said ... ).
>
>There was a web broadcast of part of the show which had a proper sounding
>bass guitar, so a decent recording obviously exists somewhere ...
>
>(And on the "other" subject, this underscores the importance of audience
>taping, since that's the only way to get a copy of the 'Yule Ritual'
>Astoria set that *doesn't* have this mastering screwup.  Sorry to dwell on
>this, since I've mentioned it before, but words cannot describe how
>appalled I was when I first heard it.)
>
>    -Doug
>     jasret at mindspring.com