Red Mosquito

tragabigzanda wrote:Yeah the focus on the center channel is so odd

Good ears strat!

tragabigzanda wrote:Says the guy who bought a Tesla!

Strat wrote:Man.....

Car Ride included Dark Matter into Breakerfall.

Lol production on Dark Matter

It was so nice to hear the bass being all sexy in the middle, various guitars off to the side doing their individual parts, drums not choking me out. All that space yet aggressive killer playing.

Dark Matter is just one big loud thing with everything seemingly shoved right up the middle.

DDWJMUVW wrote:
Phones always sound the best though. I just don't get the bitterness. To me they've never sounded so clear, powerful, and punchy. Loud is good. This is a rock band.......

E.H. Ruddock wrote:I’m no audiophile like trag or strat or others on here, but i definitely think this sounds bad. My hope is that the music is good and the live versions will be burners. I didn’t think ST or Gigaton sounded the greatest, but a lot of those songs live (especially ST) are some of my favorite live songs at shows.

Monkey_Driven wrote:Yeah, I fully expect these songs to be performed well if they were largely written together in the same room.

DDWJMUVW wrote:

Strat wrote:Man.....

Car Ride included Dark Matter into Breakerfall.

Lol production on Dark Matter

It was so nice to hear the bass being all sexy in the middle, various guitars off to the side doing their individual parts, drums not choking me out. All that space yet aggressive killer playing.

Dark Matter is just one big loud thing with everything seemingly shoved right up the middle.

I'm beginning to think people are listening on different platforms and with much different equipment. I have ZERO problem clearly hearing and separating all the instruments and it sounds great. Center channel or not, it's vastly better than that soup thin drums on breakerfall (which now that I am paying attention may actually be thinner than soup and more like my squirty diarrhea after too much Thai).

For reference, I am listening on Air Pod Pro 2nd gen and using Spotify with spatial audio (with a custom eq - that I modified from the default R&B setting).

I signed up for Apple Music last week and it's absolute dogshit. You can only utilize the default iOS eq settings in your iPhone and they are a joke. Maybe many of you are using this, but then no question you don't like the production.

In the car, I have harman kardon 16 speaker 464 watt surround. It's not the pinnacle of car audio but better than most. Sounds great.

Phones always sound the best though. I just don't get the bitterness. To me they've never sounded so clear, powerful, and punchy. Loud is good. This is a rock band.......

tragabigzanda wrote:Why is there a bold letter Q in the top left of stip’s post on mobile? Anyone else seeing that?

tragabigzanda wrote:Why is there a bold letter Q in the top left of stip’s post on mobile? Anyone else seeing that?

tragabigzanda wrote:

Mike wrote:trag, can you explain to me in technical terms why the drums sound like they sit "on top" of the mix instead of "in" the mix? When listening to older Pearl Jam songs the drums sound like they're in the room with the other instruments. In this song they sound very separate. Or is that just my ears?

You're asking about two separate, but related, things here.

While it sounds like the drums were isolated from the other instruments, that's not really unique for a PJ record. Even an album like Riot Act, which is soaked in room ambience, still utilizes a lot of instrument separation. The difference is that on Riot Act, they capture a lot of the room tone -- and importantly, it's the same room tone for all the instruments -- and they don't compress the hell out of it, so dynamic changes in the band's playing create dynamic changes in the tone of the room; you can hear the room to varying degrees depending on how they're playing their instruments.

But here, Serban Ghanea has compressed the room tones to death, and then added artificial reverb on top of it, so we're approaching an 80s gated reverb sound, where the room sounds exist at a pretty constant level. Check the reverb tail every time the snare hits during the first verse; it decays down to zero just before the next measure starts. The net effect is that the drum sounds come across as much more deliberately affected instead of simply a natural room sound.

The other thing that creates a sense of the drums stepping on top of the mix is the way the guitars are treated, and the stereo mix EQ is mastered. There are some weird choices made with regard to the midrange on the guitars; they don't cut through the mix at all. They're also compressed to death, so again, no natural room sound. Listen to something like Ghost, with headphones, and you can hear the sound of the guitar amp bouncing off the wall on the right hand side. There's nothing like that happening here. Just no sense of natural space around the guitars; they all seem to be close mic'ed, then reverbed, then compressed to death.

Dynamics are important for this stuff, and there are none happening here.