APHEX TWIN - SYRO

[awepittance]

the song sounds really good whatever they did to it, but it definitely has less dynamic range than anything off Rushup Edge.

one thing I don't understand though is that when people use limiters usually the point is to stop it from actually clipping/hitting the red but I can see what you mean at various points in this track it actually is in the red. Is there any artistic or audio reason for doing it this way? My understanding is that certain systems will actually crap out and make an audible distortion or clip sound if something like this is played through it, but on all the systems I've played minipops on it sounds great. In other words what's the advantage of actually letting a digital master clip VS making sure a limiter stops it at like -.01 db

edit: now I'm just confused, the Bleep 320kbps mp3 I downloaded is at 32-bit and is clipping like crazy compared to the wave file I downloaded from Bleep. I could have sworn I downloaded the 24-bit wave but it shows up as 16 on audition.

Edited September 8, 2014 by John Ehrlichman

[awepittance]

so i guess I accidentally got the 16-bit wave, just downloaded and checked out the 24-bit wave. There is also clipping (not audible, just going past 0) on this version but it happens slightly less often than in the 16-bit version

[Guest matrigs]

 

 

ouch

 

Not seeing that here.

 

Hey, what did all this mean btw? (There were a few others.)

 

I don't mean, "Is RDJ's face in there somewhere?", I just mean: Can a person w/ knowledge explain what this means to a non-musician? I noticed some ppl described minipops as "loud," and someone posted about why the person who did the mastering may have chosen to do it that way... hopefully this doesn't make it a stupid question. Can someone explain something beyond "it means the song sounds loud"?

 

 

here you have a waveform of one of the "best mastered" tracks ever.

 

 

mind you, it still clips ocsassionaly and is pretty loud, but you can see that it's not maximized very much

[SmackSmash]

I don't really understand the praise for Minipops' sound. You could hear immediately that it's overcompressed with the scratchy high end on the shakers, and the first time I put it on the distortion in the first bassline really struck me. There are some really cringeworthy moments at points where there are too many elements stacked together and everything gets muddy and distorted for a moment. Initially I thought it was just me so I checked the waveforms and there's clipping all over the place. It sounds like the track's really been pushed to it's limit. Still love the track but someone fucked up the mastering IMHO.

[Verdant Hickies]

I don't really understand the praise for Minipops' sound. You could hear immediately that it's overcompressed with the scratchy high end on the shakers, and the first time I put it on the distortion in the first bassline really struck me. There are some really cringeworthy moments at points where there are too many elements stacked together and everything gets muddy and distorted for a moment. Initially I thought it was just me so I checked the waveforms and there's clipping all over the place. It sounds like the track's really been pushed to it's limit. Still love the track but someone fucked up the mastering IMHO.

yes i noticed this too, definitely a serious step back from the tuss

[chim]

 

 

ouch

 

Not seeing that here.

 

Hey, what did all this mean btw? (There were a few others.)

 

I don't mean, "Is RDJ's face in there somewhere?", I just mean: Can a person w/ knowledge explain what this means to a non-musician? I noticed some ppl described minipops as "loud," and someone posted about why the person who did the mastering may have chosen to do it that way... hopefully this doesn't make it a stupid question. Can someone explain something beyond "it means the song sounds loud"?

 

 

Some audiophiles here have this idea that the song is mastered badly because of the clipping, that there are some transients cut off at unity - in layman's terms, music levels are backwards, we talk about negative decibels and the loudest a song can be is 0db. Anything going above that is cut off and disintegrated, so that's what you see in the bottom and top of the pic, parts of the waveform aren't there. Limiters and compressors push the sound up towards that limit, and this is almost a necessity to have a competitive volume level in this day and age, but if it is excessive, you hear audible distortion, and that is a negative. I look at a lot of these and the truth is that this is nothing in 2014, track sounds fine. The picture is zoomed out from the waveform quite a lot so it can be rather misleading.

 

My (worthless) opinion is that the song is mixed and mastered well but not fantastic, aside from the shakers it's well balanced, lots going on on the lower registers without it being muddy and a pleasing sound overall - the song is loud and there is a little audible clipping, but there's less harsh treble than most electronic music these days. A good ear can hear that analog summing gear hard at work. But I listen to a lot of EDM and bass music that's ridiculously loud, so I don't judge it by the same standards as someone who might be used to quieter music.

Edited September 8, 2014 by chim

[Hexahedral]

 

 

 

ouch

 

Not seeing that here.

 

Hey, what did all this mean btw? (There were a few others.)

 

I don't mean, "Is RDJ's face in there somewhere?", I just mean: Can a person w/ knowledge explain what this means to a non-musician? I noticed some ppl described minipops as "loud," and someone posted about why the person who did the mastering may have chosen to do it that way... hopefully this doesn't make it a stupid question. Can someone explain something beyond "it means the song sounds loud"?

 

 

Some audiophiles here have this idea that the song is mastered badly because of the clipping, that there are some transients cut off at unity - in layman's terms, music levels are backwards, we talk about negative decibels and the loudest a song can be is 0db. Anything going above that is cut off and disintegrated, so that's what you see in the bottom and top of the pic, parts of the waveform aren't there. Limiters and compressors push the sound up towards that limit, and this is almost a necessity to have a competitive volume level in this day and age, but if it is excessive, you hear audible distortion, and that is a negative. I look at a lot of these and the truth is that this is nothing in 2014, track sounds fine. The picture is zoomed out from the waveform quite a lot so it can be rather misleading.

 

My (worthless) opinion is that the song is mixed and mastered well but not fantastic, aside from the shakers it's well balanced, lots going on on the lower registers without it being muddy and a pleasing sound overall - the song is loud and there is a little audible clipping, but there's less harsh treble than most electronic music these days. A good ear can hear that analog summing gear hard at work. But I listen to a lot of EDM and bass music that's ridiculously loud, so I don't judge it by the same standards as someone who might be used to quieter music.

 

 

Agreed. The other important factor is that RDJ probably would not have approved something he didn't like or didn't feel was appropriate for his music. The artists' preference for mastering comes first, not the fans'.

[chim]

You can't compare it with a fucking RATM track from 1991! This is 2014 and clipping is completely acceptable, if not a must in everything but classical music.

 

He knew what he was doing and if he didn't expressly dictate the process, he probably decided that this was the best version out of many.

[Kavinsky]

so the most fussy electronic artist fucked up the mastering of his first official track in 13 years (except of analord)

sure.....

[chim]

the song sounds really good whatever they did to it, but it definitely has less dynamic range than anything off Rushup Edge.

 

one thing I don't understand though is that when people use limiters usually the point is to stop it from actually clipping/hitting the red but I can see what you mean at various points in this track it actually is in the red. Is there any artistic or audio reason for doing it this way? My understanding is that certain systems will actually crap out and make an audible distortion or clip sound if something like this is played through it, but on all the systems I've played minipops on it sounds great. In other words what's the advantage of actually letting a digital master clip VS making sure a limiter stops it at like -.01 db

 

edit: now I'm just confused, the Bleep 320kbps mp3 I downloaded is at 32-bit and is clipping like crazy compared to the wave file I downloaded from Bleep. I could have sworn I downloaded the 24-bit wave but it shows up as 16 on audition.

 

limiters can mask or reduce the distortion quite a lot compared to a raw digital clip, due to compression and other factors. this is why you can't judge a track by its waveform, you have to actually listen

 

the -.01db is for CD purposes, CD's don't like 0db.. anything down to -.05db is good for mp3's like on soundcloud to prevent artifacts in the transcoding

 

a tune can still be mastered ridiculously loud within those parameters, so it's not about whether it goes up in "the red" or not

Edited September 8, 2014 by chim

[Gordon]

He probably just lost the original .wav file and had to use an mp3 he fashioned just to play out :P

Edited September 8, 2014 by Gordon

[r2c]

He probably just lost the original .wav file and had to use an mp3 he fashioned just to play out :P

Yeah, he left it on a plane and so he had to rush the minipops mastering, so it isn't very good.

 

Seriously, thanks for all the feedback. Obviously there are diferences in opinion, which is interesting (even though I can only understand about 50% of it). There's no question whether Mr. James or the person who did it "fucked up" the mastering. He knew exactly what he was doing/choosing.

 

Maybe he wanted the mastering "loud" on minipops, since it would be the first single (and thus wouldn't sound quiet compared to other music or whatever), whereas he had someone else master the rest of the album with a different approach/emphasis/goal in mind. Just more baseless speculation though...

Edited September 8, 2014 by r2c

[BCM]

maybe he just turned the bass up a bit

[Guest isaki]

[funkaholic]

the only thing that sounded odd to me is when the acid line comes in at 2:39, seems really out of place, like as if it added on after exporting or something

 

but i think the song sounds lovely, the beat in particular, those sounds are so tight

[lumpenprol]

doesn't make it acceptable...clipping bugs the hell out of me...the "loudness war" sucks

 

luckily this one is not as badly brickwalled as some...

Edited September 8, 2014 by lumpenprol

[randomAmateur]

Is it the same master that is pressed on vinyl???

<I'm not an expert>

[MisterE]

some of you guys need to stop using the word clipping so interchangeably with limiting, or just assuming that when you look at a track that has been limited, that what you're seeing is clipping. just about every track that gets released on a professional level is going to have some limiting somewhere, and of course pretty much all or most of the mainstream stuff on big labels uses a lot of it. but if any time a limiter was used meant that something clipped, then pretty much every single piece of music you listen to is clipped. they aren't the same thing. they are two totally different things. yes they are related in some ways, but not the same.

 

in fact, the basic idea behind limiting is to PREVENT clipping.

 

when you look at a waveform like that, all you can say is 'the dynamics have been reduced' and the peaks are being stopped from going beyond a point around 0db. that can be accomplished a few ways, limiting being one of them, but yeah sometimes mastering guys will intentionally do things like clip their A/D converters to lob maybe the top dB or so off of the peaks. they'd probably do that in combination with limiting. some converters are known to supposedly sound good when clipping like that. there are different types of clipping or at least different results. some is 'softer' (bit more rounded edges), some is just perfectly flat.

 

a 16bit wav cant actually have anything going over 0db recorded in that wav. which is why this whole thing goes on.

 

but when you see a waveform like that with the whole track on display, all you know is that there is almost surely limiting, and the signal may or may not have also been clipped in the mastering process. limiting is compression which means the volume level gets dropped as the signal is about to exceed the limit, so limiting prevents clipping, and if you zoom in horizontally on a track you limit with something like waves l2, even with extreme limiting, you will see that the waveform goes up close to 0db (or wherever you set the limit) but then curves back down, but it always stays 'rounded', and looks somewhat like the rest of the waveform. up close it still looks kind of 'natural', which is due to some crazy algorithms in how those limiters work. obviously you can still hear them affecting the sound, but it's NOT the same thing as clipping. if you zoom in on a clipped signal, its going to be like a flat line going across where that peak tried to go above a point and coudln't due to limitations of digital systems. so instead it just stays 'pegged' at that maximum allowed point, and you see a flat line. that causes distortion. yeah extreme limiting causes distortion too, but the signal is typically kept rounded and more natural looking with the much used big name limiters out there. theres a pretty huge difference between that and a signal just being completely chopped off. i think something like l2 tries to kind of 'mirror' the waveform back down below the limit, to retain it's basic structure. with clipping, that musical information that was happening where the signal tried to cross that point and got flattened, that information is just gone. its totally gone forever. and its sounds a lot different.

 

just showing the entire track zoomed out horizontally like that, you have absolutely no idea that there is significant 'clipping' on that track. zoom in, look for flat lines where peaks used to be, then talk about clipping.

 

limiting ≠ clipping

[Hugh Mughnus]

some of you guys need to stop using the word clipping so interchangeably with limiting, or just assuming that when you look at a track that has been limited, that what you're seeing is clipping. just about every track that gets released on a professional level is going to have some limiting somewhere, and of course pretty much all or most of the mainstream stuff on big labels uses a lot of it. but if any time a limiter was used meant that something clipped, then pretty much every single piece of music you listen to is clipped. they aren't the same thing. they are two totally different things. yes they are related in some ways, but not the same.

 

in fact, the basic idea behind limiting is to PREVENT clipping.

 

when you look at a waveform like that, all you can say is 'the dynamics have been reduced' and the peaks are being stopped from going beyond a point around 0db. that can be accomplished a few ways, limiting being one of them, but yeah sometimes mastering guys will intentionally do things like clip their A/D converters to lob maybe the top dB or so off of the peaks. they'd probably do that in combination with limiting. some converters are known to supposedly sound good when clipping like that. there are different types of clipping or at least different results. some is 'softer' (bit more rounded edges), some is just perfectly flat.

 

a 16bit wav cant actually have anything going over 0db recorded in that wav. which is why this whole thing goes on.

 

but when you see a waveform like that with the whole track on display, all you know is that there is almost surely limiting, and the signal may or may not have also been clipped in the mastering process. limiting is compression which means the volume level gets dropped as the signal is about to exceed the limit, so limiting prevents clipping, and if you zoom in horizontally on a track you limit with something like waves l2, even with extreme limiting, you will see that the waveform goes up close to 0db (or wherever you set the limit) but then curves back down, but it always stays 'rounded', and looks somewhat like the rest of the waveform. up close it still looks kind of 'natural', which is due to some crazy algorithms in how those limiters work. obviously you can still hear them affecting the sound, but it's NOT the same thing as clipping. if you zoom in on a clipped signal, its going to be like a flat line going across where that peak tried to go above a point and coudln't due to limitations of digital systems. so instead it just stays 'pegged' at that maximum allowed point, and you see a flat line. that causes distortion. yeah extreme limiting causes distortion too, but the signal is typically kept rounded and more natural looking with the much used big name limiters out there. theres a pretty huge difference between that and a signal just being completely chopped off. i think something like l2 tries to kind of 'mirror' the waveform back down below the limit, to retain it's basic structure. with clipping, that musical information that was happening where the signal tried to cross that point and got flattened, that information is just gone. its totally gone forever. and its sounds a lot different.

 

just showing the entire track zoomed out horizontally like that, you have absolutely no idea that there is significant 'clipping' on that track. zoom in, look for flat lines where peaks used to be, then talk about clipping.

 

limiting ≠ clipping

 

[SmackSmash]

I think people are only showing the waveform because it backs up what we've heard in the track. This was my experience (probably similar to some others here):

 

I listened to it when it premiered on Radio 1, and recorded it too. I thought it sounded kinda overcompressed but I figured that it was just the transmission (radio is notorious for this kind of stuff). I went back to my recording, saw the clipping (limiting, maximising, whatever... it was audible) and figured that I'd recorded at too high a level. I waited for it to come on again on Radio 6 and ended up with the same results. "Oh well, that's radio I guess". Then I saw that bleep had released it I was really excited to hear it in it's proper, shimmering, full, beautiful Tuss-like glory. I grabbed the 24bit wav and was disappointed to find out that it sounded just the same. Now of course it's nothing major: it's not had the shit smashed out of it or anything, but compared to what I was expecting it really didn't sound that good. It doesn't hinder my enjoyment of the track, but I thought it was weird considering that what we've had from him in the past decade or so has been so clean and, dare I say, 'perfect'. When I saw so many people on here talking about how incredible it sounds I just felt like I had to give an opinion on this. It's all subjective anyway, but after hearing the live version so many times I was really looking forward to hearing that bass pulse ripple around my room and fill the air with crystal clear definition, and this version just didn't quite hit the spot. Anyway, I think the vinyl version will be much better so I'm looking forward to that even more now.

 

INB4 "expectations", "audio snob", "RDJ knows better than you" - I'm starting to remember why I don't post here too often.

[MassfreeKid]

Why is no interviewer asking Richard:

 

1. How important is mastering to you and what is your definition of a good mastering?

2. What's your take on the loudness war?

3. People have accused your new "sound" of clipping: what do you think?

 

It would probably shut up a couple of people on here hehe.

[baph]

lol @ complaining about imperfect sound quality on an Aphex Twin release. It's like everything pre-1997 gets... listened to... with rose-colored, uh... earholes?

 

Go listen to that fucked up distortion about 3:30 into Next Heap With a couple hundred times as a sort of mantra to allow yourself to move on.

Edited September 8, 2014 by baph

[MassfreeKid]

I think people are only showing the waveform because it backs up what we've heard in the track. This was my experience (probably similar to some others here):

 

I listened to it when it premiered on Radio 1, and recorded it too. I thought it sounded kinda overcompressed but I figured that it was just the transmission (radio is notorious for this kind of stuff). I went back to my recording, saw the clipping (limiting, maximising, whatever... it was audible) and figured that I'd recorded at too high a level. I waited for it to come on again on Radio 6 and ended up with the same results. "Oh well, that's radio I guess". Then I saw that bleep had released it I was really excited to hear it in it's proper, shimmering, full, beautiful Tuss-like glory. I grabbed the 24bit wav and was disappointed to find out that it sounded just the same. Now of course it's nothing major: it's not had the shit smashed out of it or anything, but compared to what I was expecting it really didn't sound that good. It doesn't hinder my enjoyment of the track, but I thought it was weird considering that what we've had from him in the past decade or so has been so clean and, dare I say, 'perfect'. When I saw so many people on here talking about how incredible it sounds I just felt like I had to give an opinion on this. It's all subjective anyway, but after hearing the live version so many times I was really looking forward to hearing that bass pulse ripple around my room and fill the air with crystal clear definition, and this version just didn't quite hit the spot. Anyway, I think the vinyl version will be much better so I'm looking forward to that even more now.

 

INB4 "expectations", "audio snob", "RDJ knows better than you" - I'm starting to remember why I don't post here too often.

Now to the real question: what is your setup? What do you listen to this album with? This determines a huge portion of what you wrote.

[Hugh Mughnus]

I was going to ask the same thing Mass.

 

Sounds like crap played off my ipod but I streamed it direct to my receiver from my PC and it was much better.

[Guest skibby]

doesn't make it acceptable...clipping bugs the hell out of me...the "loudness war" sucks

 

luckily this one is not as badly brickwalled as some...

 

no problem m9

 

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/mastering-forum/471279-de-clipping.html