Metallica "Death Magnetic" Yes, it IS clipping... - Mastering Media Blog

Thursday 18 September 2008

Metallica "Death Magnetic" Yes, it IS clipping...

This is a very brief post with another image. (I know some people don't find pictures convincing - in that case please see the YouTube video I linked to in my last post, where you can clearly hear the effects of the distortion.)


I have read people deny that the CD is clipped. Here are closeups of waveforms from the UK release of the CD (top) and the GH sample I was sent (bottom).



As you can see, the CD is clipped (the tops of the waveforms are "squared off" ) whereas the Guitar Hero version on the bottom is not. This is the cause of a least some if the distortion people are hearing.

However as I mentioned in a previous post, digital clipping alone isn't enough to make the album sound as distorted as it does. So yes, the album is clipped, but in my opinion the distortion probably results at least partially from an earlier stage in the process as well - presumably the mix.

10 comments:

UncleN00b said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
UncleN00b said...

I think what you're doing here is great, Ian. There is a lot of attention being pointed to your blogs. THANK YOU!

Would you possibly be able to get a copy on vinyl and do a sound analysis on that? I've read many reviewers (cited from Amazon) complaining that it sounds worse than the CD/iTunes versions. Vinyl is known for being "best in quality" and showing the vinyl is messed up too would help this. Just a thought...

Richard Tollerton said...

The vinyl is clipped too.

http://audiamorous.blogspot.com/2008/09/metallicas-death-magnetic-clips-on-both.html

MV said...

Hey: I've been reading all your posts about loudness and totally agree. An album that I've always thought really suffered from its loudness was "The Woods" by Sleater-Kinney. Oh, I know a lot of the distortion in the music is intentional, but I was wondering, is it technically clipping as well? I actually originally downloaded it, then actually BOUGHT a physical disc because I thought my mp3s were corrupted in some way. Are you familiar with this album? I love the way a lot of it sounds, but...

Elizabeth C. Smith said...

Very helpful information.!Thank you so much for the detailed article

clipping path service provider

Unknown said...

Thanks a lot for your good job.Please keep continue sharing with us. photo editing service

Lucia Stone said...

Fantastic Tutorial, thanks for placing this together! This is clearly one wonderful post. Many thanks for the useful information. Read more: clipping path service

Photo Editing said...

If the clipping is hard, or if the signal is strong, close to 60% of the signal melts into noise, because of the harmonics that will be produced by the non-linearity of the device image background removal

Taylor Bara said...

Metallica is one of my favorite band! Here are some good parts of a narrative essay about it!

Shiv B said...

Thats great. You know? You can get high quality image editing services done at really afforable prices . Or you can hire a Virtual Assistant for to take care of the image editing for you.