Metallica Guitar Hero Release Has Higher Quality Than CDs

Last week Metallica released a new album, Death Magnetic, on traditional CDs as well as downloadable content for Guitar Hero III. Fans quickly noticed that the sound quality on the CD version was noticeably below-par, thanks to the recording studio's decision to sacrifice range for loudness. However, the tracks released for Guitar Hero III made no such sacrifice, as proved by Mastering Engineer Ian Shepherd. NME found an audio clip comparing the two tracks. This comes alongside statements from Activision claiming that Aerosmith's recent venture into Guitar Hero is generating more success for the band than their actual albums.

Old News

[cryptoluddite]

Dance Dance Revolution on PS2 has better sound quality also, using 24 bit samples instead of 16 bit. And that was back in 2000 (or whenever).

Recent "loudness war" discussion on /.

[Graywolf]

FYI, the "loudness war" topic has been discussed on Slashdot lots of times, most recently here: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/23/1219205 [slashdot.org]

Re:Well...

[sleigher]

I agree. The day the black album came is the day I wept (figuratively), as the band I grew up with turned their back on me and so many other. Today is a new day for those who were abandoned. The album is good although it is only good because Load(of shit) and the other later albums actually happened. Compared to the real Metallica it is still low on the chart. It does have some balls though.

Re:Recent "loudness war" discussion on /.

[Cow Jones]

Ah, here I am, replying to myself. I'm sorry, but just in case there's somebody out there who isn't conviced yet, here are a few prime examples:

one of the most cited examples [youtube.com]
The Smiths - How Soon Is Now [youtube.com]

The Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has a great article about it, too, as usual.

Re:i can't stand this.

[AttillaTheNun]

Unfortunately Rick Rubin is a producer, not a mastering engineer. He has little say in what happens to his work downstream of the mixing process.

Re:Well...

[Lisandro]

And yes, in case you all were wondering, their new album most certainly does SUCK. Listening to Metallica is like having banged the prom queen in high school only to see her become a queen of the 300-pound welfare sort :(

Actually, i downloaded some of the clips that were floating arround the net prior to the release and i thought it wasn't half bad - excellent for the standarts the band set for itself lately, in fact. I DID notice the awful mixing though, and i read the CD sounded much better. Well, it didn't.

It's a shame. Lately a lot of bands are going with this loudness trend and i just can't help it, it sounds horrible. After 5 minutes i have to switch to something else.