HW: Yule Ritual

[Doug Pearson]

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