UnMastering Wrongly Mastered Commercial CD's

This seems like such a small thing with all the Gulf Coast disasters right now (we're still donating though!)...

I've been getting stiffed by the corporate record company and radio machineryfor the past few years now. Some gems have appeared but more often than not the loudness syndrome has destroyed the beauty of the artists music. For my tastes it is beyond the needs of a studio performance, live performance, virtual performance, beyond the needs of artistic expression. I've had enough...so have you.

I've talked and listened to many folks on many forums and tried many techniques. What I've come up with that works for me is:

1. Import into Adobe Audition at 32bit float.

2. Use ClickFix to fix clips, I've tried Audition clip repair but the extrapolation is unreal and creates further problems.

3. Smooth using GlissEQ in High mode.

4. Re-Adjust loudness to taste using Voxengo Elephant Mastering Limiter and SPAN to get K-12 metering (per Bob Katz).

I just remastered a couple of tunes from the notorius 1997 reissue of Iggy Pop "Raw Power". I now have transients and the only distortion is from the original mix when they pushed it too hard into the mix buss - haha that's not my problem!

I'm just getting started here and will post some results and more details if there's any interest. This is a huge waste of time and major embarrassement for the pros that are feeding the commercial machine. Yes it's true that the mastering engineers are doing it - but thay know better and the next thing up the chain is the producer, that's the problem.

What I expect is this Producers & Record companies: 2 versions of the commercial CD, clearly marked:

1. Radio Master

2. Audiophile Master

Call it whatever you like but don't charge me good money for a suck sounding "Radio Master" - give me a K-12 level audiophile master. Also be very EMBARRASED that a guy with a project studio has to (and is successfully doing so) unmaster major commerical record company mastering. Haha - you think we wouldn't notice and are a bunch of sheep! Maybe for a while - Revolution begins now

You will have better luck trying to extract eggs out of omlettes.

I wonder how much of this loudness insanity is done on purpose so the record companies can later sell us the same thing, in a better format and maybe less damaged.

I mean, if a new consumer audio standard is to ever succeed (maybe 24/96), it's going to have to sound a lot better to convince the public to purchase their records in yet another format.

Let's face it - the average punter is never going to hear the difference between good CD and 24/96. UNLESS - they sabotage CD's now, so you will be able to hear the difference in the new format ...

Maybe it's just me, but if I ran an evil record company, that's how I would do it ...

Yeah - that's an interesting take on it Kiwiburger...haha no argument from this consumer - whatever they're doing it surely is not for my benefit - ears or wallet!

I just think they know not what they do.

Some of the "remastered" classics I've heard were clearly -- and badly -- remixed. Obviously, that's always going to be a temptation when one is faced with "flawed" original masters and one has access to the original multitrack masters. But good intentions do not faithfully recreate mixes, even -- or especially -- from older, limited format multitrack masters.

But, as noted, there's still plenty of mayhem that can be wreaked on the stereo master. And even the best of intentions with the participation of key people is not enough to ensure beneficial results. (I'm specifically thinking of the Rudy Van Gelder remaster series, overseen by The Great One -- and his 90 year old ears -- himself. [sigh] )

Anyhow, I have resorted to 'remastering' a disappointing release (although it wasn't itself a remaster).

Back in the '80s I bought a then-contemporary live recording by Rory Gallagher and it sounded like it was coming out of a 50's transistor radio. All brittle high end (and this was on vinyl, no less) and no bass to speak of. It was fingernails on chalkboard.

I looked at the credits and decided to start using ear protection when I played (would that I had used it everytime I went to a concert venue!)... the producer or exec producer was Rory, himself. And I thought, yeah... hard drinkin', loud-playing blues rocker might just have worn away a lot of his hearing. But why did they let him put it out? I mean I love Rory -- but I would have yanked on his plaid flannel sleeve and said, "Mate, check your hearing!"

I ran it off onto cassette through a graphic EQ (it was all I had, yeah? It cost like $60... I was a broke student), rolling off the high end by a whopping 9 dB and bumping the bottom by at least 7 or 8 dB and it started soundling like music again.

Nice info, Kylen.

I always assume that trying to unmaster a record was similar to trying to unscrew a pregnant chick. Doesn't work.

It's a sad fact that so many records I hear today sound like they were "mastered" by someone with no mastery of that particular art. Overs are just unforgiveable. Sorry, no sympathy here. These folks get paid well, and the entire "louder = better" argument carries no weight with me.

How about better = better? There's a concept.

- Jeff

You can't really *Unmaster* a CD. But, *IF* the issue is overclipping through the entire track, you can try this process i've been doing (posted on my site) -- When Commercial CDs Go Wrong (Too Loud) .

If the CD is not heavily clipped, this will not work at all. And, not all CDs will sound reasonable when this is done. Keep in mind that some music just lends itself to the sound of the process.

Good luck...

Good points blue2blue - I haven't gotten to the remastering of commercial releases part yet (rebalancing I call it to prevent too many fist fights! haha). Like in your case Iggy Pop was producer of this reissue too. Not to pick on Mr. Pop too much - this might be minor in his list of accomplishments and the original mix was pushed way into the board, I can just see a wild-eyed Iggy throwin peanut-butter all over the Pro-Tools screen screamin - jam it into the converters!

PS: I'm a big Rory Gallagher fan also!

Good point Jeff - doesn't stop me from trying though, haha - to unmaster that is. I'm pretty sick of it and the producers need to offer me an any like minded folks better versions. I'm using the term unmastered loosely, I just mean that I want to select my own loudness. Right now I'm trying to undo the loudness from K-6 (if there were such a thing) to K-10 or K-12 (this is the loudest thing the Bob Katz standard recognizes). In addition to those crazy parental warning I want a loudness sticker - like the FDA puts on food - have the RIAA or whomever do something useful and put a K-X loudness label on the crazy CD...haha won't happen so I'm stuck trying to shame producers into using their brains.

Hi Audiomaverick - I was hopin you'd stop by. I remember you did some work on this last year and we tried out various things. I'm gonna keep pluggin away at this for a bit - you know what I really want to do is just tweak the loudness back to where it's reasonable, rebuild the shaved off tops. I really want to hear thru the loudness mastering back to what the original mix might have been - it'll be a little of the mix loudness and a little of the mastering loudness that will remain if I get lucky.

Adobe Audition clip repair can do certain things but it's algorithm will extrapolate certain clips into outer space and cause worse problems - you've seen this too I think. I dug around and found the old link to your fine web page. ClickFix I referred to earlier isn't goint to do the job I want either since it doesn't understand a flattop as well as it understands an impulse. Today I'm trying Sony (previously Sonic Foundry) clip repair in their Noise Reduction package (if I can get my auth code following my pc crash...aaahhhh!).

Bad computers and bad music - what a month, not to mention friggin Katrina came around to teach us all some new lessons...

All ideas are welcome concerning unmastering loudness and spanking "producers" I'm not trying to be a hero and do this myself - I could use a hand anyone who has similar thoughts!

A quick test of Sony clip restoration shows it to be quite ineffective even though it claims to round off flat peaks...my testing shows otherwise.

I went back to the Audiomaverick Adobe Audition clip restoration and found out something more about what I don't like - both sound and visual wise. It's the Audition hard limiter. By replacing it with Voxengo Elephant I'm able to get a great sounding release at 2ms which is about 100 samples (give or take). Not exactly a sample level limiter but a lot better sounding than the one in Audition (which can release fastest at 40ms but argh).

So back on track with 32bit waves, Audition clip restoration and Voxengo mastering limiter to unmaster some CD's...any good sounding results I'll post.

Ok - it's the Forrest Gump of audio here again...

The audio CD I was tryin to unmaster has been written with digital overs (L=+0.01dbfs, R=+0.02dbfs) along with some nice dc offset. I thought it was just my converters freakin out but it is the CD fer sure...Turns out I have to bring the dbfs down under 0dbfs or it seems to confuse the de-clipping algorithms all to hell - they don't mind outputting >0dbfs (@32bit float) but they don't seem to understand >0dbfs...this changes their behavior a lot.

Beginning again...audio is like a box of chocolates

I must say that I admire your efforts. However, I am FAR too lazy to do such a thing.

I will certainly agree that confining a pop tune entirely in the top .3 dB of full scale is awful. I just hope people are taking good care of the unmastered mixes so they re-remaster them if and when the dumb volume wars are over. Unfortunately, it seems the volume wars are in a vicious cycle, and I can't see how it will end. Nobody wants to have the lowest volume CD in somebody's CD changer, and the market dictates a failure for anyone brave enough to leave some semblance of dynamics in the recording. Unfortunately, the "market" is really you and me, and far too many of us are just plain ignorant.

True enough...I'm usually just a sheep and just buy whatever the radio or TV tell me...when the news is over and they say "Good Night" I know it's time for bed - that kind of stuff. But this thing really has my wool up in knots. I'm buying CD's that sound like the FM fricking radio - without the radio!

Besides the real things happening to our fellow countrymen & women, watching the news, supporting the Katrina devestation and sending out good vibes this CD thing is buggin me enough to play around with it some more.

I'm gonna learn how to do it...this Iggy Pop CD isn't really a good example so I'm not gonna post any samples. For one reason to get a before and after sample adjusted rms-wise so they play about the same volume level would fix some of the problems with the crappy version since it has digital overs on the CD - I mean what repro company in their right mind would press something over 0dbfs - is this April fools or something. So now I know they're in on it too!

To fix the distorted CD track here's what I ended up doing in Adobe Audition (audio set to 32bit float):

1. Normalize to -1.0dbfs, fixed dc offset at the same time.

Note: I was previously running clip repair plugins either before or after the normalize but they either just mostly normalize or overshoot so bad it creates worse problems. I think a modern daw upward expander would do much better and use one in a later step to restore transients.

2. Restore transients if necessary. The Iggy Pop cut I was working with was pushed hard into the mixer pre-amps during mixdown, in addition during the course of the song they pushed the vocals and guitar tracks harder which caused the upper mids to build up and get harsher - of course this overdrove the preamps even more. To try and rebalance the track I used Sonitus multiband compressor and set 1 band up for upward expansion (lo-mids) so that when viewing that band in Voxengo SPAN I could see there was an rms dynamic range of about 10db or more. This helped fluff the dynamics back up.

3. EQ to taste using PSP MasterQ

4. Voxengo Elephant mastering Limiter & SPAN to set final loudness.

After all that the track now registers at K-12 (-12dbfs rms) or thereabouts and peaks at -0.2dbfs whereas before it was about K-6. I'm gonna try this some more on some other "Professionally" produced commercial CDs and get better at it. Pretty silly actually... Kibbels & Bits!

Even though IMO it is not really productive to post any audio samples of this session here are the before and after wave stats. You'll have to take my word for now that there was a subjective improvement - that's all I want, audio that is listenable for me personally!

Search and Destroy (Before = Approx K-3)

Search and Destroy (After=Approx K-10)

Those are a couple of jpegs so if you want to blow them up some more there's a hidden box in the lower right corner you can click.