Originally posted by: HendrixFan
I think Sarah has a better voice (and uses it moreso) than Norah. The thing that makes me listen to Norah Jones alot and Sarah McLachlan just a little bit is a more "natural" sound. I think it is the producer/engineer that Sarah has, because her music is way too loud and horribly compressed. Any gains she has by having a better voice are negated by the compression done to her music. A new mix and master of her songs would tremendously boost it. Her vocals are buried way underneath the music with her songs that it makes it difficult to really focus on it. I dont want to hear her crappy session drummer, I want to hear her!
That's a great point. Mastering has reached an all-time low. This idiotic race to get the loudest CD has squeezed all the life out of the music. There's no clarity, no separation, no dynamics, it's just a wall of white noise. You can't stand to listen to it more than 20 minutes before you start fatiguing. Modern music is being RUINED, RUINED, RUINED by overcompression. It's almost like they've decided it's all garbage, disposable music now, that people are only listening to mp3/radio and don't care about sound quality, so why not just give it disposable-quality mastering too by squeezing the life out of it and pumping it to full volume. It's really unbelievable to me. If people knew what was going on and were able to do an A/B comparison of typical 90's/00's mastering vs. what they used to do, they would be SHOCKED. That's the reason that vinyl sounds better in many cases. It was mastered better. CD is technically superior, but the butchering that digitial allows has resulted in horrible sounding CD's in virtually all modern pop/rock and recently remastered classic rock.
Just look at the pictures of ripped waveforms on this
website. If you know anything at all about wav/audio files, you can just look at the waveforms and know that the tracks probably sound like ASS. And they do.
Apparently 99% of the listeners don't care or don't realize. I'm not even an audiophile, most of my listening is done on cheap headphones, and I can still tell. It's pretty hard to ignore blatant digital clipping, like on the Californication album for example. If you're able to compare differently mastered versions of the same song, it's just PAINFULLY obvious that they're butchering music now. :|
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