While there is no doubt Nirvana's "Nevermind"had a huge impact on the music of the day I find Mr. Bairds Aural Robert review of the 20th anniversary edition almost shocking. In the article Mr Baird, correctly, points out..."expert use of loud/soft dynamics" and then goes on to praise this latest atrocity of the loudness wars as saying these same features..."have been caught on these newly remastered or unreleased sets" WHAT?????????? are you kidding me??? These things are absolutely NOT dynamic in any way...they are totally and completely crushed. Before you wrote this did you check the waves out in just about any editor that shows clipping and compression??? These things show up as pretty much SOLID red!!!( the apparently uniform color for showing where the clipping is in at least all 5 editors I have at my disposal). This remaster is completely brickwalled, compressed, squashed and clipped to hell.
Your comment on the vinyl probably not getting any better than the ORG however is spot on...The ORG is way better and that version does promote and demonstrate much more accurately, than these causalities of the loudness wars, the dynamics of the original.
This kind of stuff concerns me because we look to Sterreophile to help fight the loudness wars not give the labels more evidence and reason to continue to destroy the fabric of music...I mean if Stereophile golden ear reviewers think squashed dynamics preserves and demonstrates dynamics( which is an oxymoron) than how the hell do we ever expect to win that war????
While there is no doubt Nirvana's "Nevermind"had a huge impact on the music of the day I find Mr. Bairds Aural Robert review of the 20th anniversary edition almost shocking. In the article Mr Baird, correctly, points out..."expert use of loud/soft dynamics" and then goes on to praise this latest atrocity of the loudness wars as saying these same features..."have been caught on these newly remastered or unreleased sets" WHAT?????????? are you kidding me??? These things are absolutely NOT dynamic in any way...they are totally and completely crushed. Before you wrote this did you check the waves out in just about any editor that shows clipping and compression??? These things show up as pretty much SOLID red!!!( the apparently uniform color for showing where the clipping is in at least all 5 editors I have at my disposal). This remaster is completely brickwalled, compressed, squashed and clipped to hell.
Your comment on the vinyl probably not getting any better than the ORG however is spot on...The ORG is way better and that version does promote and demonstrate much more accurately, than these causalities of the loudness wars, the dynamics of the original.
This kind of stuff concerns me because we look to Sterreophile to help fight the loudness wars not give the labels more evidence and reason to continue to destroy the fabric of music...I mean if Stereophile golden ear reviewers think squashed dynamics preserves and demonstrates dynamics( which is an oxymoron) than how the hell do we ever expect to win that war????