OK, I've spent too many hours listening to this cra-Z track. Things were a lot more consistent this time. I'll kick off a crit thread- here's how things sounded over here. One track, 2102, was so lastminute that I essentially missed it- sorry- I thought I had them all when I started, but there was that one straggler.
Source- +0 db. Big and clear but a bit flat. Definitely flat. Big dynamics, insanely exaggerated towards the end. Challenging sub-bass rumbles (listen the bird dance). Brutal distorted bass hits (where my crazy people at?) with a real point on them (very high RMS here). The track feels very dynamic with lots of very heavy bass that goes way down. Highs aren't very hyped, but they're sort of cardboardy. It feels very digital, with all the digital headroom but no air on the mix buss. The super lows, surprisingly, develop a compressed/squashed feel now and then- probably due to some sort of compressor which is releasing too fast to play the super lows cleanly. You can hear the artifacts produced, but they're all low frequency, nothing like clipping. A grind/rumble, VERY soft.
0192- +11.22 db. Airy, perhaps a bit hissy/tizzy. Bird dance pretty clean and kind of smooth. Hits are pretty clean too, slightly softened rather than dirtied. Everything's kinda weightless around that heavy bass pounding. Bright light on the lead vocal, on all trebly elements. It still sounds digital, with no room between the sounds in spite of the brightness. Was gonna say 'very' digital, but them's fighting words
1001- +13.07 db. Spacious. Good textures. Bird dance throws up a bunch of crackly distortion here and there, but not directly on itself, more around it. Hits are good and hard, solid. This one feels undigital. The bass is being carried by midbass, it doesn't have the sheer extension of some, none of that shakey wobbly quality of the super-lows. The strings sound nice! Things have a physicality that's appealing. The highs are actually real extended, but not in a tizzy way. I like this
1234- +12.16 db. Sort of sparkly. Breathy. Bird dance grinds a bit. Hits are definitely distorting further and they're not going louder than the body of the music as they're supposed to do. These highs are very extended but they're not coloring stuff that's not supposed to be brite. The effect is kind of like imaginary noises poofing out of the air and vanishing again- very quiet background here, which is a good sign. Good and listenable. Things feel solidly placed. The strings sound kind of funny, but they're clearly some kind of synth anyway... The arpeggio lead seems a little veiled. This is like a polite version... it's not really crazy people, that's just a lyric.
1776- +12.28 db. Big dynamics, stuff fighting with each other to be more solid. Bird dance grinds even more hard but also comes off extra heavy. Hits are buzzier but it's not cutting their volume much. There's some funny kind of presence going on that shows up on the reverbed lead vocals- a heightening of the texture. Big- the space keeps getting bigger as stuff is added, as if there's expansion in here. There's a tizz, but instead of being a glaze it pops things out of the body of the track. Hyper-focus on the voices, presence on the arpeggio even though it's way back there. This has really brutal bass down low.
2102- +10.33 db. (entry was lastminute, can't do much of a crit this late at night) Sounds good, clean on 'bird dance', using the extra dynamic range of its lowish loudness well. Maybe a bit unaggressive. Sorry- spent hours doing all the tracks, now it's 1 AM, gotta move on. I thought I was starting to review 'em pretty late, kept checking back to see if anyone was coming in at the last minute but didn't expect anything LITERALLY at the last minute
2980- +10.93 db. Airy, hissy- major top end. Bird dance very good- not crunching too much, thick-sounding. Hits are pointy, with a hard front attack, but then compressed and buzzy. There's something simple about this one, where it feels a lot like the source in a way that 1776, 1234 etc do not. There are good things about that but the source isn't the last word in amazing- it's limiting to be too true to a source like this, because the character and atmosphere needs help. The space is just as flat as it was in the original track, no worse but no better. Seems like this is someone with good ears but an unexciting chain, doing not a whole bunch.
3554- +14.17 db. Sounds big from the first note. Edgy. Bird dance grinds a bit, bits of clipping around it. Hits are buzzy and slightly clamped down on, but still pretty big. This is upfront and hot from the word go, with a fine ferocity to the bass. The voices are also getting a nice presence to them, that slight dry edginess not really hurting them. What's lacking is the size of the bass- it's smaller, everything's on a slightly smaller scale so it can come forward like that. This puts the whole track in your lap, but you needn't bother watching your bassbins, because it's not really hurting them as much as you'd think. I suspect some kind of highpass.
6666- +13.22 db. Zwip of hihats is suddenly loud. Damn that's brite. The brite is louder than the vocals? Bird dance clips and sounds kind of distorty, not just grindy. Hits are very buzzy in the same kind of way. The brightness is a bit fatiguing, though I should mention that it's happening WAY up top, enough to hype out the hi-hat (shaker?) without hitting the vocals very hard. What happens is the vocals sound right except that certain sibilance, nonpitched sounds, lean forwards really hard in the highs. By contrast, 1776, another brite track, has a similar hyper-presence but it doesn't drop out between sibilances, it's applied to everything evenly. In the final analysis this version sounds smiley-EQed and it draws one's attention too much to the frequency ranges of the sounds- a steam-hiss sound hits and instead of thinking 'steam!' you think 'treble!'. Gotta draw more attention to what the sounds are, not so much to what their frequency ranges are.
6969- +14.15 db. Loud as hell, but sounds kind of congealed and dry. Top end dry too. Bird dance clips hard. Hits are very buzzy and seem to fade in and out as other elements enter the mix. This one feels pretty flat and squashed, but the extreme lows aren't there. Also, it's getting its very high RMS loudness largely by hypercompressing- not limiting, but compressing. Things are pumping like crazy. It's not OK when the tail ends of noises swoop up and are as attention-getting as the 'hero' sounds. You gotta hit the important sounds harder even if it's to distort them, you can't get level this way and have it work musically, imagine what would happen after radio station compression? Just gotta pump less. That's the most important lesson here. Also, the end bit isn't faded. It just sounds like you're not hearing the subtle stuff very well and pumping it up to compensate. I have no idea who this is but I can be totally sure who it isn't- I know a number of guys who would never make this mistake. Be careful to avoid it, and if you need these levels, limit or just flat out clip because as ugly as that is it distracts from the main sounds less than the pumping. (sorry, harsh critique, but it's an obvious problem most people are avoiding)
7777- +10.66 db. Big preroll. Extra wide? Punchy kicking bass. Faintly tizzy highs. Bird dance grinds but doesn't clip much. Hits are buzzy but sound pretty solid. There's an airy quality here that's kinda cool, and I'm hearing some details in background vocals that aren't always obvious. Actually, on the Lavry Black/HD600 there are little vocal echoes popping up _everywhere_. Somebody's doing something interesting! Parallel compression? This is also not too flat- there's a spatiality here that grows on me. It's like the musical qualities (making it sound hiphop, slammin', about crazy people) aren't that intense, but some of the sonic qualities are just amazing. Good lord, does this one swim in a sea of delicious detail. I'd like to hear experimental texture-music mastered like this. Ear candy.
8080- +6.63 db. Quietest entry by a wide margin. Dynamics more clean that way, space less congested but also less dense and phat. Sort of classical? Bird dance very clean but there's still a bit of clipping around it. Hits are closest to the source, because the dynamics are expressing themselves most of any entry. This one's mellow-sounding... elements like the vocals that are supposed to grab you are kinda sitting back. There are places where the vocal should sound rushed and breathless because the performance is, but the feel is more sedate. The scale of the track is also not that big considering how much headroom it has- there's a politeness in the upper mids that keeps things from being aggressive. It's very luxurious, but very very not 'slammin'. Somebody is being true to their sound, but that wasn't what was being asked for.
8765- +12.24 db. Starts gently. Really heavy bass. Highs not hyped but a little thin, maybe rolled? Like a hardware unit that's a bit rolled. Bird dance thick and heavy, very free of crunch. Hits are buzzy and compressed, sort of clamped at the beginning and then swelling up into a buzz. This one's on a bigger scale, bass especially is really meaty. The vocals aren't tizzy but they've got just enough edge to express the performances. I'm hearing details in the string-section stuff I didn't hear before. I also like the amount of compression that's here- it definitely feels fuller than the source track, but when everything cuts out, it's got just the right fullness of the background, not too pumping but not too empty. I like the swing of this one. Interesting choice to totally kill the hang-over noise! I hung onto it because it was different enough that I thought it had to be intentional, but this sounded good too, just going to silence immediately. Interesting.