Yes, indeed a great article echoing a lot of Chris's sentiments on the subject.

Mastering our album "Perspectives" was a lot tougher than recording it. We spent days on this up until the last minute, but couldn't get a sound we were happy with. So, we finally just had DiscMakers do it. It's pretty decent.

Mastering was an area Chris really had to persuade me on. I grew up listening mostly to pop music, and only got into some of the great classic records a few years back (thank God I did - can hardly stand most pop music now. Ha, ha!) So, I was very used to squashed, loud records. I felt if ours didn't have that loudness to it, people wouldn't think it was very professional.

Chris's argument was that if you mash the levels on the CD, you lose expression. The dynamic range disappears, and all the emotion you put into it is thrown out the window. He guided me to one of Peter Gabriel's recordings (don't remember which one now, but something from 1980something). The recording has a lot of expression. Starts out soft, but comes in loud when everything gets going during the choruses. Anyways, my thought was the only reason this record of Peter Gabriel's sounded this way was because they didn't have the technology back in the day to make it loud like today's CDs. But Chris argued that if you take the same record and squashed the levels to make it loud, it wouldn't be as emotionally captivating as it was.

After much persuading, we did go with a softer sound. And to my surprise, no one has commented that Perspectives is lower in volume than most commercially released CDs. Either they don't know, or they don't care.

After reading this article, I'm glad we went with a softer sound. I too have noticed that I get so easily worn out on most of the new music I buy. After a few weeks, I dont' want to listen to it anymore. But some of my old music, when I first bought it, I listened to year after year - never seemed to get tired of it. I never thought that this was because my senses were being exhausted by the onslaught of sound that never seems to give you a break, but this makes sense. No wonder singles only get played a few weeks on the radio anymore. When I was a kid, they'd play a single for like a year or two. No anymore. Of course, radio today sucks anyways, IMHO.

Thanks for the link Steve. Great article.
-Sheila

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