I'm okay, I just haven't had time to blog between working, sleeping, getting caught up on TV shows, and getting out of the house. I'm hoping to get a place of my own soon, preferably in Louisville. I'm simultaneously thrilled and terrified. Thrilled because I'll have my own place, I get to set up my turntable for the first time since I boxed it up six years ago, and because living with mom and dad has been killing me, literally and figuratively. Terrified because I only make $12.50 an hour, and am afraid that something will happen that will make it harder to pay rent, among other things, than it already is. I'll likely not be getting out so much, giving me time to do things like work on this blog.
I've taken down my "Vlado: The Music Impaler" post. It was my most popular post, but I'm not so sure now that Vlado Meller deserves to be as demonized as he's been. He's no Greg Calbi, Bernie Grundman, or Vic Anesini, but he is capable of doing decent work, and I'm not sure that he's the Worst (dedicated) Mastering Engineer Ever, so much as he is the CD mastering engineer on some of the worst recorded or mixed popular music of the past twenty years. I'm more bothered by people who try to fill all the roles of producer, recording engineer, mixer, AND mastering engineer. An exception is Jack Endino, who I thought did a decent job with mastering The Decline Effect's self titled LP, and on remastering Soundgarden's "Screaming Life/FOPP".
However, I'm not letting Vlado off that easy! I had mentioned before that I thought his remastering of Living Colour's "Vivid" was tolerable. The truth is that I had never owned the original CD or vinyl of it until recently, so the only thing I had to compare it to was hearing "Cult of Personality" on the radio. Broadcast radio is very compressed, and so the remastered "Cult of Personality" sounds pretty similar to what I remember hearing on the radio. I was content to keep it since I was satisfied with the sound, and it's worth keeping for the bonus tracks. After reading that Greg Calbi was listed as mastering the original "Vivid" CD*, I had to check it out. The original CD sounds so much better than the remaster! I swear I heard stuff in it that I never noticed before. The EQ-ing on the remaster might be okay, but the dynamic range has been squashed badly enough to make it virtually useless. One odd thing about the remaster is that "What's Your Favorite Color?" is way shorter than it originally was, down to 1 minute 41 seconds from its original 3 minutes 56 seconds. I don't know what the story with that is, I can't even find much info about it doing a Google search. Vernon Reid was a producer on the reissue, so the shortening of it was probably his idea, and he probably approved of the overall sound as well. Between having the original "Vivid" CD and having the Japanese import version of "Biscuits" which includes a few tracks that ended up as bonus tracks on the "Vivid" reissue, the only real reasons for me to keep the reissue are for those few bonus tracks that had never been on CD, and the novelty of the shortened version of "What's Your Favorite Color?". By the way, the Japanese import version of "Biscuits" was mastered by Vlado Meller. I don't own the Bob Ludwig-mastered U.S. version, so I can't compare the sound, but Vlado's version sounds fine to me.
I am hoping to post more about the Loudness War and the mania of music and movie collecting, probably even updating older posts with recent revelations. That might be a while, though.
*Greg Calbi might have mastered the CD version, but it's hard to tell who actually mastered something sometimes. Back in the 1980s, CD credits often just listed the mastering engineer for the vinyl version. These days, you're more likely to see the CD mastering engineer listed on the credits for vinyl albums, but the deadwax (that part of the vinyl between where the music on a side ends and the center label) usually include the initials of the vinyl mastering engineer, or some indication of who or where it was mastered.
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