#381

LOVE that album

1 Like
#382

Probably the most ‘interesting’ record in my collection is the Mellon Collie box set from a few years back. It’s fucking wonderful; They kept the original track order so it’s 8 sides (as opposed to the bastardised 3-disc version from a while back), each disc has its own artwork on the sleeve and there are a couple of coffee-table worthy booklets of art, lyrics, and Billy explaining the inspiration behind the songs etc.

it’s such an effort to get through 4 discs that it’s a once-a-year thing but with the booklets etc it makes a really nice ritual.

2 Likes
#383

Yeah, it’s a beatuiful record. Is the pressing ok? I’ve heard bad things from random comments about mellon collie on vinyl so haven’t blown the cash on one over the years but really would like to own it

#384

I would have bought it years back but it was the equivalent of £70 where I lived

#385

Yeah, i remember it being around that and nearly going wild but read up on the pressing and held fire. That’s a lot for an album anyway in my book, let alone if it ends up sounding crap!

#386

I paid about £90 but I’d just been made redundant and I was spending money like I was in Brewster’s Millions or something.

My recollection - and I have to be honest, I’m not sure I’ve ever listened to it without having had a smoke first - is that the quieter and more delicate songs sounds amazing and that some of the heavier ones… don’t. Which makes me think it’s on the tapes, rather than an issue with the pressing itself. I mean, Mellon Collie is a weird-sounding record at the best of times isn’t it? incredible songs but no-one’s about to argue it’s a masterclass in production. Very much a relic of its era

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#387

hi are you new to DiS

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#388

ha really? people cape for mellon collie? I’ve always thought of it like those last two Baroness records. Clearly deliberate choices, but ones that… are bad

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#389

So I’ve just done some research into this and it seems like it was one of those crapshoots where some copies sounded great and others were really problematic with lots of pops and hisses. Seems like we got fobbed off with a subpar pressing plant in europe where the American version was pressed at that Pallas place I mentioned in my Rumours post

#390

No problem with coloured variants provided they either (a) look suitably snazzy and/or (b) have some sort of aesthetic connection to the band or album in question.

e.g.

Big Thief’s Two Hands on ‘desert peach’ coloured vinyl? chef’s kiss Perfect!

Weezer’s Blue Album on SOLID PINK coloured vinyl? Get to fuck, HMV. Get. To. Absolute. Fuck.

4 Likes
#391

So the needle is moving side to side within the groove? The wider the groove, the more room for dynamic range (bass & treble)?

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#392

Not so much “side-to-side” as tracking the waveform (which necessitates a side-to-side movement). you know when you see a graphic of what a song “looks” like (usually to make a point about dynamic range/“the loudness wars”)? If I understand correctly, it’s that waveform that is pressed onto the record.

2 Likes
#393

So the groove in undulating?

Apols for being dim.

#394

I’ve recommended this book before - it’s a really great read.

This video is good

This one has some good images at the start

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#395

Oh cheers!

I need to get this straight in my head!

I also want to try and understand what mastering actual means as it’s often sited as the most important factor in how an album sounds.

#396

Don’t try. You won’t. I have a friend who’s a producer and mix engineer for major label bands who can’t fully explain what exactly mastering is. It’s a dark art. Magic.

All I know is that when a record has been properly mastered for vinyl, the most common thing I notice is that the drums are louder than everything else as you’d have in a live setting, as opposed to everything being “brickwalled”. But given that mastering is expressly not remixing, I still don’t understand how it can make such a difference.

I think the three reissues in my collection which sound noticeably different (I won’t say ‘better’ as that’s entirely subjective) from the digital versions are Coheed’s 2014 remaster of IKSSE:3, the Mobile Fidelity reissue of the first three Weezer albums, and the Foo Fighters vinyl reissues from a couple of years back (particularly There Is Nothing Left To Lose). AFAIK all the engineer can do is tweak the EQ, but there’s clearly a lot more to it than that.

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#397

Ace I can just accept it as important!

The one thing I’ve seen mentioned that made sense to me was the idea that some albums are mastered just generically whilst others are mastered for the format e.g, specifically for vinyl.

This made sense to me given vinyl has, I think, a narrower dynamic range than digital.

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#398

It’s true hypothetically but in practice, vinyl often has more dynamic range precisely because of the format’s limitations. The discs I mentioned are great examples of this - all mastered loud on CD, with barely any dynamic range

Generic mastering is depressingly common and immediately identifiable because it almost always sounds horrific and distorted on vinyl

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#399

Apparently I’m technically wrong (although functionally correct). This is very annoyingly written but this dude does know his stuff:

https://productionadvice.co.uk/vinyl-mastering/

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#400

I have always heard that mastering was done for cassettes and records that tended to emphasise the low end because you’d get hiss in the upper register more and I have wondered if the reason people say vinyl sounds warmer is just that you lose your higher end hearing first so they probably just enjoy a mix in the lower register or something like that.

But interesting to see it’s not really necessary. We had a vinyl master done for our band’s releases on record and we just used those to do the CD version in the end. Sounded great.