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Comment by medstrom | Hacker News Reader

But why?

Low-quality playback equipment. Mastering music correctly makes it sound "worse" on crappy hardware. But mastering it for crappy hardware makes it sound worse on quality speakers.

Some people backed the wrong horse. Much music exists mastered for old shitty car stereos and earbuds and the like. Sometimes, the original recordings are lost or nobody bothers to remaster them.

Yeah I got one of those „high end“ systems and some albums are just not made for quality speakers. Bands like metallica are sounding very bad on those speakers

Surprisingly, the first Korn album and the first RATM album sound great on high-end gear. And for what it's worth, Justice and the Black album do sound really good on quality equipment.

And if your equipment is really really good, you can even hear Jason on Justice :).

You just gave me a flashback to kid me listening to Korn on my dad's new stereo while jumping on his bed.

I do indeed remember how good it sounded. Also had a Sony Walkman, pretty good but nothing like a good furniture-size stereo.

Hahaha yeah that is true. That is also one of the first thing I hear in a good recording. A well defined bass. Its crazy how on bad equipment and mixes the bass is only a static noise in the background

I've noticed this to be especially annoying with recordings that artificially inflate the bass. Yay for earbuds but it's a real pain in the ass when my car speakers rattle until I have to turn the sound down so low that road noise becomes an issue.

I like to listen to playlists on shuffle and the inconsistency between different albums has me fiddling with the bass on a song to song basis. Luckily my car has steering wheel controls for this. But most modern vehicles would have you fucking with a touch screen which is a non-starter while driving.

More detail: It's because different speaker construction techniques make for different frequency response curves - i.e. there's sounds a cheap speaker can't produce well, so music mastered for listening on commodity hardware of a bygone era sounds "compressed", because they squeeze all of the sound into a narrower band, so you could hear all of it.

The other replies aren't incorrect. But I think the main reason is out of fear that other music tracks sound louder in a club which would make them feel more exciting.

This is kind of repeating with playlists now. Not all services normalize perceived loudness across tracks (e.g. Spotify web player).

This.

And related cause: A&R people listening to xyz's new album and judging it sounds "huge" / "phat" / "modern"... when actually it's just a bit louder than the other guys, but nobody's adjusting volumes between demos...

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