I just picked up Joe Satriani's new album 'Unstoppable Momentum' on CD. Most of the songs are really good, but the recording quality is compressed and distorted - another victim of the 'loudness war'. 


I ripped a few tracks and loaded them in Reaper, just to see what the wave forms look like. While there's no brick-wall limiting, the dynamics are squashed and non-existent. The level meters peg out at -.3dB and stay there with occasional clipped peaks at +.7dB!



Here's a sample of what I mean:

Joe Satriani - 'Can't Go Back' (Edit)


The drums are clearly distorted, clipping is audible in the snare and cymbals - and the dynamics are squashed down to less than 2dB. Even playing the CD at low volumes, I can hear the distortion and clipping; it drives me crazy!

I think some of the mediocre reviews on Amazon.com (Unstoppable Momentum) are due to the compressed and distorted audio. When everything sounds loud and distorted, it hurts your ears and makes you want to turn it down, not up.

Joe recorded his last three albums at Skywalker Sound, and all three have the same audible problems. He doesn't seem to care about audio quality that much, not like Eric Johnson or Steve Vai; and he doesn't release anything new on vinyl or in HD formats (96k~192k/24bit). 

You would think that a modern, cutting edge recording studio like Skywalker Sound would know how to record and mix music without distortion and clipping, but then again, this is George Lucas's studio and he just loves everything digital. He's the king of CGI and chroma key digital compositing (which I personally hate). 

I guess we'll all have to wait until Joe makes a Bluray video of him playing his new songs live, hopefully without a compressed and clipped audio track.

Well, until music listeners won't be all audiophiles, they will buy this crap because they don't know what well recorded / mastered music is.