Mobos moaning: Kelly Rowland's not happy

Perhaps the only piece of comfort for Kelly Rowland - livid at the poor sound of the MOBOs stage - is that it was only the MOBOs, and so it's not like anyone would have heard her performance.

What's hilarious is the way the MOBO organisers are trying to deny there was a problem at all:

A Mobo spokesman said: "Kelly Rowland looked at the BBC's iPlayer and thought her performance was better than she initially thought when she came off stage and is completely happy with her performance."

That seems a little unlikely, given that it sounds rotten on iPlayer and - even if you could ignore the muzak-in-a-cow-shed mix, that she is pulling a face of a woman trying to hold a feisty kitten in a room full of birds throughout suggests that she wasn't comfortable while it was happening.

Her Twitter stream recorded her anger...

OK. So, I'm at the MoBo's and getting ready to have a GREAT show with David and the MoBo's F'd my sound up!!!!! PISSED!!!!!

HONESTLY, that just makes me work harder! But, what I will say is the MoBo's owe me an apology!!!! I was LIVID after the show!

I wanted you guys to be the 1st to hear it from me! rehearsals. were fine. soundcheck. was fine. performance, wad a struggle at 1st

But, I got through it!!!!!!!! So-----It happens! The next show will be Better!--------TRUST!!!!!!!!!

Poor woman. Not only was her sound awful, but it looks like her exclamation mark key is sticking too.

There is, it's worth noting, no further tweet going "oh, it looks fine on iPlayer. Chill!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Hooky unhappy with lossy New Order

Unlike Metallica, who somehow are trying to tell fans that their dissatisfaction with the poor sound quality on the new record is wrong, New Order are actually leading the attacks on the Warners re-release series. Or at least, Peter Hook is - although his name has fallen off ContactMusic's report:

He claimed that the record industry has changed over the years, saying: "They don't have half the staff they used to have so everything becomes quite a trial, and I know from doing the Hacienda compilation tape, you get a lot of masters of old songs - they are mastered from the record because nobody can find the tape."

The bassist also said it was "intensely annoying" that Warners had chosen to distribute the re-issues to the shops before sending them to the band, deeming it "a masterful piece of planning".

I know Hook is being sarcastic, but he's probably hit the needle on the playhead: if you know the records are a bit ropey and the artist is going to kick up a fuss, you probably would plan to release them before seeking feedback. Not only does it stop costs spiralling out of control as you try to placate a famously grumpy bassist, but it opens the doors to yet another bloody edition of the same records five year's hence, with promises of Hook-pleasing fidelity.

Metallica: It sounds alright to us

The grinding complaints and counter-complaints about the quality of the sound of the Metallica album continues. Now Lars Ulrich has waded in, telling people who've complained they should ignore the evidence of their own ears and accept that they're wrong:

Rick Rubin's whole thing is to try and get it to sound lively, to get it (to) sound loud, to get it to sound exciting, to get it to jump out of the speakers. Of course, I've heard that there are a few people complaining. But I've been listening to it the last couple of days in my car, and it sounds fuckin' smokin.

Isn't the heart of the complaints that it doesn't sound exciting?

Still, Lars can't ignore the complaints from the fans. There has to be a reason for them, right? Hey... you don't suppose it's your old nemesis The Internet, do you, Lars?

"The difference between back then and now is the internet. The internet gives everybody a voice, and the Internet has a tendency to give the complainers a louder voice."

How much happier we all were when people who had complaints had no voice and had to just shut up and swallow it down, eh, Ulrich?

Metallica: Fortunately, most of our fans are almost deaf

Metallica's management have rejected the complaints about the pisspoor sound on the new album, using the time-honoured excuse of providers of poor service that "nobody else has complained":

Metallica and the album's producer, Rick Rubin, declined to comment. Cliff Burnstein, Metallica's co-manager, says the complainers are a tiny minority. He says 98% of listeners are "overwhelmingly positive," adding: "There's something exciting about the sound of this record that people are responding to."

See? It's not shitty or botched, people. It's "exciting". They're going to try this down my local taco stand the next time someone finds a finger in their chili - "that's not unhygienic, that's exciting, that is."

Still, 98% of people are "overwhelmingly positive", are they? Let's not jump all over the guy and assume that he's using "overwhelmingly positive" in the sense of "they haven't complained" here - and that his figure isn't just made up off the top of his head. That still means, on an album that's sold over a million copies, that's still twenty thousand people having a slightly negative experience - and we're using "slightly negative" in the same incorrect sense.

Metallica: New album sounds bloody awful

Not the songs themselves - that's a matter of taste (they do sound bloody awful, though) - but the audio quality on the record. Indeed, analysis of Death Magnetic by Chris Vinnecombe suggests the fidelity on the CD is so poor, you'd be better off buying the USD18 download of the tracks for Guitar Hero and recording that.

As is often the way, there's an online petition appeared calling for the album to be given a fresh mix but a cynic might wonder if the release of a fairly duff version of the record is part of a policy allowing for a "fully remastered" album in a couple of years?

Young doesn't like the sound of Apple

They don't go into very much detail, but Fortune reports Neil Young having a go at Apple:

“Apple has taken a detour down the convenience highway,” Young told the Brainstorm audience after taking the stage for an interview with Time Inc. editor-in-chief John Huey. “Quality has taken a complete backseat - if it even gets in the car at all.”
[...]
Young complained that music has become “like wallpaper” - more Muzak than music. “We have beautiful computers now but high-resolution music is one of the missing elements,” he said. “The ears are the windows to the soul.”

It does, of course, come down to what you want - immediate access to hundreds of thousands of tracks in acceptable quality, or a strictly controlled supply of super high quality tracks. The sad truth is, that for most people, for most songs, the quality of iTunes (and the Zune store) is good enough, for the same reason that before music shifted to computers, most people weren't going to spend twenty, thirty quid for gold-plated connectors for their hi-fi equipment. Hell, before the computer age, most music was played through crappy equipment - portable CD players, never-cleaned cassette machines, wobbly record players with enough fluff on the needle to keep Ken Dodd in tickling sticks for a decade and a half.

Young is right; the quality of digital music isn't the very highest. But - much as with Pete Townshend's comments on how iTunes is just a way of selling music - he's comparing it with a golden past that never existed.

One thing remains perfectly clear/ it's the buzz buzz buzz in the drum of the ear

Music engineers are starting a campaign against peak limiting, the practice where music is mastered so that the quiet bits are effectively pumped out, resulting in tracks sounding either "punchy" or "flat, loud, distorted and rubbish", depending on your point of view.

I say "launching a campaign", it seems to be more grumbling about it to The Times, but every campaign starts somewhere.

Peter Mew, senior mastering engineer at Abbey Road studios, said: “Record companies are competing in an arms race to make their album sound the ‘loudest’. The quieter parts are becoming louder and the loudest parts are just becoming a buzz.”
[...]
“The brain is not geared to accept buzzing. The CDs induce a sense of fatigue in the listeners. It becomes psychologically tiring and almost impossible to listen to. This could be the reason why CD sales are in a slump.”

The record companies? Surprisingly, they don't see a problem, some cheerfully admitting they release records with sound mangled so that it that it can be heard above background chatter in pubs or above car engines:

Domino, Arctic Monkeys’ record company, defended its band’s use of compression on their chart-topping albums, as a way of making their music sound “impactful”.

Because Alex's word play and the band's skills as musicians, presumably, fall short?

Bob Dylan has also said something about this - or "joined the campaign", apparently:

Bob Dylan has joined the campaign for a return to musical dynamics. He told Rolling Stone magazine: “You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like – static.”

Although with the way his voice sounds these days, you'd think he'd welcome this development.