This brings us to the end of this little series on recorded music through the decades.  

The song to represent this decade is 'Uptown Funk' by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars.  

The song is good, the recording is good, the mastering is good, if a little loud, at LUFS -11.8.  

There are a few clipped samples, but not bad in this day and age. 

I decided to do something completely different and record the song myself in my studio with midi.  

I match the LUFS number of -11.8, but keep my clipped samples at 0 with -1.0 dB true peak level.  

I play a little of my version of the song, and then the same section of the real one.  A fun exercise.

I hope that you have learned something on this quick tour of recorded music in the United States in the past 80 years.

There is a lot more where this came from, but this gives you a start.

Not sure what we will do next, but it should be interesting.

Continuing our journey through the decades, we choose another George Benson album for the decade of 2000 to 2010.  

This is the album called Giving it Up with Al Jarreau.  

Good clean recording that is mastered by Doug Sax.  

The only problem is that this version has 4,284 clipped samples in the left channel, and 4,080 in the right, and -11.2 dB LUFS.  

So we lower it to what we believe should be the level of all masters...-1 dB on the true peaks, -16 dB LUFS.  
The sound is actually better at the new level.

Good recording about 10 years old.

Audio Mastering Issues # 13.

The video that represents the 90s is about George Benson's 'That's Right'. 

We look at the title track on one of the best recorded albums that you will ever find. 

We have seen that often when new issues or runs of CDs are made, they are often quietly remastered to make them louder, as if that is going to make them better.   

This is no exception, and I do not have a CD of the original to make the case, but this one is squashed and pushed to clipping in a way that Doug Sax would not have done on the original. 

I remastered the screwed up version by fixing the waveforms (a few hundred clipped samples) and setting it at what I believe to be the standard for all properly mastered tracks... 

 -1 dB true peaks and -16 dB LUFS.  

Next time we will look at the 2000s.  

Good recordings are harder and harder to find, the further we go in time.

A comparison of Michael Jackson's 'Billie Jean' with the 25th Anniversary version 25 years later.  

A serious mess in the mastering of the later version.  We do the numbers. 

How about these for starters...52,703 clipped samples in the left channel, 61,823 clipped samples in the right channel.  How is that a good mastering job?  


The original was 9db lower in level, but nobody accused it of not being loud enough.  A perfect example of half witted arrogance gone amuk. Isn't it great that we can analyse things today with great software tools and be able to back up what we hear with cold hard numbers?  


The bottom line?  Do it right, and forget about trying to be louder than everyone else.  Some have suggested that we have a limit like the broadcast limit of -23LUFS.  


Not a bad idea, but in the meantime, we can have fun seeing who won't hesitate to destroy their own music in the 'Loudness War'.


I picked this album as an example of the eighties.  It just happened to be a great example of bad mastering 25 years later.  See Mastering Audio Issues #1, #10, #11.  All great albums the first time around, destroyed by bad mastering, even though mastering equipment is much better.

This week I ran across a newer (2009) version of "The Devil is a Liar" by Seawind that originally had been recorded in 1976.  33 years later it just did not have the life that it originally had.  

But that was not what got my attention.  When I opened it up to analyse it, it looked horrible. 

You can see the overall waveform in the video "Mastering Audio Issues # 10" that I just put online.  

One of the consequences of squashing the life out of the music was intersample peaks that were 1.75 dB
above the 0 dB limit.  And there was not just one; there actually were 6,644 clipped samples in the left channel, and 4,139 in the right.  That is quite a bit for a four and a half minute song.  

Just for fun, I took the mangled track and fixed all the clipped samples, but that was not really a challenge or rewarding.  The original version of the song from 1976 was much more interesting to me and so I decided to work on that and bring it up to modern levels, just as a challenge.
The result is a great song that now kicks even harder than it used to. 

The LUFS of the original was -13.2 dB with 0 clipped waveforms.
The LUFS of the rerecorded version was -10.6 dB with thousands of clipped waveforms.
The LUFS of my version is -11.9 dB with 1  dB extra headroom and 0 clipped waveforms.


I think you will agree that in addition to being 1.3db hotter than the original, the sound is better overall.

I actually knew the Seawind guys when I lived in California, and I saw and heard this song done many times live, so I am quite familiar with it.  I never heard a band sound as tight and punchy in person as
theirs, and I am sorry that more people did not have the privilege of seeing them live.

They played in small jazz clubs around L.A. and you would be sitting or standing just a few feet from them.  It was very loud, but not obnoxious as live music is today.  The playing was as tight as it gets,
which is why some of them ended up working on the Thriller album of Michael Jackson.  Pauline's vocals were at that time as strong and as beautiful as she was.  They just never were willing to completely throw their hat in the ring of popular music, which is why they never achieved fame.  Jazz is a hard taskmaster.

The good news is that the old Seawind albums are available again online, and I highly recommend them as an important addition to your listening collection.

So we are still in the seventies, but maybe next time, we will get to the 80s...