The Enemy Inside Discussion Thread

[TheGreatPretender]

100% agreed. I'd seriously wish I didn't care about the compression as some people here. I'm not telling this to put anyone down, if anything, I'm actually jealous that they get the same enjoyment from the terrible loud mixes of today. It ruins the thing for me.

But yeah, spot on on that this shows how meaningless the loudness wars are. People either hate it or are indifferent. Not one single person benefits from it.

I don't know about benefits, but I will say that I have heard albums where the dynamic range was so extreme, that sometimes I thought the song was over, when it was just a really quiet part. Listen to King Crimson's Larks Tongues in Aspic Pt. 1. Frankly, I think it could benefit from a little bit of compression.

But it is a matter of moderation.

[Destiny Of Chaos]

Spent a lot of time driving today. Must have listened to this song like 50 times. So incredible. JP's got his chocolate cake!     

[SubV]

Spent a lot of time driving today. Must have listened to this song like 50 times. So incredible. JP's got his chocolate cake! 

Yes, the song itself is very, very good. I hope they will release the HDTracks version soon.

[TheGreatPretender]

While I think the HD tracks are a cool idea, I think it's a bit of a spoiled mentality to just expect them to be released, and soon of all things. I'm sure we'll get the album in that format, sometime after its release, maybe shortly after its release, but if we don't, it's not like we're entitled to it.

[7StringedBeast]

While I think the HD tracks are a cool idea, I think it's a bit of a spoiled mentality to just expect them to be released, and soon of all things. I'm sure we'll get the album in that format, sometime after its release, maybe shortly after its release, but if we don't, it's not like we're entitled to it.

The thing is, it takes no effort to make.  Everything they record is at the highest bit depth and sampling rate.  All they have to do is export the files same as source.  The only thing they really need to do is host them on a server for people to pay and download them from.  Which I would totally do as long as they bypassed the brick wall mastering phase.  If not, then there is not point.

Also I completely agree about the wah rhythm section.  That part was really really cool.

[TheGreatPretender]

While I think the HD tracks are a cool idea, I think it's a bit of a spoiled mentality to just expect them to be released, and soon of all things. I'm sure we'll get the album in that format, sometime after its release, maybe shortly after its release, but if we don't, it's not like we're entitled to it.

The thing is, it takes no effort to make.  Everything they record is at the highest bit depth and sampling rate.  All they have to do is export the files same as source.  The only thing they really need to do is host them on a server for people to pay and download them from.  Which I would totally do as long as they bypassed the brick wall mastering phase.  If not, then there is not point.

Also I completely agree about the wah rhythm section.  That part was really really cool.

Yes, but it would also take no effort to make Instrumental mixes of the album, and we're not getting those this time around, much to my disappointment. Point is, I'm trying to release myself of this notion that I'm entitled to this and that. Most bands just release their albums, with a single CD, mixed and mastered the way they decided to do it, take it or leave it.

[7StringedBeast]

I don't feel entitled.  It's just, they should be releasing stuff at the highest quality they possibly can.  We don't have any reason to be held back by CD quality anymore.

Don't get me wrong, I think there is nothing wrong with CD quality.

I'm more upset by the mastering of modern albums more than their delivery.

[TheGreatPretender]

I don't feel entitled.  It's just, they should be releasing stuff at the highest quality they possibly can.  We don't have any reason to be held back by CD quality anymore.

Don't get me wrong, I think there is nothing wrong with CD quality.

I'm more upset by the mastering of modern albums more than their delivery.

But the fact that they do compress albums when mastering them, means that's the way they want to deliver the music, so if we get an uncompressed, or HD version of the music, I see that as more of a bonus.

[johncal]

I think I'd relax about the sound quality at this point. We still have no real idea how the CD will sound. There's a world of difference between a CD and an iTunes or MP3 rip. Besides, I'm looking forward to the 5.1 Dolby mix. That will be set up for 5 channel and will be mixed differently. I would fully expect to hear James's voice out of the center channel better. If not, I'll just turn up the center channel. Also, with my subwoofer I have no problem hearing the bass at all unless it's being doubled.

I'm not discounting or debating that it could have more headroom, but if it did, there'd be those complaining that the album was too quiet. Quite frankly, I'm glad it is pushed a bit. Some of my old school CD's are so quiet you can barely hear them compared to a more modern CD. Not to mention other issues too much, but if you have to crank your amp louder, you start hearing hiss and other amp noise unnecessarily. On my sound system at home ADTOE sounds great. WAY better than a lot of my older stuff. The thing is, my car stereo, computer, and sound system in the house all sound so different it's impossible to make something that works on everything well. That is why they make adjustment knobs, etc. on stereo equipment.

Right now I'm just happy to listen to the new single a dozen times a day. It's a GREAT tune.

[Lucien]

While I think the HD tracks are a cool idea, I think it's a bit of a spoiled mentality to just expect them to be released, and soon of all things. I'm sure we'll get the album in that format, sometime after its release, maybe shortly after its release, but if we don't, it's not like we're entitled to it.

Well, considering DTF's usage of the word "soon", expecting them to be released soon is kind of pessimistic.

[TheGreatPretender]

While I think the HD tracks are a cool idea, I think it's a bit of a spoiled mentality to just expect them to be released, and soon of all things. I'm sure we'll get the album in that format, sometime after its release, maybe shortly after its release, but if we don't, it's not like we're entitled to it.

Well, considering DTF's usage of the word "soon", expecting them to be released soon is kind of pessimistic.

I can't argue with that.

[7StringedBeast]

I'm not discounting or debating that it could have more headroom, but if it did, there'd be those complaining that the album was too quiet. Quite frankly, I'm glad it is pushed a bit. Some of my old school CD's are so quiet you can barely hear them compared to a more modern CD. Not to mention other issues too much, but if you have to crank your amp louder, you start hearing hiss and other amp noise unnecessarily. On my sound system at home ADTOE sounds great. WAY better than a lot of my older stuff. The thing is, my car stereo, computer, and sound system in the house all sound so different it's impossible to make something that works on everything well. That is why they make adjustment knobs, etc. on stereo equipment.

Exactly, that is why god created the volume knob.  Unfortunately when an album is over compressed you only have 1 option and that is to turn it down.  I've never heard anyone ever complain that images and words is too quiet.  Because it isn't.  The bar has been pushed so far that everything is mastered as hot as possible.  All this does is screw the people who want to listen to music.  It detracts from the quality of everything and doesn't add a single thing in the positive as far as sound is concerned.

[TheGreatPretender]

Personally, I prefer the way albums like SDOIT are mastered, over Images and Words. Images and Words, I think, lacks a bit of a punch. I don't know if it's a compression issue or not, but I actually prefer my music with a little more oomph than I&W.

[wolven74]

Yes, but it would also take no effort to make Instrumental mixes of the album, and we're not getting those this time around

We didn't get instrumental tracks with ADTOE either did we? Were they part of the box set? I can't remember. 

[TheGreatPretender]

Yes, but it would also take no effort to make Instrumental mixes of the album, and we're not getting those this time around

We didn't get instrumental tracks with ADTOE either did we? Were they part of the box set? I can't remember. 

They were part of the box set, yeah.

[wolven74]

Yes, but it would also take no effort to make Instrumental mixes of the album, and we're not getting those this time around

We didn't get instrumental tracks with ADTOE either did we? Were they part of the box set? I can't remember. 

They were part of the box set, yeah.

I wonder why it's not in the box set this time. Studio time cost a lot more? Mixing would take too long? 

[Grizz]

The lyric video reminds me of LSFNY Live Projection.
I hope we're not going back to that, I much prefer BVD's animation of Hugh Syme's trippy artwork.

[TheGreatPretender]

I wonder why it's not in the box set this time. Studio time cost a lot more? Mixing would take too long? 

Well, I'm not an audio engineer, but I don't see why it would be so difficult. All they'd have to do is take the masters that they already have, and simply silence the vocal track, and mix the rest down, right?

Either way, I'm bummed they're not included, but at the end of the day, I just want a stellar album. I just wish more people cared about having the instrumental mixes, then maybe there'd be a point in reaching out to RR and getting them to include it or something.

[Thoughtspart3]

I too hope HD Tracks releases the album.  I told myself I was going to wait and only buy that this time around but I couldn't help myself and I preordered to get the single.  I was too curious and wanted to see how it was mastered.  Too bad I saw a brickwall in Audacity.

I really like the song though.  It just rocks.  I like the lyrics as well.

[BlobVanDam]

It does get better as you approach CD quality, (and will hopefully be even better when the actual CD comes out,) but I'm listening to the song I've bought off Amazon - and every single time the vocals come in, I instinctively reach for the volume knob. As in, I physically move to turn the sound up and then go, "Oh yeah." It's not a concerted thought, it's not my inner critic going, "The engineer should have really thought harder about the best ways to showcase the song's relative merits and could you perhaps add a bit of treble and dynamic range?" It's my outer music fan going "Speak up, mate?"

Between this and the... rather funny drums, The Enemy Within is a bit of a mixed blessing for me. I rarely ever notice production artifacts - people say Systematic Chaos is mastered really hot and Images and Words has so much more room to breathe and they bring up all these diagrams but I just hear Systematic Chaos and Images and Words. I regret, though, that on this occasion, I'm finding the mix really distractingly bad. Not worse than Vapor Trails, it's an easier listen, but definitely more noticeable.

Love, love, love the song - it's a feat of composition. New brand of Dream Theater, taut and dynamic. Makes Constant Motion sound plodding. Instrumentally spastic, yes, but curtly so: not a single note wasted. That's keen. Their metal side and their progressive side have seldom - if ever - been married so inextricably. Pretty good for a six-minute single. But it's probably not going to eclipse On the Backs of Angels as my favourite DT single for a little while, because I'm so put out by what they've done to it.

I'll tell you what it sounds like - it sounds like someone compressed a 5.1 mix into two channels.

That's a paddlin', rob.

[TheGreatPretender]

I wasn't gonna say anything...

[adastra]

I've listened to The Enemy Inside for like 50 times now.  It is the first DT single I've liked this much!
Good chorus and Petrucci's kickass guitar solo! :3 

[TL]

I too hope HD Tracks releases the album.  I told myself I was going to wait and only buy that this time around but I couldn't help myself and I preordered to get the single.  I was too curious and wanted to see how it was mastered.  Too bad I saw a brickwall in Audacity.

I really like the song though.  It just rocks.  I like the lyrics as well.

While seeing what the waveform for a song looks like can certainly tell you about its degree of compression and dynamic range, reducing the discussion to the appearance of waveforms and numbers on a scale seems a bit overly simplistic.

Even though, yeah, the track is definitely over-compressed.

[Lucidity]

 Am I the only one here who first care about compression and sonic contrast and super high-definition sound and all that? Everyone is getting so world up about the way the single sounds and how all DT albums sound, and maybe I'm just more easy to please, but I have never encountered problems with the sound quality of anything DT has released.

It's making me very nervous, and makes me feel like I should care about all of this-- but on the other hand I really don't want to have to worry about this and am sure I'll be fine with how this album will sound. It almost seems a bit ungrateful to me that everyone is so critical of how the single sounds. It sounds exactly how DT intended it to sound.

[TheGreatPretender]

Am I the only one here who first care about compression and sonic contrast and super high-definition sound and all that? Everyone is getting so world up about the way the single sounds and how all DT albums sound, and maybe I'm just more easy to please, but I have never encountered problems with the sound quality of anything DT has released.

It's making me very nervous, and makes me feel like I should care about all of this-- but on the other hand I really don't want to have to worry about this and am sure I'll be fine with how this album will sound. It almost seems a bit ungrateful to me that everyone is so critical of how the single sounds. It sounds exactly how DT intended it to sound.

You're really better off not caring about it, man.

Personally, I (like a lot of people) thought the drums in ADTOE were mixed a little low, and the guitar didn't have enough definition. But aside from that, I thoroughly enjoy the sound on every DT album, in one way or another. Some people said that Systematic Chaos was overcompressed, and while I understand what they mean, it doesn't prevent me from enjoying the album one bit. As long as the production quality is there, and the instruments sound clean and crisp, that's all I need.

Personally, I'd gladly take an overcompressed album that has good production quality over an uncompressed album that sounds like The Sex Pistols.

[robwebster]

It does get better as you approach CD quality, (and will hopefully be even better when the actual CD comes out,) but I'm listening to the song I've bought off Amazon - and every single time the vocals come in, I instinctively reach for the volume knob. As in, I physically move to turn the sound up and then go, "Oh yeah." It's not a concerted thought, it's not my inner critic going, "The engineer should have really thought harder about the best ways to showcase the song's relative merits and could you perhaps add a bit of treble and dynamic range?" It's my outer music fan going "Speak up, mate?"

Between this and the... rather funny drums, The Enemy Within is a bit of a mixed blessing for me. I rarely ever notice production artifacts - people say Systematic Chaos is mastered really hot and Images and Words has so much more room to breathe and they bring up all these diagrams but I just hear Systematic Chaos and Images and Words. I regret, though, that on this occasion, I'm finding the mix really distractingly bad. Not worse than Vapor Trails, it's an easier listen, but definitely more noticeable.

Love, love, love the song - it's a feat of composition. New brand of Dream Theater, taut and dynamic. Makes Constant Motion sound plodding. Instrumentally spastic, yes, but curtly so: not a single note wasted. That's keen. Their metal side and their progressive side have seldom - if ever - been married so inextricably. Pretty good for a six-minute single. But it's probably not going to eclipse On the Backs of Angels as my favourite DT single for a little while, because I'm so put out by what they've done to it.

I'll tell you what it sounds like - it sounds like someone compressed a 5.1 mix into two channels.

That's a paddlin', rob.

Oh, piss.

ETA: 'Tis fixed, now. In my defence, not entirely without precedent - it's been two years and I still struggle with the idea that Bridges in the Sky isn't called The Shaman's Trance any more. I'm an equal opportunities forgetful sod.

[noxon]

I think I'd relax about the sound quality at this point. We still have no real idea how the CD will sound. There's a world of difference between a CD and an iTunes or MP3 rip.

I very much disagree with this sentiment - especially when you consider the 320kbps mp3 that came with the Ltd. Edition preorder. Yes, mp3 and iTunes is lossy compression, but combined with the lossless compression it first does alongside the psychoacoustic compression applied (such as limiting the frequency range to about 18khz (or even 16khz in some mp3 encoders settings - and removing sounds that would be masked by other loud noises anyways, the audible difference beetween the cd and the mp3 is going to be virtually none for 98% of the listeners out there. I'd wager you'd not be able to tell which file was which if i played you both back to back.

[aprilethereal]

on an unrelated note, i just stumbled upon the Warner page promoting the "lyric video" to the song (german):

https://www.warnermusic.de/news/2013-08-08/the-enemy-inside-lyric-video

Something strange about that picture, isnt it? 

What's wrong with it, other than the arm in the top left corner?

[TheGreatPretender]

I very much disagree with this sentiment - especially when you consider the 320kbps mp3 that came with the Ltd. Edition preorder.

256kbps. But I don't disagree.

[wolven74]

on an unrelated note, i just stumbled upon the Warner page promoting the "lyric video" to the song (german):

https://www.warnermusic.de/news/2013-08-08/the-enemy-inside-lyric-video

Something strange about that picture, isnt it? 

What's wrong with it, other than the arm in the top left corner?

Mangini doesn't have a fat cigar? He needs a stogie.

OH FUCK.... I just saw it... NOOOOO!!!!!!

[soulburner]

There can be many audible artifacts introduced by mp3 encoding when it's done wrong, but dynamic range doesn't change (maybe except it may be clipping a bit more, but that's irrelevant). If the lossless source has headroom, breathing room, good instrument separation and all that stuff, so will the mp3.
I would prefer to listen to a 128kbps mp3 of a great sounding record than to a lossless overcompressed loudness war example.

[Nefarius]

Because I've seen the words mix and master used pretty much synonymically all over this thread... mix and master are completely different things! A little summary for those who are not that much into the technical part of recording music:

Mixing is balancing the levels of each individual track. Pretty much the studio version of what an engineer does at the mixing desk in a live concert situation. More of this, less of that, those two up, that one down, this goes left, while the other one goes right. Many of us felt that the drums on ADTOE and JLB's voice on TEI were mixed too low. Most of the times those are very conscious creative decisions and not necessarily mistakes, no matter what we might think about them. We may not agree with all of those decisions but DT albums never suffered a case of really bad mixing (only a few strange bits and pieces here and there).

Mastering is the process of preparing the final mix for production, making sure the mix sounds good on a wide range of systems, repairing little flaws in the mix that have gone unnoticed, finding the best possible equalization for each medium (CD, vinyl, stream, ...), equalization across all tracks, and finally taking care of volume, dynamic range, compression, and limiting. That final part is where 90% of the problem we're discussing happens.

Everything is pushed as close to (and sometimes beyond) the limit as possible until even a moment of silence between two powerful jolts of sound is perceived as loud. That will obviously result in a loss of dynamics and it also leads to the seemingly contradictory effect that turning up the volume will actually decrease the amount of details that you'll be able hear. The individual tracks from mixing become less and less audible and turn into one undifferentiatable mass. Last but not least it's also very tiring for one's ears.

Thanks for petrucciing bearing with me and my hectoring, I'll try not to do that kind of ranty and teachery stuff too often, but I just can't help myself, I'm feeling like I'm going out of my head with this topic sometimes.

Greetings...
Nef

[puppyonacid]

Because I've seen the words mix and master used pretty much synonymically all over this thread... mix and master are completely different things! A little summary for those who are not that much into the technical part of recording music:

Mixing is balancing the levels of each individual track. Pretty much the studio version of what an engineer does at the mixing desk in a live concert situation. More of this, less of that, those two up, that one down, this goes left, while the other one goes right. Many of us felt that the drums on ADTOE and JLB's voice on TEI were mixed too low. Most of the times those are very conscious creative decisions and not necessarily mistakes, no matter what we might think about them. We may not agree with all of those decisions but DT albums never suffered a case of really bad mixing (only a few strange bits and pieces here and there).

Mastering is the process of preparing the final mix for production, making sure the mix sounds good on a wide range of systems, repairing little flaws in the mix that have gone unnoticed, finding the best possible equalization for each medium (CD, vinyl, stream, ...), equalization across all tracks, and finally taking care of volume, dynamic range, compression, and limiting. That final part is where 90% of the problem we're discussing happens.

Everything is pushed as close to (and sometimes beyond) the limit as possible until even a moment of silence between two powerful jolts of sound is perceived as loud. That will obviously result in a loss of dynamics and it also leads to the seemingly contradictory effect that turning up the volume will actually decrease the amount of details that you'll be able hear. The individual tracks from mixing become less and less audible and turn into one undifferentiatable mass. Last but not least it's also very tiring for one's ears.

Thanks for petrucciing bearing with me and my hectoring, I'll try not to do that kind of ranty and teachery stuff too often, but I just can't help myself, I'm feeling like I'm going out of my head with this topic sometimes.

Greetings...
Nef

[noxon]

I very much disagree with this sentiment - especially when you consider the 320kbps mp3 that came with the Ltd. Edition preorder.

256kbps. But I don't disagree.

What? The one I got (and I ordered from the warner store, mind you) was a 320kbps file 14.4 MB large.

[TheGreatPretender]

I very much disagree with this sentiment - especially when you consider the 320kbps mp3 that came with the Ltd. Edition preorder.

256kbps. But I don't disagree.

What? The one I got (and I ordered from the warner store, mind you) was a 320kbps file 14.4 MB large.

Then it seems I've been stiffed. 11.8 MB for me.