2.0 out of 5 stars
Great music, but poor mastering, November 28, 2011
This review is from: A Majestic Christmas (Audio CD)
I like Christmas music played by a good orchestra, and this music definitely meets my criteria. I enjoy this music.
However, while playing the music I heard what sounded like noticeable distortion in several places. After doing several sanity checks to make sure it wasn't just my audio system, I extracted the CD onto my computer and examined the waveforms. The music is clearly limited to -3dB, and zooming in on the areas with disortion I can see the flattened tops of some of the waveforms in the distortion areas. I don't know if the music was clipped at some intermediate stage during mixing/mastering, or if someone just set a hard limiter too agressively, but the end result is very unpleasing to listen to.
This distortion isn't noticable in most of the recording (I'm guessing 10-15 seconds total), so if you can ignore those imperfections this is a nice CD. Unfortunately for me, those few seconds of distortion tend to ruin the rest of each track that containing it.
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