Question for those with “Golden ears”, and a frustration! (The Loudness Wars)

lowrider57
Excellent counterpoints as well. In a modern era, we tend to forget how much MTV and Radio Stations media played a significant part in consumers receiving their "product". A different time to be sure.Enjoy the Music.
Happy Listening!

@jafant 
I was editing music videos as well as MTV content in the 90's. I experienced the changeover from analogue to digital technology as well as MTV's increased dominance in the biz and in our culture. 
One change I saw was they started to reject videos not only for explicit content but because they didn't like a shot or sequence.
BTW, all video and audio was required to be uncompressed. 

Getting back to modern day audio quality, on the Dynamic Range DB I've seen entries for "MTV version" in addition to the various audio releases. Saw this 2 or 3 times but didn't check to see the DR measurements. That would be interesting.

 

lowrider57
Very cool personal history. I miss MTV Unplugged series from the 90's.
I wish I could purchase the Don Henley episode on CD or DVD.
Happy Listening!

Worst gripe for me. 
  The CDs that are recorded so loud, the music distorts and gets too loud way to early on the volume knob. Drives me nuts. 
 I will put the cd on my cheap 99$ computer, run it through audiolab 3.0 and lower the entire album to a more listenable level.
then record to a cdr. Sounds much better to me this way. 
 Not a fan of 3000 decibel recordings on newer CDs (some)

@lowrider57 ,

Thanks for the 'inside' information - mystery solved.

The fact that they can tweak the sound for broadcast probably renders it impossible for the OP to get a commercial equivalent of his preferred version of The Joshua Tree.

The fact that they sometimes actually improve it can also be a little frustrating when the supposedly official version fails to match up. 

I've experienced similar situations where I wanted a recording of a certain song from a film only to find the version on the official soundtrack album significantly worse sounding and/or edited/ truncated.

[Elvis Presley's Wooden Heart from G.I. Blues and Oom-Pah-Pah from Oliver! are two examples, but there are  numerous others.]

In the end I would sometimes resort to downloading the music off the preferred YouTube clip and then fixing it in Audacity if required. 

In this laborious way I've managed to back up quite a few of my preferred versions of  favourite recordings over the years to a USB stick. Before anyone asks, yes I have also backed that USB up to a hard drive. 


@arcticdeth, 

I sometimes do the same thing with MP3Gain if the CD is recorded a little too hot for its own good.

It kind of works but then I worry that I've destroyed the precise balance that was intended, as MP3Gain tends to average out the differences in volume between the various tracks

Or if I can I just try to find a better mastering. 

On a side note - one of my friends bought all the remastered Scott Walker albums (1-4 and maybe Til the Band Comes In, I think) to replace his originals only to later have to admit his mistake and then go back and find copies of the originals!