🚀 go-pugleaf

I bought the new deluxe two-CD sets of the catalogue by The Who: it's supposedly "Digitally Remastered!" (Don't be fooled: anything that's been prepared to be burned on CD has been "digitally remastered"!)

What I noticed (particularly on *Who's Next?*) is that among other things they ran the music through Adobe's Hard Limiting feature (or something similar). I compared the files against those on two "Gold" remasters from the 1990s, and both run circles around this new stuff when it comes to sounding what the album sounded like. However, the new one is much "easier" to listen to, having had its dynamic range squished through a meat grinder. (FM radio, anyone?)

I'll be the first to admit that I'm running my entire collection through Hard Limiting simply because I can get more "bang" while bothering fewer neighbors. Despite my tirade above, I've been waiting for something like Audition's Hard Limiting for years! Decades! I can remember trying to squeeze the dynamic range out of King Crimson in the 1970s using the DBX system -- so I could hear it in my jalopy. Before I bought Audition, I'd do something similar "by hand" using Cool -- taking upwards of an hour to squeeze a song without clipping.

My point? When I set Audition to 32-bits I get more than is needed for any recording purpose for the home. (In 32-bit, it runs faster on my new twin 3.4 Pentium 4 system than 16-bit did on the 1G Pentium 3 that I just replaced.) I might want a little more than what Audition offers if I were, for example, putting together the music for an Omnimax presentation, but I don't think that anything coming out for home use can be perceptably degraded by Normalizing it in Audition in the 32-bit mode.

And speaking of The Who, I'm currently listening to an a capella re-performance of the album *The Who Sell-Out,* with all vocals and instruments (every one of them) meticulously sung and mixed by Petra Haden. She does the ads between the songs, and even re-creates the message that repeats when you let the needle travel off into the inner groove -- clicking her tongue for the scratches! Bizarre? Yes, as bizarre by today's standards as *Sell Out* was by the standards of the mid-1960s.

Did she use Audition?

It sounds like she easily could have: Audition supports as many tracks as she laid down on this record!

As for Roger McGuinn, I simply LOVE his web site! Unfortunately, many of the files he has recorded are somewhat muddy-sounding, but I forgive all of that every time I listen to the version of "To Morrow" he laid down at age 16!! I gave his web site the most prestigious award that mine gives out -- for making use of the web in ways that only web media can offer. And his recent quasi-live performance on XM Radio (downloadable on eMusic) is esquisite! I've listened to it at least 50 times, now.

Cliff Walker