Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo Metallica-St. Anger

Anyone got this CD? I've now listened to it on 3 systems: my car (Kenwood head unit + Alpine speakers), my home (Cambridge Soundworks Ensemble --not really very good-- + CS Subwoofer 1 + H/K 525, set to Dolby PL2, Stereo, and DTS), and Peter's (pmbuko) M22 + SVS + Onkyo setup. It seemed very compressed to me; it was mastering that was either so bad, or so weird, it was hard to get into (not to mention the rather, uh, challenging material). At times, it sounded like certain tracks of the recording were intentionally mastered badly (such as the intro to St. Anger). The second half was better, but it still sounded very compressed (horizontally). Anyone else have any impressions?

Ken

i havent heard the whole thing yet,but they said they were trying to get a raw sound,and go back to there heavier roots(trying to win back some of the old fans after the big sellout)ill pick it up this week,and throw in my 2 cents...ill be expecting change...ron

They're lame venture to win back their old fans is a pathetic attempt to mock System of a Down's sound. It's weak and pathetic and we're not impressed. We spread their sound via dubbed taped and underground recordings. Now they sue their fans for the same fricking thing digitally.

Way to piss off everyone that ever fought for you, jackasses.

Actually, I don't believe that they ever sued the fans. They sued the company that was making money off of them without giving them anything (ie, Napster). That, I'd say, is out and out theft. If you emailed your friend an MP3, I doubt they would give a rat's ass. They've said as much (if you read their press releases). Not that I understand what the hell they're talking about with their refusal to put stuff on the Apple Music Store.

Damn, didn't want to start one of these flamewars...

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Not that I understand what the hell they're talking about with their refusal to put stuff on the Apple Music Store.

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Right. That seems to me to tell how little they have really cared for their fans from the outset. IMO, Metallica is one LAZY group of artist, refusing to compete in this digital era of music reproduction and distribution -- Who the heck do they think they are?!

i think they were going to try to find out all the people who downloaded their songs and try to collect royalties that way.but by the time they would get through that mess it would probbably cost them twice as much as they would get back.now they are coming to town at around 100 dollars a ticket,they are very greedy,so now i take back what i said about picking up the new disc.ill pick up another blues clues video for my kids with magreedicas money...screw them...ron

Wait a second...sushi is a Metallica fan??

JUNK

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That, I'd say, is out and out theft.

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False. It's copyright violation. Theft involves depriving someone of their property. Metallica isn't having its property removed, they're having it duplicated in violation of the copyright.

Fair enough. I mistyped. Nevertheless, it's a company making money off of someone else's effort. A person getting use out of someone else's effort wihtout paying for it is something slightly different.

I have no qualms about burning CDs, downloading music, etc... If "artists" and record companies have no compunctions about charging $15 for a piece of crap CD, then I'm going to have none about burning it. They view us as cash cows, milking and bleeding our wages from us. They should accept the fact that CD sales won't pay their bills anymore. They should use CDs as promotional devices (like air time on the radio) to get more people to appreciate their music and attend their concerts. Oh, but wait, that means they would actually have to "work" for a living, rather than lay around the swimming pool doing drugs.

St Anger, I hear, was recorded live in a basement.

Yeah, real genious there... so now they've spent 50$ recording an album, trying to maximize their profits. i can barely hear drums or bass on it, the vocals are distant, and the guitars sound like crap.

don't they realize it's time to quit? i think they're just money hungry.

that DVD that comes with the disk is an absolute waste of i don't know what.

i'm glad i didn't buy it.

Uh, have you listened to it? The drums are quite prominant (sometimes too much so), and the bass is far more present than on any album since Cliff. The vocals are probably the clearest thing on the album. I'll agree that the guitars are weird, and I haven't watched the DVD yet.

NOTE: Please be aware that this semi-rant has a liberal dose of devil's advocacy sprinkled throughout.


The problem with saying that the music companies treat consumers as cash cows, "milking and bleeding our wages from us" is that they would go out of business if they didn't charge so much. They've got a lot of costs to recoup from supporting a band and producing an album.

Granted, a studio probably doesn't have to spend too much money on marketing for a band with a (declining) reputation like Metallica, but take newer, younger bands as an example. Do you have any idea how much money a recording company has to throw at an "average band with above average looks" (i.e. most "new talent" out there these days) in order to make them marketable? The recording companies have to charge a lot of money for the CDs because they need to recoup those costs. (Unfortunately, the system is so bloated that the number of people involved in producing an album is ridiculously high. In this sense, yes, we are being milked, but everyone needs to make a living, right? )

Please understand that I am not trying to defend the system. The system came into existence (well before the advent of online file sharing) by capitalizing on not-too-discriminating teenagers with money to burn. Studios were justified in spending tons of money to make bands look hip and cool because kids were/are more than willing to buy into the image.

I guess what I'm trying to say is you can't put too much blame on the music companies. If a market exists, a business will always appear to take advantage of it.

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The problem with saying that the music companies treat consumers as cash cows, "milking and bleeding our wages from us" is that they would go out of business if they didn't charge so much.

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Untrue. There was a time that the "single" was a common form of distribution costing a staggering $0.99 per song. The RIAA had a valid business model then. Furthermore, CDs are significantly cheaper to mass produce than tapes or records and modern albums cost far more than their predescessors while moving in volumes unheard of in those times.

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Granted, a studio probably doesn't have to spend too much money on marketing for a band with a (declining) reputation like Metallica, but take newer, younger bands as an example. Do you have any idea how much money a recording company has to throw at an "average band with above average looks" (i.e. most "new talent" out there these days) in order to make them marketable?

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This is actually an argument FOR digital distribution be it free or charged. It costs them so much to market their talent because their talent doesn't have any. It costs a fortune to convince the masses that five monkeys that don't write their own music, can't define their own dance steps and whose voices would be intollerable without computer manipulation are something they should spend $15 a pop for. It costs a fortune to manipulate and own the radio, MTV, and the record stores. The pay off is that you have to invest not one dime in finding new talent or fostering new sounds because you can rubber stamp manufactured carbon copies of the same droll crap over and over again. It's far easier and it's why the music scene is dead. THAT is why their sales have fallen.

It's truly ballsy to produce 25% less material than a year ago in a recession and blame a 5% drop in sales on pirating when every study ever commissioned by anyone other than the RIAA indicates that free online swapping actually results in BETTER sales as people are finally exposed to music that interests them rather than the mindless crap you're pushing.

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I guess what I'm trying to say is you can't put too much blame on the music companies. If a market exists, a business will always appear to take advantage of it.

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And it has.

Regards,
Semi

Well said, uh, typed.

Mainstream music has transformed from an art into a commodity.

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Wait a second...sushi is a Metallica fan??

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NO WAY!!! But my oldest daughter is a fan of the general genre (not necessarily of Metallica specifically), so I've been inevitably exposed to the jumbo mumbo surrounding them. I've also been interested in the digital copyright issue in general, ever since the Napster fiasco.

So she gets to listen to that stuff on your Pioneer/Hales/Axioms?

Nope. My system refuses them.

You know, she is a typical teenageer, who can care no less about the sound quality. She's very content with her boombox and PC speakers.

Maybe it's time for me to educate her...

Are you mad? Convince the person financially dependent upon you that she needs expensive gear (relative to the crappy little computer speakers)?

that will give sushi a good reason to upgrade all or part of his system!

Curtis got it right.

I'm the ONLY male in the household of SIX (including a live-in nanny); I wish I had a boy who is as geeky and techy as me. LOL I need someone on my side...

Actually sushi, it sounds like your Y chromosome needs some beefing up. Aren't you in the pharmaceutical biz? Can't you take something for that?

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I'm the ONLY male in the household of SIX (including a live-in nanny); I wish I had a boy who is as geeky and techy as me. LOL I need someone on my side...
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Ah Sushi, I can relate. My wife is expecting our third. I can only hope that the balance of power will shift slightly in my direction this time around. I would love to have some Hot Wheels in this house.

watch out for one of those Hot Wheels going down a speaker/sub port!

Semi On,

I can't remember the last time you wrote something i DISAGREED with.


We need to have a beer sometime

Semi...you should change your handle to Dead_On, as you are dead right.

Since I've begun downloading mp3's my purchases of cd's has probably tripled. I've found so many new artists through the downloading of mp3's that my collection of cd's has been growing and growing.

Any time you're in Phoenix, Ravi.

spifnme,

That was the experience I had at the height of Napster. I'd post a thread to Ars asking for new artists and get 80 replies with hundreds if not thousands of new bands. I'd download them all and drop a few $100 on the bands I liked.

Not anymore. So long as the RIAA continues their stupid antics, I'll avoid buying CDs. I'd miss having uncompressed and high quality copies of good new music if I were being exposed to any but I don't even bother any more.

And THAT is why the RIAA is screwed.

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Since I've begun downloading mp3's my purchases of cd's has probably tripled. I've found so many new artists through the downloading of mp3's that my collection of cd's has been growing and growing.

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That was the experience I had at the height of Napster. I'd post a thread to Ars asking for new artists and get 80 replies with hundreds if not thousands of new bands. I'd download them all and drop a few $100 on the bands I liked.

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Precisely! And I remember a number of highly vocal artists openly endorsed the phenomenon in the height of Napster, saying that they gained a great, zero-cost vehicle of advertisement, and lost nothing.

Interestingly, there's a topic on this on Ars's front page at the moment. Here's the discussion:
http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=174096756&m=7290972475&r=9360933475#9360933475

Scroll down to the post by zAmboni in which he does some graphs using RIAA data for sales figures over the last decade.

I tried Morpheus but the availability of titles was pretty meager at that time, and their software had some spyware built in. I suspect the others do as well. What I've been doing is going to the Wherehouse (there's a few in my area that haven't closed down) and buying used CDs willy-nilly. I've picked up a lot of the titles that were recommended here, and many others that "looked" good (judging a book by its cover), whether I'd heard of them or not. Burn them all and take back the ones you don't love.
I discovered a huge number of jazz artists that are just awesome - Billy Ross, Arturo Sandoval, Ottmar Liebert, etc... In fact it seems like 95% of the Cds in the used jazz section are keepers. Blues, too. And reggae.