Loudness War Follow-Up: Billie Jean

I'm going to keep this brief, as I believe I explicitly promised not to dip into this particular well again. But hell, I just can't seem to help myself when it comes to this topic.

As you may have seen, today's Song Of The Day is "Billie Jean", prompted mainly by me managing to find a FLAC (lossless audio file format) rip of the original Thriller vinyl. I'll spare you a talk about how great this album is, as you've likely embraced it already all on your lonesome. And if you haven't... well. I wouldn't know what to say.

Anyway, I pursued a digitalized-vinyl copy of this album for one reason: the remastered CDs are unbearably terrible. I picked up the 25th Anniversary version ages ago, and it very nearly managed to make me hate the album. Why? Take a look at the waveform (remember those?) for "Billie Jean", the album's stand-out track:

Jesus Christ! This is roughly similar to the waveform for Pearl Jam's Ten which, by all rights, should be considerably louder than slickly produced R&B like Thriller.

For comparison, here's the waveform for the original vinyl, after I recoded it from FLAC to an MP3 at v0 VBR (basically an extremely high quality MP3 file; don't worry about it if you don't understand it):

Mhmm. That's some loveliness right there. Note that there's absolutely no clipping (indicated by lines hitting the top or bottom of the chart) on this version of the track. Also note the variations on the track's peaks; while the remaster is brickwalled to hell and back, there's virtually no compression at all on the original master.

This is a major reason why audiophiles have a loathing for record company remasters; the new standards for volume and production (very fucking high and none at all, respectively) render most of them actively bothersome to listen to. Hearing "Billie Jean" shouldn't be an ordeal, but a lovely bit of pleasure, wouldn't you agree?



I can't really give you a YouTube comparison, but if you have Spotify try the following comparison: cue up the 'Thriller 25 Deluxe Edition' or 'Thriller 25 Super Deluxe Edition' (they're roughly the same) version of "Billie Jean" and compare either to the one listed as from plain old 'Thriller', and pay specific attention to the way the drums sound in the intro. I think you'll be able to notice an audible difference.

That's all for today. See you all on Wednesday!