Music Reviews

Many (most) RBCD’s suffer from compression and high volume levels, especially pop/rock. I think the audio magazines would be better served if they assigned one reviewer to the music reviews. That person should have an audio system capable of resolving audio at a high level, and ideally the reviewer should either listen to live music on a regular basis, or be a professional musician. This will help but unfortunately not solve the problem because many artists seemingly don’t take enough care to ensure their masters sound good and allow the volume levels to be over blown – this is particularly true of pop recordings. I continue to be reluctant to buy RBCD’s because of the unreliability of the reviews and still concentrate on SACD’s, although even that doesn’t assure you of a good album sonically because of the recording and mixing process. Hopefully the emphasis on computer music servers and high resolution will help create a greater number of better sounding albums, but it doesn’t directly address the recording, mixing, and engineering processes.