[bwoodward]

if you like a less polished sound, you should tuck into the Nirvana demos [1]. Back in the day it was really difficult to acquire these things (mainly trading or buying CDRs later on).

Nirvana is an excellent rabbit hole band, though. There are plenty of b-sides, bootlegs, demos, technically unreleased tracks, compilations, etc etc. They've released box sets that have pretty much everything besides the live bootlegs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoBcTBkNp94

[agumonkey]

I'm not sure I prefer Albini's mix, I'm still missing the released (commercial) mix. Somehow I find albini's version too toyed with (some instruments pops out at times). And the demo you linked is closer to the final version in that regard, sounds more like Nirvana to me. Thanks for the link, I had no idea these were online.

In a totally other genre, Michael Jackson Thriller vocal studo outtakes are breathtaking.

[eggsbenedict]

>Somehow I find albini's version too toyed with (some instruments pops out at times)

I'm a professional record producer and songwriter. Here are my thoughts:

Very likely it's the other way around. Albini is notoriously hard-headed about refusing to use compression on tracks and mixes. He's gone on record about how compressors ruin the tone, expressivity, and micro-dynamics of recorded sounds.

Regardless of whether you agree with that, and he does have a point, compression performs one job admirably: it prevents dynamic sounds from unexpectedly popping out of a determined dynamic range.

This is a disagreement lots of people have had with Albini's method, and he's also a little prickly about these things. He has an artistic vision of "properly" recording bands and mixing them in a way that doesn't adulterate or modify their live sound. In other words, he tries to get the final sound just through exacting microphone placement while recording, and applies the absolute minimum of post-processing.

However, the consensus in commercial record production at this point is that signal processing such as compression, distortion, and equalization, even in dramatic quantity, can create a more compelling audio result. Albini certainly views this as leading to a decline in fidelity (in the etymological sense of truth), and possibly as leading to a decline in artistic integrity (heavily debated).

A couple final ideas:

- In a recorded-music world, what constitutes an "authentic" or "true" sound?

- Should a studio operator (recording/mixing) aim to respect the real-world sound of the artist, or the intentions of the artist? How do you identify the intentions of an artist?