[Arjuna]

”The same thoughtless disregard for basic music fundamentals that plagued the preliminary edits ended up on the final OST.”

As a musician and music-lover, seeing how they brickwalled [1][2] Mick’s tracks in the screenshots only serves to add to the heartbreak of his entire saga.

[1] Loudness War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

[2] The Loudness War https://youtu.be/3Gmex_4hreQ

[mrob]

It seems the brickwall mastering was intentionally done by Mick Gordon. See the section starting at "id Software approved my mastering". The alleged "disregard for basic music fundamentals" appears to have introduced more dynamic range, although not in a way that's pleasant to listen to.

[ndepoel]

Lowering the volume does not equal introducing more dynamic range. It was just done to avoid clipping when pasting two bits of track on top of each other.

The masters delivered by Mick Gordon were meant for use in the game. I'm not an expert at game audio engineering, but the brickwall mastering may have been intentional to make the music stand out over the rest of the game audio. Either way those masters were approved by id Software for use in the game so nothing was wrong with those.

The problem is that those exact same masters were then used to produce the OST. To do a proper OST, you would have to go back to the source materials, remix them and produce a new master that is suitable for playback as an album. One that isn't as brickwalled and maintains more dynamic range. This is the important part that was skipped by Chad Mossholder and not caught by id Software's internal QA. If you take an already mastered piece of music meant for a different context and just cut it up and splice it back together, without regard for volume leveling, tempo adjustment or proper balancing, then you're inevitably going to produce garbage.

[Arjuna]

FTA:

”His edits are riddled with these clearly visible mistakes. Anyone comparing my original tracks to his edits can hear (and see, by looking at the waveform [1]) the unmistakable errors introduced during the editing process.”

[1] https://twitter.com/DoominalCross/status/1251690243389927424

[filoleg]

> It seems the brickwall mastering was intentionally done by Mick Gordon

Where are you getting this? His in-game music was perfectly fine, and the only instances of brickwall mastering were present within the "official OST" (that was mixed by Chad, splicing together the in-game music poorly). Which Gordon had no hand in whatsoever, outside of providing the source material, i.e., the in-game music.

[mort96]

From the article:

> [...] Doing so caused dramatic amplitude spikes at the edit point. Chad didn’t bother to crossfade the transition: both files play simultaneously (causing spikes at double the volume).

> To compensate, he “remastered” the edited song by normalising it to 0dBFS — a rudimentary error.

That's why the OST is so incredibly brickwalled.