Great 80's Thrash Metal Tone, The good old days of cranked Marshall tone Options

[Mudbone]

To me, this is one of the greatest metal tones of all time. When I think of Heavy Metal guitar, this is the tone that comes to mind Software emulators have their purpose, but they can never recreate this tone.

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[Saoirse O'Shea]

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Old music sounds better turned up really loud, its more dynamic and less compressed than todays production. It seems like music today is produced for use with ipods and the like. In order to get the big bottom end on tiny ear buds the bass needs to be boosted. But when you play the same stuff on a regular stereo system its too bassy and compressed. If you can't get an album produced in the 80's to sound good, you're not turning it up loud enough

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In part.

The increase in volume for commercial CDs goes back before I-Pods albeit that it's gotten worse in the last few years. Very few MEs master specifically for I-Pod reproduction, what we do is master to maximise translation across systems. WRT I-Pods often the problem is caused by poor format conversion by the digital re-distributor including compression caused by poor conversion, distortion from intersample overs and not turning off the various options that Apple provide for format shifting a CDA to AAC.

What you're describing regarding bass is due to the Fletcher Munson effect, where how well people hear low and very high frequencies in comparison to the high mid is dependent on volume. The ideal production of the full frequency spectrum however does not occur at high volume but at @84dB. Above and below 84dB the low bass and high end actually appear psycho-acoustically to recede in comparison to the high mid.

The better, albeit expensive, solution here is to have good full range speakers that are flat all the way down to 20hZ. Most speakers, including home stereos and monitors for mixing however start to roll off from @60 Hz between 3-6 dB per octave. Many start rolling off even as high as 100 Hz. Every 6dB drop is equivalent to halving the volume of that frequency. The end result is that you lose most of the low end because the speakers can't reproduce it accurately.

It's possible to add a sub to a speaker system to try and reproduce the low bass. However many subs are not properly integrated with a net result that you do not re-produce the spectrum accurately and you create phase and timing issues along with stereo smearing. Moral of that is if you use a sub set it up properly or you will do more harm than good.

Pro-end mastering monitors reproduce accurately to below 40Hz without a sub. However they also cost over 10k dollars.

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