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I am absolutely loving the album. It’s a 10/10. However, the mix across all platforms seems really bad. Clipping in many of the songs and a muddy, wall of sound in the non-acoustic tracks.
My guess is something went wrong in the transfer of files? Your production is too good to make these kinds of mistakes in studio.
I hate to be *that* gu…
I am absolutely loving the album. It’s a 10/10. However, the mix across all platforms seems really bad. Clipping in many of the songs and a muddy, wall of sound in the non-acoustic tracks.
My guess is something went wrong in the transfer of files? Your production is too good to make these kinds of mistakes in studio.
I hate to be *that* guy, but has the band seen this feedback on their socials?
I love The Decemberists so so much and I hope no offense is taken by bringing this up. ❤️
It gets weirder, though. I noticed the same last night, when I put on music as I was leaving work. I was thinking "man, this sounds really muddy compared to when I first heard it".
So this morning, I did some investigation of "Long White Veil", which I feel is a good test track because it's so clean and has a lot of crash cymbals (which makes low bitrate really, really eady to spot).
All of this testing was done with spotify set to highest quality, and using my Soundcore Life Note 3 TWS earbuds. Yeah, yeah, I know... but I know what they're supposed to sound like, and I can tell when they're the limiting factor to sound quality.
"Long White Veil" on Spotify on my android phone sounds muddy and distant, like it's low bitrate. There's also some clipping evident in the chorus.
When I play this youtube video: https://youtu.be/65ZujegODRg?feature=shared on my phone, it sounds good.
Now for the really weird part: When I connect the same bluetooth headphones to my laptop (Linux, pipewire, etc.), the Spotify version played there sounds great- indistinguishable from the youtube video.
I wonder if this isn't a problem with the mix, but rather with something in the file messing up the Spotify android app's ability to transcode? Other albums sound fine on spotify on this phone. I'll leave the question of "why is the app messing with it" to someone else, but that seems to be the case, at least for me.