Digital Distortion is Not a Preference

Oh Lars...there you go again, shooting off your mouth about things:

There's a lot of the rock generation who have aged and who are now in their 40s, and who are still holding on to what was 20 or 30 years ago, and I don't fault that, whatsoever. But obviously compression plays a different role in music and mixing and mastering than it did 20 years ago or 30 years ago. And obviously, MP3s and online services and downloads — it's a different game than it was. So obviously things sound different. You know, there's no right or wrong here. It's truly about tastes, and it's truly about what people prefer.

I was a wannabe audio engineer for a long time, so I'm willing to admit a bias brought on by some ear training, but you know how there are some immutable truths out there? Death, taxes, stuff like that? "Death Magnetic was mixed so loud that it's rife with digital distortion" is an immutable truth. I can - and do - prefer this album to other albums, but trying to cover a poor mixing job with some wishy-washy bullshit about different strokes is stupidly disingenuous.