Turn up the treble
 

So I'm digging The Eternal but the mix is killing me.....Its loud, but its swamped in bass, muddy and atrocious....had me wondering WTF?

Till I heard it.....Kim telling me to "Turn Up the Treble" , right there on the opening track.

Cranked the treble on my stereo and.....sweet! Suddenly it sounded like Sonic Youth.

Anyone else find the sound on this record odd? Why'd they mix it like this? Just to sound good on ipods?

That's an odd thing to say. I've been convinced that all my headphones suck. And/or that they did the weirder [subtle] things more subtly ["well then, that's just stupid!"]. But if it wasn't the headphones or the other one, was Kim dissatisfied with the levels and trying to subtly hint to listeners?

I'm still waiting for my Eternal CD, so I can't tell ya.

probably because they used some classic analogue gear to record and mix the whole album so it often has a remarkable mid range and cuts out some of the higher frequencies (if the mixboard is overdriven) to give the whole thing some 'warmth' ...
but thats just a guess. i havent heard the album in good quality yet

I always turn up the treble anyway so it sounds perfectly fine to me. I hate midrange mixes, they bother me.

"Turn down the volume!
Turn down the bass!
Turn up the midrange slightly!
Now turn up the treble!
Yeah!"

if thats a reason I would be a sucker for it...cant wait

I guess it sounds different based on the system you play it on anyway.

If anything, this is probably the least "iPod-friendly" SY album next to Sister, which is a good thing. I thought RR was mastered way too loud. This one sounds just fine.

mastering is supposed to tak ecare of the differences between listening systems.
I found the overall sound on the CD kind of weird also. Lack of high-mid + treble. O well.

Wasn't there a song by that limp bizkit side project Big Dumb Face that had something like that?

that does not apply to crappy/"wrong" equipment.
try to listen to it on 1/2" inch deep pc speakers and tell me how mastering is supposed to take care of that :rolleyes::eek:.
Or try and listen to a record with jsut a 18" subwoofer, tell me how mastering is supposed to take care of that :p.

i think you're thinkign of the song "rebel" ... "So you say i'm the rebel, turn down the bass and turn up the treble" if I remember correctly.

Big Dumb Face rules. Actually, everything with Wes Borland involved is usually good.

Yeahhhhh I think that was it! That album was really fun at the time.

It's not a question of my equipment which I'm well familiar with.....I'm listening to the (supposedly HQ) vinyl on my high quality system including nice reference speakers with a flat frequency response which bring out the true natural sound of most recordings......99% of my records sound awesome with my amp set flat but The Eternal is completely lacking in upper-mid and treble frequencies. Its the only album in my large collection that requires me to turn the treble all the way up just to get a reasonable sound.

This seems beyond merely going for anologue "warmth".....and other recent indie rock releases I've picked up on HQ vinyl manage to have creamy warm sound with all the treble frequencies in tact . To satisfy my curiousity I downloaded the mp3s and its the same muddy sound, only in crappier mp3 quality.

Mind you, it sounds pretty good once the treble is cranked, but I shouldn't have to do that.

I didn't mean that you're not "well equipped" ;) or not entitled to an opinion, just wanted to point out that replies might be dramatically different according to each listener's equipment/listening habits/ears, after all.

no worries nicfit, of course you're right it depends on how you're listening to it; I just wanted to clarify how I'm listening to it!

at last
some sense.

Yup I can't stand the mix myself. I wish they'd bring back Richard Hell. Sonic Nurse sounds perfect!

Or maybe you wanted to show off with your Super HQ Sound System....;)

I transferred it to 8-track using a phonograph. I'm that fucking awesome.

The mixing is super weird, although not to the extent it ruins anything. Not for me anyway.

Pretty much all Sonic Youth these days is mastered in the red, or very near it, so that doesn't bother me much.

The hissing during the quiet moments is slightly strange, but I'm assuming they were going for that.

I'm not exactly certain I'm responding to what you're talking about, but just tonight (with my new official cd (in my still crappy headphones, but whatever)) I was reveling in that "roomy" sound at the beginning of "Massage the History," where you can actually hear the space around the music, before the music starts in full; and while I've noticed it before, tonight was the first time it felt like the very end of "Washing Machine" [which blew me away when I discovered it a couple years ago (having long owned the album)]; it just wasn't quite as lusciously gratuitous [as much as people talk about the relaxed energy of this album, it seems to be just as much about restraint, and not letting any one aspect of them (ie: "noise") get in the way of any other (which brings several things to mind, including my friend's comment about indulging in many of the "7 deadly sins," (the trick being not to let any of them overpower the others), and the underlying drug theme [see the artwork [opium poppy filtered through lsd, etc], plus the fact that "Massage" seems unnervingly personal with my own situation])].

In sum, by now I'm positive I'm not talking about the same thing you were. I don't even know if I'm talking about the same thing *I* was. But as a side-note: my vote for best use of tape hiss [this year, and of the things I've heard] goes to The Breeder's recent "Pinnacle Hollow." That song had me in tears.

I forgot to mention the cover art specifically, how when you focus on any one thing in an attempt to fix it or pin it down, other stuff starts going haywire. So you can try to keep track of everything, but you end up like a dog chasing its tail, just going in circles [though recognizing the circle as an entity in itself is a step on the path to enlightenment].

excuse my lack of knowladge but what does Richard Hell have to do with sonic nurse?