Coheed and Cambria - Gravity's Union (Dynamic Edit)

This is what I like to call a ‘dynamic edit’ of “Gravity's Union” by Coheed and Cambria! The Afterman: Ascension and The Afterman: Descension were mastered loudly, and while they’re not as badly mastered as *Year of the Black Rainbow*, they nevertheless are quite distorted from their clipped masters. In this, I attempt to undo that clipping and resulting distortion, making the music more dynamic, and hopefully also more listenable as a result!

For those not in the know, the Loudness War is a phenomenon beginning in the mid-90s onward, in which music was mastered louder and louder, with the underlying reasoning being that louder music sounds better, and thus, should sell better. As with any medium, however, there is a peak loudness a signal can reach, so dynamic range compression (not to be confused with data compression, which concerns MP3s and such; dynamic range compression makes the louder parts of the signal quieter while keeping the quiet parts the same loudness) and sometimes even clipping (attempting to make a signal louder than maximum loudness) were used to make music as loud as possible.

The issue with this is that overuse of dynamic range compression and clipping can make music fatiguing to listen to, and sometimes even audibly distorted. Additionally, clipping, poor compressors, or overuse of compressors can result in artifacts such as hiss or crackle being audible atop the signal. The vocals of “Key Entity Extraction III: Vic the Butcher” and “Gravity’s Union”, and the guitars of “Key Entity Extraction I: Domino the Destitute” are especially subject to this crackle. Even aside from the crackle, the louder the songs are, the worse they sound with the compression, sometimes just sounding like big blobs of sound (“Key Entity Extraction V: Sentry the Defiant” especially).

I attempted to undo the mastering compression and distortion on both Afterman albums with a program called “Perfect Declipper”, which can not only affect clipping, but mastering compression as well. It can undo much of the distortion caused by heavy compression, such as on “Vic the Butcher”, “Gravity’s Union”, and “Domino the Destitute”! The program also makes the music more dynamic, and I was able to bring the dynamic range of Ascension from 6 to 12, and Descension from 5 to 12, and hopefully that makes both more listenable as a result! I also included some bonus tracks I got on a digital release (edited, of course)!

It’s important to note that the dynamics are not being restored with the “Perfect Declipper” program that I use, but rather, they are being approximated. While one may not be able to “declip” an album as one would be unable to “unbake a cake”, I find the results here to be a convincible attempt at doing so. Only in the most extreme examples have I heard the program produce odd artifacts that would appear unintended in the album’s mix.

I also want to note that dynamic range compression is not an inherently bad thing. It can tighten up performances, add grit, and help remove dynamic outliers that would take you out of the mix. Additionally, mastering engineers are often underneath the implicit and explicit pressures of artists and record labels to master albums loudly, so the results of mastering may not necessarily reflect a mastering engineer’s intentions for how they wanted an album to sound.

I produce many more dynamic edits on this channel as well as further descriptions in posts over on Reddit! You can look at this for a full list of the albums I’ve done: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19...

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