I guess it must happen to all of us at some point, you buy a great album with wonderful music, but the mastering makes listening to it horrible, fatiguing assult on the lug-oles.

It happened to me recently and I had an idea which is not one for the purists, but it means that I can listen to my new albulm and enjoy it.

I’m a bit of a Beth Hart fan but the My California albulm was just too hard to listen to. I had already ripped it to my NAS drive so opened the album up in some free music editing software called Oceanaudio and used the spectrograph function. It was rather obvious that there was a lot of energy in the upper registers, right up to nearly 20 khz. The only other time I have seen a spectrograph like that is when my budgie decides to sing at the top of it’s ear piercing screech. The music seemed overly compressed too, with little difference in volume between anything you would expect to be loud or quiet.

I used the softwares expander function, which is the reverse to compression, just a little to help put some dynamics back. I also then changed the EQ by rolling off the higher frequencies until the spectrograph looked a little more kinder on the ears.

Once I done this for one song I just used the same settings for the rest of the albulm, but no reason other than time not to do each sone individually. Afterwards the albulm much was better to listen too, not perfect but certainly listenable.

Has anyone else tried anything similar?