Starcamp EP - uh oh, looks like someone screwed up
Amazon JP delivered my package containing my copy of Mizuki Nana’s 17th single “Starcamp EP”. The short of it is that I was kind of surprised how much I enjoyed the single from the music stand point - I have not seen a single second of the tie-up anime “Rosario + Vampie”, not even the opening nor ending, so I approached this single purely as just more songs by Nana-chan. My original opinion of “Astrogation” holds - I enjoy listening to it when it comes up on the playlist, but it’s not one I would actively seek out to play as it doesn’t stick to my mind. “Cosmic Love” reminds me of some of the cute songs from Nana’s second album “Magic Attraction”, which I kind of enjoy. “Dancing in the velvet moon” turns out much better in recording compared to the version that Nana-chan performed at the last session of her Live Formula tour and was definitely the highlight of the single, and with a ballad “Soratokei” wraps it all up in one neat complete package. When Nana-chan claimed that this is an “all A-side single”, she wasn’t joking, as even though the songs aren’t mind-blowingly outstanding, the quality is definitely there.
However, ther was one major problem with this single. While I’m no audiophile and will not claim the ability to tell the minute difference between hi-fi equipment and a decent pair of bookshelf speakers, but one doesn’t really need to be a audiophile to tell that “Cosmic Love” and “Dancing in the velvet moon” had problems - there were massive clipping in the recording. Now on the other hand being an engineer who took some signal processing classes, I was able to quantify this by quickly looking at the waveform of the recording - and sure enough it confirms my suspicion. The recording for “Cosmic Love” and “Dancing in the velvet moon” was recorded way too loud and the majority of these two songs’ volume was over the normal threshold. To illustrate this let me show you the following:
The waveform on the top is from “Cosmic Love”, and the one at the bottom is “Meg Mell” from Clannad’s OST, which was just something I grabbed off the shelf at random. Without getting all technical, let’s just say that you want to clearly see the peaks of the waveform fall within the celling and the floor as in “Meg Mell”, and not touching and/or concentrated at the top/bottom as in the case of “Cosmic Love”, “Dancing in the velvet moon” is in the same boat as “Cosmic Love” but I’m not going to put up the graph. So if you found that the sound of these two songs on Starcamp EP sound rasped and was wondering, no it’s not what it’s suppose to sound like. At least I hope the people at King Records weren’t intending it to sound like this…
Seems that I am bitching about company failures alot lately.
February 10th, 2008 at 14:45
Something about the sound has been bugging me since day one — I hated this single at first and only slowly grew to like “Astrogation” — and I’m happy there’s some basis for this, heh!
February 11th, 2008 at 02:32
Didn’t exactly felt the clipping at first, but now that you’ve pointed it out, I did notice it. Perhaps placebo effect at work, but then it could be my 15yr old stereo speakers.
I sure hope the singles will be released in a more perfect form later.
February 12th, 2008 at 23:24
all is not lost.
try this to see if it helps.
http://www.cutestudio.net/data/products/audio/declip/index.php
February 13th, 2008 at 02:03
> Lss
Thanks for the link, will give it a try. Though the engineer in me is not too hopeful.
February 13th, 2008 at 12:24
[…] Put it in simple terms, it was recorded too loudly. So, if you play without using any external program for fine tune, you will hear the ‘noise’ thru out the song. More details can be found at seiyuu3.net. […]
February 16th, 2008 at 05:32
One of an old Hayashibara Megumi song was like this (can’t remember which from the top of my head, it was in one of her album).
Let me tell you, the clipping was _bad_, even to my poor ears…
Yes, both that album from Megu and this single from Nana-chan are from the same company XD;
February 26th, 2008 at 16:13
My guess is that when trying to normalize the tracks, someone forgot to use soft limiting; it’s surprising that someone screwed up in mixing but this could also mean that they didn’t have enough money for mastering, which is often the case for not-too-big labels.
February 27th, 2008 at 14:09
Haha, so it wasn’t my imagination when I thought I heard something grating against my ears in COSMIC LOVE. I think the clipping isn’t as bad in Dancing in the velvet moon, but maybe that’s just me.
I’m no good with sound-editing programs, so I’ll just live with it and hope the single either gets re-released, or wait for the next album :)
February 28th, 2008 at 14:31
To Yoruko
Yeah, the album is definitely worth a wait based on the compositional quality so far.