No Oasis For Dynamic Compression

Well, this post will be hackneyed and cliched by the time you read it but, please, allow me to vent.

I just got a pair of Kef LS50s. The original. The sound of my dreams. Nick Cave has grown another foot. His piano is 12 feet long. Vampire Weekend is whole new band. Who knew that they sounded so deep and rich? Where did all those guys come from that are playing all those instruments?

But I guess that speakers that giveth also taketh away. I’ve been enjoying “Be Here Now” by Oasis recently. My previous understanding was that the band collapsed after Morning Glory (or WTSMG as their fans would put it). I was happily proved wrong. BHN is terrific and absolutely belongs in the Oasis canon.
Then I played the album through the LS50s. Hey, some albums sound better than others, it’s a fact of life. But I never delved closely into the particulars. Plus, some albums—Sex Pistols, Ramones—are supposed to sound bad. But now I had run head-on into the dread compression monster. Through the KEFs there was no mistaking it. Where were Noel’s beautiful melodies that he had stolen so carefully from the Beetles? I heard them just the other day, through my cheaper speakers. Now they were buried under a wall of sound. This was the first time I heard the compression creature in all of its gruesome horrors. It was almost unlistenable.

A bit of googling taught me that a) there’s a whole legion of people dedicated to this issue as it relates to Oasis, and b) Oasis was a particular offender of this crime.

In their defense, I note that they didn’t do it to sell records. They became overnight sensations before they knew anything about music production, they hired engineers and producers who didn’t know anything about music production, and the band was too coked up to notice or care what the tapes sounded like. But at least they weren’t sell-outs. (They didn’t need to be.)

So while I’m luxuriating in the deep, rich, Uni-Q sound, have I lost BHN forever? Will I lose I lose all of Oasis? Will other bands follow? After all, the problem only got worse after Oasis’s day. That’s a high price of admission to real hi-fi sound.

Bothered In Brooklyn