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What makes music so congested?

I just have been playing Yes Fragile. So good, haven't heard it for year being a jazz guy these days.

But man there is so much going on and it's so congested, just a mushy mix. After hearing Stanley Clark's Jazz in the Garden, Dave Holland Points of View, on which everything is so crystal clear even when lots is going on, the Yes is just almost unlistenably irritating.

Is it speakers? the CD? Amp?

How do you decongest music?
river251

Showing 1 response by bombaywalla

bombaywalla's avatar
bombaywalla
1,958 posts
 
I did a bit of research on the dynamic range of this Yes Fragile album. there was some info on a Head-fi.org forum by a person skilled in the art of mastering & there was some data on avaxhome.ws. In both locations the dynamic range of the various tracks on this album showed the range of DR12-DR10.
The info shared on the head-fi.org forum stated that tracks having a DR14 ie. a dynamic range of 14dB are likely to sound very nice & spacious. Those tracks having in the region of DR10 will sound very aggressive (due to the hard clipping of the waveforms at both the top & bottom ends thereby creating a lot of distortion).
I'm thinking that even tho' it might be your equipment the real reason for the congested sonics is that this album was compressed a lot during mastering to make it loud. You can optimize your equipment & speaker placement & that might help a bit but the source of the issue is the high level of compression in the source material. No way around this unless someone else remasters the analog tapes & we hope that the analog tapes were recorded with plenty of headroom.....

the head-fi.org forum link:
http://www.head-fi.org/t/492421/dynamic-range-of-cds-examples
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