Fans complain about massive distortion on retail CD that's non-existent in the GHIII DLC

Metallica's latest album, Death Magnetic, was finally released to the world on September 10 -- including to Guitar Hero III players, as the album was also released in-full as downloadable content. But according to keen-eared fans who've heard both versions, it turns out the sound quality in the Guitar Hero DLC is actually better than the quality of the retail CD. And according to Ian Shepherd, a mastering engineer and DVD author at SRT, they aren't just hearing things.

In a post on his personal blog (via Yahoo! Games), Shepherd provides photographic evidence (shown above) that the CD version of Death Magnetic suffers from far greater compression than the Guitar Hero DLC. "As you can easily see, the CD version on the bottom has been heavily compressed, limited and/or clipped, and sounds massively distorted as a result," Shepherd writes.

But why was the audio on the CD compressed so heavily? Apparently, the compression of the audio increases the loudness of the music in the CD release -- that is, if you listened to two CDs at the same volume on the same CD player, the one with compression similar to Death Magnetic would still sound louder (it's the same technique used to make television commercials sound louder than the shows they run in between). While this does result in a louder album (which you would think may be what metal fans are looking for), Shepherd also argues that it destroys the quality of the music in the process.

"In a nutshell, the continuing arms-race for 'loudness at all cost' is now dramatically damaging the music we listen to -- even in a traditionally loud, distorted genre like rock," Shepherd writes in a separate blog post. "As a result we are given squashed, lifeless and often unpleasantly distorted products to listen to. These are less exciting, less involving, less impactful and ultimately fatiguing to listen to." In his own analysis, Shepherd concluded that the CD of Death Magnetic was 10 decibels louder than the Guitar Hero DLC, which roughly translates to twice as loud to the human ear.

Obviously, that's a bummer for those who greatly care about the audio quality of their music. But hey, at least there is one better quality version of Death Magnetic to listen to, huh?