A mixing/mastering question about Def Leppard's Hysteria and its singles.

I was just curious to see if anybody knew what was up with the big notch taken out of the highs in some of the songs from the album from 15k to 17k?
I understand that CRT monitors were used in the studio and sometimes left a undesirable noise in that frequency range but why did they cut those frequencies so much? Couldn't they have just applied the filter to just some of the stems/tracks before mixing it down?

 

Considering Def Leppard's musically sonic style is high energy and LOUD, those frequencies can't be heard even in cymbal crashes. Now I'm sure there's going to be arguments about what can be heard and not heard within those frequencies but if I listened to that style of music I would be very glad they attenuated downward those frequencies because I'm likely to crank it up and there's quite a bit of non-linear behavior in that region played on a wide range of devices.

Can you think of any instrument being played that would sound terrible when played loud on that album with that notch applied?

I mean I'm having to edit big band and ' 80's synth styled CD music where I start the high frequency roll off cut at around 6000Hz because without it, when I play it cranked up on my low powered car CD player the 10kHz of screeching trumpets and singer's 'S''s feel like they're cutting my eardrums. Playing on relatively wide dynamic range speakers like my Polks 6x8's makes it even worse.

 

YouTube samples listening at 720p HD of that album pretty much convinces me they needed the notch. Wasn't familiar with that "Hysteria" album but it sounds like a typical '80's sonic quality/style, the very thing I hated about that era. Flem ridden vocals sung at the top of their lungs creates all sorts of irritatingly raspy frequencies.

Hall & Oates "Can't Go For That" is the worst I've heard.

 

Its not that it sounds terrible but is noticeable. The cymbal ride and crash on some songs doesn't sound quite right to my ears.

Could it possibly a mid/side EQ problem? I wonder if it has any pre-emphasis or some type of Dolby encoding? It sounds like it could be attenuated with TDR Nova or some type of EQ compression with a real high compression ratio and real fast attack and release.

 

Not familiar with all the hardware you mentioned. I know what you're describing about the timbre of cymbal crashes and how it's effected by EQ notches vs gradual roll offs of high frequencies. But those high frequency ranges mentioned are way too high to be heard as part of the timbre of cymbal crashes. The notch filter is most likely a noise suppressor. Just a guess.

When I'm editing already mastered music so high frequency detail sounds right, a roll off approach preserves the texture/timbre of the highs where as notches can create a kind of overly dampened or nasal pinched nose tone within velvety sounding cymbal crashes as an example. I'm not hearing a lot of noise in the YouTube samples but noise can be very high pitched where you can't really hear it "a hiss"(around 15kHz) or course and raspy (around 8kHz-10kHz), but I'm not hearing either in the YouTube samples.

 

Usually YouTube cuts the highs around 16k on most videos anyways plus on top of that the mastering guy brickwalled the heck out of the album on the most recent remasters...
It really doesn't help distinguish the sound that is heard with the added volume and distortion. I can sort of see where you are coming from, it shouldn't be audible because it's so far out in frequency but it's similar listening to a 128k MP3 or A YouTube video. I can almost usually tell when HFs are missing in a song without using Audacity or a program with a spectrum readout.

 

As to your question, no idea, but I did notice old converters were used for this-
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