[filoleg]

> It seems the brickwall mastering was intentionally done by Mick Gordon

Where are you getting this? His in-game music was perfectly fine, and the only instances of brickwall mastering were present within the "official OST" (that was mixed by Chad, splicing together the in-game music poorly). Which Gordon had no hand in whatsoever, outside of providing the source material, i.e., the in-game music.

[mrob]

The edits described in the article have no mention of additional dynamic range compression. The music in the OST is described as "normalized" to 0dBFS, which means simply adjusting the gain. This suggests that the dynamic range was already compressed (which is not unreasonable for game audio, because it will make the sound effects easier to hear).

[filoleg]

The edit described in Gordon's post talks about overlaying tracks with zero crossfading done and instruments clashing, all being done hastily by hand. That alone is a massive contributor to the dynamic range brickwall.

Gordon explicitly singled out those instances. He didnt say "the track as a whole has a DR brickwall through and through." He mentioned a complete lack of crossfading being the massive contributor to the brickwall and weird tempo changes, and it all checks out.

[massaman_yams]

"Brickwall" limiting is about very short-term transient compression; to oversimplify things, those limiters are operating at the timespan of 1-30 milliseconds, more or less.

These edits are a few hundred ms to a few seconds at a time, so it doesn't make sense that Gordon would refer to them as "brickwall".

(Another problem here is that evaluating a mastered waveform's dynamic range by eye is extremely subjective, and I would argue next to useless most of the time. The way these waveforms are shown in the post, we'd be hard-pressed to tell 9db (hyper-compressed) from 14db (pretty good) by eye. Professionals have software and metering to measure this; that's a much better approach.)

Bottom line: do these clumsy edits contribute to brickwalling? Really doesn't look like it, but I don't have the raw files to measure to know for sure. Are the edits good? Not in a million years.

[filoleg]

> Really doesn't look like it, but I don't have the raw files to measure to know for sure.

You have access to the official OST of Doom Eternal (which is claimed to have the brickwalling), as well as access to the in-game versions of those tracks (which you can rip out of the game or find the already-ripped ones on youtube easily). I can certainly confirm by playing the game and listening to the ripped files myself that there was no brickwalling in the in-game tracks. However, it becomes very obvious in the official OST.

[mrob]

Interesting. My initial comment was discussion of the article only. This additional information, which is not mentioned in the article, makes it seem that the brickwall mastering was not done by Mick Gordon.

[massaman_yams]

Now, applying a mastering limiter to sub-tracks? Extremely novice mistake, and could be described as brickwalling. Certainly within the realm of possibility given the novice quality of the editing here.

[mrob]

Overlapping without crossfading is strange and very likely wrong, but it cannot contribute to brickwalling unless further dynamic range processing is applied, or unless it causes clipping, which is avoided by the described normalization. No further dynamic range processing is described in the article, and no evidence of such processing is visible in the screenshots.