[Chiharo]

What I'm talking about is mastering, because I think that's where the things usually get screwed up with the abuse of compressors (although I'm sure none of us can know whether the person who mixed or the person who mastered screwed up (in relation to use of compression/EQ), or both).

Mixing is basically where you have everything at disposal and you put "pieces" of music/effects together. You decide where will sound come from in relation to space, and you make sure that everything is "in place" by controlling the volume of each separated recorded track (whether its vocals, instruments, etc). Mastering is more of a finishing polish that prepares all the tracks of the album for the final CD release. But it's as important as good mixing. If the mixing is bad, little can the mastering engineer do to save it. But the mastering engineer can screw up a good mix, too. So there is room that in the chain of production things could go wrong, especially if more people are involved.

All the bad things I hear in A ONE is nothing surprising to me at all, seeing as this is jpop we are talking about. By the way, I was listening to the album in the 24 bit FLAC from mora.jp. Just to be clear, I am listening through dedicated DAC and Amp + Sennheiser HD 600 (which are pretty revealing headphones, although still more musical than analytic as compared to its brother HD 700) And let me tell you that with this kind of music production you don't even need 24 bit FLAC, or even 320 kbps. Why? It doesn't really matter. You DON'T need to spend ridiculous amount of money on good audio gear if all you're listening to is (most of) Jpop. If the source material is crap, then the output is almost always going to be crap whether you listen to it at 192 kbps, 320 kbps or even FLAC. What little you can lose with lossy compression is almost negligible. Any difference you hear is most likely imagined. Especially if you listen to it straight from your computer on a pair of cheap earphones. (Let's not argue about this here; it's really just my opinion which I stand by.)

Mixing and mastering are very subjective fields, and no one can really tell you what's right or wrong. After all, music is art. BUT if you abuse something too much sonically just for the sake of wanting things to be louder than everyone else's is where there's a problem. And that's what's going on here, and in most of Jpop really, if not most of Ayumi's albums anyway. But in "A ONE", for the first time I can actually clearly hear the distortion. If all you listen to is (most) pop/R'n'b/Hip Hop/etc from 00's then you most likely have never heard what a good mixed/mastered song sounds like. Music is going downhill dynamic range wise.

Wow, okay, I really didn't want to get into this so much, but it's something that really does bother me; especially the fact that people can't even tell that something has the living sound squashed out of it (I think people not caring about sound is exactly what continues the trend of awful production in music today).

The bottom line is, in my opinion (I'm by no means a professional), A ONE sounds very unpleasant to the ears, seeing as I can't even turn the volume up without having those distorted highs attacking my ears (not on all songs, but on some yes), is unnecessarily too loud and is not how an album should sound like IMO. But keep in mind that most Ayumi's albums, or most Jpop albums in general are not to be considered as standards of good music production. Although it's nowhere near as bad as whole lecca's discography for example. So there's that.