Sonic Exciters & Enhancers...

Not sure of the extent to which they are still used & abused in mastering ?

[It's a few years I stopped reading "Sound on Sound" every month]

But I've got piles of CDs from the 1990's that were rendered almost unlistenable
by major record labels inflicting their near religious belief that recordings would be improved
by being artificially 'excited & enhanced'...

Who the f@ck actually enjoyed the ear fatiguing overemphasised harsh upper mid and treble frequencies.

Only 10 years ago, I remember a local low cost vanity production studio owner
automatically running every mix he produced through the factory preset 'enhancements'
in a new Alesis 'magic box' he'd got cheap somewhere and believed would impress his gullible music tech illiterate clients;
then handing over the finished master on a 'modern state of the art' mini disc.

.. and of course he immediately erased the multitrack tape for reuse.


Just mucking about, I discovered I could get similar 'pro sounding mastered' results by running a 2 track demo cassette
through the auto level recording audio inputs of a bog standard Sony VHS Hi-Fi video recorder....