As I write over and over, you can't go wrong with Ma-kun. Her songs are musical, have meaningful lyrics, and just plain rocks.
Mixing is terrible as ever, though. I doubt anybody hears me, but let me explain. We (humans) like loud music. Actually, we like dynamic music, but they're actually more similar than some might think on a well mastered CD.
Unfortunately, our hearing mechanism can't take sound with high average energy for an extended period without short and long-term physical and psychological damage.
The so called "hot CD" or "loud CD" is a CD mastered with excessive dynamic range compression. That means, the CD always has high average sound energy. When one listens to a CD like this, it's highly dissatisfying because it's not dynamic. Obviously, its dynamic range is compressed to a tiny range, so there's no way it can sound dynamic. In an effort to try to compensate for it, one turns the volume up. It then becomes plain annoying because all that does is to increase the average temporal energy level up, possibly beyond the safe level, without adding any dynamics.
Basically, a badly mastered CD is either dissatisfying, annoying, or both. The only thing they're good for is listening at noisy places, like while driving. Umm, I only drive like 3,000 miles per year.
Of course, there's more to a good mastering than just avoiding excessive dynamic range compression, but just this one thing would make a huge difference because it's so incredibly bad these days.
At this point, I would like to recommend My-HiME ending theme single, "Kimi ga Sora datta" (LACM-4166) as one of the super rare, well mastered recent CDs. Wait a minute. "One of the?" I think it's the only one among the recent CDs I purchased.
