"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.