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Good luck training a machine to decide what the perceived volume is then decide how the human ear is perceiving it in relation to the television programming. Unfortunately sound meters are how machines decide what volume is, and the sound meters only understand peaks, which are the same for the programming and the commercials.

There are average volume meters but the relationship between what they read, and what you are hearing is tenuous at best. That's why a real engineer relies on his ears, not the meters. All the meters are good for is to keep you from clipping a signal.

OK, I think we agree. It doesn't really matter what the meters display, what matters is what people hear. What I was suggesting was that a regulated broadcast/advertising industry would rely on measurements rather than subjective judgment. And that would be ineffective at best, if not downright dishonest.

You have no idea how sound engineering works...

You're right, I don't.

I'll do you a favor. Go learn something: http://www.digido.com/loudness-war-explained.html

Thanks. That was interesting.

If you want to be able to hold an intelligent conversation about sound, study every article on the site.

Get all my information on a subject from only one source? I'd rather remain ignorant thanks.

For purposes of the link I gave you, think of the original recording as the tv show, with the LOUD WIMPY SOUND BEING THE COMMERCIAL. The peak levels are the same, but the average volume (aka perceived volume) is much higher. So to make the perceived volumes match, you either brick wall limit the tv show to sound as horrible as the commercial (which wouldn't really work, continue reading), which is a violation of contract, since you are tampering with the programming, or you have a guy sitting there on the board turn the commercial down, which is also tampering with the material and will cost you your advertisers. Since all commercials are mixed differently, it'd be a non-stop job to keep the apparent volume of the commercials right and a human would have to do it.

If it were regulated there'd be no way to measure whether or not a broadcaster was compliant since all sound volume measurement devices register peak volume. The volumes would "match" right now with no regulation.

Again, I think we agree. You're adding technical weight to my somewhat cynical, uneducated, based-entirely-on-observation-and-commonsense suspicions.

The problem lies with the people that make the commercials. The engineers on the commercials are getting paid by these people and if you want to get paid, you do what you are told.

No, the problem is that the broadcasters accept ads that are too loud so the advertisers keep making them that way. They are both at fault. Although, it does make me wonder why the problem of the ads being louder than the programmed content is much more prevalent on one station than on another, even though they show mostly the same ads. (the discrepancy is particularly noticeable here in .au between Ten and Nine)

This is why I don't watch TV. TV doesn't care and I know it. I just don't like the constant auditory assault every few minutes. It drives me crazy.

Fair enough. I do watch TV, but if the ads are too loud, I hit the mute button on the remote. (Hey advertisers! Read this - If your ads are too loud, I won't hear them. Got it?)

If you don't like it, watch a pay cable channel, or watch movies. Stop supporting broadcasters that take overcompressed ads from advertisers.

Or you can complain to the broadcaster. A carefully considered, well written letter of complaint is considered far more seriously than an email or phone call. I can recall many years ago hearing that a single letter of complaint represents about 1,000 dissatisfied customers, whereas a phone call equates to about 20. And I wouldn't be surprised if an email were even less.

Good luck training a machine to decide what the perceived volume is then decide how the human ear is perceiving it in relation to the television programming. Unfortunately sound meters are how machines decide what volume is, and the sound meters only understand peaks, which are the same for the programming and the commercials.

There are average volume meters but the relationship between what they read, and what you are hearing is tenuous at best. That's why a real engineer relies on his ears, not the meters. All the meters are good for is to keep you from clipping a signal.

You have no idea how sound engineering works...

I'll do you a favor. Go learn something: http://www.digido.com/loudness-war-explained.html

If you want to be able to hold an intelligent conversation about sound, study every article on the site.

For purposes of the link I gave you, think of the original recording as the tv show, with the LOUD WIMPY SOUND BEING THE COMMERCIAL. The peak levels are the same, but the average volume (aka perceived volume) is much higher. So to make the perceived volumes match, you either brick wall limit the tv show to sound as horrible as the commercial (which wouldn't really work, continue reading), which is a violation of contract, since you are tampering with the programming, or you have a guy sitting there on the board turn the commercial down, which is also tampering with the material and will cost you your advertisers. Since all commercials are mixed differently, it'd be a non-stop job to keep the apparent volume of the commercials right and a human would have to do it.

If it were regulated there'd be no way to measure whether or not a broadcaster was compliant since all sound volume measurement devices register peak volume. The volumes would "match" right now with no regulation.

The problem lies with the people that make the commercials. The engineers on the commercials are getting paid by these people and if you want to get paid, you do what you are told.

This is why I don't watch TV. TV doesn't care and I know it. I just don't like the constant auditory assault every few minutes. It drives me crazy.

If you don't like it, watch a pay cable channel, or watch movies. Stop supporting broadcasters that take overcompressed ads from advertisers.

As for the effects from optical audio cables, they're all lying sacks of shit. You either have bit loss or you don't, any changes in sound quality is a result of the AD/DA chips or speakers, not the cable.

Most digital audio interfaces have an implicit clock that is recovered from the data being transmitted. If the interface between components is crappy, you can end up with the right bits but at the wrong time. This effectively reduces the quality of the audio. As the impact has been both measurable and audible for almost 20 years now, suggesting "you either have bit loss or your don't" is provably false. There is a clear intermediate state where bits are delivered, but with enough timing jitter that the result is slightly degraded.

Cable changes aren't necessarily the best approach to resolve this though--some audio interfaces, like the common Toslink optical one, are really problematic no matter how good the cable involved is. If you have a good enough system for these problems to be audible, using a better digital transmission interface, or something that buffers and reclocks, would be better solutions.

Suggested reading on this this topic:
Jitter explained,
Digital Domain - Jitter,
Jitter, Bits, & Sound Quality

There was a slashdot thread about it http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/09/052620 1 The most interesting link was an explanation of "the loudness wars", by a sound engineer. It has audio examples to listen to. http://www.digido.com/other-audio-articles/loudnes s-war-explained.html

Here's a great audio and visual (narrated) example of the "loudness wars" and the way that reduction in dynamic range reduces the quality of the recorded sound. Keep in mind, this isn't audiophile mumbo-jumbo... this is a very real and very unfortunate trend in what the engineers who master albums (specifically pop albums) are required to do to keep their albums "competitive" with all the other loud albums.

Most of the geeks who mentioned compression/limiting are about there - it's compression/limiting that you're after not normalization.

The funny thing I find is that our aesthetic of what makes a good piece of music has changed soooo much. In the 80's/90's we had reasonable dynamics, reverb was perhaps a little overused - but the tracks were great. These days I compare stuff done in the last 5 years and it's very very dry and the levels are a good detectable 10db higher. If they actually had the same space/reverb as the 80's they wouldn't be able to compress/limit so much because the track would sound washed out.

I'm a musician and part time recording artist and I really struggle to bring my tracks up to the same level as others - it's just that it doesn't need to be that loud and that lacking in real dynamics. One of the worst I saw recently was Maroon 5 - if you load one of these tracks into a wave editor it is fucking flat the entire way. This leaves NO room for real dynamics - I've compared it with stuff thats been mastered by Bernie Grundman (arguably one of the worlds best mastering engineers) - his stuff was about 13db quiter but so rich in terms of harmonics and dynamics because he had room to move. The Maroon 5 stuff - whilst radio-friendly scared the living shit out of me. I don't want my music to be a square wave but in order to compete I have to do that :/ If you're interested in technical, psycho-acoustics and philosophical approaches look at http://www.digido.com/. Bob Katz has a nice list of what he regards to be the best mastered CD's ever.

I know you're looking for something thats aimed at desktop speakers etc.. (oh. btw - WMP, Winamp, Foobar2000, Audacity, JAMin can all do what you want) but I've decided over the course of the last year or two that I'm not compromising my listening to compete with the latest Sony, BMG pop release - give me my DYNAMICS! This is where world/classical music will always have the advantage - to preserve that wonderful sound they need the full dynamic range. Even Trent Reznor gets this - NIN - whilst fucking loud industrial music has some good dynamics..

I'd say the fact that compressors are still being utilized is indicative that 98dB is simply not enough for the way all music is currently being engineered

I call BS, for several reasons:

First of all, audiologists have demonstrated an illusion of "louder == better" in double-blind tests on human listeners. A record that's 3 dB louder than the competition's may "sound better" to the listener even though the rest of the mastering process may have introduced more noise. Apparently, the record labels may be trying to get the record to sound "better" on already-heavily-compressed commercial FM radio (which is just one big fat advertisement for major label albums, but that's another rant for another day), and they're willing to clip the shit out of drum hits to achieve this.

Second, adult ears have greatly reduced response to frequencies above 16 kHz. I'm 23 years old, and I tested myself not to have any ABXable response above 17500 Hz. There exist noise-shaped dithering techniques that push virtually all dither noise above 16 kHz, extending the dynamic range in the most audible 2000-4000 Hz band above 120 dB.

Finally, room noise fills in a lot of the gaps. With an amplifier's volume set such that -90 dBFS is just below room noise, prolonged exposure to full-scale CD causes hearing loss. In fact, because of several reasons including the fact that the brain itself makes noise, human ears can't hear below 0 dB SPL even in the quietest of conditions. (In fact, that's part of how 0 dB SPL was defined.)

I'm all for 32-bit mixing and 32-bit early stages of mastering. I'm also all for advanced dithering techniques that give the feeling of a 20-bit master in a 16-bit literal word length. In fact, there exist several examples of great-sounding CDs mastered without hypercompression. Even for the most inept of audio engineers, most of the expensive (i.e. better than Audacity or Cool Edit) audio packages can maintain 32 bits up until final mastering and make the most of 16 bits (that is, noise shaping) when exporting to Red Book-spec audio.

I'd say the fact that compressors are still being utilized is indicative that 98dB is simply not enough for the way all music is currently being engineered

I call BS, for several reasons:

First of all, audiologists have demonstrated an illusion of "louder == better" in double-blind tests on human listeners. A record that's 3 dB louder than the competition's may "sound better" to the listener even though the rest of the mastering process may have introduced more noise. Apparently, the record labels may be trying to get the record to sound "better" on already-heavily-compressed commercial FM radio (which is just one big fat advertisement for major label albums, but that's another rant for another day), and they're willing to clip the shit out of drum hits to achieve this.

Second, adult ears have greatly reduced response to frequencies above 16 kHz. I'm 23 years old, and I tested myself not to have any ABXable response above 17500 Hz. There exist noise-shaped dithering techniques that push virtually all dither noise above 16 kHz, extending the dynamic range in the most audible 2000-4000 Hz band above 120 dB.

Finally, room noise fills in a lot of the gaps. With an amplifier's volume set such that -90 dBFS is just below room noise, prolonged exposure to full-scale CD causes hearing loss. In fact, because of several reasons including the fact that the brain itself makes noise, human ears can't hear below 0 dB SPL even in the quietest of conditions. (In fact, that's part of how 0 dB SPL was defined.)

I'm all for 32-bit mixing and 32-bit early stages of mastering. I'm also all for advanced dithering techniques that give the feeling of a 20-bit master in a 16-bit literal word length. In fact, there exist several examples of great-sounding CDs mastered without hypercompression. Even for the most inept of audio engineers, most of the expensive (i.e. better than Audacity or Cool Edit) audio packages can maintain 32 bits up until final mastering and make the most of 16 bits (that is, noise shaping) when exporting to Red Book-spec audio.

Check out this article: "How To Make Better Recordings in the 21st Century---An Integrated Approach to Metering, Monitoring, and Leveling Practices" by Bob Katz, a well-respected professional mastering engineer.

Yeah, in a compressed format

Most newer rock CDs are over-compressed in mastering anyways. For example, according to Cool Edit Pro's clip restore filter, Californication by Red Hot Chili Peppers appears to have peaks over +9 dBFS! In fact, I find it largely unlistenable unless I pass the tracks through clip restore. To avoid destroying the depth of the sound, level compression and limiting should be used in moderation.

Oh, you mean audio data compression? FLAC is a form of data reduction coding, but it's lossless. Even lossy coding (e.g. 192 kbps VBR MP3) can sound transparent to the average listener's stannous ear.

if I need to lay the smackdown on some joker in the lane next to me, I need crystal-clear high fidelity coming out of the speakers (in my trunk)!

You'll probably overdo the bass and mask the treble, so store the treble at a lower bitrate. (Do this by EQing down the treble before you encode the audio, and then reverse EQ in the car.)

Besides, any grumbling about lossy vs. lossless coding is Offtopic in a story about iTunes Music Store, which uses a lossy format for delivery.

Yeah, in a compressed format

Most newer rock CDs are over-compressed in mastering anyways. For example, according to Cool Edit Pro's clip restore filter, Californication by Red Hot Chili Peppers appears to have peaks over +9 dBFS! In fact, I find it largely unlistenable unless I pass the tracks through clip restore. To avoid destroying the depth of the sound, level compression and limiting should be used in moderation.

Oh, you mean audio data compression? FLAC is a form of data reduction coding, but it's lossless. Even lossy coding (e.g. 192 kbps VBR MP3) can sound transparent to the average listener's stannous ear.

if I need to lay the smackdown on some joker in the lane next to me, I need crystal-clear high fidelity coming out of the speakers (in my trunk)!

You'll probably overdo the bass and mask the treble, so store the treble at a lower bitrate. (Do this by EQing down the treble before you encode the audio, and then reverse EQ in the car.)

Besides, any grumbling about lossy vs. lossless coding is Offtopic in a story about iTunes Music Store, which uses a lossy format for delivery.

Radio

1. I called several stations and tried to request some of the songs on the albums from which they regularly play songs, and the DJ said: "Sorry, we don't have those songs because they were not released as a single."[1]

2. The sound quality of radio is no indicator of the sound quality of the CD itself because of all the dynamic squeezing the engineers do to fit the sound within the limited dynamic range of FM radio. Many CDs sound like crap because they're mastered to sound louder than other CDs, not to sound better than other CDs.

MTV, VH1, CMT

For one thing, music videos are made only for singles, so we're back to the same problem as radio if an album has only one or two singles. For another, if I don't have the money to buy an album based on one song, how can I have the money for cable television?

friends who have a copy of the CD

Most of my friends live far away from me and often aren't willing to mail me their copy. Is this normal?

concerts

Should I be expected to be willing to drive 200 miles (320 km) to a venue where 1. the band is playing, and 2. no alcoholic beverages are served? Many bands play mostly at bars, and not all people in my exact situation are old enough to enter bars in their home jurisdiction.

commercials on TV for SamGoody

Again, the problem of only singles.

CowboyNeal Karaoke Night

Again, the problem of geographical distance.

[1] My favorite song (nine inch nails - into the void) on one of the albums I have bought on recommendation from one of the few friends who live near me (nine inch nails - the fragile) was not released as a single in the United States.

don't forget jitter