Why Music Really Is Getting Louder

Teksty Piosenek writes "Artists and record bosses believe that the best album is the loudest one. Sound levels are being artificially enhanced so that the music punches through when it competes against background noise in pubs or cars. 'Geoff Emerick, engineer on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, said: "A lot of what is released today is basically a scrunched-up mess. Whole layers of sound are missing. It is because record companies don't trust the listener to decide themselves if they want to turn the volume up." Downloading has exacerbated the effect. Songs are compressed once again into digital files before being sold on iTunes and similar sites. The reduction in quality is so marked that EMI has introduced higher-quality digital tracks, albeit at a premium price, in response to consumer demand.'"

Comments

Also, the Loudness War

[antdude]

VideoSift mentions an one minute and 52 seconds YouTube video showing big-name Compact Discs (CDs) [and other audio sources] manufacturers are distorting sounds to make them seem louder. At the same time, sound quality suffers.

A good video explanation

[aaron p. matthews]

This video explains the effects of audio compression quite clearly, albeit the sound quality is only what YouTube can allow.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

cheers.

Re:A good video explanation

[philicorda]

"What's different now that the video shows is the peaks are not getting clipped anymore, instead they reach 0.0 db but the entire mix is digitally volume maximized so almost every single peak is that loud."

No, they are getting clipped. Have a closer look for flat topped peaks.
The damage is being done by look ahead limiters like Waves L2, which are the last process in the mastering chain.
These limiters work on psychoacoustic principles, employing some of the temporal masking ideas used in lossy audio compression to make the artifacts of very fast peak limiting as inaudible as possible.
It's known that humans cannot hear short periods of clipping distortion (less than 2ms or so), so these limiters allow that to happen, clamp down a millisecond later, and increase the subjective loudness of the signal without losing 'punch'. As this kind of limiter incorporates a delay line in the audio output path, but not the side chain, it's always looking a few milliseconds ahead and so knows how to react to a peak in advance.

The problem is that if you push a limiter of this kind really hard, it cannot keep it's artifacts inaudible, the clipped periods get longer, and the music starts to sound harsh and tiring.

It's a shame as they a beautifully clean limiters if used correctly, you can knock 4-6db of pop material without the kind of artifacts a traditional analog limiter would produce.

Good audio example

[Guanine]

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.

Re:Terminology confusion?

[mypalmike]

You are completely correct in your analysis. Compression isn't really related to compression. But it makes a good "double whammy" for the article.

Re:Terminology confusion?

[dgatwood]

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence just as easily.... The whole thing strikes me as an article written by someone who simply doesn't understand the difference between psychoacoustic-based data compression and dynamic compression....

I'd be amazed if any album other than classical music were made without compression. A drum kit or other similar drums without at least some compression sound pretty silly. Basically, you end up burying the entire mix in the mud to keep the drums from clipping... unless you record on analog tape and just let it clip (soft saturation), but in that case, you're really compressing the signal, just without calling it compression. The peak of the sound is just too soft compared to the meat of the sound to give you a usable volume without either adding compression or limiting (which is just a special case of compression).

Re:Peaking

[varkatope]

The issue isn't the peaking itself. A peak happens when a signal has surpassed what the receiver of that sound was designed for. If you pump a really loud signal into a preamp on a mixing console (even a small cheap one these days) and the "peak" light has come on, it means the signal is too loud for the equipment. It results in audible distortion and you should turn it down. What a compressor would do in this case is take the full spectrum, from lowest to highest point of the sound frequency and compress in a way that in effect, makes the highest and lowest frequencies squish into a tighter waveform. It's like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, but then shaving off the corners of the square peg to make it fit. In effect, you're avoiding actual peaking or overloading of the equipment so you can turn the signal up louder without overload. Therein lies the problem.

Compression is a necessary part of recording. Judicious use of compression can make a mix really come together and fit everything into it's right place. Notice that I said judicious. It's unfortunately a very useful tool which can easily be abused. OVER compression starts to result in the degradation of the signal. Sometimes you can hear it "pumping and breathing." Over compression is nasty, plus it destroys dynamics. Forget that crescendo on the second movement. Your violin solo is now exactly as loud as your entire orchestra. Are you excited yet? It's also extremely tiring to listen to. Take a pure square wave and pump it through a speaker. Look at that speaker and notice how fast and constantly the speaker cone is vibrating. Take your newfangled over compressed rock/pop CD and extract audio into some sort of multitracking software like Pro Tools or Ardour even. Expand the view a bit and look at the wave form. Looks a lot like a square wave the way the tops and bottoms of that wave form are chopped off doesn't it? Extract audio from a cd you really like from say, the mid 60s. Look at the wave form. There are peaks and valleys and quiet parts and loud parts, the tops and bottoms of the waveform are not chopped off. Now imagine what that new over compressed pop/rock record is doing to your eardrum even at low volume while keeping in mind the speaker cone. Your ear works a lot like that speaker cone. It's vibrating exactly as fast as that speaker cone. It's a mechanical part. There is fatigue involved. Plus it's just boring to listen to. It sucks out emotion and excitement.

By the time you hear your average top 40 hit on the radio, it has been compressed during recording twice (on individual sound sources and probably again when a stereo mix is produced), during mastering, then again at the radio station. Radio stations want their station to catch your ear, plus it helps in keeping signal strength over long distances. Labels want louder songs to compete with the other loud songs, bands want their record to sound like this other loud record, mastering engineers are asked by either the band or the label to make it as loud as possible. You know who's paying the bill so they do it. Recording engineers can be pressured to over-compress by the band or label or just by wanting to have a job in the next year and they might do it as well. Even if they turn in a good balanced mix for mastering, it's a crap shoot whether their mixes will sound the same when the record actually gets put out.

It's a shite state of affairs all around.

Loudness

[steveha]

You can read more about the loudness war here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

It really is true: if you apply too much sound-level compression to a recording, the recording sounds worse. Music is more interesting with some dynamic range. Some of my favorite classic rock songs sound much better from the CD than they do when played on the radio, because the radio station applies sound-level compression.

On the other hand, it's not really wrong for the radio station to apply the sound-level compression; you wouldn't thank them if you set your volume control knob for one song and then the next song was much louder. And the compression helps the music "cut through" the background noise of driving, so you can hear it better. But it is a pity if the CD is mastered with that kind of sound-level compression from the beginning!

Here's another really good web page about this.

http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/dynamics/dynam ics.htm

Just take a look at the Ricky Martin song. The gain was set far too high, and as a result many waveforms went outside legal bounds; when you try to master a CD with a wave that is simply too extreme to be legal, it is hard-clipped to make it legal. That sort of clipping makes an unpleasant sound, and makes the CD sound even louder. And hard-clipping means discarding audio data; there is no way to reconstruct it later.

The above is one of the reasons why vinyl LPs still have their fans. You simply cannot push an LP so hard that it's playing hard-clipped square waves. But a well-mastered CD will have more dynamic range than even the best-mastered LP, and less distortion. (Some of the distortion you get with an LP can actually improve your music, and that's another of the reasons why LPs still have fans. But you could apply a digital effect that sounded like LP distortion, if you wanted to.)

steveha

Re:The older I get the louder I need it

[ahbi]

PowerDVD
Yeah, I have to use a PC. Well, my laptop.

I usually copy a DVD or 3 to my laptop before going on a business trip. NetFlix has gotten me so DVD dependent that I can't watch normal TV anymore. So, the hotel TV is out (unless HBO just happens to have something on). (I am always stunned when I watch CNN that that is what network news has devolved into. 2-3 people screaming.)

My wife would never handle the 1.2x speed for things she watches.
My actual DVD player appliance that I bought ... mmm ... 5 years ago when they finally dropped below $100. It doesn't do sound or subtitles during fast forward. Nor does it do 1.?x speeds. Just 1, 2, 4, & 8x. Whereas PowerDVD has 1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.5, 2, and up to 32x. Normally I watch at either 1.1 or 1.2x.

I used to hook my laptop up to the TV via the S-Video port, but that is cumbersome.

Re:Sound engineers can bitch all they want,

[Hal_Porter]

Most people listen to music while doing something else, such as driving, ironing, gardening, trolling slashdot, etc.

The best music to troll to is alternative rock like Laibach since everything they did was a troll to dim witted lefties. Most real punk rockers would appreciate the concept of trolling too - consider Sid Vicious in his Swastika T shirt. Sid probably didn't like the Nazis, he just wanted to trigger a debate on their alleged crimes. Post Dead Kennedies however punks have a simplistic worldview where the US is evil and its opponents are good. If you argue with any part of it, you must be evil.

Not coincidentally, this worldview is identical to the Bush supporters' worldview they pretend to hate but with all the signs reversed, a sort of ideological mirror image. This sort of music is therefore very bad to troll to, since it is just designed to agree with the prejudices of its fans, much like Fox News does for Republicans.

If I were flaming slashdot or driving however I'd go for Neanderthal, irony challenged Rap music. Or Post DK punk, something dumb and angry.

Re:Cranked up to 11

[Eideewt]

Hearos make a good pair of reusable ear plugs for only $15. They're not as good as custom molded plugs, but they're fairly flat and don't even come close to totally messing up the sound. If you plan to go to a concert ever again, think about picking up a pair. Heck, just carry some in your pocket all the time, since you never know when you'll meet with loud noises.

I beg to differ!

[haraldm]

Compression is a necessary part of recording.

Nay, nay, and nay. The CD by its architecture has a dynamic headroom of 96 dB. Make it 90, to compensate for poor AD/DA converters. No pop band will ever use this full headroom, no matter what. Maybe classical music does, but not always. It's plenty. As an audio engineer, you can play with it just fine. The artist can express herself by using loudness levels - louder parts, quieter parts, depending on what you want to say. What happens here is audio engineers making the quieter parts louder, and limiting the loud parts so that the average dynamics is less than 30 dB sometimes, hence a millionth of what the transport medium can accomodate. The main reason is to make listening in noisy areas easier - cars, subways, in the street, etc. A song with too quiet parts will hardly get any airplay. This is mass market, not art. Hence the limiters and compressors in the studio.

Compression as such is an absolutely unneccessary part of recording, if the audio engineer knows his job, and the producer keeps his mouth shut.

Re:It is not too loud!

[KlaymenDK]

Your post reminds me of the film "All Gone Pete Tong (The Legend of Frankie Wild)". Odd title, but a light-yet-deep story about an Ibiza DJ who deals with the effects of a deafening work environment.

http://imdb.com/title/tt0388139

Watch it if you like.

I don't think you know what "compression" is...

[Joce640k]

When an sound engineer talks about "compression" he means compressing the dynamic range to make the music sound louder.

This is NOT the same thing as compressing sound to save disk space.

Not always true - the Fletcher-Munson curve

[Andy_R]

The 'smiley face' EQ curve is actually desirable if you are listening at lower than usual volume levels. It's a known property of the human ear (discovered by Fletcher and Munson in 1933) that we are better at hearing midrange sounds at low levels. While it's true that the eq will have been set by the professional engineers who recorded the music, since they do not know the volume level you will be playing it back at, they cannot compensate for the changes in eq perception at low levels (or indeed high levels). To get back to what they intended, the 'smile curve' should be applied at low levels and it's oppostite at high levels.

Re:Not always true - the Fletcher-Munson curve

[iluvcapra]

Hello, I'm a film sound designer and I LIVE for when the occasional sound article comes up on slashdot.

The parent poster is completely right, hearing damage is a function of Sound Pressure Level and time, and sound pressure level is a measurement of energy in the air, and not a measure of your perception. Something people don't recognize along these lines, is that a lot of people do terrible damage to themselves by simply driving with the car window down on the freeway, as (in our modern aerodynamic cars) the turbulent airflow can pummel your ears with LF, though it doesn't bother you because it's below 20 Hz. And the wind noise makes you turn up the radio louder.

With regard to graphic EQ, the things were invented, partly, to help engineers correct the acoustic characteristics of rooms -- if your room has a mode at 400 Hz, turn down 400 Hz, if it has some high ringiness due to some resonance, turn down the high end. A 30 band graphic EQ is ideal for this sort of work because some rooms have a bunch of little peaks and troughs on an RTA and you'd need a ton of parametric EQs to do the same goofiness. A 5 band graphic EQ is just for show, you need at least 10 before you can do anything particularly fun, and even then in a car I can't imagine where it'd get you. Maybe you could shape the music over the engine noise or something :P If you want the music to stay loud over engine noise, you're better off using the automatic level control, if your car has one (it's basically a compressor, the audio kind, not the data kind).

It should go without saying, if you want to hear the song the way the band mixed it, they listened to it with a flat EQ, and if you want to enjoy the nuances of a piece of music, don't listen to it in a car. Also, the standard practice in music mixing since forever is to record the song as loud as possible without distorting on the medium. Compression (the audio kind) is a style thing, and bands have been using since the beginning of rock and roll, and particularly with CDs, the music is physically incapable of getting any louder on the medium. You kids have just been cranking up your damn volume knobs.

Re:The older I get the louder I need it

[DerekLyons]

I have noticed that the older I get the louder I need music to be. Especially voice. In fact I am 35 and I watch all DVDs with the subtitles. (Of course, part of that is that I watch a lot of DVDs at 1.2x to 2x speed, but ... Really who the Hell could actually stand "A Scanner Darkley" at normal speed?) But back to my point, as I age I am less and less able to sift background noise from speech. And we now live in an aging society.

If you are experiencing significant hearing loss at 35... one of three conditions exist; a) you work in a job that has damaged your hearing (unlikely with OSHA etc...), b) you have a medical condition (unlikely, but possible), or c) you've been listening to loud music/tv/whatever for so long you've damaged your own hearing.