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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.'"
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.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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.
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.
I got a fever...and the only cure is more cowbell!
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.
No sig today...
"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.