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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.'"
You are too old!
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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).
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
but if the music keeps selling, the labels are providing exactly what the cloth-eared idiot masses want, and in the end they're out to make a profit, not "quality music."
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.
Is it just me, or does that article (intentionally?) confuse the two meanings "compression" can have with regards to digital audio? The loudness bit is audio compression: reducing dynamic range (which they do talk about). Then, they bring in the bit about data compression and the EMI iTunes Plus downloads, which is entirely different (admittedly, it also introduces artifacts, but of a completely different nature). The bit about the Los Lonely Boys album "compression-free" could easily be free of either (or both!) kinds of compression.
While the logical part of me chalks it up to confusing terminology being misunderstood, part of me wonders if those meanings are being intentionally conflated to make the article more impactful... it would sound less impressive if EMI wasn't "admitting there is a problem with compression"
I recognize people by their sigs. Is that a bad thing?
The problem is that todays speakers go up to eleven. That one louder...
:(){
We always called it "peaking", and it's something that everyone who's recorded an album in the spare bedroom of their band mate's house can attest to - if you record with fewer peaks (places where the sound wave maxes out at the top of the available volume area), it sounds better. It just plain sounds better.
But, take songs off that CD and slam them onto a mix-tape style rotation or an iPod, and you'll be reaching to turn up the volume every time your song comes on.
From what I can tell, recording engineers are responding to the bands who don't want people to have to turn the music up (in particular record execs). It's one of those terrible problems - if everyone would agree on such-and-such date to back off the recording volume and get less peaks (say, no more than 7 per album), everyone's music would instantly sound better. But the fact that everyone's competing, and you don't want your copycat pop punk band to be the quiet one, means it's a self perpetuating problem.
~X
sig?
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.
Long live ears!
What are we talking about?
It's involves all audio devices in general, although it could have to do with unintentional design specifications.
More often than not, I find that I need to set the Windows master volume to an extremely low level - one or two pixels above silence. After that, I need to set the wave volume to that same region - near the bottom. Next, my speaker volume is set to low as well. After all this, I'm actually comfortable with the standard operating system sounds.
Unless there's some boost or gain that I haven't noticed, it's more than just the music industry that's having problems.
I find the notion that people are unfamiliar with their volume knobs ludicrous. Putting together tracks with more dynamic range isn't going to make people listen to them at whisper quiet levels -- they're going to turn it up to normal listening volume.
I suppose the good news is that we literally can't compress music more than we are now. We've hit the wall, and the only way to go is the right direction.
if your music sounds good on an iPod, you're listening to crap.
Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
Some studios indeed attempt to make the end result of their recordings louder. Why? For one, because the client wants their recording to sound as loud as the other recordings they own. Another, better reason is because it will lift up some detail from below the noise floor into the audible range. Only thing is, there is such a thing as the 'maximum amplitude' that one can represent on the medium. Let's call it 10, these people want to push the volume up to 11 because it will give them a richer listening experience. Now there are various way to do that in the studio. Simplest way is just to make it 'one louder'. Something along the lines of 1. select all, 2. amplitude->maximize, 3. amplitude->amplify->110%, 4. file->save 5. Profit! However this will clip the sound (most likely the bassdrum, in the case of rock bands). This is what the article is complaining about. Example: the Californication album from the Red Hot Chilipeppers. With good (monitoring) speakers you can hear the clipping in the bassdrum. But it's trivial to see this clipping with a wave editor. A better way to up the average volume is to use a dynamic range compressor- smooth out peaks to make them less high, then do amplitude->maximize, and the result is a louder sounding recording without audible artifacts (when properly done). Unless you have a trained studio ear, you'll rarely notice the loss of dynamics, because, that is what a dynamic range compressor is for. However, in extreme cases we *do* notice. In classical recordings, louder passages may not "jump out" so much anymore). So instead of having a richer listening experience, you end up with a poorer one. So it's all a tradeoff. The problem depends on the material that is recorded. You can't go and treat all music styles in the same way. Usually classical recordings do not contain as many 'little detail sounds' as current studio recordings, so you want to do as little as possible to the dynamic range and let the listener decide how loud (s)he wants it. Pop recordings usually do not need as wide a dynamic range, so the sound level is upped artificially. Either way, the sound engineers and record companies are aiming for the richest possible listening experience, albeit in different and opposite ways. In that sense sound engineers and programmers share one thing: they usually have big egos and like to badmouth their competition. Geoff Emerick doesn't seem to be an exception to the rule.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Sadly, you don't have to go back to the vinyl days for examlpes of this.
The "engineering to death" that you talk about is usually dynamic range compression, where you artificially limit the difference between the softest and the loudest sound reproduced in the media. Compression is very useful in certain situations (guitar compressors are fairly popular to "focus" the sound of the instrument, and compressing vocals is a common practice), but nowadays it has become popular to over-compress pretty much everything in modern music. The net result is that the music appears louder, since the volume variations are reduced, but what you get is tracks where it is impossible to discerne fine details - everything feels mashed together, in a way. This might be good for certain styles (hiphop, perhaps), but the practice is so extended that it has become impossible to find new music with proper production and mixing.
Adding insult to injury, it has also become very common to boost the audio levels (volumes) in the CDs so much that they "grow" outside the margins that the media offers, again, trying to make it sound louder and meaner. This is called clipping, and creates clearly audible, horrendous distortion. I've noticed this in a shitload of new tracks, and it boggles my mind that anyone might find ok to distribute audio in that state.
Nowadays i have a hard time finding music produced after mid 90s' that doesn't suffer one of these symptoms. Pop music, particularly, is horrid in this sence. The art of subtely crafting layers of sound seems to be lost... and i'm not saying that every band should sound like Pink Floyd, but, for Gods' sake, when you have all the instruments sounding constantly at the same level in a rock trio it just becomes annoying. Tool is one rock band i've discovered still cares about proper mixing, off the top of my head. On the other hand, i fell in love with the self-titled CD of Army of anyone... or their songs, atleast. It's a shame such a fine album can wear you out after a few listens because of poor mixing.
Basically, TFA is written by someone without the first clue about the difference between dynamic range compression and lossy audio data compression.
The two have absolutely nothing in common and yet they are somehow grouped together by the author.
THAT'S NOT TRUE. HEARING LOSS CAUSED BY LOUD MUSIC IS A MYTH SPREAD BY BORING PEOPLE.
I had to put this in because the lameness filter doesn't have a sense of humour or irony.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
So... replaygain?
There's a version of the 1812 Overture with real cannon fire that will blow out your speakers if the volume is too high. I been trying to get my friend to play that on his 1969 Marshall amp to see if that would happen, how many windows it would take out in the neighborhood and how fast the landlord would kick him out.
I have noticed that the older I get the louder I need music to be. Especially voice.
... Really who the Hell could actually stand "A Scanner Darkley" at normal speed?)
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
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.
You can read more about the loudness war here:
m ics.htm
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/dyna
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
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Couldn't we just add a tag to every track with a floating point number by which to multiply the magnitude of all the samples in that track by default.
You already have a built in upper limit, normalizing the range to that limit fixes the problem.
Normalize-audio is a package that does this. Here's what the Debian repository says:
The package also works on ogg vorbis and mp3. You can do it on ripping, or playback. Each song can be normalized individually or as a collection. The result is that you don't have to reach for the volume knob all day.
You are SOL if the record company has already applied dumb techniques to the CD before you get it. Peak "compressing", where all of the peaks are maxed out is a real distoriton of the original sound. When you add a heavy handed turn up that clips as well, you get Californication as mentioned. As the article also notes, it's difficult to digitize clipped audio. A clipped wave is like a square wave - it has all frequencies and takes lots of bandwith.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
It's tough being able to hear.
I know what you mean, and I'm not even old and wise. I went to a concert for the first time in a few years, and was reminded of why I stopped. I had to wear ear plugs most of the time, which, since they don't attenuate all frequencies evenly, totally messed up the sound.
Imagine if, when you entered an art gallery, they stabbed out one of your eyes. That's how much sense it makes to destroy people's hearing when they go to concerts.
WHY are albums mastered so damn loud?
It's a vicious circle and it is caused essentially by one feature: shuffle mode.
Here's how the problem reveals itself:
Band A decides they want to have the "heaviest, loudest album ever made", so they tell the mastering engineer to make their master louder.
Band B is hears Band A's album and wants to be louder (or at least AS LOUD) as Band A. So they tell their mastering engineer to pump up the volume, too.
Assume the same thing happens with Bands C through L.
Now Band M comes along and they've had these other 12 albums playing on iTunes while they're mixing their album. Band M isn't so concerned with being "the loudest", but when the put their ref CD into iTunes and are listening in shuffle mode, their songs get completely drowned out by a factor of 6-12 dB of amplitude difference.
So Band M now asks their mastering engineer to make their master louder so they'll match up with everyone else's.
And Bands N-Z follow suit.
It's a very difficult domino knockdown to break out of, since no one wants to make the album that is super quiet and requires intervention with the volume knob. (Yes, I'm aware of the "Sound Check" feature in iTunes, but that's just a lousy attempt to solve the problem with technology.)
In 2005 I recorded an album for a Hawaiian band. It was gorgeous and I convinced the band to master the album at Universal because I knew the main mastering engineer and was adamant that he was the ONLY guy who could do the record justice. I was also adamant that the album did NOT need (and would avoid) any compression.
We only boosted the overall level of the album by 4 dB and that was purely using a limiter to ensure no overs.
I then sent the first ref CD to the band member who couldn't be present. He was thrilled with the mastering but had just one question: Do they make it louder when the CDs get pressed?
I told him that it was at the level I was recommending and that Mastering was the time to change levels, but that we really wanted it to sound good, not loud. His response? "Oh. But it's so much quieter than every other CD I own."
And he's right. Compared to every CD that has come out in the past 5 years, his album is seriously quiet. Possibly as much as 8 dB quieter than current albums. And maybe we did it TOO quiet. But it matches in amplitude to CDs that came out in 1989, back when some dynamic range was still an OK thing in music. Nowadays we don't like ANY dynamics.
So who is right? And can we go back?
I've been a HUGE advocate of dynamic range and NOT destroying our months of hard work at the last step in the process. But I can only do what my clients want. And I was really hoping we had a chance with DVD-Audio and other surround formats, but the over-compressors are winning out there, now, too. And it's a bigger problem on that format, since you are now forcing people to change levels between movies and surround music, when both are calibrated identically.
Jory
"The brain is not geared to accept buzzing. The CDs induce a sense of fatigue in the listeners. It becomes psychologically tiring and almost impossible to listen to. This could be the reason why CD sales are in a slump."
The <b> is added for emphasis. The "buzzing" is clipping - where the audio signal peaks and the wave is squared off. Cloth ears don't make you immune to that.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
In blind testing of audio equipment, it is critical to match volume levels within a fraction of a decibel. That is because people have a strong tendency to prefer a slightly louder source. In blind testing, listeners will describe the louder source as better in all sorts of subjective ways that have nothing to do with loudness: brighter, richer, warmer, etc. This happens with any kind music, from chamber music to stadium rock.
I think the article oversimplifies somewhat by casting this as a matter of taste for loud rock music, rather than a more subtle issue of psychoacoustics.
It's been going on for years - Oasis albums are basically unlistenable: horribly engineered, and they actually sound clipped. The newspapers wheeled out the example of Californication (Red Hot Chili Peppers) last week and they are right. Not quite as bad as Oasis, but half of the tracks are unlistenable. It ruins good songs like Californication itself.
I also find it really annoying to have the volume level OK, then suddenly everything is too loud and distorted when the next album comes on, because some asshat of a recording engineer pushed the levels up until the waveforms clipped.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
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...
Get a set of these:
:)
http://www.etymotic.com/ephp/er20.aspx
I never go to clubs/raves/live music events without them. It makes it heaps easy to talk to people when wearing them too
While most people here think if RIAA as an evil anti-sharing group, back before they turned to the dark side, they used to set decent audio standards. Too bad that was in the era when hi-fi records were new.
The volume compression crud is one of their more recent "technology advancements". Volume compression is isn't data compression but reefers to horizontally compressing the waveform or boosting the quiet bits and cutting the loud bits.
This is why modern music has no emotion. The soft bits get boosted and the high energy bits get clipped. It is why most remastered CDs suck so bad.
Its also why rap is so popular. Rap's verbal beat messes up the auto-compressors and break them and since rap is about the only modern music that has an energy, its got a huge younger following.
Television commercials have had the volume artificially jacked-up for many years, perhaps decades now? To rephrase the OP quote: "It is because television companies don't trust the viewer to decide themselves if they want to pay attention during commercials." So they crank it up to make damned sure we do.
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.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Classical music public radio stations are supposed to be bastions of sanity and concern for quality, right?
Well, the choir I'm in collaborated with another choir and the local symphony orchestra to put on Carmina Burana. So we did -- great show and such. The recording was broadcast by the local public radio station the next day. I recorded it off the air (with decent equipment that isn't the culprit), since the symphony wasn't going to make their recording available to the singers (something about union rules).
Carmina starts (and ends) with the piece "O Fortuna" -- you've probably heard it. Theme song to Excalibur, used and spoofed in tons of advertisements, etc. There is a short (~15 second) ridiculously loud introduction, about a minute of very quiet music, thirty seconds of loud, and then forty seconds of extreme loud -- if you know the piece you know what I mean. All the dynamic changes are sudden. It's the poster child for dynamic range, and the effect is wonderful.
I get the recording, and the quiet bit is just as loud as the rest. WTF? I pull the waveform on Audacity -- flat.
Aargh!
Then I started listening, and you can hear it all over the place in much of their music. Peak limiters and such kick in to reduce the level whenever there is a high-amplitude sound... so you can actually hear the rest of the orchestra suddenly get softer when the bass drum goes off. The bass drum isn't that *loud*, thanks to the response curves of human ears and the frequency-power connection, but it is high-amplitude and triggers the peak limiter like nobody's business. (Orchestral bass drums have a very, very deep sound.)
It's ridiculous.
Finally you get to the heart of the matter.
Get Audacity. Import a few tracks off of modern CDs. Look at the squared off waveforms. Then take a CD from, say, the late 1980s or early 1990s and look at the waveforms on that. Note the less clipped waveforms? Then take a listen. You will be amazed.
Oversaturating analog tape is fine because the clipping is more organic and less buzzy. In fact, you get a bit more presence from "recording hot." Oversaturating digital recording media? You get ugly digital clipping, artifacts, and buzz galore. Yet numb-nuts producers insist on "recording hot" when recording to digital. Result? Crappy recordings.
I am always struck by how wildly better the state of recording in the '70s was to what it is now. This is part of the reason. Don't get me started about Autotune.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
The reference CD for amazing dynamic range on a popular rock album is Pink Floyd's "The Wall". We can argue about the music, the lyrics, the message, but there's no arguing that the recording, mixing and mastering of this album is second to none in the pop and rock world. The quiet birds chirping just before the girl says "Look mummy, there's an airplane up in the sky" contrast sharply to the smashing of the televisions or the deafening helicopter.
:)
As far as truly loud rock and roll albums, Robert John "Mutt" Lange (aka Mr. Shania Twain) has a long tradition of producing punchy, loud rock albums that still manage to keep a decent dynamic range....Def Leppard, The Cars, even AC/DC albums produced by "Mutt" are layered with music without compressing it beyond listenability (if that's a word).
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
BSplayer (get older versions, new ones are adware) offers playback speeds between 1% and >500% in one percent intervals, though no built-in pitch-correctionh _modification,)
/w included libcodec ) 5% intervals between 5% and 300% percent with acceptable quality, 270% speed works fine on 800MHz P-III.
/w EAX provided Time Scaling.
& cid=7113290
(ie. Time stretching, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_timescale-pitc
with winamp plugins such as Chronotron from 25% to 400% in 0.1% intervals with very good sound quality but brings a 2.4GHz P4 down to it's knees at >200% speeds.
With Adapt-x + Studiotime (http://www.acondigital.com/us_StudioTime.html ) not quite as great a quality, 0.1% between 33% and 200% with far lower CPU usage.
With The KMPlayer (http://www.kmplayer.com/forums/index.php , portable software
Hardware solution: Creative Audigy series sound cards
GOMPlayer : very similar to KMPlayer except not portable, 10% to 400% in 10% intervals.
Without subtitles , usually watch at speeds between 200% and 250% , except for Gilmore Girls.
With subtitle , between 270% and 300%.
All that comes via Television watched as described in this post:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=80789
When you talk about digital audio "compression" you have to be careful because compression means a different thing at different stages of audio production. I have yet to see an article on the Internet about digital audio and compression where the author didn't mix this up at least once.
DYNAMICS COMPRESSION (compress the audible dynamic range)
During mixing and mastering, the dynamic range of the audio content is compressed. The softest sounds are made louder and the loudest sounds are made softer. This is what music and audio people think of first if you talk about compression.
Dynamics compression has nothing at all to do with bits, this can be done acoustically, electrically, or digitally, it is about audio. The human ear does outrageous dynamics compression. Analog tape machines have a built-in dynamics compression that is considered to be musically useful and that is imitated today by digital. If you don't do that, you don't have "rock" music. Take away a rock band's dynamics compression and you have a really lame jazz combo, it is all the same instruments, the difference between the sound of jazz and rock drums is 98% dynamics compression. For rock vocals the compressor/limiter is more important then the microphone. Whether the singer whispers or screams it should all be the same volume. If it is not, you can't believe the complaining you will hear about it from everybody because that is not what rock singing sounds like. It is all the same volume. Go and listen to your records, the singer is right there in the front of your skull the whole time.
If you want music with a broad dynamic range there is plenty of it around, it just doesn't sell very well. With a broad dynamic range you have to turn up the volume high to catch the low sounds, and you have to shut the fuck up so you can actually listen to the musical presentation like you would a concert performer. This covers at most 10% of music listeners who are going to do that. Most people listen to music as an accompaniment to their lives like a movie soundtrack. They are running or partying or dancing or reading or whatever while they listen. For that purpose you want the dynamic range to be tight or you will miss a lot of music.
DATA COMPRESSION (compress the amount of disk storage used)
After mixing and mastering, you can make a mix that takes up about half the file size by compressing the data in the file, same as making a Zip archive. This is what computer people think of when you say compression. The bit stream that the player sees is the same as raw audio, but on disk it is compressed data.
LOSSY COMPRESSION (compress the amount of playback bandwidth required)
Finally, you can encode a mix into a lossy format, and the encoder will throw data away in order to compress the bandwidth the file requires to play in real-time. This is how MP3 and MP4 do it. This is what video people think of when you talk about compression, because this is also how DV and many other video-related formats keep their file sizes low enough to be practical.