Slashdot Mirror
The "Loudness War" and the Future of Music
An anonymous reader notes an article up at IEEE Spectrum outlining the history and dangers of the accelerating tendency of music producers to increase the loudness and reduce the dynamic range of CDs. "The loudness war, what many audiophiles refer to as an assault on music (and ears), has been an open secret of the recording industry for nearly the past two decades and has garnered more attention in recent years as CDs have pushed the limits of loudness thanks to advances in digital technology. The 'war' refers to the competition among record companies to make louder and louder albums by compressing the dynamic range. But the loudness war could be doing more than simply pumping up the volume and angering aficionados — it could be responsible for halting technological advances in sound quality for years to come... From the mid 1980s to now, the average loudness of CDs increased by a factor of 10, and the peaks of songs are now one-tenth of what they used to be."
Amps that only go up to 7. Because 7 is quieter than 10.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Are TV adverts where they do exactly the same. It means I either have to muck around with the volume I was happy with or change channel. Obviously I do the latter.
Deleted
Here's a good video outlining what the record companies have been doing.
Wikipedia has a decent article on the Loudness War, complete with interesting graphics of the same song from newer and older releases.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I have a few CDs that I just can't listen to, because it's just a continuous blast of noise from one end to the other. All concept of light and shade is lost. It just sounds horrible.
If I want it to sound loud, I'll turn the volume up.
Lets see... if they make it louder, I can turn the volume down, to a minimum of 0 (no sound). If they make it quieter, I can only turn it up to max, then if its still not loud enough I won't be able to hear it. I don't think it's that tough of a choice. Besides, if I take a lower-max-volume audio stream and turn it up "too loud" it doesn't seem to sound as good as when I have a higher-max-volume stream that I have to turn down the volume. Maybe its my speakers, but I'd rather have the choice of volume than to be tied to one setting or another.
And they said zombies weren't real!
All the record companies are interested in is maximizing profits.
A few years ago, my in-laws bought one of those digital satellite TV setups. Not bad, a pain when it rained, but otherwise aok. I recorded a few shows onto VHS, for posterity. Well, I visited there, and it still looked fine, especially compared to my digital TV at home, but then I popped in the old VHS tapes... something's happened to the picture. The shows I recorded years ago are sharper, and more pleasing than the modern footage. Then I began digging up old 3/4 and 1" masters from even further back, even better looking still. Then I bought myself a Super8 film camera previously used as a newsreel camera in the 70's. The footage it shot looks astounding.
And then I began looking at my digital cameras output vs my grandfathers old Yashica 35mm. The camera made in 1973 was blowing away $8000 Canons!
We are in an age of eroding quality. The DVD player you buy today likely will not last as long as the one you bought 5 years ago. Companies are cutting every corner they can to reduce cost, and telling us all the way how much better the new systems are.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Just releasing tracks that are much quieter than the current standard is going to be annoying for a lot of listeners.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
For the tin-eared masses. The bar of quality for audio/music/telephony has never been lower. We now accept crap MP3 audio as "acceptable", stuttering vocoders and dropped calls as "tolerable", and reduced/compressed bandwidth as "louder (hence better)". We are now getting spoon-fed the worst quality audio since wax recordings and the Western Electric "Noiseless" recording system of movies from the 30-40's. And like everything else around us that continues to suck worse and worse, we take it in stride, shrug and say "well, it sounds good enough, I guess."
Don't get me wrong - I'm not a Luddite, and I love the Digital revolution of music. I am just sickened by it's apparent side-effects, and AMAZED at the tolerance we the "consuming public" have for getting fed shit. As long as we accept this as the standard of quality we find acceptable, the various producers and manufacturers will keep feeding us more and crappier garbage.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
You just need to turn it up to 11.
:: Save Us Oh Lord From The Wrath Of The Norsemen
Isn't there a problem, for people too accustomed to hearing pre-recorded music, that they will be conditioned not to look for the missing dynamics? What are the long-term effects on one's hearing?
Thank goodness for software solutions that at least lets you normalize your music collection.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Call me stupid, but........
WHY?
I mean, it's not like you're going to let the purchase of a cd depend on the volume lvl it was recorded on. Or am I getting that old?
Life starts at the end of your comfort zone.
Maybe there is a connection? As music gets more industrialized and standardized, nobody cares anymore about having the lastest stuff?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Actually, the same thing is happening at live gigs. I was at a Jazz gig recently (not exactly loud thrash metal ;-) ).
It was your typical Jazz club, small, smoky, excellent atmosphere. I could talk quietly at one side of the room and you would be able to hear me with no problems.
But the jazz bands that go there all have amplification. why?
America, Home of the Brave.
Has anyone done a study to find out if loudness is inversely corollated to the quality of the band? Does a modern pop group get amplified but they leave classic acts (pick your own favorite great rock band) alone? In that case I'd say the record companies are doing it because they know full well the level of crap being pushed on consumers and are trying to milk every last penny they can.
I'll also say that if they screw with Dark Side of the Moon so you hear that heart beat in the middle of every song I'll be pissed!
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
In related news [in Dutch], earplugs are becoming common among the *audiences* of pop concerts.
I think that is really shocking: they are turning up the volume so much that people who haven't destroyed their hearing yet (and are not planning to do so) need earplug to listen to a concert! I am pretty sure that turning up the volume at the speaker and then applying a very low-tech filter to turn the volume down at the ear can't be good for the quality...
That was a great video explaining the problem. I had no idea things like that were going on.
I don't understand why it is felt necessary to record the music "loud", though. Don't they know people can and will adjust the volume however they want with the volume control on their stereo? I don't understand the perceived benefit.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Doing this makes most popular music sound much "better" at low-fi audio equipment such as portable cd players, mp3 players, $100 home "mini" stereo sets and cheap surround sets.
When I say "better", I mean that these devices cannot play the full dynamic range that an expensive HiFi set could, which means you'd miss part of the music if a CD is mastered the "old" way, as compared to a CD that is mastered using dynamic range compression.
Now you may guess how many people these days spend $3000 (or even $1000 for that matter) to buy just an amplifier, a CD player and 2 speakers, as compared to the amount of people who listen several hours a day to MP3 players, cheap (portable) sets etc.
That's why "they" are doing this.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
I blame Phil Spector. Thank God he's been brought to trial for his crimes.
+0 Meh
There is your first problem. People who look at music as an elevated art that needs to be bowed down to.
Coming from someone in the field, paid by the people you all hate, and also holds undergrads in areas of perception and music and currently working on my final thesis beyond that, we are giving the listeners what they want. This has been well documented over the years that the loudness and distortion are only problems upon multiple listenings, and even then, only upon critical review, hence the idiots that want to know how Rikki Rocket blickemed the drum solo in the 1983 line up of Poison.
In other words, it doesn't matter.
What do listeners want? They want wallpaper. They want something even and uneventful that they can drive to. 95% of all music listened to these days is listened to in the car. That is what it is sold for. Drivetime radio, or burning iTunes tracks to listen to between 730 to 845 and then again at 530 to 645. Two hours a day.
Personally, I don't care much for what recorded music sounds like. I've had my share and I've never heard anything even remotely close to what I know it the real thing. I could care less that the RIAA is beating down teens who pass bad music, I think it is a lesson in aesthetics, not economics, because I don't know anyone in the music industry that likes the crap kids are listening to. This is why we all have our secret bands that we get signed for the fuck sakes of getting signed, promote them all we can, knowing none of the tin-eared teens are going to appreciate it, and take time away to personally make certain that the shit is recorded correctly. The rest? Who the fuck cares. I say jail anyone listening to it.
So if things are clipped and enloundened, you only have bad listeners and human psychoacoustic understanding to blame.
Seriously, I don't see the problem. Decreased dynamic range is good, as far as I'm concerned. It means you set the volume where you want it and it *stays* there. Most of the music I listen to has a fairly narrow dynamic range. Most Bach pieces, for instance, have pretty much a steady volume for the entire piece. You don't find yourself straining to hear and cranking the volume up to 11 one minute just to convince yourself the speakers are still attached and then covering your ears and dragging the slider back down to 2 the next moment to avoid angering the neighbors across the street, like you do with Beethoven and his ilk.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
The amount of compression they apply to do this may not be noticeable on portable radios, car radios, and mini hifis and the like, but I know that I can't play the Oasis album "What's the story (Morning Glory)" on my main hifi as the compression sounds just too strange when played thru a proper amplifier and set of speakers.
Explains why people listen to awful demos in department stores (those horrible tinny Bose cube things with terrible hissy fizzy treble and booming vague bass) and think they sound good simply because it's turned up loud for the midrange.
And no, I don't have "exotic cables", just quality speakers and a hefty power amp with plenty of headroom to spare.
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
Unfortunately they are giving people (the masses) what they want. I love the dynamics in music and it is one of the elements that makes it interesting, but a lot of people don't.
I hate to make the stupid food analogy, but here it goes. I grew up on home cooked meals and I like a lot a variety. I like all kinds of vegetables and spices. A lot of younger people I know grew up on McDonald's and Pizza and that is all they will eat. Everything else sucks. It is the same with music, I grew up listening to many types of music from classical and jazz to rock and country. I can enjoy most any music and find elements I like in many different styles of music.
A lot of younger people I know grew up in the age of Clear Channel radio stations where you are pigeon holed into one very narrow genre of music. The most popular genres have become almost free of dynamic variety to the point that people don't want to hear it. The record companies are giving people what they want.
Maybe this has to do with what Bob Dylan was talking about earlier when he mentioned the lower sound quality of modern recordings.
Happy people make bad consumers.
Why is it that articles like this hardly ever include audio examples? Without audio examples, it's drastically more difficult for a casual reader to understand what they're talking about. As it stands, the article aims itself at the small group of people who know enough about sound to understand what they're talking about, but not enough to already be familiar with it. This problem seems to be pervasive amongst sound/music writers, they'll spend paragraphs trying to describe a sound in vain rather than just including an audio file and allowing the sound to speak for itself. This may be understandable in print publications, but on the web it's just ridiculous.
Trying to describe a sound is often difficult to the point of being futile. Don't bother, just let us listen to it and reserve the writing for describing other things about the sound. Let audio and print do what each does best.
I'm curious if there might be any connection between overloud music and the increasingly popular observation that modern music is inferior to older music? I'm sure engineered bands are somewhat to blame for this, and it does seem that people tend to prefer the music they grew up with during their teens and early twenties.
n dustry.html They even used "Far Cry"! I swear I typed the above before I found this link.
But then there's the case of bands that have existed for twenty or more years. One of my favorite such bands is Rush. I'm not exactly an audiophile, but their later releases seem to suffer from being overloud. The new Snakes & Arrows album has a track "Far Cry" which I think might have been fantastic had it been mastered 15 years ago.
Upon typing the last statement their, I figured I'd do a quick search for "snakes and arrows loudness". WOW:
http://fudgeland.blogspot.com/2007/06/snakes-in-i
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
Yep, I'm one of those. The volume at concerts is getting SO LOUD that my ears are "clipping", and the distortion is so bad that I can't really hear the music. Stuff in some earplugs, drop the level a few dB, and now I can hear everything clearly. Yeah it can't be good for audio quality, but it's better than the auditory overload.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Sometimes dynamic compression is a good thing all around.
I often am forced to listen to my music in either a loud environment or in an area where I must keep the music volume as low as possible. A wide dynamic range means that in order to hear the quiet parts, the louder parts are unacceptably loud.
Yes if all I ever did was listen to music inside a quiet, soundproof room all by myself, then I'd want the widest possible dynamic range. But since I am almost never in that situation, I find myself artificially compressing the dynamic range myself because I want to be able to hear the quiet parts without bugging everyone else or blowing out my ears during the loud sections.
Plus I'm not an adolescent gangsta wannabe so overall volume and the ability to irritate others by playing my music at full volume simply isn't an issue. And frankly I couldn't care less about the type of music where that sort of thing is an objective, so if that sort of music is "ruined" by dynamic compression it just doesn't bother me in the least. I'm not going to stand on principle to save from destruction something I find offensive, and it's silly to try to get people concerned about the destruction of an industry that they find offensive. I like classical music and rock, and as far as I can tell neither one is being ruined by dynamic compression. You still need a quiet environment to really experience good classical music, and somehow I don't find myself too concerned with not having to strain to hear the words in Holiday or September.
If you're offended by me listening to me listening to Mozart with my windows up and the system down, let me know and I'll see what I can do to be less irritating (heh).
I listen mostly to modern rock. I was curious to see how much I'd gotten used to the compression of modern albums. After reading the Wikipedia article, I saw they mentioned that Superunknown, so I pulled it up. Keep in mind I haven't listened to it in several years.
Wow! I'd forgotten music could sound this good! And I'm not even a huge fan of grunge these days. The lack of compression in the music seems to make it less tiring to listen to. The soundstage is bigger, the music seems to breathe a little more, and it generally ebbs and flows more. I'm listening on a pair of $30 Sennheiser headphones, not audiophile-grade equipment by any means.
Once again, we see the danger of pandering to the lowest common denonimator: you end up pissing everyone off eventually. It is a shame that we persist in thinking this is necessary. Of course, it is difficult to be surprised by it, given that the music industry is about selling the performer as a product instead of producing art.
Don't we see one of these articles every six months or so?
It's kind of like complaining about fast food: everyone knows it's bad for you, yet people continue to buy it in mass quantities.
There's just not enough people who:
a) Care enough about sound
b) Have equipment good enough to reveal the difference
c) Have sources for the better stuff
- Jasen.
I appreciate the lengths some modern recording artists go to in order to create dynamic, intricate recordings (nine inch nails' The Fragile comes to mind, or the 10th anniversary edition of The Downward Spiral) but I also like listening to the likes of The Mummies and Mr Oizo (who publishes under "one speaker is enough" music, iirc).
I have long thought that it would be best if label-produced albums preserved the appropriate amount of dynamic range, leaving compression up to consumer devices. I realize that built-in EQ and reverb settings on stereos don't set a particularly good precedent, but give me a tv and a stereo (in the car too!) with a pair of compressor knobs, please. When those poorly mastered tracks from 80 CDs turn up in the playlist, squash away! When the too-quiet movie switches to the overly compressed car salesman ad, handle that appropriately! The hardware and software are out there.
I am Leviathant and I approve this message.
you're too old.
May sound like a weird topic but it's true. I'm seeing soooo much mis-information in these threads it's ridiculous. The dynamic range is being compressed, yes. This doesn't make your cds "louder" than a "quiet" cd, it reduces the dynamic range between the sounds so loud doesn't sound so "loud" as quiet.
Now, the reason record companies are doing this, yes, to maximize profits, but that cynical answer doesn't explain how or why really. The real reason is because people in cars with loud stereo systems aren't able to distinguish the dynamic ranges in a loud, noisy, moving environment so they compress the sound to make it sound best in cars. Really. Take say, the latest Front Line Assembly album (crazy loud) and listen to it in your car. It sounds great. It's compressed all to hell. On headphones it sounds like a mess though. Now take any Dire Straits album, particularly Brothers In Arms (Quiet as a mouse) and listen to it in your car. It's quiet, you can't hear it, it sounds like crap. Now listen to it on headphones and it sounds incredible. Why? The dynamic range is there so you can hear the nuances of the music throughout the album, unlike the former album where everything sounds approximately the same level.
THat is the difference between loud and quiet and compression on dynamic range.
I remember reading about this about a year or two ago. Too lazy to seach :P. .. the dynamic range and the vinyl rulz (even the casette).
All about crapy music from today
Anyway, who of you expect quality from today pop music?, content quality, technical quality.
All the today industry wants is just plain money making machines.
So if you want better sound quality, search for it in other places.
Maybe the loudness increase is just a reaction to losing real speakers that shake the air all around our bodies. Little earbuds, and even circumaural cup headphones, don't give us the full sensation we want when we're really "getting into" music we like. We crank it up in our ears, longing for the real shake we expect. FWIW, I know I like listening to my car stereo more with the motor running, even when parked, and nothing compares to rocking out while blasting through traffic, screaming the words at the top of my lungs.
Maybe if we brought back the Bone Fone we could crank down the ear damage. Just as a subwoofer. Though those annoying people on the subway forcing their tinny little noise byproducts at the people around them will be a real pain in the ass when we sit on the seat next to them.
--
make install -not war
I can understand why Hi Fi enthusiasts would prefer a wide dynamic range on their CDs, but compressed sound is quite good for cheap stereos which can't do a big dynamic range. Perhaps that's why music companies produce them this way? After all, most people I think listen to music on cheap equipment rather than Hi Fi.
Radio is even worse. Many stations operate under the philosophy of 100% modulation, all the time. They also use multi-band compressors that split the audio into multiple frequency bands and independently compress each band. The result is boring and fatiguing, with no dynamic range. FM, and even AM, radio can sound very good with decent equipment and engineering. The problem isn't money or knowledge, it's station managers that have become obsessed with producing a "competitive sound".
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Someone complained to "Points of View" and got read out. The answer: adverts aren't louder, they just *soulnd* louder.
Um, if I recall correctly, loudness is a PERCEPTUAL figure. So if it "sounds" louder, it IS louder.
My ears clip so bad I hear STATIC at those concerts. So I don't go. It's a shame, I suppose, but you can always sit further back with binoculars.
- too much dynamic range.
Scenes with explosions, traffic, etc are way too loud while the dialogue is way too soft.I solved the DVD problem by inserting a compressor on the audio out of the DVD player before it reaches my stereo - precisely what the network station did before the era of DVD when everybody watched movies on HBO, Turner Classics, ABC, NBC, etc. I did the same to my parents' TV so they wouldn't get blasted by commercials on cable TV. We are all much happier.
Unfortunately there is no easy solution to "squashed" CDs. Once the dynamic range is compressed to oblivion, you cannot get it back without the source material (IE master multitrack). In the last five years I have bought 10x more DVDs than CDs.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
agh, no wonder I've been turning up midrange to compensate for problems with sound lately
http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/5429
The most important thing to do in your life is to not interfere with somebody else's life. -FZ
How many people prefer the large volume difference in DVDs? Like, where you have a scene where people are whispering and you can't hear what they are saying, so you turn it up only to STILL not understand what they whispering (perhaps hearing that monotonic static from your speakers), and then suddenly BANG! BANG! go gunshots in your movie and its extremely loud. Makes a movie difficult to watch at night when someone nearby is sleeping, so generally you have to play the movie at the volume of the loudest parts- meaning you dont hear the whispering parts. Its even more frustrating when the damned background music is twice as loud as all the talking.
Same thing here. The difference is that it has more to do with people in general prefer to listen to a song at a constant volume. Likewise, many people listen to music over the sound of something else, so any quieter parts wouldn't be heard at all if there was too much volume range. If I cannot comfortably listen to an entire song at the volume I enjoy then I'm going to turn it up or down or have to fiddle with it throughout the song, which is annoying and takes away from the point of listening to music (which is to have it going while you do something else).
So who's actually met someone who WASN'T inconvienced by the HDR of DVD's? Unless you only watch movies in home theater, I can't imagine why you wouldn't be.
.. why ? .. because there IS a change in electronics. I have to crosscheck doubletime before I know (not for sure) that I'm buying crappy or good equipment. I got plenty of examples of old-electronics that are still working around my house and similar newer-electronics which are dying all the time just because it's more compact and looks newer. In most of the cases it was also cheaper electronics (inside).
...
...
I tend to see to the characteristics of the product. If the device comes +/- from the same year I check for the specifications. If the specifications are TOO good to be true, I will look at this product carefully with doubt. If the specs are normal; I'd put it on top of the list. There is in no way a DVD manufacturer can add plentoria of new options without loosing some of the quality of the device; unless this quality gets charged for; alas you get an expensive device.
The price sometimes tells truth; although not in every case. If you are going to pay more for your television it might be that television will last longer than the cheaper version. I still got a Sony TV which is 16yrs old and a Hoher which died already 3 times and is not even 3yrs old. Both prices were very similar; although the specifications of the Hoher were quite broad; more than the CPU in the television can handle even.
The Sony costed me 17.000Bef (it's that old!) while the Hoher costed me 300 euros which is roughly 12.000Bef. The difference was for sure to notice in both price and quality. That's about 100 euro difference for a BIG difference in quality! I knew it would be less in quality but if I'd knew it was going to be *THAT* bad I would never have bought the television but it's in my house now
A lot of people buy a cat-in-a-bag; they listen to those salesdrones on the second floor showing the loudness of the newest hi-fi tower you want to buy; telling you the newest gadgets on the equipment missing the quality part on how the equipment has been built up.
Check your specs before you check-out your wallet!
This is not only for audio-video equipment but also for toasters, laundrymats, fridges, microwaves, writable cd's,
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Clipping occurs when you overdrive your speaker and it cannot have a response that is proportional to the applied signal. When a song is digitally compressed, you allow the medium & quiet parts to be louder. So, when you set the volume to listen to an 'average' passage, the loud parts are not all that much louder, so you actually have a lower chance of clipping. The applied signal has a much lower dynamic range, so its much easier for mediocre equipment to reproduce the signal. Its like photographing a gray goose on a cloudy day - with a limited dynamic range, its pretty easy to get a good exposure and even if you are off, you can still get useful results. But like a gray goose on a cloudy day, the limited dynamic range makes for uninteresting results.
Think global, act loco
We have a solution to these sorts of problems. I hereby declare a War On Loudness!
As a software-developing cube dweller, I spend a lot of time at my computer listening to MP3s with headphones. The lost of music information definitely bugs me. But, what bugs me even more is when the overall volume changes between tracks. I know that some music would be naturally quieter than other types, but I don't like adjusting the volume so that I don't blow out my eardrums after switching from a quiet track to a louder one.
If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0.
Every1 seems to be listening to 128k mp3s on their CrapPods. So everything sounds terrible. Louder crap vs softer crap doesn't make a difference, it's all sh*t. Well that's my op anyway. Any1 agree?
I agree with you on that Oasis record - it just sounds incompetently engineered because it's so clipped.
The Chili's Californication would have been a much better album had they not let that get horribly clipped, too. There's only a couple of tracks I can stand on that album because it's so badly engineered.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I agree, the record companies know their business. Though it's still a shame when a mix that could do with gentler treatment gets maximum maximising in the mastering suite anyway. The thing is, music isn't what a lot of people think it is, or want it to be. Most of the people who comment on this kind of story prefer classical music or jazz. That's OK, but music for dancing does need a different treatment because it has a different social context and purpose. And then there's the growth of asocial listening with headphones ... often in loud urban areas ... so it's a no brainer they're compressed (even clipped) to hell.
Another issue I think is we've run out of ideas, musically speaking. Mixes tend to be very busy and very balanced so that no one part dominates, because they're individually uninteresting. And maximising serves to reinforce this approach. There are exceptions, some good songs still being written and recorded, but they've lost a lot of sensitivity by the time they reach my speakers.
I actually have a beef with too little vocal compression on BBC Radio 4. They're so busy watching their PPMs to realise every time they play a "music clip", I have to cover my ears.
Good post. I was going to say something similar but had the sense to search for "Dire Straits" in the thread....
I've noticed the difference in music most on my home theater system (HTPC), and Dire Straits sounds awesome, and my Coldplay CD sounds like arse. I've also taken the next step and encoded my 'good' CD's in FLAC onto the HDD, and to be honest I really only want music that sounds great - with high dynamic range....
Are there any software tools (pref for Linux) that tell me the stat's of the dynamic range etc, or that can normalize this compressed crap?
Any audiophiles out there?
You're not deaf enough. Now excuse me while I turn up Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor so I can rattle my neighbors windows.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/5429
I think that at least some of the blame can be placed with those recording/mastering engineers who insist on working with visual waveform displays. It's oh-so-easy to get seduced into working with what appears on screen, rather than actually listening to what's coming out of the speakers, and the height of the waveform becomes the metric by which audio levels are set.
The best way to mix and master with a computer-based DAW system is to switch the screen off.
"the low-volume will contain much greater dynamic range and will sound much better."
y namic+range&i=42193,00.asp
http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=d
Dynamic range, by definition, is the difference between the low volume and high volume.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
"Dupe War" here... ...in Slashdot!
For the tin-eared masses. The bar of quality for audio/music/telephony has never been lower. We now accept crap MP3 audio as "acceptable", stuttering vocoders and dropped calls as "tolerable", and reduced/compressed bandwidth as "louder (hence better)". We are now getting spoon-fed the worst quality audio since wax recordings and the Western Electric "Noiseless" recording system of movies from the 30-40's. And like everything else around us that continues to suck worse and worse, we take it in stride, shrug and say "well, it sounds good enough, I guess."
Total apples/oranges comparison. We tolerate "crap" MP3 audio due to a quality/portability tradeoff. The dynamic range issue is a completely different animal - that doesn't provide any tradeoff to the consumer unless he likes constant, loud noise. Note also that this has shit all to do with analog/digital - even analog media have a dynamic range, and having the audio signal occupy a very small part of it will still make a recording sound like shit.
Additionally, I find a poorly mastered CD to be much more offensive than compressed audio. For one, I think one could probably demonstrate that poor mastering destroys more of the information in the audio signal than does compression. Additionally, the issue isn't just one of information loss (though that is important) - it's also listening fatigue, because the output ends up just being a constant barrage of noise.
Ultimately, I'm not an audiophile, but I can tell the difference between a decently-mastered track and a bad one even at 128 bit MP3 compression, and I don't have to try.
I actually prefer a lower dynamic range, at least moment to moment, because my car's (admittely crappy - it's a Saturn) sound system tends to make it unlistenable if there's much variation in the volume. Either the loud parts are too loud, or I can't hear the soft parts. Yes, part of this is cabin noise (also craptacular on my Saturn) but still - a CD with less variation is far more listenable.
Okay, so then. And for quality, you want maximum dynamic range, right? But on bad equipment/noisy environments, you can't get the volume up high enough without distortion or clipping, right? Is it not possible to dynamic range compression... ummm... dynamically? High-end equipment could have a second knob for it, low-end could make a guess at a good amount of range compression according to the amount of clipping that is happening, and do it in software, no?
I would think it's possible but increases cost/unit too much at the low end.
sam brightman
And no, I don't have "exotic cables", just quality speakers and a hefty power amp with plenty of headroom to spare.
Come on now, don't you know that Monster Cable makes everything sound better? hehe. When I was in college I had a buddy with a hi-fi amp that oscillated when connected to speakers with a long run of Monster Cable. It was just too damn capacitive. I replaced it with Radio Shack speaker wire and it sounded great. What a rip off.
It's like satellite radio. People claim it's "CD Quality", when it's not as good as FM radio.
If you listen to music on satellite radio (And Sirius is far worse than XM), it sounds like bad shortwave, with voices and music phase shifting. Saxophones on Sirius are unlistenable, which makes Jazz problematic.
And people forget how good FM could be (and used to be). Until recently, we had an FM classical station WGMS which didn't compress too much, and when you listened to it, it was wonderful. I mean, you could actually listen to it critically on a good stereo.
What people forget (and people will hate me for saying this), when utilized properly, CD's are really very good. There are a lot of good bands out there today (and people will hate me for saying that as well), that I can't listen to very much because the dynamic range (or lack thereof) makes it seem flat and uninteresting. It's like your brain is saying "the music is good", but your heart is saying "hit the skip button".
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
The Cure's advice for the Paris "live album" was play this music loud. Correct advice absolutely and in all respects (apologies for any typos, we're moving offices and have just said goodbye to our local pub).
As an introduction to an at best misguided post, that's a superb qualification.
The latest FLA sounds poor in my car - give me Tactical Neural Implant any day, please: it sounds better.
I have a semi-serious in-car setup (sources: rockford 8140 and mini-itx pc, flac encoded tracks, digital out to an Alpine PXA-H701, using the crossover functionality to split to 2 soundstream continuum 5 channel amps - one for each side of the car, 4 of the channels bridged to 2 running midbass to mid transition actively up front for 3 way - and a class a 10.0 for sub duties) and you're plain wrong.
You mention dire straits: give me the dynamics on the start of "money for nothing", please and leave them alone. The track builds, it's dynamic.
I'm also learning to play the piano and dynamics is important to tell the story of the music. Sure that sounds pretentious I suppose, but the original composer had a reason they did what they did...
no. exactly the opposite. Removing dynamic range makes quiet passages sound as loud as loud. The mean loudness of a track is increased, meaning dynamics are reduced to a tiny space at the top of the power levels.
He was always a problem.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
But so does getting blown out of your chair after you've turned something up because you can't hear the quiet part.
Isn't the whole point is to have the loudest boom-car on the block? Who need sound quality when all there is to "music" is: **THUD** **THUD** **THUD** **THUD** **THUD** **THUD**. That and maybe some moron chanting mosoginistic obsenities, racial slurs, and glamorizing drugs and violence.
Next thing somebody will write an article saying that music should have composition, harmonies, melodies, varity, and subbtle qualities. Or that vocalists should actually be able to sing - not just talk into a mic, or that "musicians" actually read and write music, or that musicians actually play a musical instrument. Or that lyrics should be more than "funk soul brotha" repeated a thousand times.
Come on folks, this is the 21st century. The point of a sound system is prove that you're a real man by being obnoxious, and irritating other people. And besides, the recording industry is a *business* it's all about your crib and your bling. Screw "sound quality."
What is really needed is a web site which lists CD's that have the compression jacked up to extremes so people can avoid them.
Yes I know, Joe Shmoe will not care about this site, but I will/do.
Does such a place exist?
The same thing is being done to your food with sugar and salt.
Except not by the record companies, obviously.
erroneous: look me up in a dictionary
This is why I was so sad at the demise of SACD... because among their improvements, SACDs go to eleven.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Have you listened to a modern pressed record played on a modern (made this year) turntable?
I have a set of flac music files of the latest White Stripes Album. The hiss is almost inaudible, there are no clicks, pops or any of the other crap you would hear on a mid 70's turn table.
Yes, the frequency range is nothing like a CD, but the dynamic range is SO much better. Plus on the CD version of the same album above is SO loud it actually clips (click sounds on loud points of the album).
It's a sad state of affairs when the Vinyl version of a record sounds better than the CD.
In the old days, people listened to music in their home with a stereo that could reproduce sound fairly well. Then, CDs came out and improved the dynamic range (level difference between the pop, hiss, and crackle of the media and the loudest sound recorded). People really loved them
Then, the entire generation of early stereo adopters moved on and the next generation listened to music primarily in cars, subways, outdoors next to noisy streets, and on the radio. Soon, any dynamic range in excess of 20 dB was probably totally wasted because quiet passages would disappear. Add in the issue that compression takes more room for more dynamic range, and songs compress better if flattened like a pancake and thrown at the listener
The music industry is wondering how to sell their product - they could restore the dynamic range and sell real copies of the music to people who like real music - as an art and not as a distraction.
Yeah! Then you could charge $99.99 for the "Dynamic" audiophile version!!!
Deleted
The article summary improperly uses the term "loudness" to refer to the base volume or decible intensity of the stored music. Audiophiles use the term "loudness" when discussing psychological or perception qualities of sound reproduction. That loudness knob on your home amplipher typically drops out the mid-range frequencies to enhance the lows and highs. Wikipedia has a terrible article which doesn't explain loudness very well.
signature pending slashdot approval
A few years ago, I wrote an album using sounds generated within Matlab. The idea was to produce an album that was as entirely original as I could- not using any recorded sounds, and not using synthetic sounds that I had not created myself with my own algorithms.
:(
When it came to mixing the album, I adjusted things as best I could, but I had no background along those lines. I got feedback from my friends that the loud portions were too loud and the quiet portions were too quiet. But I didn't know to what degree the audio should be compressed. I was at square one.
I took a cross-section of tracks from my ripped CD library and measured their peak level and RMS level. Having this information would tell me what people would be used to. Unfortunately, the only consistent pattern that I found was that the higher the RMS level, the later the release date of the CD.
I often am forced to listen to my music in either a loud environment or in an area where I must keep the music volume as low as possible. A wide dynamic range means that in order to hear the quiet parts, the louder parts are unacceptably loud.
So process it yourself - there are plenty of dynamic compression filters out there that you can run your music through. If the source material has not been messed around with and is an accurate representation of the original, you can mess it up however you like. However, if the mastering process has done this for you, you can't reverse the process.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Heck I can tell on my car stereo! I am talking about just my stock from the dealership stereo. While it isn't easy to tell the quality difference it is easy to tell when I play my very old CDs mixed with new ones. The difference in volume levels is unreal.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Back in LP days, records were often compressed to cope with the limitations of vinyl phonographs, in particular limited signal to noise ratios. You could compensate for this by getting an expander box, which would do the opposite of compression. It wasn't a perfect solution, since you had to guess how much expansion to use on an album by album basis, but it could be pretty effective. McIntosh built this kind of circuit into some of their preamps, and you could also get a stand alone box to do this. The best known brand was the dbx Compander. I'm sure you could find one of these on eBay, or if you're lucky at a garage sale or Salvation Army.
Before I discovered compression (http://www.abandonatmyplace.com/Listen to "Cave Crawler" as example) had to ride the faders to try and get a nice consistent level for specific instruments. Bass and drums typically cause problems with volume levels popping.
Also, It's nice to take vocals and do a compression with some gain. It helps pull them out and forward in the mix. Vocalists (and I'm not one, but I try) can really change the volume by moving w/r to the mic while performing which really can change the dynamics of a performance in undesired ways.
Compression doesn't eliminate music dynamics if you don't over use it. An individual instrument might not be able to go from ppp (extremely soft) to fff (extremely loud) but the overall composition can still have emotional ebb and flow.
Compare the previous song attempts to my I Read it on Slashdot Song and I think you'll see a positive difference.
Now I'm not a huge fan of squashing the entire mix once it's done (really what the IEEE is talking about), but a little compression to avoid clipping and smoothing out the sound isn't too bad. I know my use of compression isn't what the complaint with music becoming too "loud" is really addressing...but don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
I love the sound of distortion in the morning -- webcommando
additionally to my post down here I'd like to strengthen this fact by pointing you right here where it happens also in different sectors.
...
...
The Internet might be good and open and all that, but still there is a lot to change before society -demands- anything to be of better quality worth for its money. There are different magazines, in my country (Belgium) we have "Test Aankoop"; I'm not member of it and even think I'm too high-demanding towards quality for my money (except when it's not frequent used or temporary).
Maybe there are sites around which discuss these matters but still I did not find enough about the problems I have been experiencing with the Benelux market of equipment around here. The market is overpromoting itself with products which do-more for less-money but often people forget also for less-quality.
This has on the other hand, to do with production costs and cheap component usage; it's a never ending vicious circle which the market is also taking its finest share of. Either people stop voting with their wallets or the market will segment itself with throw-away devices creating diverse new mountains (of trash) all over the world. So many problems caused by such small amounts of numbers on a special designed piece of paper. I can write lots more what I think about the current throw-away-stuff-society; but I'd probably bore you all out with it *smile*
I guess fast-food and fast-shopping are cross linked to eachother
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
At my site there is a constant barrage of newbie engineers saying "how can I get more volume out of my CD's so it sounds like a store bought one" so, we tell them how to do it, compress, maximize, flatten the frequency spectrum, etc...then two threads later somebody starts a topic about how pissed they are at the over compression and these "loudness wars"...so, well, either stop buying CD's, or, if you have the clought in the industry, stop making them. Compression is a great thing in moderation, but, well the entertainment industry knows nothing of moderation in any area of life.
dB Masters
It was top of the line for that time, though. That's when I stopped buying vinyl. What I found then was that the vinyl sounded better than the CD, IF it was the first play of the vinyl.
Since I don't buy a record to listen to it once, it does not make sense to buy vinyl.
Maybe they should bring back the laser disk, but for audio only.
That would indeed be the best solution. Music made to contain the highest possible range, and various settings to adjust it to standarized loudnesses. Not sure if it is expensive or not, but hopefully music will be headed in that direction sooner or later. (As far as I remember, mp3 encoders can adjust loudness. So in a way, it would be possible to make separate recordings for each environment if you had access to a high-quality original.)
Anyway. Wait until anyone stars selling losslessly compressed music, and people will be able to recompress and readjust it to their own preferred level. Hopefully, increasing loudness will then only cause music to loose quality for people wanting a high range, and not adding any value for other situations. Which would encourage record companies to release with a high dynamic range.
I lost my sig.
I've always resented that Soundgarden is categorized as grunge. They are predominantly, and obviously, metal. Alice In Chains had the same problem. I don't have anything against grunge, mind you, I just don't see why everything semi-popular coming out of Seattle just had to be it.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
All recent music sounds flat to me - now I know why.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Perfect timing on this article. I was just wondering to myself if MP3s are actually louder than the original music. Now I have to explain what "louder" means here, it's effectively dynamic range, but not quite. The layman's description of how MP3s work is that the look for soft frequencies that will be pyschoaccoustically masked by the loud parts of other frequencies, and then information to encode those is removed. Thus in effect one is filtering out some of the spectrum selectively. But that means two things 1) loss of signal energy and 2) loss of some noise at the deleted spectrum. The loss of energy could be compensated for by raising the volume. And that compbined with the lower noise, means higher dynamic range at the retained frequencies.
From your ear's point of view, then the folicles and cells that are tuned to the reatined frequencies, experience more accoustic energy at a given sound level.
On top of that, I suspect there are other effects as well. I suspect that MP3s may compand and decompand the music. Any mismatch between the compander and decompading codecs, or roundoff errors, might increase or decrease the dynamic range. Likewise the pyscho accoustic model might tinker with this as well.
The reason I think this is the case is that I always notice that when I play highly clipped music (e.g. Green day) through my ipod that the symbols and snare drums are actually slightly painful to the ears even when the overall volume is at low listening level.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
of what happens when a new album is mastered.
Brick Wall Limiting
I found the latest Oasis album to be particularly offensive in this regard. The audio literally sounds like it was smashed against a brick wall and my ears are fatigued after a few minutes of listening. I honestly don't know if I like the album or not because I can't listen to it long enough to tell.
I know that I can't play the Oasis album "What's the story (Morning Glory)" on my main hifi as the compression sounds just too strange when played thru a proper amplifier and set of speakers.
Are you sure you don't just find it unlistenable because it's fucking shit?
If you think today's sound quality is worse than 78's or a dusty, scratched, greasy Beatles 45 that your sister played on her Mattel ModGirl Record Player until you wanted to shoot her in the head, you're just wrong. And even the best turntables and tape decks introduced artifacts (rumble, clicks, hiss) of their own. Before digital music, the music listening experience largely sucked.
I have about 1500 LPs, 78s, and 45s that I am slowly ripping down to MP3, and I'm reminded every time I break out the distilled water and microfiber cloth to clean a record just how much better things are now, even if the music itself isn't.
As far as telephone and other communication sound quality goes, you used to have to raise your voice when talking long distance. Now, you just have to get out of the wind, or put on your noise-canceling headphones.
Compared to having physical media noise, distortion, and interference, digital music in general and MP3 specifically is wonderful. OTOH, the dynamic compression is bad. But they've been doing dynamic compression since the 1960s. Its worse now because they're selling what sells, and it gives the MP3 encoding algorithm less difference to work with between one part of a song and another.
Want to experience something different? Grab Wish You Were Here.
sigs, as if you care.
So now my question is this: Why the hell are we not doing that now, with this music-squashing epidemic in full force? The old arguments for why we should squash the dynamic range no longer hold. One of them was to increase the average volume compared to the hiss. Well, we can control hiss better than ever. Another reason is that amplifiers that play music which is on average quieter need to be turned up louder, which adds noise and distortion. But amplifier circuits are much better now, and this effect is tiny.
It just can't be that hard, from a caclulation point of view, to re-expand the dynamic range in a squashed recording. Real-time sotwtware should be able to do this easily. Yet I don't know of any such plugin. Google revealed that a shareware plugin called DFX ($20) might do something like this, but the details are unclear. Am I missing something? What's holding back the dynamic range re-expanders that so many of us want?
So to handle the shit demand from the shit consumer, we get this time honored recording principle: Shit in = shit out
The recording industry is one of the only businesses that CAN actually polish a turd, but you have to start with a nice big fat turd so that there is something left after all the polishing. In the case of something like Britney Spears, however, we are getting straight diarrhea, with no body to work with.
Every era has bad pop music as well and yes, the current era has a particularly large influx of it, but don't blame the recording studios. It is their job to sell music (pref. shitty music). Consumers are stupid (always have been, always will be, because they are people) so shitty music with shitty sound quality will prevail.
My brother and I recorded a new EP recently, and we're choosing to leave it unmastered. We'd rather have people turn it up than lose dynamics.
Noise Marines... yay Slaanesh. another step on a slippery path towards damnation (Warhammer 40.00 references!)
They realise recorded music is on its way out as the profit-making medium, so they're gradually worsening the quality so that it becomes the established fact that 'live music sounds better'. Thus, they will sell more gig/concert tickets. /TinFoilHat Blog
The people who CRANK the compression on their tracks are generally not worth listening to anyway. So who cares what the mainstream does? This is just one more reason why they are dying fast. Good artists like Tom Waits never do this.
Audiophiles don't listen to Britney Spears.
Replay Gain fixes this. mp3gain and wavegain implement Replay Gain, so do music players like foobar2000.
The algorithm does some psychoacoustic modeling, so it's better than plain RMS or worse, peak normalization.
Yet another reason why vinyl is still better.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You know...I've often wondered why kids of today, aren't as into getting good sound reproduction, as they were when I grew up.
Short answer:
Because unless you had especially well connected friends or super hip parents you had much less of a sampling pool. It was important for each song to sound as well as possible since you would be hearing it, much, more often. Today's kids/teens have a huge wealth of music, even in the pop arena.
--- I do not moderate.
This is funny, because the other day I filed an 'obscenity complaint' at the FCC's website complaining about the 'obscene' way all the stations crank up the volume on commercials and suggesting that the average volume of commercials be required to roughly match the average volume of the previous 30 minutes of programming/commercials.
I filed the complaint under obscenity because the 'General Complaint' form seemed to apply only to telephone issues... And the loudness of commercials - especially ones featuring alarm clocks ( I avoid Irving gas station nowadays because of this, and anyone who buys HeadOn is contributing to giving ME a headache )
Anyway, this goes to show that those who draft the FCC regulations are either not experts about what they regulate, or are in fact experts hired by the regulated industry's lobby. I am fairly ignorant of sound processing, but even I knew enough to specifically define volume as average volume rather than peak volume.
Not defining volume as average volume is completely ineffective. I was completely unaware that commercial volume was even regulated at all until reading this article. The current state of affairs is as if there were no regulation at all.
...
http://haha.nu/interesting/the-loudness-war/
There are 10 types of people in the world; those who understand binary and those who don't.
I guess not ? If so chopin pieces would be impossible to listen. we are able to actually listen to them and not get annoyed, so i guess not.
Read radical news here
My 14 year old son was digging around in the basement last year and found my collection of around 1200 record albums (sealed and properly stored in air-tight containers). Since then, he's been busily digitizing them, even where he has the "remastered" CD version (the record companies say "remastered" as if it's a good thing). It appears they sound better to his young ears, even with the occasional clicks and pops, and while he can't explain why, he prefers them to the more modern alternatives.
No wonder the new audio format discs haven't taken off.
As for me, my ears have deteriorated from going to too many rock concerts over the years. It all sounds the same to me now.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Here's a very good paper on the subject from TC Electronic's tech library:
r tion_tmt20.pdf
http://www.tcelectronic.com/media/lund_2004_disto
Although it's a couple of years old it's still very valid.
With strong compression, there will be no extra loud sounds to damage your hearing. The music will appear loud to you, which is often what you want, though.
Is that anything like 'Microsoft Works'?
That doesn't make any sense. What do you mean by "most significant bits"? And why would they be 0?
Doesn't your stereo have a volume control? Mine does. When I put Little Feat's Waiting For Columbus on, someone invariably says "turn it up", and I invariably reply "it gets louder".
As to the "technology" aspect of it, that's pure BS. Although CDs have inherently better dynamic range than LPs, that increased range was never used. In fact, most factory CDs I have that I also have the LPs of have less of a dynamic range than the LP, despite the technology.
I no longer replace my old LPs by buying CDs. Now I buy blanks and sample the LP instead. I invariably wind up with a CD with more dynamics and a better frequency response. Even if there may be a little noise when I crank it to 10, it still sounds better than the factory CD.
But TFA, or at least the anonymous submitter's rendering of it, is backwards. Less dynamics mean lower volume, not higher volume. If I can hear the soft parts there is no need to turn it up.
TFA is obviously garbage, no need to R.
-mcgrew
Rather alarming the number of young people I see on the subway with hearing aids, and the occasional coworkers who boast about how deaf they are.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
That's what a DVR is for. Your cable company probably offers one for less than $10/month. Worth every penny.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
The music industry is not there to make music. they're there to make money. they do that by coming out with simple jingles that are easily remembered along with a catchy beat. Kind of like 3 minute commercials for whatever the star of the week is. And so people can belt out the lyrics to these shoddily rhymed creations they must be as loud as possible without forcing people to buy better stereo equipment to turn it up.
As one of the chart toppers said "It's all about the benjamins"
-asleep
It would be nice if the music industry agreed on a standard for putting Relay Gain values into one of the sub-channels for regular CDs. It's probably too late for such a thing to become commonplace.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Having lived through the Disco Scare of the late '70s, I can now confidently say that the Loudness War will also pass. At that time, Rock aficionados (me, too) were convinced that popular music was irreparably damaged. In fact, popular music is now more diverse and, frankly, IMHO, better than ever. As far as loudness, I think a lot of that has more to do with some of the popular genres taking advantage of the technology than anything else. As the genres evolve, the loudness craze will die down. BTW, does anyone remember Phase Linear and Bob Carver? I had one of their boxes that did noise reduction and peak expansion...
Couldn't this problem be solved if all apmlifiers also had adjustable (analog or digital) compressors built into them? That way, the user could adjust the amount of compression they wanted, along with the volume.
Normally, I don't like heavily compressed audio, but there are times that I'd like to compress, for example, a recording of a Classical symphony. Only because the full dynamic range makes it just too loud to play in a satisfactory manner, in an apartment.
Does anyone know if there are amps out there that have adjustable compressors in them?
Whether it's a lack of musical/vocal talent or poor engineering, nearly every song I've ever heard from the Chili Peppers sounds "washed out", like I'd imagine a newspaper left to bleach out in the sun for a week would sound if it made the same type of music.
a few weeks ago, we saw an article about an award winning producer who claims that the mp3 is killing music.
I replied that mastering engineers had been killing music for years.
He stated that an mp3 contains less than 10% of the original music. (an exaggeration)
I claim that the CD itself contains less than 10% of the music.
Shrinking the dynamic range is tremendously bad. Loudness is tremendously bad.
I'm a musician and producer. My music contains portions which are loud and portions which are soft.
If we as a culture lose the loudness war, then we allow the industry to kill music.
The opposite of dynamic is static, which is what most of today's music sounds like. (not making a comment on electronic, just music as a whole).
They're using their grammar skills there.
The process isn't reversible. Dynamic range compression destroys information. You're taking a waveform that uses, just to make up a number, 32 different instantaneous signal levels, and transforming it into one that uses 16. The resulting waveform just doesn't have enough information to reconstitute the original one.
Clipping is also very common. And to make things worse, in today's DSP world, I don't think there is just one dynamic compressions algorithm/implementation.
Yeah, but (a) it was analog, (b) the compression was standardized, so you knew how to decompress it.
If you have a recording that uses 16 different instantaneous waveform levels that are closely bunched together, sure, it's easy to process it to get one with 16 levels that are spaced apart more. What you can't reliably do is turn it into a recording that uses 32 sound levels in a way that makes it more faithful to the original.
Why not have multiple mixes?
Here's one for listening on your hifi speakers in a quiet room, with no effects or reverb or anything - let the sound fill the room for a "they are here" experience.
Here's one for your car or earbuds - lots of compression, a typical mix for a noisy environment.
Here's one for your hifi headphones - full dynamic range with all of the reverb and effects, a "you are there" experience.
Now everyone's happy!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
The same way that completely mainstream pop-rock is now labeled "alternative" or "indie". Alternative or independent from what - actual alternative and indie music??
"But this one goes to 11!"
Because you're retarded, whereas the other guy has a sense of humour?
Would probably be a format that supports compression information. Basically your make it so that the playback unit has to have a compressor/limiter built in. Hell, these days DSPs are cheap enough you could probably have a real nice multi-band one. Then the music format would have information for levels of compression built in it. You could pick how compressed you wanted it, the compressor would deal with it.
24 is the worst. The dialog is barely audible so your have to crank up the volume. Then there is an explosion, or even the ticking of the clock, and you rush to turn the volume back down so your ears don't bleed. More dialog, volume up ...
If you are in a noisy environment (car, subway, work) you want compression (e.g. loudness), because otherwise you either won't hear the quiet parts or blow your ears out on the loud parts. If you have a decent stereo (or decent headphones) and listen to the music in a quiet environment it sounds much better if there is less compression. I suppose this would even go for clubs. I have never used compression when playing prerecorded music to an audience.
Since nowdays you could get decent compression out of an el cheapo chip in your average mp3 player (I dunno, do they already put those in?) they could go back to produce albums with some dynamic range. I mean you wouldn't even hear it if your mp3 player compression isn't the best, because you are in a noisy environment anyways. Radio stations compress it anyways.
This way everyone wins. But the record industry has a much better idea. They are just going to sell you two versions of each song. One for home and one for the car. This way they can retain at least part of the income they used to generate when people had to buy a new media of the same content they already purchased, because they couldn't back up their songs and their old media broke. Maybe they will do much more than two versions. How about one more for the computer, one more for running etc. -> Damn, I should be a music industry exec.
lol MOD UP you beat me to it! Haven't listened to it for 10 years, never plan to again.
I always tend to enjoy the newer remastered discs, or just plain modern discs over old CDs. The newer louder ones are much more enjoyable to listen to. They have more 'kick' to them, whereas the old ones sound weak to me now.
Remember that on the DVD you are getting the theatrical soundtrack. Well, when you are in a quiet theatre, with (hopefully) good speakers you want and can use a mix with tons of dynamic range. A properly done Dolby Digital mix has tons and all the levels are specified in the bitstream itself. It contains data on how loud in absolute terms the highest peak should be, how many dB below the effects the vocals are and so on.
Your DVD player itself should have a compressor in it to deal with this. If it doesn't your stereo ought to if it is a good one. Normally, DVD players compress the output of the 2-channel analogue signal. Some allow you to configure how much. If you are doing a digital hookup, well then it is a 100% accurate copy, so no compression. In this case the job falls on the receiver. Most have tunable compression settings. On mine, a Yamaha, it is simply called "Night Mode". Engage it, and everything is compressed. In particular the vocals are brought up closer to the effects, and the LFE channel is toned down a whole bunch.
However the dynamic range on DVDs is great. If you own a home theatre setup, which is not as unattainable as you might think, you can get real theatre sound.
Either way you shouldn't need a separate compressor (though that's an acceptable solution) and you may find that getting the DVD player to compress the movies gives you better results. Remember that your compressor just does it blindly based on the curve you set, the DVD player is (or at least should be) aware of the actual way the stream was mastered, and also has access to the individual channels. It can choose to actually mix in more of the centre channel (where almost all the dialogue is) and less of the LFE.
People just want some kind of rythmic background noise. People hate the silence, because they feel uncomfortable with themselves. And they hate even more being with the others. Some kind of music playing creates an illusion of personal space. It's like a wall separating from the rest of the world.
But for the wall to be good, it should be equally high everywhere. It does not make sense making it higher in one place and lower in the other. So, the music is made equally loud. It is convenient: it can be played continuously all the day. On radio, in MP3 player, in car audio... Sure you cannot be emotionally attached to music all the day, but it easily becomes a habbit to listen to something. It is like a chewing gum. You get used to it, it is tasty, but its nutritional value is zero.
That's why the modern music tends to be monotonic. It is either noisy (the closer to white noise, the better, but still some rythmic pattern should be obvious), or very repetitive and simple. Of course, arbitrary changing loudness should not distract the listener from his daily affairs. Hence, DR compression, clipped records come into play.
So this is just the music itself is mostly crap (market demand!). Aggressive DR compression even increases the customer satisfaction (makes the record more suitable for day-long passive listening). The market demands crap, the market delivers crap.
Having been processed through a lossy codec, it is possible that clipped waveforms may become further clipped. As the waveform is reconstructed by the decoder, not all of the original frequency coefficients are present; some, which the encoder did not deem audible, will have been discarded; especially high frequencies above the 19KHz range, which MP3 in particular cannot encode well.
These are usually not audible, but when the decoder reconstructs the waveform, their removal will change the shape of the waveform; the formerly-clipped flat edges will have had the edges rounded off and may bulge slightly higher as they more closely resemble sinusoids.
This can actually sound better than the original clipped signal (as clipping is highly audible in double-blind tests and strains the ear) - except that the new "bulge" may go over what was previously full-scale, and unfortunately many MP3 decoders, particularly embedded ones like the iPods, will simply clip it again if it does.
For this reason, the LAME MP3 encoder actually applies a 1% volume reduction before compression in all the preset profiles. This is not within audible limits, and can never restore already-clipped waveforms, but helps to prevent any further clipping during decoding. Some other encoders do similar things.
It is preferable if such signals are left unclipped and instead, the signal is passed through a limiter that helps to avoid the harsh clipping sound (yet again) and leaves the sound as intact as possible (sound below full-scale in regions that are not clipping will be unaffected by a properly implemented digital limiter). For example, an audio playback chain in foobar2000 will typically do this as the final step of DSP.
This effect may be audible, and is often preferred to clipping. Additionally, thanks to the advent of ReplayGain: if a track has ReplayGain information (information on the perceived "loudness" of the track and/or album relative to a reference level; represented as how much the volume needs to be increased to reach the reference level; although with all modern recordings there is a considerable reduction, occasionally as much as -12dB), the highest peak level is recorded in the metadata, so the volume as a whole can be lowered in advance to try to preserve any high peaks.
They crank up the 'loudness', which is totally subjective. There is no way the FCC can go after commecials for being 'loud', unless they created some new extremly byzantine rules about dynamic range, which would basicly fuck up the whole art of mixing and music production and ruin a lot of good music.
You obviously don't live in an area with many teenagers.
They don't merely sound louder without turning up the volume (which the record companies want), they also sound louder (duh) when you do turn up the volume (which probably 90% of car stereo buyers who think volume==quality want). They want to be able to crank the volume up and both drown out the outside world completely and let everyone else know how sweet their stereo must be since you can hear it from three blocks away.
There is a minor advantage to that when you're listening to music in a noisy environment, because the low volume portions of the song are still audible over the background noise. But then when you hear it in a decent environment or actually listen to it instead of merely using it as a more favorable background sound or a soundtrack for life, it sounds dull.
Imagine listening to the 1812 Overture where the cannon aren't any louder than the trombones. It just sounds cheesy.
From end of article: "RMS (average) normalization algorithms, such as Replay Gain, have been implemented in many digital audio players and work to bring all songs in a digital library to the same average level. " :-(
Personally, I really don't want this kind of technology in players. I want all producers to adhere to common-sense sound engineering standards! Isn't this why the RIAA exists? So that recording companies and artists can band together than come up with standards, practices and initiatives that benefit them as a whole? --oh right, that's what the RIAA *USED* to be for.
Last year we recorded an album, whilst in the studio I was read an article about this trend.
I discussed it with the engineer and we agreed that we wouldn't compress the shit out of the album when we mastered it. Put up against other CDs it sounds quiet. However the extra dynamic range is obvious.
We're a rock band and some of our songs contain a lot of "light and shade" the quiet bits are meant to be quiet, and the loud bits are meant to be loud, it's part of the feel we created. Thankfully we're independent and completely self financed. OK it means we'll never be millionaires and we have a marketing budget of £0, but it also means the music is exactly the way we want it to be.
The feedback (no pun intended) we've received from our fans has been universal. Everyone loves not just the songs but the "sound" of the album. So people can tell the difference, even if they don't know what it is. If we were a dance act then the compression makes more sense but for "live" bands then compression needs to be used carefully so you don't suck the life out of the performance.
Cheers
Jimbo
This is because all you tard-o-matics want to hear thundering bass on your rap music on your $1.98 tinny stock speakers in your car and your vanishingly small I-Pod ear buds.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
No, I didn't. The amount of work required to pull off such a feat isn't worth the Internet-credibility I'd get for having said, "I double-blind tested this with N = 500, theta =
Dynamic range is easily apparent to all but the worst ears, and for those it isn't apparent to, you can simply look at how saturated the Winamp spectrum analyzer is on average. No matter how bad your ears are, you should be able to see the difference between Californication and a good classical recording.
Most likely, what it is doing is just recompressing the audio again another time itself to even it all out, and losing even more resolution. Which sucks, but is better than nothing.
Well there is no reason why the dynamic range on digital audio shouldn't be greater than that of vinyl LPs. 16 bits (or 24 with newer formats) is a LOT of dynamic range. Typically you have to do a lot of compression, especially of the low frequency ranges, in order to master for vinyl. With CD's you can pump the bass without worrying about the needle jumping the groove...
If you like to fiddle a bit with sound compression and other tools that are used in professional audio mastering, izotope ozone (a commercial product unfortunately) is quite nice to play with. Using a few basic edits can give flat sounding tunes nice warmth and depth. It's basically like the audio equivalent of photoshop and the techniques have very similar intuition.
The problem is not so much the use of such filters but the fact that they are used to optimize recordings for the very mediocre equipment most people use. Subtle bass sounds are simply lost; as are quiet high pitched sounds, because cheap equipment doesn't do anything with this information anyway. To counter this, the trick is to boost the volume of such sounds (relative to the rest) and to shift the spectrum away from very high or very low sounds. Like manipulating photos generally leads to loss of detail and undesired artifacts, manipulating sound results in similar loss of detail and distortion of what remains. Commercial records are edited to the limit of crappy mp3 players and radio. It's the equivalent of boosting a photo's contrast so much that most detail is drowned out to make it look good on a good old matrix printer. The psychological effect is similar as well: we humans appreciate contrast in all sorts of ways and the matrix printer doesn't do grays very well anyway. Unfortunately if you have a high end inkjet printer, such photos don't look much better than on the matrix printer because there is no extra detail anymore.
When used properly however, manipulating sound can improve quality significantly. Many expensive highend amplifiers basically contain lots of dsps to 'improve' the sound and do some restauration work on the distorted signal on the CD (e.g. by interpolating and reinserting detail that was lost in the mastering process). Old fashioned valve based amplifiers are all about sound distortion (in a pleasing way). This is no different than what happens in the studios except that the result would be much better if the studios didn't throw out so much detail. This point can be demonstrated easily by playing back some sixties/seventies recordings which have much less aggressive audio manipulation.
Jilles
Not at all. It'd be trivial to add a button to future preamps/amps that does the same thing for CDs that the narrow/wide toggle did for FM stereo years ago -- namely compress/expand the dynamic range.
Of course, compression could be introduced when burning the MP3/AAC, which is the better solution anyway. Compression makes less sense for music that is played around the house (e.g. CDs). It makes more sense when the listener is on the move -- in the car, ipodding, etc.
If two versions of each song were to be distributed, I'd prefer they be built into the media: disc vs. audio file, where only the MP3/AAC gets compressed by default.
A final thought. It may be that if CDs are to be compressed by default, the practice may only increase the demand for new music format variants (like the various bit rate versions of a song available now from iTunes). Perhaps this would add yet another MP3/AAC/AIFF format -- perhaps an uncompressed SACD-quality binary. Now that's a compromise that an audioprig like me could live with.
Randy
...isn't how well it handles the loud, compressed crap so pervasive today.
The true test of an audio system is how well can it handle the un-compressed, quiet tracks. Because it is those which have low-level info.. page turns, the 3rd fiddle shifting in her chair, the loose change in the conductor's pocket, the guy walking behind the drumset, the guitar player tokin'... it's all there, on a good, un-compressed, wide-DR recording.
It takes a really bangin' hi-fi to deal with the quiet, uncompressed stuff... because after the quiet, ppp, soft parts, usually comes a ffff part, loud enough to wake up the dead. =oD
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
So, if your problem is that the average level of some song is about -6 dBFS, why not reverse the process of compression (easy to do) until that same track has an average level that you like better (say -15 dBFS) ? We could easily have an audio player that would analyze tracks for their average level, then when playing them process them so that they have an average level matching to the user set setting. Tada, problem solved!
Now I'd like to clear something up about dynamic range as talked about in the article. It says that a rock concert has a dynamic range of 120 dB, and that a CD only has a range of 96 dB. This is correct, but misleading, as we could think that the CD is unfit for fully reproducing the sounds heard during a concert.
While this is technically true, here's what it all means. They say a rock concert has a dynamic range of 120 dB, they say so because the dimmest sounds we can possibly hear are said to be at 0 dB, and the loudest sounds heard in that convert are at about 120 dB. Thus, the dynamic range is max_level - min_level = 120 dB - 0 dB = 120 dB.
But here's the catch. While CDs can only retain the upper 96 dB of that 120 dB dynamic range, it means that what's on the CD goes from the sounds at 120 dB to the sounds at 24 dB (120 dB - 96 dB). And here's what it all means, that means that on the CD, you can hear everything you heard during the concert, you can even play it at the original volume if you wish (and if you want to kill your ears), but that means that you won't hear sounds as soft as 24 dB. Now you must be wondering, how loud is a 24 dB sound? That's softer than a whisper (not a whisper to your ear, a whisper a few feet away from you), softer than a completely quiet atmosphere at 2 am in the middle of a desert, as soft as leaves rustling. Could you hear such a soft sound in the middle of a concert?
No? That's why the 96 dB dynamic range of a CD is not a problem.
You just got troll'd!
If the bass goes THUD you need a better sound system!
:-)
The bass should resonate: BOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM buh chicka BOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM buh buh chicka BOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM
THUD is an elephant fainting. Who wants to hear that? What you want is a low, clear tone as loud as you can get it. If it's not keeping your girlfriend's seat humming you need some better gear!
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Back in about 1980 or so I was an AOR ("Album Oriented Rock") DJ. That was a format that allowed you to play interesting stuff but also required a playing a fair amount of popular tracks to pay the bills. One of the steaming piles of talentless dreck on our rotation in those years was whatever the Subject band had most recently excreted. Several of us noticed at the time that you could tell the age of their albums by the amount of movement in the console VU meters (yes, analogue meters children - I am an ooold fart!) In other words, to keep the listeners interested in this stuff, they had to keep jacking up the compression level with each release. Once the needles stopped moving, guess what? They dropped off the face of the earth.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
Is it a surprise that living in a barbaric empire that is committing war crimes (U.S. citizen here) that we have lost sensitivity to subtle music and subtle colors? I think not... Rock on dude X-treme to the MAX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
The same game plays out in the food processing industry where the loudness of a food item is defined by its salt content. Drunk people staggering homeward pay more attention to a loud selection on the Jukebox the same way they choose their late night snack selections: pretzels, pizza, poutine, peanuts. Common ingredient? Hint: it's not the letter p. Recently I tried a Greek ewe's chees, Myzithra, that caused my salt detectors to compress my sense of taste into a square wave. Would have been a toss-up against anchovie paste straight out of the tube.
"Yes, but most non-profits are non-profits are not interested in , e.g., suing their customers."
I didn't know that those who would download the "Blood, Sweat and Tears" (pun intended) for free meaming illegaly, could be called "customers".
Where I come from they are called "thieves"!
"So, if your problem is that the average level of some song is about -6 dBFS, why not reverse the process of compression (easy to do) until that same track has an average level that you like better (say -15 dBFS) ? We could easily have an audio player that would analyze tracks for their average level, then when playing them process them so that they have an average level matching to the user set setting. Tada, problem solved!"
...but not really the solution.
Why this is
The Loudness war is an analogy of the Steroid in sports WAR...its a game of one upmanship and will only cease when someone steps up to end the madness.
Until then, enjoy the overpaid and fake athletic abilities of steroid junkies and the over pumped tunes, they'll both leave your nuts shrivelled and broken!
The solution is simple.
I want a knob on my audio player, right next to the volume control, that allows me to choose any arbitrary amount of compression.
When I'm listening in a perfectly quiet environment, I'll turn the compression competely off, so I can experience the full dynamic range from the tiniest whisper to the most thunderous tempest.
On the other hand, if I'm listening while mowing the lawn, such that I would never have any hope of hearing that tiniest whisper, I'll dial up quite a bit of compression.
This would be the best of both worlds. Make it so, audio industry!
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
To summarise, film grains are binary (i.e. on or off), so you require a large number of them to generate the illusion of a given shade. By contrast, each pixel in a sensor array can measure a large number of grey levels. Therefore you can't directly compare grain and pixel counts.
But even disregarding this and measuring lines of resolution from a photo of a test card is misleading. Why? Remember that film grains are either "on" or "off"; so are the high-contrast lines in a test card. This plays to film's advantage, because (for this purpose) its resolving power is as fine as the film grain. Unfortunately, this is absolutely *not* representative of 99.9% of real life cases, which contain continuous shades.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I'm not an audiophile, but I wish they wouldn't push the loudness to the limit. When I try to use the eq on my ipod or pc to compensate for my cheap headphones, I get clipping and it sounds terrible. My only option with some records is to keep the eq flat (or to spend the $$ on a better set of headphones).
It's strange, because we all know what "strawberry" flavour is supposed to be, and yet it doesn't really occur to us that most strawberries taste nothing like that. I didn't think about it until I read this essay.
I'd say that strawberry flavour tastes like strawberry *jam*. Maybe it's just the sweetness that accounts for the difference. As the article says, real strawberries aren't actually that sweet, and can often be quite tart (admittedly this may be down to crappy modern strawberries).
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
You said: "And no, I don't have "exotic cables", just quality speakers and a hefty power amp with plenty of headroom to spare."
Wow if more people understood that little fact then many people would be hearing much better sound quality and perhaps we'd get less 128 MP3 through 2 dollar ear buds "sounds fine" and less I need two 5,000 dollar Krell monoblocks with a 2,000 dollar "special" power cord for my bedroom "audiophile" dumbasses. Hint the power cord, speaker wire, and patch cables make zero difference in sound, deal. I have a 60.00 dollar Yamaha pre-amp from the late 70s, 90 dollar Yamaha power amp from the mid 80s and 12 dollar Phase tech speakers from a thrift store, and yet I seriously doubt in a decibel matched ABX test most "audiophiles" could tell it from a 20,000 dollar "reference" system. Nor could said audiophiles tell a 320 MP3 from a CD, hint both will sound like crap if the source recordings are heavily compressed. The White Stripes new Cd is unlistenable, not because the music is bad, but because it enough compression to be headache inducing.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
First, read this comment for a little better info.
Second, this is perhaps the very reason that professional photographers are all over the map with where they stand on using digital versus film. Last I was aware, it was about a 50/50 split along who used what; however, reasons varied more greatly.
Some professional photographers use digital and claim its better; others use it b/c its the latest & greatest tech; yet others use it because it's what they can afford & play with. Others on the other side claim its inferior, reverse the same arguments, add some others. In other words, not even the professionals have decided completely that digital is worth it.
Personally, I'd wait until digital has gotten to the 35 megapixel range before really doing a comparison. Right now, when I'm shooting, I carry around my 6 MP digital for taking a lot of shots in supplement to my SLR, and my Minolta SLR (with lots of film) for the more serious shots and momento shots. (I easily burn 2GB of data on the digital and roughly 7 rolls of film when I'm taking pictures for events that are just a couple hours.)
Lastly, I have a hard time finding film to be binary in nature for all kinds of film. It may be for certain kinds of black & white film, but I'm not convinced per color. Author has a good argument, but still misses, IMHO, as a single CCD sensor typically cannot pick up a whole lot either; digital really uses several individual sensors to build a single pixel, so his argument breaks down as well.
Also, I would think the chemical nature of film would lead better towards blending wrt color than the sensory nature of CCDs in digital.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Today's kids/teens have a huge wealth of music
No. Today's kids listen to what is fashionable among their peers. I don't understand exactly how that is determined; presumably the media companies' marketing achieves something; but it is 100% worthless crap. The level of subtlety is approximately that of a monkey banging a stick on a tree-trunk. You don't need dynamic range for this rubbish.
Actually, a real solution might not be far off from what you're suggesting.
Why not make an amp with a "dynamic range compression" knob on it. When you turn it up, the music sounds clear in noisy environments. In a quiet environment, you turn it down and you get a more authentic sound with all the detail.
Then you need a few studios to produce broadband recordings.
Of course, getting hardware manufacturers to develop a standardized feature like this on their equipment (including factory installed car systems) is non-trivial. But maybe someone like THX could be enticed into making this a requirement for sound system and even recording certification? THX is a somewhat prestigious label. If THX makes a big deal about it, maybe both manufacturers and studios would pay attention?
Would you prefer to buy recordings that have been THX certified for wide dynamic range (and other quality metrics)? I would. A lot of geeks might.
Moreover, a THX initiative may serve as a channel to help educate the general public. At least half the battle is getting people to know that quality is being trashed for inane reasons.
Privacy Statement: We value your privacy! It is very valuable. That's why we try to sell it whenever we can.
Another possible channel to propagate the issue might be in software like Winamp, etc. If a knob or slider is stuck somewhere on the primary interface, people will wonder what the heck it is for... They click context help and get an explanation of dynamic range.
Privacy Statement: We value your privacy! It is very valuable. That's why we try to sell it whenever we can.
Of course, grains come in all shapes and sizes, and may overlap each other in multiple layers with colour film (and possibly with black-and-white). And of course, colour films don't retain the grains themselves for the final image, but are replaced with less distinct dye clouds. And, and...
Yep, it's complicated. However, my point was that the author *did* successfully point out a fundamental flaw in the thinking used in a very large number of "film has more resolution" arguments.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
One of the items no one has touched on is the aesthetic reasoning (or lack thereof) behind compression. On most rock songs, compression of the dynamic range makes the song sound much "fuller." You can get some idea of the concept by listening to old albums by the Ramones and comparing them to Green Day. While the Ramones sound great, their relative lack of compression makes the recording sound less "full" when played next to a Green Day song with mroe compression, which captures and magnifies many quiet, ambient characteristics of the recording. High end playback equipment makes up for this by reproducing the music loudly with much higher fidelity, but the Ramones are going to sound a bit softer and quieter on 90% of the equipment out there.
Certain genres and groups with greater dynamic range will be especially hurt by this - could you imagine Stevie Ray with modern compression? It would definitely take a bit of the edge off. However, that's the job of the producers and engineers to make sure to hit the right compression level for the artist. Whether they're succeeding is a different matter.
EMP! That's Electro-Magnetic Pulse ... but I shouldn't have to tell anyone here that, right?
whooooooosh!
In fact, it amazes me, that The Shift happened to your language. English used to be much more phonetic as well. Should have been the influence of those weird Frenchmen.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Actually i think part of the problem may be that our musicians these days are substantially worse than they used to be so you need to reign in their sloppy ass playing by compressing the hell out of it.
I would imagine the effect would be noticable on say, an oasis album.
I wonder if some Music Biz exec is sensing an opportunity here, in re-remastering classic albums to help restore all this lost tonality. Is this compression present even in the marquee remastered CDs? Nothing like buying Dark Side of the Moon for the fourth or fifth time!
Since CD audio suffers from quantization noise at higher frequencies of human hearing, it's possible that lossy compression at high bit rate (such as 2048k) from a better input source might still provide higher quality audio.
It also makes sure the quiet bits aren't lost through tiny cellphone speakers. Downloadable ringtones are a lucrative market.
Ill informed? That's an understatement. Not that being a Slashdot reader is a mark of a great intellect or anything, but I would expect more from a Slashdot reader.....oh.....wait.....I guess that makes me the dumbass.
With CD sales haemorrhaging the music industry needs something to prop up sales. So why not actually get behind SACD/DVD-Audio and give us truly high-fidelity recordings that are mixed for dynamic range? CDs can then be left as source for MP3s / car stereos while the hifi version can command a premium and give us a reason to shell out our hard-earned on the premium format. But *please* let's make sure they mix hifi disks to -18db to ensure a consistent amount of headroom.
I saw a really interesting comparison using albums from the rock band "Rush", who have been putting out albums consistantly since 1974 (18 studio albums, 5 live albums). They took something like every 3 albums, or every 5 years and displayed a waveform from them, and the difference was distrubing.
Then again, could this also increase our sensitivity to dynamic range? If music is compressed and limited to the point that the dynamics change only very slightly, might we become more attuned to dynamic changes?
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Remember the good old "loudness" button? I have a pre-loudness era spectrum analyzer that is almost totally useless these days because so much of what comes off my CD player maxes out all of the bars on the display. I've actually been thinking about installing my own "quietness" button - probably just a couple of potentiometers in series with my line in. Anyone run into an issue like this with an older hardware? Any clever solutions?
ôó
The advent of digital media has warrented heavy use of compression and hard limiting of the audio due to the undesirable distortion artifacts it produces when overdriven. Tapes and vinyl (analog media) have a warm saturation consisting of "musical" harmonics and most analog recordings are recorded at redline (saturation) to achieve to the best signal-to-noise ratio.
...on NPR any way. Sometimes compression is your friend. It's really annoying listening to NPR programs in the near white-noise environment of my old pickup truck. I crank the volume way up so I can hear their interviewees, but the then the host or bumper music comes blaring on strong and I have to crank it down quick. I'm constantly riding the volume knob.
Hey NPR, it's only talk, go ahead and compress it a little.
Of course, if I really cared about NPR's content, I wouldn't be driving a 19 year old diesel pickup truck.
>Why not make an amp with a "dynamic range compression" knob on it. When you turn it up, the music sounds clear in noisy environments. In a quiet environment, you turn it down and you get a more authentic sound with all the detail.
Thank you, you've outlined in perfect detail exactly what I've been wanting on my car stereo since I first had a car stereo.
I remember seeing an NAD cassette deck in a hi-fi shop that had a knob like that to assist in making mix tapes for your car. But screw that, put it right on the amplifier of any device used in a portable situation whether it be a car or a pocket. I specifically chose an A/V receiver with the Dolby "Night Mode" dynamic range control and find it essential when the situation is right. Late at night is what they chose to name it after, but it's even more useful to my family when we have a fan on in the room, belting out all that white noise. Man I want a control like that on everything. I want to be able to turn it off when I'm in the right environment! But I want to turn it on when I'm not.
Some of you already have those cute little shirts on that say disco sucks, right? That's not all that sucks.-Frank Zappa
William Hurt on the witness stand, during the divorce trial, said to his better-half's attorner (black arts of the twister, tearer, ripper), I cannot believe I am hearing this.", "I cannot be hearing this," and/or "I am not hearing this." over and over. ...
Are you confused?
What parts of "I cannot hear you." do you not hear or fail to get?
CDs made from vinyl or tape are compressed copied, then compressed and re-copied, again and again unto replication fade.
MY amp goes to 0x11000 and this ultimately compressed white noise must rise above the threshold of my tinitus and V8.
Meanwhile
Will someone? PLEASE! ANSWER THAT DAMNED PHONE! RR
PS. At least mod me up above MY threshold.
It must suck to bring that sense of resignation to your job everyday.
They are youngsters, they do not know what dynamic range, compression is. neither did they listen to any 'old' technology. so they dont know.
doing something that is low quality and getting away with it or the populace not seeming to object to it does not mean that what is being done is not wrong. same went with DDT pesticide in the 60s and 70s. people didnt know it was harmful, didnt object, companies pushed it.
record companies are pushing low quality, and they bear the full blame.
Read radical news here
Yes there is an objective measure of 'loudness' it's the Root Mean Square average volume. RTFA
...
hmmm, 146 buttons and 88 knobs on my stereo system makes me wonder if i have one ;)
Or can i fake it by adding/subtracting dolby or mpx or something? Wonder what terms might apply. I do actually use it to make mix tapes (including 8-tracks, no less) for older cars.
we know what it is and we know how to use it to make people buy more of our songs. ;-)
RMS is used by certain devices to try to predict and normalize loudness, but it is very far from perfect. And it doesn't represent any sort of objective measure of loudness.
you bastards !
Read radical news here
"always notice that when I play highly clipped music (e.g. Green day) through my ipod that the symbols and snare drums are actually slightly painful to the ears even when the overall volume is at low listening level."
When an audio system clips, you get distortion which is essentially square waves. Square waves are composed of 3rd order (odd) harmonics which naturally sound VERY bad to our ears. Tape distortion sounds better than square waves. Perhaps that is why it is "painful" for you.
Libertas in infinitum
CDs have a dynamic range of 96dB. DVDs have a dynamic range of 144dB. That's a difference of 48dB!!!
CDs are 16 bits. DVDs are 24 bits (some are 20 I think). The formula is x*6 = dynamic range in dB where x=# of bits.
Libertas in infinitum
One of my local bands--for whom I do house sound--cut our second CD at a pro studio. Eventually the studio engineer asked the question: Do we want dynamic range, or compression? (I have no real memory of the exact words he used, but I remember the occurrence quite clearly). The musicians, technically savvy people from the computer industry, chose dynamic range, especially after my impassioned advice to do so. Their complex vocals and instrumentals deserve a larger dynamic range, and sounded far superior in an A/B comparison at the studio ... in isolation from commercial music comparison.
Later on, when playing our CD in sequence with others, the musicians were disappointed. "how come ours is so quiet?" they asked me. When I explained that they made the choice intentionally, none of the five musicians remembered making a conscious decision on compression vs. dynamic range. I remembered the discussion, and stand my my decision, becuase of their music's complexity. Yet some days I wonder if I misguided them: if we ever failed to get a gig due to the lack of compression on our demo CD.
I used to drive a Heisenberg, but every time I glanced at the speedometer, I'd get lost.
It's the ultimate in middle class whinging. Music's too loud, turn it down.
Better yet, why buy major label music? Buy independent.
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1
Would be for the audio replay equipment -- the cheap car stereos and so on -- to do the dynamic range compression.
It's perfectly easy to do digitally real time with modern technology.
You don't want your wallpaper yelling at you and full of noise, do you?
Limited dynamic range is decent for wallpaper. But distortion and high average volumes *aren't*. I find that with modern crap recordings, I turn my volume knob to "1" (doesn't matter how many settings there are on it) because otherwise it's too loud. Then the recording is silent half the time.
Unlistenably loud music is not what customers want. Ever. Except deaf customers, of course.
Nothing wrong with that. I approve of that. Dynamic range compression is fine.
But cranking up the average volume in contrast stinks, and there's absolutely no excuse for it. You want your compressed music louder, turn up the volume knob.
The rest of us want all our music to be at the same *average* volume. We have to adjust the volume knob constantly in order to maintain this.
Compressed dynamic range is bad from a hi-fi point of view.
But the other thing is this: instead of compressing the dynamic range around the same average dynamic level, they pull the range up to the top, raising the average level.
So with newer, louder releases, you have to turn the volume down lower and lower to hear the same average volume.