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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."
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.
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Which knob do you adjust to increase the dynamic range and re-add the lost information?
Oh that's right, you can't. You're right, it's not a tough choice is it?
Wrong kind of compression. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compres sion
Different kind of compression. This compression evens out the volume, so you can boost the overall volume level without clipping. Totally different thing than data compression.
The benefit is that a louder signal is perceived as a better signal by the ear. Since our sensitivity is not equally distributed along all frequencies a louder signal "acquires" more frequency range.
Of course that is a lower fidelity signal because high fidelity means reconstructing also the dynamics of the original sound, so to audiophiles a compressed signal sounds crappy.
I think the war started with sound engineers overcompressing stuff out of experimentation (in dance music compression is an important aspect, for instance). That made louder records stand out better in radio programming (even if radio stations have good compressors themselves nowadays) and casual listening, especially on crappy audio equipment.
Once the ear has adjusted itself to the loud recording, the less loud one sounds a little worse.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
I wouldn't say it "evens out the volume". It makes the gap between quiet and loud much smaller (a "thinner" signal, if you will) then pumps amplitude into the whole thing (volume level) so that you don't get much/any clipping. The result is a louder signal that is NOT the same as what was recorded.
Yes, many people and many systems can't tell the difference. A casual listener listening to terrestrial radio in a car hasn't a chance in h*** of noticing; the degradation of the signal from other means makes this just noise. If you have a nice home system and actually enjoy LISTENING to the music then you probably can tell the difference.
This irks me almost as much as the whole "sell music in MP3 format" talk. MP3 is a lossy format, by definition, and is NOT the same music as recorded and particularly at 128k is very noticeable in any halfway decent environment. 256k is better, but I do NOT want a lossy format as my only choice for digital audio!
The expression is "Hear hear" you dumbass. Although in this case the expression is "HEAR! HEAR!"
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Not at all. Like many other people you're confusing dynamic compresssion (what the article is about) with data compression (what YouTube and generally MP3 does).
:)
Data compression should be clear - the raw audio data are processed in a way that they take less space on a storage medium or less time to push them over the Intertube. This is done either losslessly by purely mathematical means or lossy by using so-called psychoacoustic models that try either to remove those parts from the sound that the human brain won't really recognize (eg. because they're "buried" below some other sound playing at the same time), or simply store those parts with way less precision. Basically lossy compresison throws away some decimal places in the parts of the audio data you won't hear too well anyway.
Dynamic compression on the other hand simply reduces the dynamic range of the sound - it makes loud stuff quieter or, if you simultaneously push up the total volume, makes quiet stuff louder. This hasn't anything to do with digital audio data - it's a purely acoustic modification that's been in use in recording studios for decades now, sometimes reasonably, sometimes not
Interestingly dynamic compression for the sake of getting things louder and data compression are almost mutual exclusive - by increasing the average volume of the song and basically emphasizing every little detail you're making the music noisier and noiser - and white noise is the worst thing that can happen to data compression of any kind. And even psychoacoustic compression schemes are given a hard time when they've got to figure out which of all those things coming screaming at you are important and which aren't.
It's illegal to crank commercial volumes, but every local station does it anyway - advertisers love it. I have to turn down the volume every time a stupid loud commercial comes on.
You don't seem to understand it, but that is the crux of the loudness war. The local stations do not in fact crank the volume on commercials. That would be illegal. In fact what they do is compress the dynamic range of the audio, so the "apparent loudness" is increased. The peaks (which is how the FCC defines volume) are the same, but the RMS volume (essentially the average sound level and what our ear perceives as volume) is increased. Think about it, a CD is 16 bit, so the max volume is obviously 2^16=65536 for any particular data sample. So, they can't make the volume 2^17. What they can do, however, is compress the dynamic range, so instead of the average volume level to be at 4096, say, it is now 16483.
Commercials on TV suck, don't they. The audio is compressed to hell and back.
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.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
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.
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