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."

Comments

I have the solution

[jollyreaper]

Amps that only go up to 7. Because 7 is quieter than 10.

Re:I have the solution

[smilindog2000]

Of course, mine goes to 11 :-)

I'm probably just ill-informed, but aren't CD's just plain old 16-bit, with no compression, and great sound quality? The summary says 'CDs', but the link refers to technologies used on DVDs, which are highly compressed. As for annoying volumes, TV commercials really piss me off. 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.

Re:I have the solution

[Maxx169]

Wrong kind of compression. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compres sion

Re:I have the solution

[iainl]

CDs hold the capacity for great sound quality, yes. But not if you crank the master this far, crushing all the dynamic range.

Re:I have the solution

[Andrewkov]

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.

Re:I have the solution

[jrsp]

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!

Re:I have the solution

[mwvdlee]

You could just assume the most significant bits to be 1, and thereby create both dynamic range compression and filesize compression at the same time ;)

Re:I have the solution

[MrMr]

Well on SGI-IRIX of course it did for a long time.

http://www.eeggs.com/items/521.html

Re:I have the solution

[crgrace]

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.

Re:I have the solution

[CogDissident]

Yes, MP3 is a lossy format, but so long as you don't open it up and edit it all the time, it will keep 99.99% of the sound quality it had when it was recorded.

Re:I have the solution

[beaverbrother]

A real solution might be to have a few bytes in the compression format that "strongly recommends" to the player what the average volume of the song should be and what the range should be. Then the data is preserved, but the range of volume is still where the record companies want it to be.

Re:I have the solution

[asliarun]

Yes, MP3 is a lossy format, but so long as you don't open it up and edit it all the time, it will keep 99.99% of the sound quality it had when it was recorded. But then, it is the 0.01% that has kept the entire audiophile industry going, hasn't it? I was buying the audiophile story when it was about vacuum tubes vs transistors, good vs bad speakers, CD vs vinyl etc. However, I started zoning out when people started talking about power conditioners, gold connectors, silver cabling, and crap that costs thousands of dollars and looks "oh so very retro".

Back to your point, my ears can't really make out the difference between a CD and an MP3 as long as the MP3 is encoded at a decent bitrate. I can clearly make out the difference between a 128kbps and 256kbps, but not between 256kbps and 320kbps or VBR.

Re:I have the solution

[djdavetrouble]

A common test back in the day would be to play a master mix through the shittiest AM radio type
gear, or a 6x9 speaker and see how it sounded, since 90% of everyone would be hearing it on similar
gear.

Re:I have the solution

[Andrewkov]

99.99%? You mean perceived by the ear? A 45MB WAV file compressed down to a 3.5MB MP3 file is losing a lot more than 0.01% of the data.

Re:I have the solution

[dkf]

Think about it, a CD is 16 bit, so the max volume is obviously 2^16=65536 for any particular data sample. Actually that's the peak-to-peak height, but since you're actually storing a waveform you have to halve that value (to 2^15=32768 or there abouts) to get the real maximum (digital) amplitude. Your other points are correct though.

Re:I have the solution

[crgrace]

Thanks for the clarification.

Re:I have the solution

[AdamWeeden]

A 45MB WAV file compressed down to a 3.5MB MP3 file is losing a lot more than 0.01% of the data.

If you really believe that, then you don't know much about compression. Heck, even FLAC can turn a 45mb wav into a 25 mb file with NO loss of data (as FLAC is lossless compression). Going from 45mb wav to 3.5mb wav doesn't mean 92+% of the data has been removed, it simply means that by various compression methods (including, but not limited to removal of what the compressor perceives as non-audible signals and superfluous information) 45mb of data can be represented by 3.5mb of data.

Re:I have the solution

[bromoseltzer]

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.

What do you think "volume" is? It's a perception of loudness, which is only roughly related to anything you can measure numerically. A 16-bit data sample on a CD tells you the sampled electrical voltage, which is definitely not loudness. The square of voltage is power, which is getting closer. So the 32,768 to 1 range of voltages (plus and minus) gives you a range of 1,073,741,824 to 1 in power, or as these things are normally measured, about 90 dB dynamic range. Perceived audio "loudness" is roughly logarithmic; that's why the dB number is useful.

A 1 dB change (26% in power ratio) is barely detectable. The threshold of pain is up to 120 dB higher than the minimum detectable sound level. So even an uncompressed CD does not have enough dynamic range to capture what you might hear at a rock concert. (Just before you go deaf.)

Re:I have the solution

[Gazzonyx]

Amps that only go up to 7. Because 7 is quieter than 10. Great idea! If you promise to only make amps that go up to 7, I'll cut you in for 1/3 of my Monster Amp (TM) where the knob, get this... goes up to 8! I might even put LEDs in the knob that turn from green to red, to let the rockers know how much they're rocking!

Then, after everyone buys one that goes up to 8, we'll release an amp that goes up to, ready for this... 9! We'll call it Extreme something or other... Whattaya' say, we got a deal?!

Re:I have the solution

[eqisow]

I don't think it's fair to compare MP3 to WAV, since WAV is completely uncompressed. It'd be more fair to compare a 20 MB FLAC to a 5 MB MP3. Besides, I'm fairly sure he was talking about perceptible difference anyway.

Re:I have the solution

[default luser]

Back to your point, my ears can't really make out the difference between a CD and an MP3 as long as the MP3 is encoded at a decent bitrate. I can clearly make out the difference between a 128kbps and 256kbps, but not between 256kbps and 320kbps or VBR.

I have to agree, it is hard to tell the difference these days. I've been a long-time proponent of VBR: r3mix was the first encoder setting besides 256 or 320k CBR where I couldn't tell the difference between the CD and the compressed file, even on my Allesandros. Today's VBR settings are far more impressive, with alt preset standard pushing the limits of audio quality with mp3.

True story: recently, for about 6 months I was accidentally encoding my alt preset standard mp3s with a peak bitrate locked at 224k. I encoded DOZENS of CDs without noticing. When I finally noticed, I re-encoded for consistency's sake, but I couldn't tell the difference. That's how good LAME is today: ABR of 160-192k is transparent, even without 320k peaks.

Re:I have the solution

[cayenne8]

"A common test back in the day would be to play a master mix through the shittiest AM radio type gear, or a 6x9 speaker and see how it sounded, since 90% of everyone would be hearing it on similar gear."

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.

My friends and I would drool at the gear in the higher end audio shops. I knew at age 12 when I heard my first McIntosh tube amp running through a pair of Klipschorns, that that was what I wanted someday. I don't have the Mc yet, but, using a decware SET amp, but I do have the 50th anniversary K-horns.

I mean, none of us were wealthy back growing up, we all worked jobs we could get as we grew up, buying a piece at a time...upgrading over the years...etc.

But, if the music being put out the past few years....doesn't sound good due to over compression, etc....well, why get anything good to play it on....and I guess, over the past few years with this, youths of today don't even KNOW what good sound reproduction is supposed to be.

I guess that kind of explains the reactions I see here when I comment I'd not be interested in buying music online until it is available in at least CD quality....much of what I like is older, and with greater dynamic range, does sound better on good gear?

I dunno...but, I think it is sad that so many people don't care about really good sound repro...and maybe it is that music put out today (regarless of content, that's another argument) just doesn't sound as good....and all they know is to drive in a car with all subs vibrating the neighborhood, and no tweeter at all in the car.

:-(

Re:I have the solution

[cayenne8]

"I have to agree, it is hard to tell the difference these days."

Ok...it may be 'close'. But, why settle for close if you don't have to?

Why would anyone NOT be all for buying music at the best possible resolution? You can always take that, and degrade it as appropriate for the listening environment...(car, portable for gym, etc).

I can see why to offer compressed out there, for the small crowd without broadband, but, really...most anyone into downloading music and all, has all the bandwidth they need with a broadband connection. Is everyone so impatient that they can't wait an extra few mintues to get the very best quality they can?

I guess I alway like to get the best I can possibly afford when I get anything I want...I guess I don't understand why the masses are so ready to accept 'ok' or close enough...especially when the price and method between the two would so little....why NOT go for the best if that is the case?

Re:I have the solution

[Neoprofin]

Two things to consider.

1) The kids with their overpriced and overpowered subs are the behavioral equivalent of you in your youth. The goal is different but the mindset of lusting over ever better and more unattainable with your friends is the same. Sadly the technology is far too affordable and effective at producing nothing but bass and that's why I have less distraction living next to the airport than living across from the high school. 2) Low end sound quality has also improved. The gap between absolute crap and super high end still exists, but most people aren't working with the lower extreme. Mid-range systems that are just fine for casual listening are cheap and readily available.

Re:I have the solution

[timeOday]

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

A car is one place where dynamic range compression is arguably desirable. Because there's so much background noise, you can't hear quiet sounds anyways, so without compression you simply miss out on part of the music.

Also, unlike data compression (such as mp3) dynamic range compression isn't hard to hear or notice; it isn't even supposed to be. All it means is everything is about the same volume. So you *can't* have a brooding quiet passage suddenly shattered by a loud crash of cymbals. You can't have a discussion at audible volume interrupted by a gunshot so lound it makes your ears ring. You can't because the processing makes everything about the same volume. Live music seems to have a lot more dynamic range - drums especially.

To my thinking, dynamic range compression is a good idea for background sounds that aren't supposed to be too noticeable (like radio music for the most part), but bad for sounds that are supposed to be the center of attention (say, in a movie). Think about images; for stunning images (say, in a gallery) you want lots of dynamic range, but for your desktop wallpaper, not so much.

Re:I have the solution

[Applekid]

It's called the law of diminishing returns. It's worth paying, say, 10% more for a benefit of 30% on the performance. Would it be worth paying 1000% for that last 1%? 10000% for that last 0.1%?

Audiophiles either have extremely sensitive hearing (which I would consider a curse considering how much audio is around us that isn't pristine and perfect), or they're liars with too much money to blow.

Re:I have the solution

[Mister Whirly]

"Of course, mine goes to 11 :-)"

Mine goes to 11 too, AND it's in my sig.

Re:I have the solution

[Albert Sandberg]

Radiostations has been compressing audio forever to be able to send farther by doing this with a (tadam) compressor. Expensive equipment too to do it in real time, although a friend of mine has done it with a low end pentium and two soundcards :)

Re:I have the solution

[Kyaphas]

What I've always heard is that the commercials aren't louder, it's that they are at the max level set forth by the show they're in. The show keeps it's volume level logical, quiet during quiet scenes so that when something loud happens, you hear the difference. Commercials just come in at the max to grab your attention.

Re:I have the solution

[Lisandro]

Not really - the key to compression is removing redunadancy (loseless, as in FLAC) and unneeded information (lossy, as in MP3). If i give you a 100MB .wav of a 1khz sinewave, do you lose 99% if i describe the waveform to you in a paragraph?

Re:I have the solution

[Shimmer]

Not to be pendantic, but the maximum 16-bit integer is actually 0xffff = (2^16)-1.

Re:I have the solution

[Safiire Arrowny]

as CDs have pushed the limits of loudness thanks to advances in digital technology

Why blame this on advances in digital technology? It was always possible to compress the shit out of audio, weather you used a digital compressor or analog one.

Try blaming stupid suits who don't care about audio quality, or music, who basically tell audio engineers to make it as loud or louder than every other CD or else they won't have a job.

One of the most compressed albums I have ever heard, is October Rust by Type O Negative. Not only is it compressed to death, if you look at the waveform, it literally clips constantly.

Compression is not a bad thing though. It really gives punch to drums and bass, evens out the volume of vocals, etc. It is almost the one thing other than good EQing that makes modern music sound modern, in my opinion. But to do all of that work, and then shove yet another compressor or brickwall limiter on the master and squish a whole track, is sad, and only something someone who hated music would do.

Re:I have the solution

[PopeRatzo]

This might possibly explain why music consumers today are willing to accept a highly compressed (dynamic, not data compression) product. There are several reasons as far as I can tell:

1. High Fidelity was never really that important to the enjoyment of music. When I listened to the Stooges on my parents' cheap Sylvania stereo, I wasn't really listening for the lovely interplay between the oboe and the English horn. I wanted volume and a big, big beat.

2. Popular music is much more rhythm and less melody than in the heyday of Hi-Fi, the 50's and 60's. When you've got producers who actually desire the lo-fi sound of some neolithic synth and then proceed to dirty it up with distortion and bit crushing, it's clearly not about getting a warm, natural sound.

3. Much music is listened to via headphones these days. If you're trying to get the purest recording and reproduction of acoustic instruments, a pair of earbuds isn't going to cut it. Not a whole lot of popular music today requires pure recording and reproduction of acoustic instruments anyway, so what's the difference?

4. Many of the great recordings of popular music were given a sort of distinction and personality by the type of production "mistakes" that are the bane of the hi-fi enthusiast. An example from the 2nd Rock Era is the cut Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones. There's a part on there where a tambourine will come in on the intro and it sent the VU meter way into the red, causing an ugly distortion that a "hi-fi" producer would have immediately thrown out and re-recorded. But the groove was there, a brilliant producer left it in, and now, whenever I hear that song it's that distorted tambourine that gives me the little shiver. Now, it's something that's sought out by producers. On the New Magnetic Wonder record by Apples in Stereo, there are cuts where some backing vocals are clearly recorded using a blown-out microphone. It sounds great to me, especially when I'm pedaling to work with my mp3 player cranked through my earbuds (yes, I know I'm taking a chance, using earphones when I'm riding in traffic, but it's such a joy that I accept the risk).

When I listen to Sir Georg Solti's recording of Parsifal, or Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations, or Miles Davis In a Silent Way, I want a true and warm recording of the sound of the instruments. Air moving through a horn, or a string vibrating, or a piece of wood striking a skin. If Ceelo Green is a Soul Machine or The Books The Lemon of Pink is on my box, how would I know if the re-recording of the sample of Bernie Worrell's string-synth from P-Funk Connection is a "true and warm recording" or not? All I know is it makes the juice flow. That's good enough for me.

Re:I have the solution

[Anonymous Coward]

But my amp goes to 0x10000

Re:I have the solution

[Mattcelt]

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU MEAN!

Re:I have the solution

[zippthorne]

A compressed music file of the same filesize as its CD track would have better quality than the CD track assuming you got it from a higher resolution master. Further, with an appropriate compression algorithm (I don't know if MP3 is one), you could simply specify a minimum volume level and not even bother with bandwidth compression in the file. The player would still have to handle it, but at least audiophiles could turn that crap off and get their vaunted "pure" music.

The current crop of compressed vs. CD, though (and keep in mind that even CD-audio is just another kind of compression. You started with an analog signal) has a few pronounced differences. The obvious one is "a la carte:" uncompressed individual songs are simply not offered for all albums. The next is convenience: you can purchase a track off of iTunes by simply knowing the name of the song. The CD way is to search for and order a CD, or drive to the cookie-cutter music shop and browse through their vast rows of similar sounding reggae, hoping your taste is mundane enough to be included in the remaining racks.

In short, it's like every other decision made by rational individuals in an economy. It's a trade off of costs and benefits which much be optimized.

Re:I have the solution

[cbreaker]

I agree with you to a point but it's not just high school boys with bass boxes that seem to not care about quality sound reproduction.

Personally I think that a lot of it comes with the MP3 issue. When Napster was first out, and then all the clones, and then ones like AudioGalaxy... Most of it was compressed into 128kbit crap or worse. So there was a trade-off: Superior sounding CD's with 15 songs or 15,000 songs of sub-quality but free? People put up with the compression artifacts because it was free. Now, I'd venture that people don't even notice it anymore, or they look past it.

For me, I could never look past it. I download music sometimes but I never hold on to anything less then 256Kbit, and even then, you're going to lose a lot of the little subtleties on some types of music (but let's face it, a lot of music out there wasn't recoded with great equipment, and so it won't benefit from great playback gear.)

Re:I have the solution

[object88]

Why would anyone NOT be all for buying music at the best possible resolution?

Because I like more than a few hundred songs, and I have a life away from my computer. Because I can easily fill more than one 8GB iPod Nano with songs that I'd like to hear at any given notice. If I can't hear the difference between a 256kbps-encoded MP3 and the original WAV file, why waste disc / memory space?

Re:I have the solution

[iluvcapra]

Going from 45mb wav to 3.5mb wav doesn't mean 92+% of the data has been removed, it simply means that by various compression methods (including, but not limited to removal of what the compressor perceives as non-audible signals and superfluous information) 45mb of data can be represented by 3.5mb of data.

You're definitely losing 92% of the data; you're definitely not losing 92% of the information, but that's a different thing.

Re:I have the solution

[riker1384]

3. Much music is listened to via headphones these days. If you're trying to get the purest recording and reproduction of acoustic instruments, a pair of earbuds isn't going to cut it. Not a whole lot of popular music today requires pure recording and reproduction of acoustic instruments anyway, so what's the difference? I disagree on this point. With headphones you can get good sound for much less money than speakers. Not with cheap earbuds, but a good pair of open-backed headphones can give you the same clarity as speakers costing up to 10 times as much. High-quality in-ear monitors are also becoming more popular for use with mp3 players.

Re:I have the solution

[Theaetetus]

The threshold of pain is up to 120 dB higher than the minimum detectable sound level. So even an uncompressed CD does not have enough dynamic range to capture what you might hear at a rock concert. (Just before you go deaf.)

This is false. A CD has a 96 dB dynamic range from loudest possible instant to softest possible instant. A rock concert has, using your maximum of 120 dB and a highly conservative estimate of crowd noise at 70 dB, only 50 dB dynamic range. Crank the CD through a loud amplifier and good speakers, and it could go from 120 dB to 24 dB, while the rock concert is still only 120-70 dB.

Re:I have the solution

[iluvcapra]

The samples in a CD PCM stream are signed, so (2^15)-1 is the correct value for the positive excursion of the waveform, though you've got another (2^15)-1 on the negative swing.

Re:I have the solution

[Buran]

Agreed. And I have hearing loss (birth defect) so I encode at 128. I can hear clipping, but I don't have the fidelity, if that's the right word, to notice compression artifacts as soon as others do. And more than one friend has told me that most of my collection sounds fine to them -- 128 isn't as bad for many people as it's been made out to be. I've got some stuff that sounds awful that I replace/recompress as I catch it, though -- mostly batch imports using settings that didn't work for some songs. Usually things like full orchestral performances and the like.

Re:I have the solution

[Jeremy Erwin]

I own a SACD that is essentially unenjoyable unless played at -3 db below reference. Why? You can't hear the violins otherwise. There's about 40--50 dB of dynamic range in the recording, though, so the crescendos are very loud when they do come. Sort of the point of a crescendo, isn't it?

Re:I have the solution

[CastrTroy]

3. Much music is listened to via headphones these days. If you're trying to get the purest recording and reproduction of acoustic instruments, a pair of earbuds isn't going to cut it. Not a whole lot of popular music today requires pure recording and reproduction of acoustic instruments anyway, so what's the difference?

Please notice the difference between headphones and earbuds. I find that a moderately priced set of headphones ($50-$100 range) gives much better sound quality than even $500 speakers. At least that's my perception. I found I can hear a lot of the more subtle sounds and background noises much better on a set of headphones. The effect of stereo sound is also greatly enhanced.

Re:I have the solution

[glarbl_blarbl]

Good point! Compression has always been the audio engineer's hammer of choice. I use it all the time at live shows and on recorded vocals, acoustic guitar, bass, just to name a few. Just this weekend I recorded an awesome local black metal band, the sonqwriter/guitarist/keyboardist stayed all ten hours for recording and mixing and was raving about the mix at the end of the day.

The next day, after he had had a chance to listen to the master on a few different decks (we mixed through my crappy Edirol monitors and referenced through my JBL PA mains occasionally) he called me up and said he wanted it "louder". Of course I had normalized, so the only thing to do now is to compress it. I was having a bitch of a time getting my Mackie Onyx 1640 to play nice with 64Studio (since jack and the board have wildly different ideas of where zero is :P) so I skipped my normal 1.5:1 main mix compression during mixdown.

As for good EQ'ing, I've always preferred good mic placement to EQ, never have met a digital EQ I liked... And I haven't made enough money to buy a good outboard EQ yet ;)

[T]o do all of that work, and then shove yet another compressor or brickwall limiter on the master and squish a whole track, is sad, and only something someone who hated music would do.

Couldn't agree more!

Re:I have the solution

[OnlineAlias]

You and that guitarist are the problem. Make it louder, he said, and you made it louder.

The point of this whole article is, "we notice when you do that, and it sucks". Try to talk the guy out of it next time.

Re:I have the solution

[s4ck]

The solution for tv or home theater situation is to add a compressor unit in the signal chain.

A used dbx or symetrix would do nicely.

if you know your way around a dynamic compressor (Plenty of reading material online) you'll be able to only compress (go rms instead of peak) the adverts.

depending on the settings, you might lose out some dynamic range in the movies and tv shows but these have already been compressed before broadcast at studio level AND master control; meaning you can't really squash more what has been squashed already. however, by "limiting" the signal you'll be lowering the "volume" of the adverts.

you could also get a compressor equipped with an "expander". this feature is kinda trickier to use but can bring back some dynamic range to your audio signal.

Re:I have the solution

[mystran]

My hobbies include some signal processing and music production stuff, and I definitely agree with you. But I want to add, that even with cheap headphones, it tends to be easier to hear non-linearities than with speakers, especially in not-so-optimal listening conditions, because there's no reverb, and you hear each channel separately. Other subtle effects are also easier to notice (which can be a problem when listening to a headphone mix from speakers).

I personally get very annoyed nowadays when listening to commercially produced new music from headphones specifically because they often have been driven so hard through a limiter, that the effect is well past compression and sounds more like plain old-fashioned clipping.. which can be nice on individual tracks, but rarely on master.

Some amount of compression is essential for certain types of pop-music, and compressors can be used to enchance dynamics as much as reduce them; the real problem is when perfectly well sounding mixdowns are destroyed by "mastering" them with stupid amounts of "compression" essentially turning the whole track/album/whatever into a glorified pulse-width-modulation.

Re:I have the solution

[glarbl_blarbl]

Well, we haven't scheduled a remix/remaster appointment yet. There is a huge difference between a slight (1.5:1) compression, and heavy-handed (4:1 or more) compression -- or even worse, the brickwall limiter the GP mentioned. I did a slight compression on my bands first album (available for purchase via my homepage link ;-D ) and it sounds much quieter than anything else in a normal playlist. I like to think I know what I'm doing around the studio, and it's a bit unfair to call me the problem when you haven't listened to anything I've produced.

That being said, the band paid me $300 for ten hours of work. Do you think it's appropriate for me to make creative decisions for them, or try to influence them to follow my aesthetics? If he had paid me a producer's wage, then I certainly would have felt comfortable doing so -- but we would also have spent much more than ten hours on the two songs they recorded. I doubt that band has the budget to afford me as a producer :)

If he asks me to make it "louder" after we do some fattening, then I will politely try to convince him otherwise. Though it would behoove us to keep the aesthetics of the genre in mind, as well. Metal tends to have a much smaller dynamic range than jazz or classical music.

Re:I have the solution

[Safiire Arrowny]

As for good EQ'ing, I've always preferred good mic placement to EQ, never have met a digital EQ I liked... And I haven't made enough money to buy a good outboard EQ yet ;)

I suppose I said that because I only ever deal with purely electronic music, and I haven't recorded anything real in a long long time.

Re:I have the solution

[croddy]

Decode the MP3 and then subtract the resulting waveform from the original file. This will give you a much better representation of the difference between the two signals than simply comparing filesizes.

Re:I have the solution

[Net_Wakker]

I love it when people are being pedantic. I'd have modded you up if it weren't for the lack of modpoints.
That aside, the loudnesswar has been lost for those of us who, like me, like to actually listen to music. Apart from the afore-mentioned insane bass-blasting-from-a-car thing, apparently it now is hip to walk around with your cellphone spewing out music in utterly distorted tin-can-speaker fashion because you want the world to hear whatever it is you're not listening to. If THAT kind of puke is what today's youth deems acceptable soundquality these days, they'll go with anything.

Re:I have the solution

[croddy]

Eleven? Psshht. Play though a Fender Hot Rod series amp -- every knob goes to twelve.

Re:I have the solution

[Shimmer]

That makes sense.

Re:I have the solution

[Watts Martin]

While I've said this before on occasion on Slashdot, thousand-dollar cables are not what most audiophiles are particularly interested in -- in fact, I really only see them being talked about by people who make thousand-dollar cables, and by people mocking audiophiles. :) Seriously, while I know they're out there, I don't know people who buy them. I suppose if you've already spend $100K on the audio equipment, another $10K on cabling doesn't sound ridiculous, but for those of use who'd spend "merely" $5K on the hardware, that's not gonna happen.

Unfortunately, the focus on the ha-ha-aren't-they-stupid tends to make people dismissive of anything more expensive than lamp wire for cabling, which is equally silly. We're not talking about woo-woo stuff like silver strands versus copper -- we're talking about basic electrical principles like impedance, capacitance and resistance. They matter, and they really are different between different kinds of cable.

And incidentally, gold connectors? They don't corrode. Nothing voodoo-ish about the idea, just common sense. And for goodness' sake, you can get audio cables with gold connectors at Radio Shack for $10 -- I do not understand why I keep seeing them being talked about in the same breath as $2000/meter Transparent Reference cables.

Re:I have the solution

[jhol13]

Yes, (2^15)-1 is for the positive (0x7FFF), but you do get "full" -2^15 (0x8000) for negative. It is two's complement, not one's.

This must be one of the most nitpicking posts ever :-)

Re:I have the solution

[fractoid]

depending on the settings, you might lose out some dynamic range in the movies and tv shows but these have already been compressed before broadcast at studio level AND master control; meaning you can't really squash more what has been squashed already. Maybe I'm alone in this, but I'd really like to REDUCE the volume range (not sure if 'dynamic range' is the right word) of most of the movies I watch. It's nice in the theaters to have so much range that you can literally hear a pin drop, then a minute later have a jumbo jet taking off over your head. However, I live in an apartment with a busy road outside, and with my surround sound system, the only way I can still hear the quiet bits of a movie while not waking the neighbors is by constantly adjusting the volume. Recently I've taken to just playing the sound through my crummy TV speakers, because they even everything out a lot. I'd like to see an alternate audio track "English for people with neighbors" that doesn't have tiny whispered conversations interspersed with SWELLING MAJESTIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC!!! SEE IT SOUNDS BIG!! THE FLOOR'S SHAKING! WOW!!!! The new LotR series was a horrible culprit of that, great movies but for god's sake turn the orchestra down. >.<

Re:I have the solution

[iluvcapra]

It's been such a long time since I thought about negative zero... See Count, Compare, and Skip.

Re:I have the solution

[Calinous]

I have a $200+ Sony audio system, and I use to listen to radio. There are several (10+) commercial sounding radios, which play overly compressed music. Finding the only radio which don't do it, and moving back and forth between them makes the difference in sound easy to spot. I assume that's the compression thingy - everything sounds louder (I have to adjust the volume from 8-9 to 11), music is somehow offensive, and maybe just a little bit painful (when moving from one radio station to the others)

Re:I have the solution

[bWareiWare.co.uk]

Unless you happen to be recording at 44.1kHz/16bit mono/stereo CDs aren't lossless either.

DVD-Audio (6 (full) channels at 24bit and up to 192kHz (though not all at once)) can max out my home system and/or ears but I am happy to buy 256K+ AAC's for my mobile phone.

I also think that the lossy compression on (well done) DTS mixed still give better then CD sound, but that may be down to personal taste.

Re:I have the solution

[NulDevice]

Hell, when I grew up, the big format was cassette, which had just overthrown 8-track as the medium of choice.

And cassette had *awful* sound quality, compared to other formats available at the time. No two ways about it.

So I dunno if we can really generalize about kids "back in the day" having great ears and lust for quality sound reproduction.

Re:I have the solution

[NulDevice]

You can blame digital technology specifically because the tools that have really made this possible are digital - things like Waves L2/L3 Ultramaximizer, for example. Once everything's encoded into the digital domain, they can do things with lookahead and adaptive release that a strictly analog signal path can't. Hence you can squeeze the ever-loving crap out of dynamics in a way that doesn't introduce the artifacts - pumping and breathing - that limiting at that level would cause in an analog compressor.

In the realm of low-end mastering (people like me who do master indie records cheap - not top40 quality jobs but good enough for a demo) there are tools available as digital plugins and rack units that were barely available in the top studios 15 years ago - multiband compressors can be exceptionally surgical but they too can be used to add even more unartifacted (but wearying to the listener) compression at earlier stages of the game.

I think there's an additional issue here, too, that's often overlooked. Since a lot of this stuff is recorded entirely in the digital domain to start out with, there's a lot of focus on adding "analog warmth" to the recordings. There're a number of tools available to do this, and for the most part they do it through selective band compression and a little harmonic distortion. And this gets abused like crazy at the recording/tracking and mastering levels. By the time it gets to the mastering chain, often many, many individual tracks in the mix have been "warmed up", reducing dynamic range long before the mastering engineer gets his hands on it. Of course, it can be used judiciously - I like to use it to make programmed drums sound a little fatter, for example, but I've seen mixes where something like Steinberg Magneto or PSP VintageWarmer has been applied on every single track in a complex mix.

Overcompression CAN work for you, too - look at most "french" house music, where everything is squeezed and sidechained through the kick drum. It's not always a great effect but it can push a song on the dancefloor. But again, only to be used judiciously.

It's a complicated problem.

Re:I have the solution

[NulDevice]

There is the problem of binaural psychoacoustics, though. Most of these recordings are made in stereo, with two essentially "point" sources of sound in front of the listener. Run through headphones, it moves the point sources to the sides of your head, which throws off the perception of the sound.

Few headphones compensate for this.

Re:I have the solution

[s4ck]

Good point

tv is mighty compressed but movies, from DVD and especially European or none-holywood movies are the opposite. They have a wide dynamic range (volume range same thing). getting a compressor would definitely help for someone living in an apartment.

the only set back is that you'll only be able to listen in stereo. 5.1 surround compressor prices are prohibitive and i'm not sure they make some for consumer market. i suggested dbx or symetrix used stereo compressors, but really, a brand new berhinger would certainly do the job.

$100 budget and you're good to go. a used berghinger will go for even less. it all depend on the "audiophile" level you're on.

Re:I have the solution

[RobertLTux]

What folks don't know is that a US$200 pair of Cans can absolutely shred a 9.5 set of US$200 speakers because combined with a good sound system that knows how to
do the downmix properly The Fact of The Matter is YOU ONLY HAVE 2 EARS. So if the sound is shaped correctly and the Cans have a SubSonic module you can hear EVERYTHING.
Given 2 setups with the only difference being Headphones and Speakers you will find a Player that uses headphones will always win against a Player using Speakers
(unless the Headphones player sucks)

Re:I have the solution

[PopeRatzo]

You're right, CastrTroy. I was sloppy with the distinction. The quote above should have read "3. Much music is listened to via earbuds these days"

I've got a pair of Audio Technica headphones that beat any speakers for my money in lots of ways.

And for mixing, I use a trusty pair of Sony V6 cans. The MDR-7506 is nice, but the V6s are nicely broken in and comfy for long DAW sessions.

One thing: I've got a little 10k notch in my hearing from all the years of playing in loud bands. I have to be very careful with the EQ or I'll make everything I do sound like outtakes from the Raw Power sessions. My 19 year old daughter/assistant has more pristine ears, so she'll tell me when it sounds like hell. But if she keeps listening to that damn crazy jungle music the kids like these days with her mp3 player turned all the way up, she'll end up like me. Only prettier.

Re:I have the solution

[swordgeek]

I just have to jump into the audiophile fray here.

Gold makes perfect sense on connectors, but more often than not it's a very thin layer of gold electroplated onto the plugs, which gets scratched off easily and ends up making a worse connection than cheap nickel-plate. Expensive plugs may have thick gold plate, but the gold on the cheap ones is almost totally pointless.
As for cables, beyond a very easily attainable point (cheap coax for interconnects, 14-gauge copper for short speaker runs), any real difference that affects the signal audibly is a result of deeply flawed equipment. Yes, cables CAN make a difference, but it's trivially easy to avoid those problems, unless your gear is insanely badly designed.

Re:I have the solution

[MightyMait]

A common test back in the day would be to play a master mix through the shittiest AM radio type
gear, or a 6x9 speaker and see how it sounded, since 90% of everyone would be hearing it on similar
gear. If you look in an issue of Mix magazine, you'll see that nearly every professional studio has a pair of Auratone (see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/drmotte/221077015/ for a picture) monitors sitting on top of the mixing console. These are single speaker monitors that are used for "worst case scenario" listening.

Slightly about the Auratones are the Yamaha NS10 near-field monitors which are basically a glorified pair of bookshelf speakers.

So, it's not just "back in the day".

Re:I have the solution

[MightyMait]

That should read "slightly above the Auratones".

Re:I have the solution

[chriskenrick]

Maybe I'm alone in this, but I'd really like to REDUCE the volume range (not sure if 'dynamic range' is the right word) of most of the movies I watch. It's nice in the theaters to have so much range that you can literally hear a pin drop, then a minute later have a jumbo jet taking off over your head. However, I live in an apartment with a busy road outside, and with my surround sound system, the only way I can still hear the quiet bits of a movie while not waking the neighbors is by constantly adjusting the volume.

Most of the surround receivers these days have a "night mode" feature that does exactly this, compresses the dynamic range of the sound source. It's well worth a check to see if yours has a feature like this.

What pisses me off

[Colin Smith]

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.

Re:What pisses me off

[that IT girl]

Ah, that's what "mute" is for. I say if they're going to assault my eardrums with their crap, I'm not going to pay it a bit of attention. If they were considerate and interesting (far too many incredibly stupid commercials out there, and far too many ambiguous ones where you have no idea what they're advertising), I might actually consider buying their product, if it seemed to meet my needs. As it is, sometimes I decide NOT to buy a product based on their shoddy advertising.

Re:What pisses me off

[SuurMyy]

It seems to me that this is the reason why commercials come from many channels at the same time. You change the channel to see the same commercials on another channel.

Re:What pisses me off

[pla]

Are TV adverts where they do exactly the same.

Not that I watch a lot of TV in the first place, but I can't say I've actually had to suffer through a commercial for at least two or three years. I thought, though, that the FCC cracked down on advertisers trying to pull that loudness BS quite a while back, even before TiVo reduced commercials to nothing more than a blur accompanying four cheerful tone-pairs?



It means I either have to muck around with the volume I was happy with or change channel. Obviously I do the latter.

...Or just skip them entirely. Welcome to the 21st century ;-).

Re:What pisses me off

[192939495969798999]

TV is literally doing now what Andy Kaufman joked about... they slowly turn the volume down during the program, then as soon as the commercials come on, they boost it to as loud as it will go. I've noticed myself turning up and then way down on a regular basis, even with DVR I can't always cut off the commercials perfectly.

Re:What pisses me off

[kc2keo]

I agree. Sometimes I just use mute when commercials come along. But other times I switch between two channels when theres a commercial on one. I use the recall button for that. Sometimes its last on some remotes. So far I vote comcast for the worst commercial array. Cablevision has better commercials. I have only seen the commercials between comcast and cablevision and thats it so far.

Re:What pisses me off

[Pope]

The expression is "Hear hear" you dumbass. Although in this case the expression is "HEAR! HEAR!"

Re:What pisses me off

[Hoi Polloi]

I think some tvs (and you can add it to your system) have volume regulators that will keep the sound within narrow limits.

I heard a person on the radio talking about this once and they said that the FCC set limits on the max loudness so broadcasters will play a show at its normal lower volume (or purposefully lower it) and they play the commercial at the max allowed.

Re:What pisses me off

[IBBoard]

I thought, though, that the FCC cracked down on advertisers trying to pull that loudness BS quite a while back

It still happens in the UK, and you can definitely notice it with the most annoying adverts (like those insurance comparison places). It's probably more filling a wider range of frequencies than actual increased volume, but it just generally sounds louder to the untrained ear.

Re:What pisses me off

[gfxguy]

No, that's usually just coincidence.

The time of the commercial breaks, though, can be annoyingly consistent across networks, so channel flipping doesn't help much.

My current solution is dual tuner Tivo. They are surprisingly inexpensive for the non-HD ones, now. So when you watch live TV, and a commercial comes on, you can pause it and switch tuners. It's true there might be a commercial on the other station you want to watch, but you can pause that, too.

After one segment of the show, you'll never have to watch commercials.

I guess I'm just a thief.

Re:What pisses me off

[Rogerborg]

My 4 year old son knows to mute the TV when adverts come on. Start them off with good habits early, I reckon.

Re:What pisses me off

[Rogerborg]

Its rediculus 2 loose you're temper over that.

Re:What pisses me off

[_14k4]

I still find it funny, even though I've been here a long while, that the grammar nazis are still around... isn't that type of thing a "fark quality" as compared to what slashdot was back when I joined?

Oh well. I mean, he does have a point about the yelling at the end. :P

Re:What pisses me off

[Draek]

As it is, sometimes I decide NOT to buy a product based on their shoddy advertising.

Agreed. As my grandma used to say, "only bad products need flashy advertising". Clever woman, she was.

Re:What pisses me off

[veganboyjosh]

i don't think it's so much a random coincidence. advertising companies pay a lot of money to study what works and what doesn't. the commercial breaks are timed to maximize the value of the consumer's eyes and attention spans.

take a look at two or three different local news stations' evening news. hell, even a lot of the national news shows would probably work. make an effort to catch as much as you can from all three newscasts at the same time. ideally, you'd have three monitors with a different station on each. they all have the same stories, in the same order, for the same lengths of time. the commercials will most likely be pretty damn close to each other sprinkled throughout the broadcast.

i think it has more to do with all the networks/ad scheduling peeps having access to the same data that says a commercial break will be most effective at 17 minutes past the hour, etc.

Re:What pisses me off

[juuri]

LOL u mispelt tempear

Re:What pisses me off

[barzok]

All my TVs have a feature which limits volume variances to prevent overly-loud ads from blaring. Set the volume where you want it for your program and the ads, no matter how hard the broadcaster tries, come out the same volume.

Your TV probably does it to.

Re:What pisses me off

[An ominous Cow art]

The dual tuner setup must be nice. As for me, I pretty much never watch live TV. On the rare occasions that I do, I just pause things for a couple of minutes, to give me time to skip over the crap later on.

I've noticed lately that most of the radio stations I rotate through have commercial breaks at about 18 and 48 minutes past the hour. It's annoying.

Re:What pisses me off

[cayenne8]

"Ah, that's what "mute" is for. I say if they're going to assault my eardrums with their crap, I'm not going to pay it a bit of attention."

Well, my trouble is...I usually fall asleep with the TV on. It is my big "nightlight".

Occasionally, the big changes in volume, especially late night commercials, sometimes wake me up.

I sleep better with a little noise in the background, but, the large volume changes are a PITA.

Re:What pisses me off

[LordSnooty]

In the UK I believe there are rules which govern how loud adverts can be - no more than a certain %age of the surrounding programme or something like that - so the advertisers pull tricks like amending the dynamic range so that quiet portions are just as loud as the noisier bits, whilst the overall volume stays within the limit. This is why many people find the noise from adverts jarring, even though it's not actually 'louder' than the programme surrounding it.

Here's an article which talks about a consultation into the practice.

Re:What pisses me off

[DLWormwood]

however I don't understand how my television can't compensate for that and limit accordingly.

Some can and do. My parents (back when I was in college) had a nice feature on their TV set called "Smart Sound" that did do normalization across TV channels and commercial breaks just fine and we always left it on. However, apparently it wasn't a popular enough (or noticed enough) feature of TVs to stay on the market, as both I and my parents have gone through 3-4 sets since then, and we haven't seen a similar feature since.

Re:What pisses me off

[CODiNE]

Don't be surprised, geeks tend to have Aspergers Syndrome, so more grammar nazis actually means a more intelligent (yet pedantic) audience.

Don't be offended by it though, typos online are the equivalent to mispronouncing things IRL. If you had a friend who was talking about the Packyfick Ocean you'd point it out to him right? Wouldn't want him to look stupid in public? Same thing here. As an aside... as a child I actually called it the Packyfick Ocean, had the hardest time with non-phonetic words in English since I'm deaf and had to guess pronunciation.

Re:What pisses me off

[readin]

Ah, that's what "mute" is for.

You mean the "off" button.

Re:What pisses me off

[bughunter]

Ah, that's what "mute" is for.

Actually, that's what "30 second skip forward" is for.

And if you're thinking "TIVO disabled that years ago," then you need to go buy a cheap laptop or a Mac Mini, a 500GB firewire 800 drive, a nice big LCD display, and a CATV tuner, then install EyeTV or MythTV. You won't be sorry.

I haven't watched a TV commercial for months!

(At least not one without boobies.) As for the "Loudness War," I've solved that by NOT BUYING CDs. Except from independant labels. There's enough free-as-in-beer music out there that's well-engineered and not overly compressed or poorly encoded to satisfy most fans of modern genres...

Unfortunately, if you like classic rock or older popular music, it will cost you real money to go buy collectors-item vinyl and 80's-published CDs. I suggest you find or form a club with people of similar interests and share the expenses.

Re:What pisses me off

[compro01]

this is the main reason i have a great love for the sleep timer on my TV.

power saving takes a distant second.

Re:What pisses me off

[syntaxglitch]

Don't be surprised, geeks tend to have Aspergers Syndrome, so more grammar nazis actually means a more intelligent (yet pedantic) audience.

Asperger's is a real and fairly uncommon developmental disorder and probably not appreciably more common on slashdot than anywhere else.

You may be confusing it with the similarly-named Assburger's Syndrome, which is indeed rampant on this and many other websites.

Re:What pisses me off

[_14k4]

Blah! Lets bring back smart sound! :P

Part of me (the geek) wants to mod my tv with some limiting logic (probably using a pic or something) -- however, another part of me figures that'd be a DMCA violation! :P

Re:What pisses me off

[Anonymous Coward]

I have two relatively cheap tv's in my house that have a "Smartsound" feature. It is supposed to cut down the average volume on the loud commercials. I believe it actually does. The one in the bedroom will briefly show the text "Smartsound" across the bottom of the screen during the begining of some commercials. The text itself may be annoying to some people and I assume there is a menu option to prevent that from showing up when it is activated. Both of these TVs are about 5 years old so the technology is around.

On another note to stay more on topic.

During blind tests in the mid 80's, a popular Stereo mag determined that really high percentage of of the general population (like 85% but I forget the actual number) picked a louder source as one that sounded "better". The test was actually described as a test to determine which speakers were better, brand A or brand B. They were actually the same exact speakers and source equipment, just one was played 1db louder then the other one. The purpose was to educate the readers about the difference efficiency of speakers (spl @ 1W and 1M) and of the crooked salesmen trying to fool you into buying something that was not better by playing with the volume.

Re:What pisses me off

[ConceptJunkie]

It's not just deaf people that have that problem, anyone who reads will eventually pronounce words incorrectly. Of course, no one does that any more, and you can see it in the way people spell. A small part of me dies every time I see "Here! Here" or "rediculous" or "loose" instead of "lose" or the rather novel one I saw recently regarding an old form of money: "gold dablooms".

If you want to learn English, read books, preferably ones written more than 50 years ago. I guarantee you'll lose the bad habits and sound more intelligent.

And no, /. does not count. Nor does Wikipedia. Neither do most magazines and newspapers.

IMO, our whole society is rapidly becoming more illiterate every year.

Take the "loose" thing. I don't recall seeing it before a few years ago (I've been active online '93), yet now it's possibly the most powerful internet meme since "All Your Base", and it's just one of dozens of similar stupid mistakes that are propagated by people who seem to seldom, if ever, see the correct usage of common words.

I'm a hardcore nerd C++ developer and don't actually consider myself particularly well-read, but I can see that a classical liberal education would do everyone a world of good, especially managers and politicians, and that our society suffers greatly from a lack of it. We aren't educated these days, we are trained. There's a big difference and it's to our deteriment. I managed to escape Virginia Tech with a degree in Computer Science in 1987 and I probably didn't have to write more than 3 papers, not counting the elective English classes I took. Even at the time I thought that was ridiculous and I can guarantee it hasn't gotten better in the last 20 years. It's not so much that we are ignorant of history, I'm no historical scholar for certain, I probably know the history of Middle-Earth better than that of Europe, but that we aren't taught how to think, how to reason and how to weigh the constant barrage of seeming-facts which bombard us from every direction. Ultimately, we end up with polarized politics where rhetoric ends up being nothing but canned phrases with no meaning and debate becomes equated with seeing who can shout louder or come up with the cleverest put-downs. In fact, the very term "rhetoric" used to mean the study of persuasion, how to convince people of something using facts, logic, and a fundamental understanding of the human psyche. When is the last time anyone in public life could do that? Modern politics owes more to Goebbels than Aristotle. Our leaders sell geopolitical policy, which will affect our world for generations, with no more depth than a commercial for dish soap ("Brand X stops tyranny better than Brand Y and leave your society with a fresh pine scent").

Um. What was the original topic again? "The Loudness War"? Don't get me started. I've recently bought at least one "remaster"* that was so awful, my 15-year-old cassette tape sounds better. How is it that something can be released when the sound is so boosted it literally dissolves into buzzing. Yet, here we are. It seems all the tremendous leaps in sound quality, studio engineering and whatnot achieved since the 70's has been totally lost for so much of music released today, and I buy quite a bit of music.

* Jon Anderson's "Animation", which, ironically was a very well-produced record and sounded great on vinyl when it was first released in 1983. I'm convinced I could dust off my vinyl copy and master a better sounding CD myself, in fact I could probably do it with a needle, paper cone and a microphone given how awful that CD sounds.

Re:What pisses me off

[fm6]

Mute buttons (or, even better, the skip forward 30 seconds button on your VCR or DVR) are for people who are actually focused on the TV set. The parent poster is probably one of those people (who, I suspect, form a majority of viewers) who just leave the TV on while they do other stuff, and only seriously watch when something catches their attention. So when you're playing cards or cooking or cuddling your significant other, and the TV suddenly starts shouting at you about McNuggets or erectile dysfunction, it can be pretty irritating.

But you might be right. After all, Google made its fortune serving up advertisements that were easy to ignore. And I often suspect that most advertising dollars spent on traditional media (print, broadcasting) are wasted, since they don't really have a reliable way of measuring their effect.

On the other hand, there's a school of thought that says that obnoxious ads are more effective. The whole point of advertising is to plant a product meme in your head. Long after you've forgotten which advertisers you're pissed of at, you'll have their trademarks floating in your subconscious. That's why folks don't go out for a burger any more (they go to McDonalds), don't by markers (they buy Sharpies), etc.

Re:What pisses me off

[Smauler]

far too many ambiguous ones where you have no idea what they're advertising

I like playing a game with these adverts - the game is to see how long they can last without the viewer having any idea of what they're advertising. I've played the game with my family, and we've come up with as diverse things as tampons, a car, or glasses, for the same ad. Some ads are literally entirely unrelated to the company they're advertising - it's amazing. It is worth doing for ads the first time you see them - unfortunately, you'll see the same ad 3000 times again.

Re:What pisses me off

[Fnordulicious]

Why don't you just teach him not to watch TV?

Re:What pisses me off

[Smauler]

It's not about pronunciation, it's about spelling and grammar. "Here here" is pronounced identically to "Hear hear". Pronunciation is the main problem in my opinion, especially with a word like "lose". For example, how do you pronounce "nose", "pose" and just about every other "ose" word? They all follow that pronunciation, except for lose. If you want to get onto pronunciation, buoy has one syllable, and Aluminium has four. However, English has been taken over, and Firefox is telling me that Aluminium was spelt wrong. It's even telling me I spelt spelt wrong now. I know I'm fighting a "loosing" battle, but "its" tough to take.

The two things that annoy me most now are "walla" and "noone". I did actually make the latter mistake when I was 11 or so, but I was corrected.

Re:What pisses me off

[ConceptJunkie]

I'm not sure what you mean by "walla", but you _did_ spell "aluminum" wrong, from the American point of view. I'm guessing you're British, because you are using the British spelling (and presumably pronunciation) of that word. He in the Colonies, we lose that extra "i". Same with "spelt". Over here, it's spelled (or spelt) "spelled". Perhaps there's a British English spelling module for Firefox because you clearly have the American one.

At a previous job someone commented, when reading an article that "organization" was spelled wrong. It was spelled "organisation". I commented that that was the English spelling. What amazed me was that everyone was incredulous that I actually knew that, which in turn blew my mind. These aren't ignorant teenagers, but professionals in their thirties. I mean, even before the Web, I was well aware that spelling and pronunciation is significantly different in other English-speaking places from reading books and watching Monty Python. I also learned that the BBC would allow boobies on TV. :-)

Yes, some English words are not pronounced as they are spelled, or even spelt. English has borrowed a lot of words from different languages, and is itself as a whole a merging of Romance and Germanic roots. I don't know how it happened, but it amazes me that Spanish is a completely phonetic language. There simply are no exceptions (or if there are, they are very rare) from a certain fairly simple set of rules. Spelling and pronunciation in Spanish are so much easier. However, at the end of the day, if you spend a little time reading actual English written by people who actually know the language, you will learn it, and that's what I believe people are lacking. I've seen statistics about how many books people read, and I find it shocking how little people do read. I mean, I love TV and spend plenty of time parked in front of the computer, but I still manage to read many more books than the average person. Maybe I'm weird. Maybe I'm the anomaly. Maybe I'm a throwback who considers precision in language much more important than it really is in our post-literate world.

Re:What pisses me off

[br0d]

Adverts are louder because the advent of digital brick wall limiting allowed for a reduced dynamic range, which means the entire program level can be increased without incurring distortion by consistently exceeding 0dBfs. Psychoacoustic A/B studies have proven that people pay more attention to louder programs than a softer counterpart. Compare the relatively uncompressed CSPANs 1-3 against FOX NEWS and tell me which one seems more "engaging," regardless of the value of the content.

In the 1980s, music was softer because all they had were high quality compressors, but compressors use real time attack and release parameters, whereas digital brickwall limiters are "read ahead" and so they can look at the upcoming material and handle distortion much, much better. You can get usually up to 4-6 decibels of mean RMS limitation out of a read ahead limiter before it starts to smell funny.

Almost nobody wants jumpy pop music, with drastic amplitude changes. Dramatic, startling music like Stravinsky, Wagner, or Mahler is kewl for what it is, but the average pop listener just does not want that. Pop listeners by and large want their dynamic changes to come from changes in the arrangements (guitars dropping out, drummer hitting lighter or sidesticking, etc.)

It's a fine line, because contrast is important to maintain interest, but too much contrast is downright annoying. When it comes to dance and rock, I like the current average loudness levels in most cases. The reason some albums sound like shit is either because the mix engineer didn't know what he was doing and so he handed off a shitty mix with bass and drums poorly mixed and so the mastering engineer tried to compensate with the limiter in pursuit of an ideal mean or peak RMS--or because the mix was fine and the mastering engineer was a stupid, deaf tool who can't hear distortions. In most cases though, this is not the case. There is material out there like some of Paul Van Dyk's stuff that hits a -8 mean RMS, and sounds fantastic...because PVD KNOWS WHAT HE IS DOING. In contrast, the guy who mastered the RHCP's Californication needs to be shot into the sun.

Re:What pisses me off

[mjt5282]

I believe Dolby Labs has patented a similar approach for the modern AVR. Expect it to appear in the next generation or so.

Re:What pisses me off

[catmistake]

I'm...
I'm just gonna say that RMS stands for Root Mean Square. And the only pro audio peeps that use it are trying to get you to believe that the car stereo they are selling you for $19 is really 1000W (um... nominal wattage is what you keep in mind in those instances... and cheapo units have nominal wattage output more like 20W-45W, regardless of the RMS value). I seriously doubt anyone in the recording biz uses RMS in conversation or explaination. And... I don't think there's any such thing as a "peak" RMS, or a "mean" RMS, unless those are just flavor adjectives. But besides that... it really sounds like you know what you're talking about.... and I'll just sorta agree (except for the RMS stuff, which is... incomprehensible even when it is used correctly).

Re:What pisses me off

[Mr. Moose]

here here! Where?

Re:What pisses me off

[Thornae]

Oh god, I've gone blind.

Re:What pisses me off

[IBBoard]

Yeah, that thing, that's what I meant :) I've just never been so interested in physics, sound and waves as I have in computers so I didn't know the technical stuff.

Re:What pisses me off

[gfxguy]

Well, yeah... that's why I said "usually." If it's all news, or several sporting events, then you're going to get a lot of the same commercials, you're absolutely right.

Re:What pisses me off

[The One and Only]

and far too many ambiguous ones where you have no idea what they're advertising

Beware what you ask for. It's complaints like that that got us "Head-On! Apply diRECTly to the FOREhead!"

Re:What pisses me off

[_14k4]

I mean this in all seriousness, with only slight sarcasm: I am glad my "flamebait" modded post spawned this thread; I've learned a bit and had a good read!

Hear Here! Thanks! :P

Re:What pisses me off

[ConceptJunkie]

That's why I keep coming here after 9 years. The stories aren't often too interesting, the editing, like almost everything on the Web is non-existent, but the comments are a great place to have a good discussion.

Example...

[Suicidal Gir]

Here's a good video outlining what the record companies have been doing.

Re: Example...

[Dolda2000]

I remember seeing that video linked from the last time a loudness-related article was posted on Slashdot, and I found it quite shocking at the time. Having had some time to reflect upon it, though, I still don't get why the record companies would even want to be doing anything like that. I mean, it is obvious that a lot of sound quality is being lost, and I just don't get what advantages they gain from it. Do people actually, thoughtfully, choose to buy loudness-wrecked records because they... want them to sound louder without having to turn up the volume? It doesn't make sense to me.

Re:Example...

[br0d]

I've got to niggle here. This guy is being a bit misleading. He says we have to "take the quieter bits and turn them up." He states nothing about the fx processing chain used to do this, or if one was used at all. If you simply increase the gain to the point where the .wav file takes up the whole screen, then the peaks are going to get clipped exactly at the points where they cross over 0dBfs, which, on the sample/sine level causes a "DC offset" circus consisting of thousands of tiny voltage pops, and is a much more audible and noisy sound than the sound produced by a read ahead brick wall limiter, which makes use of (sometimes automatic) attack and release settings that ease the sound into its dynamic reductions and thus produce a far less audible effect per decibel of gain reduction.

It's actually a quite important nitpick and really makes a difference, not just sonically but factually, if he is trying to claim that what he is demonstrating is somehow analogous to what music labels are doing. If he is gain tinkering, then this video is a fraud. The way he drags the .wav's size, rather than hitting some sort of "processing" or "rendering" button leads me to believe he is gain tinkering, because inline effects take time to render, sometimes as much as 30 seconds or more. The one guy in the comments who contested him on it, he blew off. Go figure.

You've just been tagged by one of those verbose nuance nerds on /.

Re:Example...

[croddy]

Ask anyone who's spend hundreds of hours staring at (and listening to) waveforms, playing with compressors and limiters. The video is an illustration, not a real-time demonstration of applying dynamic range effects. The waveforms he shows onscreen are a suitably accurate representation of the concepts he is describing and the audio samples he is playing back.

Re:Example...

[br0d]

I am one of those people, for about the past 15 years...and I can tell you he is being misleading. He does not present enough evidence to indicate that he is even using a mastering chain remotely similar to that used by labels. I don't know Digital Performer well enough to know whether or not his dragging motion is applying an actual CHAIN, but unless that's a quad processor or he's triggering some sort of "Redo" with that, then he is not processing this wav file with any sort of normal plugins, because they are rendered, and that takes time. Mastering engineers do not DRAG wavs into bigness. Bottom line here is that he does not provide any information to indicate that he is illustrating an analogue of the procedure which creates the sound he is complaining about, so the video is ultimately worthless sensationalism.

Re:Example...

[croddy]

Like I said, it's an illustration, not a documentary. He's showing a sketch of what happens to the waveform, not demonstrating how it's done. Please refer to his comment if you are still feeling uneasy:

LoudnessWar (6 months ago)
For the sound, I used various multiband compressors and the limiter built into Digital Performer 4.12. The visuals were done with Photoshop and Snapz Pro (animated screen capture). There is no real audio program with a GUI that looks like what I did, though it is an accurate (if simplified) representation of what a compressor does.

More info

[Rob T Firefly]

Wikipedia has a decent article on the Loudness War, complete with interesting graphics of the same song from newer and older releases.

Re:More info

[olip]

And Slashdot had a decent discussion on the Loudness War 3 months ago, complete with the YouTube demo.

Re:More info

[Otter]

I'd imagine that one of the driving forces here is that listening to music is now an outdoor activity. This trend seems to have started in the days of the Walkman and boomboxes and now that everyone below 30 has headphones on for every waking hour, it's only going to accelerate.

When everyone on the subway is listening to headphones, you can see why the priorities of "audiophiles" take a back seat. Anyway, how badly do audiophiles need to listen to Lil' Flip or Chamillionaire?

Re:More info

[jc42]

I'd imagine that one of the driving forces here is that listening to music is now an outdoor activity.

Nah; that can't explain it. After all, if all the recordings were at half the current level, then you'd just turn the volume dial to get the same loudness.

To understand the escalation, it works better to think of someone listening to their Walkman or boombox or iPod, which is set to "shuffle" (or to a music radio station, which is similar). What the recording companies want is for the track you're listening to now to be slightly louder than the one you just finished listening to (and to the one you're going to hear next), but not enough louder that you turn down the volume.

This leads them to sample the competition, and set their tracks to a bit louder than the average. Over time, they all get louder, until they're all at the max intensity with no dynamic range. Of course, this will be indistinguishable from near silence, since listeners will have the volume at minimum.

Maybe you should just set yours there now.

Re:More info

[Otter]

After all, if all the recordings were at half the current level, then you'd just turn the volume dial to get the same loudness...since listeners will have the volume at minimum...Maybe you should just set yours there now.

You're at MIT? Set your iPod to minimum, walk over to Kendall T station and ride through the Broadway-Andrew-JFK section. How's that working for you?

I tend to keep music and TV volume very low at home, but still need to crank my iPod to near-full volume on the subway to play older music, and quieter parts still drop out. Music designed for today's listeners simply has to max out the CD format's volume and reduce the range.

To understand the escalation, it works better to think of someone listening to their Walkman or boombox or iPod, which is set to "shuffle"...

Yes, obviously I understand that and it may well be the original motivation and the primary motivation today. But I suspect that the continuing escalation (who listens to radio any more?) is driven also by the fact that the Who album I tried to listen to on the T the other day is simply inaudible in what is now a routine listening environment.

Re:More info

[timeOday]

I tend to keep music and TV volume very low at home, but still need to crank my iPod to near-full volume on the subway to play older music, and quieter parts still drop out. Music designed for today's listeners simply has to max out the CD format's volume and reduce the range.

I agree dynamic range compression is helpful in loud environments. However, I think the best option would be to capture music with full dynamic range, then compress it during playback on the listening device if that's what the listener wants to do. Sony was offering that on portable devices 15 years ago IIRC.

Re:More info

[fishbowl]

>Nah; that can't explain it. After all, if all the recordings were at half the current level,
>then you'd just turn the volume dial to get the same loudness.

Multiband compression does not work the same way as amplification, not physically, and not psychoacoustically.
The "Loudness War" is being fought in a domain that's quite different from merely "volume". "Perceived volume
is a different beast.

People accept loss of dynamic range and it seems to often escape them until they notice it. It's much more obvious
in video. I've had to point out shadows, color gradients, etc. Once people see it, they keep seeing it and suddenly
the DVR isn't good enough :-)

It's the same with music, but of course much less obvious to most people. The compression is as if, instead of a color
spectrum, everything is crammed into one or two shades of red, green, and blue. At least, I think that's a very good
analogy.

There's also compression in the frequency domain. Everybody seems so happy with audio compression, until they realize that they *can* hear the difference and that it does matter. "Listen to just the cymbals in this", I'll say. There's a moment when people realize that audiophiles aren't crazy, don't have superhuman hearing, etc. And suddenly 64Kbps MP3's aren't good to them either.

Re:More info

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

I heard about this many years ago (probably on Slashdot). I believe the article was called something like "the cd that was too loud", but I can't be certain. I know the author was complaining about the mastering of some Rush album.

Aha! Here we are; the article's from 2002. There are some pretty charts demonstrating the problem.

It's a serious problem

[Gordonjcp]

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.

Re:It's a serious problem

[Mister Transistor]

Umm... I think you're trying to play your WINDOWS O/S CDROM!

Re:It's a serious problem

[Hijacked Public]

Your reference to light and shade provides me the operning to point out that, in photography, there is a trend toward oversaturating color in all shots.

Velvia used to be a moderately popular film that was used my photographers to make some kind of artistic statement through oversaturation. You usually saw it used when someone wanted to emphasize some garish contrast in colors. These days oversaturation is standard practice for some people, for every photo they make. Every photo looks like a Nickelodeon commercial.

To flip the analogy around, the visual noise in the photos blares out at you the entire time, and you leave the gallery with your eyes ringing, desensitized to stuff like stoplights. Subtle contrast is overpowered and lost.

I think people in general are just getting more used to noise, all the time, and to get their attention you have to keep stepping it up.

Re:It's a serious problem

[Reverend528]

I have a few CDs that I just can't listen to

Why'd you buy them?

Re:It's a serious problem

[TemporalBeing]

I think people in general are just getting more used to noise, all the time, and to get their attention you have to keep stepping it up.

On the other hand, they could just stop for a short time, and then go back to the old ways. It'd have the same effect - getting people's attention - but without the "having to step it up" requirement.

Re:It's a serious problem

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

It is interesting (though entirely off topic) that you mention Velvia. I'm a beginner photographer, though I have books on the subject that go back to the turn of the century, and you can see the progression from b&w, to sepia, to colour to the current trend of (what I like to call it) "in your face" colour. Everything is over exposed/over saturated. Larger than life, as it were. And the sad part, to me anyway, is when I try to represent the way the world is through the lens, it's dull and non-interesting by comparision. Even though this over saturation trend doesn't even remotely reflect what's going on in the real world, or the picture just taken.

What to do, what to do...

Re:It's a serious problem

[ColdWetDog]

To flip the analogy around, the visual noise in the photos blares out at you the entire time, and you leave the gallery with your eyes ringing, desensitized to stuff like stoplights. Subtle contrast is overpowered and lost.

I think you're correct in that - as a photographer I've gone through the "Velvia" stage (CTL-U and onwards! for Photoshop junkies), even more subtle Velvia-type actions later.

Looking back at some of those experiments I get upset and end up redoing the post processing to something more reasonable. But most people actually like the oversaturated effect. I think this is because it "hits" them when they look at the picture. This works well for just noticing an image - for example in an office on the wall or in an advertisement. But to look at that type of image time after time as in a gallery exhibition, it quickly becomes obnoxious.

Much like the over compressed audio mess we have today. Perhaps another generation will demand more dynamic music and some of the older stuff can be remastered (again). But as the "background" noise for the vast majority of people increases, there will be a tendency to increase the apparent loudness of the "music" and the general trend will worsen.

SO WILL EVERYBODY PLEASE JUST SHUT UP AND TURN EVERYTHING OFF!

Re:It's a serious problem

[mrraven]

Covert to black and white with curves in Photoshop or Lightroom and throw a spanner in the SUPPER BRIGHT SATURATED colors works. BTW digital cameras even moderately expensive DSLR are set way too oversaturated to catch a good dynamic light range to look "good" on cheesy plant macros. Check out my swimming in light group on flickr where I try to fight this trend:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/swimlight/

Re:It's a serious problem

[Gordonjcp]

Why'd you buy them?

'Cos they sounded OK on the first couple of plays.

Re:It's a serious problem

[default luser]

Why'd you buy them?

You don't notice it, initially, but eventually it grates on you.

Example: I own the Queens of the Stone Age: Songs for the Deaf album mentioned on the Wikipedia loudness war page. I bought the album because the songs sounded pretty nice. I think the songs are hard-hitting, and fun.

I have noticed one issue: I have NEVER been able to sit down and listen to the entire album in one sitting. This is something I can do with almost any album I own, even heavy metal albums (even previous albums from QotSA); but with Songs for the Deaf, even though the music is great, just the effort of listening really wears on me.

Now that I'm aware of the problem, I try to pay more attention.

Re:It's a serious problem

[archeopterix]

I think people in general are just getting more used to noise, all the time, and to get their attention you have to keep stepping it up.

YEAH WE NEED TO PASS THE MESSAGE FOR EVERYBODY TO APPRECIATE THE SUBTLETY!!!!

When is everyone going to realize?

[QuietLagoon]

The record companies are not interested in the music, they are not interested in the quality of the sound, they are not interested in the artists and musicians.

All the record companies are interested in is maximizing profits.

Re:When is everyone going to realize?

[Pojut]

All the record companies are interested in is maximizing profits.

Not to omgwtf support the RIAA, but isn't that all MOST non-profit organizations are interested in?

I mean, I know some companies care about their customers more than others, but at the very crest of it all, their goal is to take your money...this is not unique to the music industry.

Re:When is everyone going to realize?

[mh1997]

The record companies are not interested in the music, they are not interested in the quality of the sound,

Listeners are not interested in the sound quality of music either. When the switch was made from vinyl to cd, improvements to sound quality ended. Sure the cd doesn't have the hiss and pops that a record had, but it was analog and the playback equipment (and record) could improve to match the sound (it did, but not as well as it could have). With digital, the sound quality was limited to whatever the ones and zeros were.

To further prove the point, the next big thing in music was MP3s, a compressed form of the cd ripped at lower bps. Take the MP3 a step further and lower on sound quality, the speakers that an MP3 is typically played through are tiny little pieces of crap that are put directly into the ear (ipod and the like).

After all this, people are complaining about loudness?

Re:When is everyone going to realize?

[Jaysyn]

Even RIAA shills get mod points every once in a while.

Re:When is everyone going to realize?

[QuietLagoon]

Yes, but most non-profits are non-profits are not interested in , e.g., suing their customers.

Re:When is everyone going to realize?

[Pojut]

And that has what to do with the price of tea on the bottom of a harbour?

Re:When is everyone going to realize?

[mh1997]

No, not "loudness": compression of dynamic range. Did you not read the article?

Yep, read the article, but took the term "loudness" from the title of the slashdot summary.

My comments about analog vs digital, digital vs digital compression, and poor quality speakers indicates that I was responding to compression of dynamic range issues.

Re:When is everyone going to realize?

[Jeremy Erwin]

Listeners are not interested in the sound quality of music either. When the switch was made from vinyl to cd, improvements to sound quality ended. Sure the cd doesn't have the hiss and pops that a record had, but it was analog and the playback equipment (and record) could improve to match the sound (it did, but not as well as it could have). With digital, the sound quality was limited to whatever the ones and zeros were.

CDs can have a higher dynamic range than vinyl. The problem lies in the fact that most labels don't take advantage of this.

Re:When is everyone going to realize?

[NulDevice]

Just for the record, there are literally thousands of record companies out there, and only a handful of them belong to the RIAA. There are plenty fo record companies specifically interested in some kind of music, and promoting said kind of music - whether it's regional, or genre-based, or whatever.

So while it's easy to make generalizations about "what record companies want" in terms of profit maximiazation and stickin it to consumers and artists...it's not always the case.

Just sayin'.

Re:The alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

It's more than just music

[downix]

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.

Re:It's more than just music

[bhima]

Nice, I wonder how many people are going to fall for this and mod you up.

Re:It's more than just music

[downix]

I hope noone, I said my piece, don't need mods to make myself feel better.

Re:It's more than just music

[shibashaba]

He's probably right. A dvd player is only as good as the cheap ass chips made somewhere in china...those merchants of outstanding quality they are. I remember watching the news one night, and they were showing some footage that was recorderd on standard digital cameras cause they couldn't get their own people there fast enough(they actually said this). I was blown away by the quality.

Re:It's more than just music

[director_mr]

That is a bunch of B.S. An $80000 Canon digital camera would be a high end EOS 1d with some really nice lenses. Right now they have 20 megapixels and can have the picture blown up to poster size while remaining photo quality. I know of no 35 mm camera that can do that at the same ASA range. Now my medium format and full-format camera can blow the EOS 1-D out of the water, but that is only because a large amount of film real-estate. Digital cameras also have greater color range and flexibility from any single film I can think of.

If you think that super8 film is astounding, you probably aren't paying attention to the substantial color shifting you are observing, or haven't bothered to check out any of the HD-quality video cameras they have out for shooting news items now.

Your in-laws probably have a REALLY bad digital satellite TV setup, because my HD satellite setup blows anything else I have seen out of the water. And waxing nostalgic about how awesome old VHS tapes look is just foolish.

I see no reason to complain about how a DVD player you buy today (which you can get for around 25 dollars) will not last as long as the 200 dollar one you bought 5 years ago, especially since HD players like Blue Ray are going to be what you really want a few years from now. I rather buy a 25 dollar dvd player and replace it every 4 years or so than buy a 200 dollar one and replace it every 10 years. But that is just me.

The market is in the middle of large changes and shifts in video technology. Video technology is progressing forward with ever greater quality. If you don't believe me watch any sitcom from 20 years ago and compare it with one from last year. You, my friend are either delusional or making things up for effect.

The thing we are complaining about is the fact that audio quality is not progressing forward but going backward even as video and image quality improves. Go back and watch your precious Charles in Charge VHS tapes with their amazing video and audio quality.

Re:It's more than just music

[downix]

You almost had me going till you tried to tell me that film color-shifts. I work with HD cameras professionally (love the HVX200 for low-cost setups) but the Super8 still comes out on top.

There's a reason why most things you see in movies or on TV is shot on film.

Re:It's more than just music

[Renraku]

The American Dream everyone refers to is not a dog, cat, 2.5 kids and a house with a white picket fence.

The American Dream is selling bleeding edge technology at rape-like prices, and then going back and selling older technology at rape-like prices once people figure out that the bleeding edge technology actually loses quality over the older technology.

All the while you're farming the hell out of two technologies..ones that you didn't pay a whole lot to impliment due to China being the industrial whore.

Re:It's more than just music

[TemporalBeing]

That is a bunch of B.S. An $80000 Canon digital camera would be a high end EOS 1d with some really nice lenses. Right now they have 20 megapixels and can have the picture blown up to poster size while remaining photo quality. I know of no 35 mm camera that can do that at the same ASA range. Now my medium format and full-format camera can blow the EOS 1-D out of the water, but that is only because a large amount of film real-estate. Digital cameras also have greater color range and flexibility from any single film I can think of.

First, 35mm film is equivalent to over 30 megapixels. So even that EOS 1-D is still over 10 megapixels short of the film for quality.

Second, 35mm film has been used by many professional cameras for decades to do larger than poster size. I could easily have that done with any of the pictures taken from my Minolta SLR that my grandfather purchased back in the 1950's.

Re:It's more than just music

[operato]

there's always a trade off for everything though. people want things smaller and cheaper, ok quality might not be as great but you get what you pay for.

Re:It's more than just music

[growse]

Mostly true, except it's still widely acknowledged that the dynamic range on digital camera sensors (yes, even the really expensive ones on the 1d series) is lacking compared to that of film.

Digital might be there on resolution, but resolution is far from everything. That said, they're getting a lot better, and I don't think this is an example of an industry that's moving backwards.

Re:It's more than just music

[russotto]

You almost had me going till you tried to tell me that film color-shifts. I work with HD cameras professionally (love the HVX200 for low-cost setups) but the Super8 still comes out on top.

ROTFL

There's a reason why most things you see in movies or on TV is shot on film.

Yeah, but 35 or 70mm, not Super 8. If you want something to look like a grainy old newsreel, use Super 8.

Re:It's more than just music

[downix]

Actually noone has used 70mm in close to a decade save for IMAX movies. 16mm is very strong, and Super8 still has a strong following. With modern filmstocks, Super8 can look quite good, and even low grain. You cannot compare VNR footage with modern Vision2 or Eterna stocks. The new t-grain structure really does wonders for the grain.

Re:It's more than just music

[Kaukomieli]

It does not stop at music and video - it has already happened with food, too.

There was study a couple of years ago, where kids in a double-blind test had to guess if "the real thing" or the flavored food tasted more natural. Guess what, many kids thought the taste one gets by mixing aroma with flavour-enhancer was more natural, then just mixing some strawberry with joghurt.

Just try it for yourself, grow some tomato on your balcony and buy some at a store - now compare and you will see, that the store-bought ones basically taste like nothing, compared to the homegrown stuff. Or try some of that convenience-food, it all tastes like compressed cardboard if you compare it to something prepared with fresh ingredients that have not been grown in some industrial-food-production-process.

Re:It's more than just music

[downix]

I'd say still not quite there on resolution, but that is highly variable as each kind of film has it's own resolving powers. Comparing Fuji Xtra to Kodachrome, you'll find one can resolve more per square mm than the other, dramatically so.

However I would still say that digtal cameras are moving backwards. Not the big guys like the 1Ds, but the average consumer camera. In the past 5 years, I have seen cameras go from rich, noise-free blacks and whites to very noisy beasts. While if you pay for it, you get the quality, on the lower end it feels like they are regressing. I know people that use a Nikon 990, and will not buy a newer camera, because the newer models don't produce pictures that lookas good.

I often times ponder if rating a camera by pixels is akin to rating a car by pistons, there's often times more to the story than just one measurement.

Re:It's more than just music

[director_mr]

The FBI doesn't agree with you. They put AGFA 200 ASA film as the equivalent of a 16 megapixel camera. http://www.fbi.gov/hq/lab/fsc/backissu/april2002/s wgitfield1.htm

Re:It's more than just music

[downix]

Tht would actually be the FBI agreeing with him. Agfa 200 is not the highest definition film out there, at only 50 lpmm. Film ranges from 40 lpmm to 160 lpmm. You use, say, Fui Astia at 110 lpmm, you'd be running right up there.

Re:It's more than just music

[log0n]

Actually, nope - Super 8 is making a major comeback (in as much as major can possibly be vs. digital). There's a pretty new(ish) wide 8mm format that a lot of productions are using now for work that is going to HD. Great result for stuff that needs to be filmic and great quality for the target distribution.

Re:It's more than just music

[Anonymous Coward]

You run out of lens before you run out of film.

A good number to use for optimistic estimates of 35mm film/digital equivalence is 100 line pairs/mm, or 5080dpi. That's around 35M pixels.
You need some very very good glass to get that full-frame, and you need a tripod to get that even in the center. Going over 100 lp/mm is both expensive and rather technical.

Actual obtainable results given typical usage are going to me more like 50 lp/mm, which comes out to around 9M pixels.

The current crop of 15-20 megapixel DSLRs are about as good as the format is going to get, in terms of usable resolution.

Re:It's more than just music

[downix]

Quite true, and think about the smaller digital cameras, 12mp but the practical limits of the lens is not that much, resulting in inerpolation and other tricks to try and "squeeze" out the final bits.

Re:It's more than just music

[damiam]

That's because a cheap digital camera five years ago was $400 and 3MP. Now it's $120 and 7MP. You can't really compare the two because of course some sacrifices have to be made to get that kind of resolution at that price. But for the price of your last "cheap" camera you can now get a top-of-the-line camera that would blow it away.

Re:It's more than just music

[BigPhatPhuck]

Mostly true, except it's still widely acknowledged that the dynamic range on digital camera sensors (yes, even the really expensive ones on the 1d series) is lacking compared to that of film.

Absolutely, positively 100% wrong. Here is an article that lays out some really good data.

From the article:

Conclusions
Digital cameras, like the Canon 1D Mark II, show a huge dynamic range compared to either print or slide film, at least for the films compared.

Re:It's more than just music

[growse]

I stand absolutely, positively 100% corrected.

Only solution?

[niceone]

The only solution I can see is to release tracks in two versions, one compressed to an inch of its life so it sound the same volume as everything else, and another with dynamics for those people who are going to listen to the album all in one go in an environment without loads of background noise.

Just releasing tracks that are much quieter than the current standard is going to be annoying for a lot of listeners.

Re:Only solution?

[nyctopterus]

Maybe they should release loud versions for radio, but the CD should preserve the dynamics.

Re:Only solution?

[jmanforever]

"Maybe they should release loud versions for radio, but the CD should preserve the dynamics."

Yes, IAABE. (I am a Broadcast engineer)

Those of us in the radio business DON'T WANT loud over compressed CDs. We do our own compression and limiting, so a "clean" CD, and an overly compressed one will be the exact same volume level over the air. The overly compressed one will sound more grungy and distorted, but it won't be a damn bit louder on the radio.

The Alt-Rock station I currently work for uses 5 different AGC/compressor/limiter/clipper boxes to crunch down the audio signal so that it is LOUD on the air, and never goes over the 100% FCC maximum modulation level. Our peak modulation is held right at 100%, and our average modulation bounces around 80%. This represents about 1.5 to 2 dB of dynamic range, regardless of what the source material is. This is very typical for most FMs. Some are worse.

I sometimes think the recording industry is in this loudness war so that their CDs will sound just as loud as the radio on most portable players.

Re:Only solution?

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Why not have it always as 24bit full dynamic range and leave the compression to the portable players? (if we're not there yet, one or two generations forward we'll have the capability to adjust that on demand)

Re:Only solution?

[nyctopterus]

That's very interesting, I might have guessed radio stations were doing something like that.

Makes the whole thing seem even more pointless. Once you've sold someone the CD, it's sold: you're out of the competition. Doesn't seem to be much point being loud then.

Re:Only solution?

[jmanforever]

These "loudness wars" were started by the radio industry. It has been going on since at least 1959.

Back when AM radio was king, CBS labs came out with a pair of boxes called "The Max Brothers", that is, the Audimax automatic gain control/compressor, and the Volumax limiter. Every station had to have this setup if they wanted to be as loud as the station down the dial. Louder stations were perceived to be more powerful, or local stations. It was proven that a listener, when turning the dial, would stop on a LOUD signal.

Many advancements in audio precessing have happened since. In the 70s Mike Dorrough made loud audio even louder with the invention of multi-band parallel processing. Every station that wanted to be a "Big Boy" had to have a Dorrough DAP-310 discriminate audio processor. Even the FM stations started using this. In the 80s, Bob Orban took FM processing to the next level with his "Optimod" line of boxes. Orban Optimods are still some of the top selling boxes to this day. There were also many other advancements in the "loudness at all cost" wars. Do a google sometime for "Frank Foti" "Mike Dorrough" "Leonard Kahn" "Glen Clark" "Greg Ogonowski" "Eric Small" and "Robert Orban". These guys are the Gods of broadcast audio processing.

Here is an interesting article writen by Jim Somich, with intro by Frank Foti.:

http://www.soundprocessing.nl/hisfrank.html

"It's Good Enough"

[Mister Transistor]

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.

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[robot_love]

For the most part, I agree with you.

What struck me from the article, and what I think applies to your arguments, is the wide range of places that people are now listening to music. We're not listening to music in places that are conducive to a wide dynamic response. My headphones on the Tube need to be fantastic* to make me able to enjoy the highs and lows. For everyone else, compression is good.

* In fact, they are. Etymotic ER-4S headphones inserted into custom moulded ear plugs. It is a wonderful priviledge to enjoy a Debussey piano prelude whilst commuting.

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[mrjb]

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. Yes, there are CDs out there which have their dynamic range over-compressed. That's something that is reported on Slashdot monthly, more or less. Yes, there is a quality loss associated with the lossless data compression of lossy formats. Duh. But you mustn't have listened to a hissing tape or a crackling vinyl record for a long time. It is amazing how tolerant our (grand)parents were to the poor quality of these media. I listened to a vinyl record only days ago, and am amazed by how little dynamic range even a well-recorded vinyl record has. Is it acceptable? Hell yes. Fact is, each medium has its own audible artifacts. Why would those of CD be worse than those of other media? That's just a value judgement.

That said, a lot of the audible artifacts of digital media can be prevented and they're not. But you can do your share. Don't like the quality of MP3? Don't do lossy compression then (you *do* have the original CD, right?) Unsatisfied with the sound quality of a CD because too much dynamic range compression is going on? Then don't buy it. This will ultimately force the studios to do their share to release a quality product.

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a side effect of copyright law, not the "digital revolution". The quality of a well-recorded digital session is awe-inspiring. You can get more range from a 24-bit digital stream than anything I've ever experienced analog (okay, there might be some high-end analog kit that would compete, but I can _afford_ 24-bit audio). Copyright law means producers have monopolies and don't really have to compete on quality.

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[stoolpigeon]

Well I can tell you where my tolerance comes from - I can't tell the difference.
 
When I was in high school I spent an afternoon once in a recording studio and these guys did this one part of a song over and over and over. It was driving me nuts because it sounded exactly the same every single time (to me).
 
Earlier this week I downloaded an album that is being marketed in a kind of shareware method (saw a link for it in a sig here at the dot) and so what you download is a lower bitrate (or whatever it is called) and the artist hopes you will like it enough to buy the higher quality files. The thing is, what he is giving away sounds just fine to me. Maybe someone with a better ear for this stuff would care, but I don't. And I struggle to see how this is a problem. If I am enjoying a song - I am enjoying it.
 
In other areas of my life I consciously choose to be satisfied with lower quality because I can't afford the best stuff. (optics come to mind as a great example) I have friends who can afford Swarovski and give me grief about the 'junk' I use. I feel the same way about this music stuff. For people who can really tell the difference, I can understand why they get passionate about it, but I just can't get that worked up over it as it's an issue that doesn't even really exist for me. I only know about it because someone tells me.

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[Andrewkov]

Same reason that 99% of people out there are using Windows, I guess. I'm at IT guy by day, but a semi-pro musician at night, so maybe this stuff is more important to me than most people. Personally, I can't stand the sound of MP3's. I do have an MP3 player, and I love the convenience and portability, but the sound quality is horrible. And I do find the overly compressed "loud" CD's to be fatiguing to the ears. But maybe it's just one of those things that's only annoying if you know about it and pay close attention to it.

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[eth1]

The problem is that no one knows what it's *supposed* to sound like any more. The current generation of music-listening teens listen to MP3s on crappy earphones and cheap speakers. When I was a teenager, I listened to a few pre-loudness-war CDs, but on crappy headphones and cheap speakers. Only just recently (I turn 30 in two months) could I afford a decent stereo system that's good enough to actually hear the difference. And that's just at home. In the car, even with a decent sound system, it's too noisy to care.

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[Sergeant Pepper]

there is a quality loss associated with the lossless data compression of lossy formats Err... what?

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[crgrace]

stuttering vocoders and dropped calls as "tolerable"

I'm with you, Mr. Transistor. We have a joke around the office, that Cingular's (now AT&T) cell-phone slogan which is "fewest dropped calls" actually translates to "We Suck Less". We have the technology to make things work SO much better, the problem is entirely economic. The large companies need to get a return on investment, so they basically just try to see what they can get away with. For the cell-phone example, if Cingular built more base stations, and limited the number of simultaneous phones on the network at a given time, they would have virtually zero dropped calls... but substantially less revenue.

PS.. what kind of xtr are you? MOS, BJT or HBT? Perhaps an exotic HEMT?

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[Kjella]

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",

Well, let me try to put on one of those cassette tapes I used to play before the CD... it's crap. Vinyl? Your everyday person had crap players and crap records that hiss and pop. The CD had all the cold, clinical neutrality of perfect silences and crystal clear sound. Except people rarely cared about that in the first place. Ever listened to music by the fire? It's full of hiss and pops and people chatting and yet that's perfectly fine. Minor artifacts just doesn't really change the music.

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[turnipsatemybaby]

While I get your point, there's one thing that seems like a catch 22 to me. How do you know how crappy the CD is until you've listened to it? If you're lucky you can borrow a copy from a friend and listen to it. If not, then you have to pays your money and takes yer chances. And then you have to put up with the hassle of returning the thing, assuming that the store even takes returns.

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[Mister Transistor]

"We Suck Less" - I love it!

PS - Why, an RF Power Transistor, of course! :)

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[crgrace]

How nice to see another electronics geek on here... I'm a 65nm MOSFET.

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[Relic of the Future]

Fact is, each medium has its own audible artifacts. Why would those of CD be worse than those of other media? That's just a value judgement.

Because being "less worse" is the reason it was made! One of the driving points of digital audio, of CDs, was to eliminate the physical problems that caused hissing and popping on earlier media. It's called progress; the goal is to make it better. By Nyquist's theorem, 44kHz should be enough for anyone. Now, you could make an argument that 16 bits isn't enough (I suppose those are the artifacts you're referring to for CDs), but that's why this Loudness War thing is so frustrating; it means that those 16 bits are being used less effectively, for no real benefit. Dumb recording execs stomping all over the hard work of audio- and electrical-engineers and musicians, that's what it is.

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[cavtroop]

I feel the exact same way. MP3's (at 128) are fine by me, and I can't notice a difference at 192, so why bother? It doesn't help that i listen to most of my music on my commute, in stop and go traffic in a convertible, though :)

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[Vader82]

Nyquist's theorem is only a guarantee of frequency reproduction. It makes no guarantees about things getting reproduced at the proper amplitude. Because the requirement is "sample twice as fast as the highest frequency you want to hear" the theory goes that you'll catch a high and a low of your sinusoid. The problem is, you don't get any choice over WHERE you catch the sinusoid. You could be sampling values very close to the zero crossings, and thus, missing almost all of the amplitude.

If you increase your sampling rate to double that of Nyquist's, at the best case you sample the zero crossings and the peaks (0, pi/2, pi, 3pi/2), and at worst case you sample equally during the rising and falling of the peak (pi/4, 3pi/4, 5pi/4 7pi/4).

In the end, it doesn't matter too much because you're losing out on frequencies on the complete upper end. Once you're over 20 the frequencies your ear is sensitive to starts dropping due to your ear aging. So its only teenagers that are missing out on high frequency amplitude reproduction.

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[toddhisattva]

When I was in high school I spent an afternoon once in a recording studio and these guys did this one part of a song over and over and over. It was driving me nuts because it sounded exactly the same every single time (to me). I once watched Baf X of Hidden Agenda mix the 10-second reverberation fadeout at the end of an acoustic guitar piece for over an hour.

There's an invisible line between mastering and madness....

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[mahlerfan999]

We now accept crap MP3 audio as "acceptable", stuttering vocoders and dropped calls as "tolerable", and reduced/compressed bandwidth as "louder (hence better)". Bad slashdotters! You just modded up a common misconception as insightful. Mp3 compression is not the same compression as dynamic compression. We're talking about dynamic range, which is the intensity or volume of the loudest passage compared to the quietest. Our music has gone downhill in terms of sound quality because they brought the quietest passage up really close to the loudest passage-- so that a quiet passage is nearly as loud as the loudest passage.
Mp3 compresses the file size based on psychoacoustics, it does *not* squash the dynamic range. It also doesn't squash the bandwidth either, it's sampled at the same 44.1 kHz that cds are. I can't believe three different types of compressions were all equated in one sentence!
Don't blame mp3s. The industry has moved to compressing dynamic range because of the prevalence of people listening to music on the go these days. People listen in commutes, exercise, etc etc i.e. loud places. We don't usually sit down in a quiet room anymore. It's hard to listen to music driving down the freeway if it has a large dynamic range.

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[iabervon]

There's a difference between lower bitrate and lower dynamic range. With lower bitrate, there's essentially a certain amount of noise or distortion being played in addition to the music, and this noise is specially tuned to be hard to hear. With the lower dynamic range, the music itself has been watered down. That is, it never gets much louder than it is normally. Now, there are some artists (e.g. Kronos Quartet) which kind of overuse dynamic range, such that you're listening to some faint music for a while and suddenly it's loud enough to startle you, but there's a reasonable dynamic range that music should have, where the band sometimes plays loud and sometimes soft, and there's a meaningful difference.

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[Bluesman]

No, Nyquist guarantees that you can *exactly* reproduce any bandwidth-limited signal if you sample at *greater* than twice the bandwidth of the signal. If you're at exactly twice the highest freq, you'll have problems if you're 180 degrees out of phase, like you said. But Nyquist does not say >=, it says >.

Mathematically, this works just fine, because you can sample the amplitude exactly. Practically, there are no perfect A/D converters, or D/A converters, so you have some loss due to phase mismatch at the higher frequencies. And 16 bits means that you'll have quantization error.

This is why CD's are sampled at 44khz (we can generally hear up to 20khz) to give us 2khz of wiggle room at the upper end.

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[Vader82]

Okay, you got me on ">" rather than ">=". It's been a while since I've dealt with the details exactly. I agree with you about the 44kHz part as I think it reduces/eliminates most of the problems that crop up in reality. But I still believe there is a problem with the theory. I guess I should try and put together some counter-examples rather than just spout off on slashdot.

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[Mister Transistor]

BZZZZZZZZZZT.

Very bad slashdotter! You didn't even read the entire sentence you copied! The third thing I listed, "reduced/compressed bandwidth", is related to the exact type of compression we're discussing here today, and MP3 compression utilizes that type of compression, among others. All three "types" of compression are subtly inter-related. And, I do know why they do it, like seatbelts or cycle helmets, they suck but they serve a useful purpose as you described.

However, your description of MP3 compression is incorrect. The compression (reduction) of bandwidth definitely occurs, good luck trying to get anything back over about 15KHz. Trying to "stretch" them out (recoding them) back to 44.1KHz WAV's will NOT restore any missing information.

Second, the dynamic range of a lot of information is not only "compressed" it is REMOVED. That's part of the psychoacoustic compression algorithm's mechanism, to reduce or remove anything the ear can't (In Their Humble Opinions) hear, like fast transient peaks.

Finally, when you squash the shit out of the dynamic range of something (the second type of "compression") you can reduce it's bandwidth. That's how noise reduction systems like DBX and Dolby "compressed" a wideband signal onto a lower-bandwidth medium like tape or LP's then try to expand it back to the original signal losing some noise along the way due to the pre-emphasis and de-emphasis.

So, yes, the other forms of "compression" help reduce the overall bitrate (the third type of "compression", data reduction), which is what you thought I was thinking of. I just didn't list all 3 types as bitching bullet points.

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[mrjb]

Where I live, the shops that sell CDs allow you to listen to them first. If your CD shop doesn't offer this service, find another shop.

Sometimes....

[VikingBastich]

You just need to turn it up to 11.

Re:Sometimes....

[aadvancedGIR]

The key word is "sometimes", today, I have the feeling that half of the balads on radio sound like they were played by the Ramones. Please, play better, not only louder!

Effect on hearing?

[salimma]

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.

Re:Effect on hearing?

[Mister Transistor]

Exactly, people are used to shit and now expect more of it.

BTW - I'm pretty sure normalizing is exactly the opposite of what you want to do here. Normalization makes that quiet contrapuntal ballad as loud as the acid rock song coming up next. Great for being lazy with the volume knob, but it squeezes some of the "soul" out of the material.

Re:Effect on hearing?

[jrsp]

Some of the better normalizations actually just tack on a data field in the ID3 (or equivalent) that says "bump it up some" or "lower it this much" instead of actually performing the normalization themselves. That way you don't run into the problem you mention, which is a valid concern. The playback devices just have to look for and be able to interpret this information and the user should have the ability to enable/disable it too.

Re:Effect on hearing?

[salimma]

Normalizing within a genre, then. It works if you normalize your compilation albums before you burn them, provided you don't mix rock and classical music!

Re:The alternative?

[ByeLaw]

I think your missing the point... Music companies that produce loader CD's do actually have a lower quality due to the fact they have to overcompress the signal (and no, this has nothing to do with MPEG compression) in the first place.

If the volume is set too high (there is a max limit to what CD's can store), then the fine detail can be lost in the noise.

Why?

[dtml-try MyNick]

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?

Re:Why?

[mpathetiq]

Audiophiles do exactly that. I personally prefer to listen to certain types of music (post-rock & jazz mostly) that require great dynamic ranges and can barely tolerate listening to overcompressed versions of the music.

When I recently recorded a demo for my band, I was struggling with the decision to compress the shit out of it to make it seem louder or just leave the recording as is to allow for dynamic movement. I chose the latter, because everytime I compressed, the music lost all of its urgency. I'm sure someone with a bit more studio expertise would have been able to do better, but I wanted to preserve the quiet moments and allow the loud bits to really have a kick.

So yes, in short, you are getting that old.

Re:The alternative?

[Stooshie]

Of course people can turn the volume down. Thats not the point. RTFA! The point is that in order for the volume to be turned up in the original track, the dynamic range has to be decreased. Also, form the graphics, it looks like there's a little clipping going on which will give some distortion.

Declining profits...

[gweihir]

Maybe there is a connection? As music gets more industrialized and standardized, nobody cares anymore about having the lastest stuff?

Live gigs

[Stooshie]

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?

Re:Live gigs

[Stooshie]

But if they find don't need it when they arrive, why use it?

Re:Live gigs

[Andrewkov]

No, it's because of all those damn people talking quietly on the other side of the room! :)

Re:Live gigs

[havoc-]

Actually, I play in a multi-acoustical-instrument band (not jazz though), and we *have* to use amplification because some instruments are so much louder than others. The more silent instruments (flutes mostly, acoustic bass) would not be heard.

Re:Live gigs

[splutty]

I'll give you a couple instruments:

Percussion
Flute
Violin
Standing bass
Trumpet
Altsax

Now think to yourself what these sound like when played properly, and you'll realize that some of them will simply be drowned out if they're not amplified.

The amplification gives you the ability to make instruments heard that wouldn't in a 'natural environment'. I've done quite a bit of sound work for live gigs, and the first thing you try to figure out is how the accoustics is in relation to the loudest instrument you have. From there, you basically try to balance everything else (generally this ends up being the drumset, and most typically the snare and bassdrum, sometimes it's a spcific type of trumpet)

Re:Live gigs

[Stooshie]

I know what you mean, however I have been to a gigs where no amplification is used at all. The best drummers can tone it down for acoustic instruments. Most bands (and I am talking about jazz bands) that are amplified live seem to need it to get over the drummer bashing away like a chimp and not being responsive to the other instruments.

Loudness and quality relationship?

[D3]

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!

Re:Loudness and quality relationship?

[Andrewkov]

I think it has more to do with politics inside record companies. If one producer makes a CD that appears to be louder than another producers, the first guy will be seen as being more professional or a better producer. Also, when record companies are choosing which artist to push, they will chose the one with a perceived better CD sound (ie: louder).

Re:Loudness and quality relationship?

[Pope]

No. Check the Wikipedia link, the 2003 ABBA remasters got totally screwed with, which is a damn shame since the 2001 remasters were perfect. There was zero reason to go and fuck with them, but the record company did it anyway. :(

Say what you will about their music, like it or not, but ABBA's production quality was second to none back in the day, you can really hear the layers in the 2001 remasters.

Earplugs becoming more common pop concert s

[mrvan]

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...

Re:Earplugs becoming more common pop concert s

[jhermans]

The article was not about the *volume* of the music, but about the compression of the dynamic range. RTFA !

Re:Earplugs becoming more common pop concert s

[Pope]

I've been wearing ear plugs to live shows ever since a Pop Will Eat Itself gig in 1991 left me practically deaf for the next day. In small clubs they're an absolute must. And contrary to the idiots who refuse to wear them, you don't lose *that* much high-end. Besides, I'd rather lose their high-end for a few hours than my high-end hearing later in life.

Re:Earplugs becoming more common pop concert s

[NulDevice]

Hell, i've always brought earplugs to concerts. I chalk it up to awareness that "hey, wow, rock concerts are loud, and my older friends nearly went deaf back in the 70's."

If they're louder now than they used to be...well, still, they were always pretty loud and bad for your ears.

Wow, very informative...

[maillemaker]

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.

Re:Wow, very informative...

[Brother Dysk]

If you've just got the radio on in the background, and a "loud" song comes on, it'll catch your attention. Or, if your song isn't "loud", and everything else is, idle listeners won't notice it (they'll tune it out). Or so the theory goes...

Re:Wow, very informative...

[marcello_dl]

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.

Re:Wow, very informative...

[Andrewkov]

Actually I think radio stations add a tonne of dynamic compression and normalize the volume levels between songs, so that you can drive without fiddling with the volume constantly.

Re:Wow, very informative...

[stewbacca]

Great link but one problem: YouTube has such horribly compressed file formats, the sound quality does no justice for the demonstration.

To answer the question why is it necessary to record loud music, well, it doesn't sound better, nor does it cut corners in mixing, so I have no idea why.

Re:Wow, very informative...

[Suicidal Gir]

"Since our sensitivity is not equally distributed along all frequencies a louder signal "acquires" more frequency range." That really has nothing to do with boosting the signal. Yes, at lower volumes our hears are far less sensitive in the lower and higher ranges. Once you're up and over around 90dB, our hearing curve evens out and we hear most the of the frequencies at the same level (except for the extremely low and high). This is what explains the "loudness" button on old receivers - it simply boosts the lows and highs for low listening volume. As for why the record companies do this, most of it can be blamed on the market; namely teenagers and college students. The trend is towards "ear thrashing" music. Like others have mentioned, they mistake loudness for quality. In the world of high end audio we know these decibel drag racers are just utter crap and most of what you're hearing is distortion, especially in the low end - another quality that the untrained ear mistakes as quality. Something not considered is what type of music you're listening to. Heavy rock music is one of those that listeners just want "in your face" noise. However, if you look at something a little more... sophisticated shall I say, the loudness war need apply. Take a look at classical music and jazz. This tends to be the type of music audiophile listen to and is where sound quality is of the utmost importance. Again, you can simply blame the market for these trends.

Re:Wow, very informative...

[marcello_dl]

> Yes, at lower volumes our hears are far less sensitive in the lower and higher ranges. Once you're up and over around 90dB, our hearing curve evens out and we hear most the of the frequencies at the same level (except for the extremely low and high)

that's what I meant by "acquires", it's a subjective impression.

Re:Wow, very informative...

[Joce640k]

To answer the question why is it necessary to record loud music, well, it doesn't sound better, nor does it cut corners in mixing, so I have no idea why.

Here's why:

Imagine a radio station or whatever is playing all uncompressed music. Now, a compressed song comes on at the same volume. The compressed song will sound much bigger and louder. It grabs your attention, it sells more copies.

Once they figured this out they simply compressed everything and everybody lost out.

The dull, flat that compressors produce sound might be responsible for the missing record sales. Compressed music is nowhere as interesting to the brain.

It might also be why most of the music which actually sells is hip-hop and death metal - they aren't really degraded by compression.

Unfortunately, it makes business sense

[Idaho]

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.

Re:Unfortunately, it makes business sense

[Yvan256]

Except that you can easily hear clipping on almost any headphones.

The studios are destroying the very music they are trying to sell.

Re:Unfortunately, it makes business sense

[ip_vjl]

I bought a car (Ford Escort) back in 94-95 that had a factory CD player.

It had a 'comp' (compression) button that would apply audio compression to the CD as it played. This meant that you could listen with the full dynamic range when you wanted, but if you were in a noisy environment (like traffic) you could apply the dynamic compression so as to allow you to normalize the overall volume to compete with road noise.

This seems to be the ideal situation. Let the playback devices have the option to add compression for people who want loud, crushed music and keep the recordings with the full dynamic range (as there's no way to get it back when it's gone.)

Re:Unfortunately, it makes business sense

[jesterpilot]

This seems to be the ideal situation. Let the playback devices have the option to add compression for people who want loud, crushed music and keep the recordings with the full dynamic range (as there's no way to get it back when it's gone.)

You mean, like giving the user control over content he/she bought? You made a big mistake not to post AC, as you will hear an RIAA-official knock on your door late at night.

Re:Unfortunately, it makes business sense

[hxnwix]

While this might be true for AM/FM radio and vinyl, why would it be true for CDs and MP3s? The dynamic range is there, in the data - 16 bits gives you about 98.08dB S/E ratio, or, according to the red book spec, 96dB. Remember, if your amplifier somehow tends to mash together different levels, the last thing you want to do is restrict yourself to a narrow band near the peak.

Are you sure that you're not just making shit up?

Re:Unfortunately, it makes business sense

[bughunter]

Let the playback devices have the option to add compression for people who want loud, crushed music and keep the recordings with the full dynamic range (as there's no way to get it back when it's gone.) I first came in here to post the same comment, then realized this will never happen.

Why? Because if the recording execs and producers are compressing music out of some sense of competition, then they will never leave this variable up to the control of the user.

Modern DAC and DSP chips are powerful enough to give the user much more control of the audio, both spectrally and dynamically. Until the current paradigm of music publishing and production is dead, however, we're not likely to see anything like this available to anyone but professional audio engineers, or those who can afford professional tools.

Re:Unfortunately, it makes business sense

[mrraven]

Because some music like classical, jazz, and well played rock actually has dynamics that are lost through compression. If you only listen to ganster rap OTH (not saying there isn't good hip-hop BTW) this is no big thang.

Re:Unfortunately, it makes business sense

[john951]

The point is, though that 96dB of headroom is there, it's not used. Peak levels are now only a few dB above the average level. There's no problem with the technology.

Wall of Sound

[Purity Of Essence]

I blame Phil Spector. Thank God he's been brought to trial for his crimes.

Re:Wall of Sound

[iamdrscience]

I never really understood what the phrase "Wall of Sound" meant until the first time I walked into a Best Buy. When I heard the ungodly cacophony of videogames, televisions, boomboxes, car stereos, computers, cellphones, appliances and more, the phrase was the first thing that leapt to my mind. It was a strong, oppressive force that felt like a physical barrier, despite only being sound.

Re:Wall of Sound

[ystar]

I never really understood what the phrase "Wall of Sound" meant Spector set microphones up to broadcast all of the instruments and voices into a small room elsewhere that consisted of a rack of speakers (a wall of sound). He would record the rack of speakers' output using another microphone. This technique produced a beautiful, spatial sound (due to the reverberation) despite being a monaural process.

Re:The alternative?

[sBox]

Show me what 'finer detail' a listener needs (or wants) in the latest Jay-Z or Sluttany Spears album and maybe that will justify the additional costs...

"Aficionados"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:"Aficionados"

[shurikt]

Bravo! Where are my mod points today?!

Re:"Aficionados"

[hxnwix]

People look at music as an elevated art that needs to be bowed down to. I don't know what kind of music you listen to, but I like stuff that doesn't suck. Since I like stuff that sounds good, I want it to sound good.

we are giving the listeners what they want As a consumer, I can tell you that no, you're not.

Personally, I don't care much for what recorded music sounds like. Why am I not surprised?

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. So, you bow down to music, and make sure it sounds good. But you don't care how music sounds and you think music isn't important. I think I'm hearing some dissonance.

So if things are clipped and enloundened, you only have bad listeners and human psychoacoustic understanding to blame. Actually, I blame idiots like you.

Re:"Aficionados"

[Animats]

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.

Exactly.

Not that popular music is any better "live". Clubs today mostly have hard walls, floors, and ceilings, for that murky "empty swimming pool" sound. If it's all about the bass, hall reverb time doesn't matter. In spaces like that, music that isn't all bass sounds awful. After twenty years of hip hop and house, club owners don't care about room acoustics, just amp power.

So we're stuck. No genre that needs decent room acoustics can get any market share, even in clubs.

Re:"Aficionados"

[jafac]

Heh - you sound like my old art teacher complaining about "sofa-sized paintings" that rule art shows and galleries.

. .. . and it's true. It's like we see ONE TRUE ROLE to fulfill for a given artform. Yes, art can express human feelings and thought. Art can communicate. Art can also be functional at the same time. And Art can act as a means for an artist to make a living. And Art can also act as a means to prop up an industry, which pretends to have something to do with this idealistic "One True Role" - and, in the end, this industry can not even exist, were it not for that pretension.

Why do we listen to music in our cars?

Because we want to think that we're "cool" because listening to music is "cool" - it implies a possession of a mind that thinks and a heart that feels and an ear that hears. Whether we're listening to music to prop up that image of ourselves for our own benefit, or the person in the next car at the light who can hear the thumping because you've got the bass turned up so loud, doesn't matter.

Is there a genuine element of self enjoyment or pleasure to listening to music, or enjoying any other form of art? Sure there is. Even when it's crap, and you're just participating in an industry as a bland consumer - propping up hoards of leisure-suit wearing promoters and executives, and maybe giving a few very lucky STARS a very comfortable lifestyle, there's a certain enjoyment to feeling like you're enriching your culture. Isn't your living room better off with a crappy painting hanging over your sofa, than no painting at all? I mean, the colors match the upholstery so well - you just HAD to be in-tune with what the artist was thinking when you picked out the sofa. That means your life isn't meaningless.

Re:"Aficionados"

[phozz bare]

Why do we listen to music in our cars?

Because we want to think that we're "cool" I don't know about you, I listen to music in the car because it's boring and tedious without it. It's also pretty much the only opportunity during the day to sit down and listen to music - some of us have jobs, small apartments and kids that need to sleep. Thankfully, driving and listening to music tend to not clash with each other (as opposed to, say, having a phone conversation while driving).
So I prefer my car music to be of the highest quality possible. For example, I am really pissed off at cars such as mine, that have an in-dash CD player that cannot be replaced, does not play anything other than plain CDDA and has no means to connect an external input without taking it apart. An FM broadcaster just doesn't cut it as far as I'm concerned.

That's why you have a volume knob.

[jonadab]

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.

Re:That's why you have a volume knob.

[tinkerghost]

Dynamic range & volume are only vaguely related in that they both are measured in dB.
Volume is the average 'loudness' of a work - IE volume setting of 5 on the stereo will generate a 50dB tone when input with a 50dB tone. a 4 will generate a 45dB tone & a 6 will generate a 60Db tone.
Dynamic range is the difference between the intensities of the midline & peak sounds of the track. IE the midline vs the crash of a cymbal or the midline vs 1/2 second of absolute silence. On a CD, the peak level is pre-defined & not changeable - anything that rises above this is set to the maximum; an effect known as clipping. What the CD companies have been doing is raising the midline intensity. Since the sound of a voice in comparison to a cymbal crash hasn't changed, they either have to muffle the cymbal for the crash or let it clipp. Both generate distortion in the music.
Classical music is actually one of the places where this type of effect is absolutely unacceptable, the 1812 overature would be a mockery of itself if the cannon shots were barely louder than the brass section. The same with shifts between strings & brass - the instruments were chosen for the specific tonal qualities & the music writen to embrace the differences.

Re:That's why you have a volume knob.

[damaki]

Don't you think that if the volume is low in a part of a song, it is because it was made so that it is low ? Maybe there is a motivation, you know, like an artistic one. I do not think that a single violin should be as loud as a full fledged orchestra, and that a whisper should be as loud as a shout.
If you do not like to turn the knob, stop listening to music. Each album has its own volume, each song too.

The issue is not much about turning the volume knob. The problem is that you cannot *unturn* the dynamic range knob. I can use replaygain to have constant album volume, while I can only cry about bringing back the lost dynamics.

Re:That's why you have a volume knob.

[Daimanta]

I beg to differ.

There are a fair number of Bach's pieces that start out very quietly and at the end I am always told to put the volume down.

Re:That's why you have a volume knob.

[DarkJC]

Why is this Informative?

If you prefer a really narrow dynamic range, then fine. Compress your music all you like. However, the whole idea behind many works (such as Beethovans) is lost when you compress their range. The quiets are SUPPOSED to be that quiet, and the louds are SUPPOSED to be that loud. When they were originally composed, there are those quiet and loud parts for a reason. They're to excite you, to surprise you, to get your heart beating, to make you feel the emotion behind it.

Ideally you adjust the volume knob to a comfortable spot in the quiet parts and enjoy the ride from there. If you don't want that, fine, but keep it the hell off of MY purchases.

Re:That's why you have a volume knob.

[element-o.p.]

Proof that, as in most things in life, moderation is the key.

I'm not an audio engineer, but I am a practicing, amateur musician who dabbles in recording. A proper amount of dynamic range compression is good, both for the reasons you mention above and also because a lot of consumer-grade audio equipment can't handle the dynamic range of a guitar/bass amp or a PA system like you find in a local club. So, a recording engineer at the studio who knows boatloads more about audio than I ever will spends a great deal of time tweaking the compression, E.Q. and psychoacoustic processing of the final recording to provide a sound appropriate to the musical genre than will play reasonably well on the bulk of consumer audio systems out there, and the end result is entirely dependent upon the skill, experience and taste of the engineer who does the audio mastering.

I suspect it is entirely possible to find current recordings that are done really well, but that there are also plenty of other recordings that -- due to the taste (or lack thereof) of the artists, their producers or the label, among other reasons -- are done rather poorly.

Re:That's why you have a volume knob.

[Reziac]

[laughing] So you probably grok why I've always insisted that punk rock is the modern Beethoven. :)

(Actually, that's why I like both.)

Re:That's why you have a volume knob.

[Kopiok]

The point is you're not supposed to crank your speakers up at the quiet part. It's quiet for a reason.

Re:That's why you have a volume knob.

[Bob_Geldof]

Playing Beethoven loud enough to anger the neighbors is the appropriate action.

Re:That's why you have a volume knob.

[jonadab]

I know what volume and dynamic range are.

> On a CD, the peak level is pre-defined & not changeable - anything that rises above this is set
> to the maximum; an effect known as clipping.

In other words, there's an enforced maximum volume, and anything louder gets chopped off. Good. I don't really want the peaks to get arbitrarily loud. My ears don't like that. Honestly I'd be happier if the peaks were not much louder than the quiet parts.

> What the CD companies have been doing is raising the midline intensity.

So turn down the volume knob.

> Since the sound of a voice in comparison to a cymbal crash hasn't changed, they either have
> to muffle the cymbal for the crash or let it clipp. Both generate distortion in the music.
> Classical music is actually one of the places where this type of effect is absolutely unacceptable,

As you might have noticed from my previous post, I'm not exactly a big fan of Classical music. The whole idea of using volume and/or dynamic range as a key part of the musical expression is one that I find uninteresting and undesirable, and a really poor substitute for good compositional technique (especially counterpoint, which unfortunately seems to have been mostly forgotten or ignored after about 1750 or so).

> the 1812 overature would be a mockery of itself if the cannon shots were barely louder
> than the brass section.

I tend to prefer my music without extreme percussion. This may sound weird to you, but I don't *like* being suddenly deafened. Frankly I can't really imagine why anyone else would like that, either. The popping baloons in the 1712 Overture push the limit of my tolerance for sudden bursts of loudness; they're only funny the first time you hear the piece, and after that they're annoying. The cannons in the 1812, likewise, are only novel the first time you ever hear the piece, and after that they just make the whole thing more unpleasant to listen to. I understand why they were used, but that doesn't make the music any less unenjoyable.

Actually, in terms of instruments, I kind of like harpsichord, or a fixed number of stringed instruments; but the most important feature of music, to my way of thinking, is not the instruments so much as the way the different voices move against one another. Playing stupid games with the loudness, moving it up and down all the tiem, just detracts from the listener's ability to hear the interaction between the voices (assuming there _is_ any interaction between the voices, which, granted, with a lot of today's music there isn't much).

Re:That's why you have a volume knob.

[jonadab]

> So you probably grok why I've always insisted that punk rock is the modern Beethoven.

Sure. They both use new-fangled (for the time) instruments to make the music unnecessarily loud in a misanthropic attempt to make the listeners deaf, presumably hoping that perhaps then they won't notice the lack of any significant counterpoint.

Classical and Rock are virtually identical, really, except that electric guitars and electronic keyboards and such didn't exist in the late eighteenth century due to technological limitations, so they had to make do with what they had, notably the pianoforte (the major selling point of which, over the more traditional/establishment harpsichord, was that the harder you pounded on it the louder the notes came out, a dubious improvement if ever there was one).

Re:That's why you have a volume knob.

[Reziac]

ROTFLMAO! -- And as I recall, Beethoven's contemporary critics made much the same remarks as do our era's critics when confronted with modern music.

Anyone who doesn't get the comparison isn't playing their Beethoven loud enough. ;)

(Mind you, I *like* both punk and Beethoven!!)

Re:That's why you have a volume knob.

[tinkerghost]

> What the CD companies have been doing is raising the midline intensity.

So turn down the volume knob.

That doesn't bring back the clipped or restore the dampened portions of the music. Worse, as the midline rises, more and more gets clipped and damped.

If you do not like music which uses the full dynamic range available, that's fine - I recommend classical guitar & string quartet music with or without vocals, the blues, and folk music from the 12th century on should also be to your taste as they follow the same pattern of a few tonally similar instruments within a limited dynamic range.

However, to say that compressing the dynamic range is a 'good thing'(tm) because it prevents artists from straying outside your comfort zone is about as close as you can get to sacralige in the music world. As for "playing stupid games with the loudness", the use of piano vs forte is as important a factor as lento vs presto. I do like classical music and your right, using the dynamic range is "playing games" - exactly the same as using the full range of notes & meter is 'playing games' - games without which, music would be much duller & homogenized. Hmm, interestingly, it would sound a lot like the crap being pushed out as pop music today.

Re:That's why you have a volume knob.

[NulDevice]

Jeez which Bach pieces are you listening to? Sure, the harpischord stuff by design has loduness issues, but something like Partita No 2 in d is ALL about the dynamics. The sarabande, allemande and chacconne especially.

Re:That's why you have a volume knob.

[jonadab]

> Jeez which Bach pieces are you listening to?

A variety. Without question my favorite is BWV 1080 (and my favorite movement from it is contrapunctus ii). I also like BWV 1043, certain of the cantatas, most of the inventions, several movements from the Brandenberg concertos, a number of the pieces from The Well-Tempered Clavier, ... there are so many to pick from.

I guess my _least_ favorite Bach pieces as a group would be the organ works. As keyboard instruments go, I like the harpsichord better. Of course, I still like Bach's organ works better than practically anything from the Classical era.

Besides Bach, I also really like the music of Domenico Scarlatti, and I can listen to quite a bit of Antonio Vivaldi without getting tired of it...

Re:That's why you have a volume knob.

[NulDevice]

I swear Vivaldi wrote the same concerto 491 times.

Optimised for radio, unlistenable on good systems

[MeerCat]

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.

what people want

[jmyers]

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.

It makes you wonder...

[Tyler Durden]

Maybe this has to do with what Bob Dylan was talking about earlier when he mentioned the lower sound quality of modern recordings.

Re:It makes you wonder...

[Dystopian Rebel]

It makes you wonder... Maybe this has to do with what Bob Dylan was talking about

Sir, people have been wondering what Bob Dylan has been talking about for over 40 years.

Is this why modern music stinks?

[ChangeOnInstall]

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.

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-in dustry.html They even used "Far Cry"! I swear I typed the above before I found this link.

Re:Is this why modern music stinks?

[crgrace]

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.

People have thought the music they listened to in their teens and early twenties was better than current music since the 1902. Seriously, I think Depeche Mode's best album was "Violator", the Cure's "Disintegration" is better than anything out now, and Morrissey's "Your Arsenal" is one of the masterpieces of modern rock. Of course I'm biased as hell and young people today wouldn't even know some of these artists. They are probably nostalgic for pop punk.... gee, I miss when music was good, like "Simple Plan" and "Sum 41".

Re:Is this why modern music stinks?

[Andrewkov]

Rush is a great example. Vapour Trails was also way too compressed, there is a great article about this album, which also answers a lot of questions people have posted here as to why this is happening. Well worth the read for anyone interested in this stuff.

Re:Is this why modern music stinks?

[stewbacca]

I thought Rush, and Neil Peart in particular, took great pride in their recording artistry? I thought they sweated every little detail for the perfect sound, but you are making it sound like they have sold out to the producer man to sell more albums. Well, in that case, they've failed, because they haven't made a good sounding album since 1984 and they don't sell nearly as many albums now as they did from 1978-1986.

Re:Is this why modern music stinks?

[NulDevice]

I...I think we should be friends.

Re:Is this why modern music stinks?

[crgrace]

Hi Null Device,

I think we should be friends too... we have a lot in common. I downloaded London and Footfalls. REALLY GOOD STUFF. I think you guys are in touch with your inner Waldorf, no? I made a small donation to thank you guys for putting up that synthpop for free. Please email me at carl_r_grace@yahoo.com

Carl

[raises hand]

[dazedNconfuzed]

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.

Re:[raises hand]

[havoc-]

My girlfriend sells hearing aids and proffessional grade ear plugs. There are relatively cheap (20 euro) earplugs which you can re-use, that will not affect sound quality. Great stuff for those ueber-loud concerts.

Sometimes it makes sense all around

[eagl]

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).

Re:Sometimes it makes sense all around

[rronda]

You must be kidding about dynamic compression not ruining classical music. There are a large number of examples of pieces which will loose quite a bit by compressing the dynamic range. Best symphonies, which for some people are the best music ever created, would be the most damaged.

Re:Sometimes it makes sense all around

[Pope]

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.

Well, that's great. Go muck around with *your* player and leave the dynamic range alone for those of us who want it. Either that, or stop worrying about missing the quiet parts so much.

Re:Sometimes it makes sense all around

[filet0fish]

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 About a month or two after I moved into my condo, the old lady living below me called the cops on me for playing Dvorak's 9th too loud. She claimed I was dragging chains around and blowing whistles. She never complained when I was playing any other style of music.

Re:Sometimes it makes sense all around

[MikeBabcock]

The complaint isn't that dynamic range compression is bad, simply that it shouldn't be done when making the music but when playing the music. Its very simple to compress dynamic range electronically and it should be done by your music player or stereo system, not by the recording engineer.

In other words, if you listen to music in a noisy environment, adjust the output to match, don't ruin MY music experience too by adjusting the recording itself.

Re:Sometimes it makes sense all around

[NulDevice]

Well, that's not strictly true, now.

The recording engineer should always apply a little compression or limiting at the mastering stage. It has the effect of adding a little "smear" to the music to bind a lot of the recordings together, it helps the album as a whole hang together, and they tend to have very specialized gear for doing that and EQ and such at a master-track level, basically adding the final polish. Mastering can often make or break a record.

The problem is not whether the recording/mastering engineer should be doing it, it's how much. Modern recordings (since the advent of tape, anyway) have always had a little post-processing. The issue in the loudness wars is that it's now possible with modern equipment to apply these normal effects in very extreme ways to drive the perceived loudness beyond sane levels.

Now, ever mastering engineer I've ever talked to HATES the loudness wars with a passion. Nobody wants to take their compressor/limiter and crank the sucker until the waveform looks like a big fuzzy block. The problem is, artists and labels demand that they do anyway. Nobody wants to be the guy whose album is quieter than everybody else's, and sadly not every band understands the intricacies of the engineering and mastering process - nor should every songwriter be expected to - but in the end it just perpetuates this sort of thing.

Re:Sometimes it makes sense all around

[MikeBabcock]

I'm sorry for my original phrasing -- I meant that audio engineers shouldn't be compressing the !@# out of the "music", not that they shouldn't use dynamic range compression at all.

Of course, I rip my music (to FLAC files) and apply comparative loudness data to equalize the loudness of all my tracks when playing them back (using Replay Gain). I tend to remix my tracks onto CDs with the gain data applied so that the tracks have even loudness to each other. Its amazing how multiple CDs from the same artist can have differing loudnesses (Nickelback comes rapidly to mind).

Re:The alternative?

[Stooshie]

Just a thought. The youtube compression is going to make the two tracks sound much more similar. Isn't it?

Try it for yourself!

[mattgreen]

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.

Re:Try it for yourself!

[Ed Avis]

Did you try a blind test? If you play the CD with the expectation that it will sound better and be less tiring, that's most likely what you will experience. You need to get two copies of the same song (an older one and a modern, squashed remastering), sample them to lossless audio files and get a friend to adjust the volume so that the newer remastering is not obviously louder. Then write a short program to play one of the two at random and ask you which one you think it is. Then you will find out whether you can reliably distinguish between them.

Many people experienced improved sound quality from using a special pen to draw round the outside of their CDs. They expected it to sound better and so it did.

Re:Try it for yourself!

[bint]

Many people experienced improved sound quality from using a special pen to draw round the outside of their CDs. They expected it to sound better and so it did.

I thought that was for beating the "copy protection"? :)

Re:Try it for yourself!

[Lisandro]

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

Well, it also helps that Superunknown is one of the best albums of the past decade...

But still, i agree with the notion that newer music is overly compressed. I mentioned in a similar story how i've recently bought Army of Anyone's debut album and can't stand to listen in for long periods, even when i find myself loving the songs. The mix is utterly loud and "mushy".

Re:Try it for yourself!

[15Bit]

>Many people experienced improved sound quality from using a special pen

> to draw round the outside of their CDs. They expected it to sound better and so it did.

Actually it wasn't a special pen - it was any generic dark marker. They also reckoned freezing the CD improved things too. As these ideas (incredibly) weren't published anywhere near April 1st we tried them out in the Hi-Fi shop where i was working (it was a slow day). We came to 2 conclusions:

1) It was a crock of shite. None of us could hear the difference after freezing/inking the CDs.

2) The audiophile turntable sounded better than the audiophile cd player. In large part due to the heavy dynamic range compression on CDs. I still find old vinyl recordings more enjoyable than modern digital remasterings for exactly that reason.

Re:Try it for yourself!

[I Like Pudding]

I've mixed complete shit that sounds better than the Chili Pepper's Californication. Screw your placebo test - there are no dynamics at all and it's fucking clipping! Non-audiphile consumers were even complaining about it. Dynamics is one of the least subtle parts of mixing - you WILL hear the difference when things get pushed so far as they have.

Re:Try it for yourself!

[Phat_Tony]

I've had a lot of arguments regarding when blind testing is necessary. It's sometimes hard to draw a line. But it's not at all clear that it's needed here to distinguish from a placebo effect, as you imply.

For an example, suppose you're looking for the best cookie recipe. You run two different trials to see which is preferred in each.

- In trial #1, you compare the Nestle Tollhouse recipe to the same recipe with 10% more butter.
- In trial #2, you compare the Nestle Tollhouse recipe to the same recipe with the quantities of baking soda and sugar switched.

Now in trial#1, I'd say that, to get a meaningful result, you had better do it blind. Maybe even literally blindfolded, putting pieces of cookies in people's mouths. But in trial #2, it just doesn't make any difference whether you use careful, blind methods, because the results will be so dramatic and unanimous that there will be no room for error introduced by subtle mechanisms.

I like to listen to my music on CD through a Wheatfield Audio HA-1 tube headphone amplifier driving a pair of Sennheiser HD-600 headphones. For those of you not familiar with audiophile stuff, this is low on the totem poll of high-end equipment, but we're still talking about a roughly $1000 investment just for a pair of headphones and an amp. And when I listen to the difference between audio that's highly compressed and the real, high dynamic-range thing, it's the difference between night and day. If we're standing outside and you ask me if it's night or day out, I don't feel that I need to find a hundred other people to survey in a double-blind clinical setting before I get back to you with an answer. The answer is usually perfectly clear.

I'd also like to note that sometimes, highly compressed audio is desirable. For example, in my car on the freeway, there's pretty much background noise, and if you maintain high dynamic range in a recording, you'll either have painfully loud loud parts, or inaudible quiet parts. You need to compress the hell out of the music to make it sound decent over background noise. That, or (inadvisably) wear noise-canceling headphones in your car.

Does this mean they should sell two versions of CD's, one for audiophiles, and one for car-listeners? No. Because it's a piece of cake for a filter to compress the dynamic range of audio, but it's much more difficult to accurately re-extend that dynamic range. So car stereos should just offer a high compression setting, and probably default to having it on. I'm surprised I haven't heard of car stereos with a microphone that determines the volume of background noise in the car and then compresses the dynamic range of the audio appropriately to keep the low volume bits audible, and just uses the volume setting to set the maximum volume of the highs. (within certain limitations ion the compression. For example, if the volume were turned down such that the highs are below the background noise, you probably don't want to let the stereo invert the wave form.)

Re:Try it for yourself!

[Dogtanian]

I thought that was for beating the "copy protection"? :) I believe it was used for that later on, but I remember hearing about this "trick" sometime in the early 1990s, long before CD copying (and hence copy protection) was even an issue.

Re:Try it for yourself!

[gad_zuki!]

Screw your placebo test - there are no dynamics at all and it's fucking clipping!

Maybe you downloaded the same low-quality mp3s I did?

Seriously, I never heard the CD, but the mp3s I have sound terrible. Incredible that thats what that album is supposed to sound like.

Re:Try it for yourself!

[Ed Avis]

So car stereos should just offer a high compression setting, and probably default to having it on.

Is this the 'loudness' feature that some car stereos and amplifiers have? I never worked out how that differed from just turning up the volume, but it must do something.

Re:Try it for yourself!

[karnal]

I'm surprised I haven't heard of car stereos with a microphone that determines the volume of background noise in the car and then compresses the dynamic range of the audio

I test drove a GM about 5 years back that had this "feature" on it and I couldn't figure out how to turn it off. I actually noticed that the radio was increasing/decreasing the sound level of the radio, but I couldn't fully place at first that it was happening.

It's just fed a speed reading from the dash to increase/decrease, no mics used if I recall. And there's a ring around the volume knob that's used to defeat it or adjust it's sensitivity.

Re:Try it for yourself!

[Phat_Tony]

Yes, "loudness" on car stereos and some home stereos and boom-boxes should be audio compression, not volume adjustment.

Re:Try it for yourself!

[drfreak]

For the sound engineer, this debate goes even farther than the commercials they compress to sound louder on TV.

There is a plethora of sound processing equipment which psycho-acoustically "improves" the original recording. The real debate here is over whether dynamic range is noticeable vs. being able to hear everything at the same -maximized- audio level.

In recording college we took the same course (mandatory) from two different music producers. One from the mic-everything-so-you-can-hear-it-all-and-control- the-volume and the other from the distance-mic-it-all-with-as-few-mics-as-possible camp.

Personally, I like the latter. If you have a good sound source to begin with and the band does not suck, why not let people hear what they *really* sound like, instead of making the drums pan all over your speakers rather than wave through them as they would if you were sitting in front of them. For some productions, it actually adds to the artistic drama to have everything sound different than if played live. This can be a good thing, but if you want a band (or any kind of event or sound source for that matter) to be able to stand on its own, then why not present it to the listener as the full experience you get right in front of the band?

I'm digressing from the original subject, bust I just wanted to give another angle to the debate.

Re:Try it for yourself!

[jschrod]

Our BMWs had this feature for at least 6 years now, maybe even before. They use an equalizer that depends on speed; no realtime feedback on outside noise. But it's good enough for most purposes.

That said, you're completely right. While compression is not so bad for casual listening on the bad speakers at my computer, much of the new stuff just doesn't sound right on my HK/Quadral equipment in the living room. And let me not start about the difference to old audiophile LP recordings. (I'm still using my 15-year old Thorens and an AKG pick-up for that, and I am really satisfied.)

Re:The alternative?

[FroBugg]

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.

This is where you're incorrect. If you take the low-volume and high-volume originals, then play them so that the volume you hear is identical, the low-volume will contain much greater dynamic range and will sound much better.

Recurring Topic

[jasenj1]

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.

How important is it, really?

[Leviathant]

don't get me wrong here, I have spent more on a single pair of headphones than most people spend on their entire stereo setup, and while I am a fan of high fidelity recording (or, in some cases, synthesis, really), in some cases I either want the music to be loud and dirty, or the music is good enough that the fidelity doesn't even matter. The general public is even less concerned! Do you think anyone really gives a hoot that the production on a song like "Hips don't Lie" is TERRIBLE? I'm sure the dynamic range has been crushed on its way from ProTools to that shiny CD, err, MP3 even.

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.

Re:How important is it, really?

[Ant P.]

A lot of car stereos already have a "Loudness" button. I don't think all of them run software either.

Re:How important is it, really?

[Leviathant]

Yeah, my car's stereo has a "Loud" button too (It's the one that makes everything quieter, huh huh.) I believe they're more of a EQ'd volume boost than a form of compression. The mids get scooped and the overall volume is increased. This is not really the kind of compression I was talking about.

it's the cars that go bump

[jgarra23]

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.

Re:it's the cars that go bump

[Spy der Mann]

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

... and that's usually because the nearby car has his volume pumped up to 200X so everybody in the neighborhood can listen to his crappy music. :-/

Re:it's the cars that go bump

[Hamsterdan]

That's why some car radios have a function to compress the dynamic range. (the stock am/FM/Tape CD changer FORD radio in my Grand Marquis has the feature, and we're talking about an OEM radio). Couldn't they leave it to the buyer to decide if they want a compressed range or not?

Re:it's the cars that go bump

[Steve525]

This doesn't make your cds "louder" than a "quiet" cd,

Actually, you're wrong,because it's not compression that's the problem, it's peak limiting. As you correctly state compression reduces the dynamic range. You make the quiet parts louder, and this does make a CD better for listening to in a car (and many other times, too). Personally I'd prefer they leave the compression off the CD and instead make it a standard feature in stereos and car radios. I know someone who had this feature in his factory car stereo (in a Saturn - not exactly high a end car) over 10 years ago.

The compression as I described above doesn't make the loud parts louder since the loud parts already reach the maximum range of the CD. However, peak limiting can make the loud parts louder. What peak limiting does is squash/chop the top off the largest peaks in the audio (loudest transients - usually a snare or bass drum). Once you cut down the highest peaks, you can have room to raise the volume of the whole thing. If only done for a few transients, this is good thing (or at least not too much of a bad thing). The small change in the transients won't be noticable, and you've increase the signal to noise for the rest of the file (assuming the master you started from has more bits than the final file) and as a bonus made the file louder. If taken a little overboard, you start changing a lot of transients and the snare and bass drums loose their kick. This is not great, but most people still won't notice. If taken even further, though, all the data starts to become distorted, and this plain sounds bad. This is how most current releases are done.

If you can find the link to the guy who compares Rush albums (I've seen others mention it in this thread) he gives great visual examples.

Re:it's the cars that go bump

[Burning1]

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.

Main Entry: loud
Pronunciation: 'laud
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English hlud; akin to Old High German hlut loud, Latin inclutus famous, Greek klytos, Sanskrit srnoti he hears
1 a : marked by intensity or volume of sound b : producing a loud sound

You might want to check the dictionary before implying that everyone else is ignorant based on a trivial technical detail.

Re:it's the cars that go bump

[Kattspya]

If the lows are higher and the highs are the same is the volume not louder overall? The loudness setting is one thing but compression arguably increases the average sound level.

Re:The alternative?

[Hijacked Public]

Which doesn't mean that it wouldn't be useful to hear more fine detail on Otis Taylor's latest album.

Bone Fone

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Good for cheap stereos

[goldenrod3]

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

[Detritus]

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".

Re:Radio

[Gunstick]

it's getting very funny when the radio station compresses the already compressed CDs *again*. It washes out even more the dynamics. I wonder why we have 16 bit. 4 Bit should be enough.
Just code them from -32752 to -32768 and +32752 to +32768

I clip too.

[Benanov]

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.

Re:I clip too.

[An ominous Cow art]

Interesting. I've only started going to concerts in the last few years, and noticed that in the the last one I went to. At times all I could hear was very loud static. The venue was a small one and it seemed to me that they didn't have to be anywhere near as loud as they were. This was Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom, Queensryche was the band.

What an interesting contradiction

[AnalogDiehard]

To counter the CD "loudness war", we have DVD movies with

• 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.

Re:What an interesting contradiction

[ErikZ]

This sounds very interesting, but I have no idea what you mean by a "Compressor".

I'm not really interested in becoming an audiophile, could you just point me at the component you bought?

Re:What an interesting contradiction

[MikeBabcock]

Every DVD player I've seen in the last 5 years has a dynamic range compressor built right in, as well it should be. I listen to my movies with full dynamic range and have the volume adjusted so dialogue is audible at low volumes and explosions are as earth-shattering as they ought to be. My wife on the other hand watches movies with the compression on full so that nothing gets too loud for her at any point.

'Night mode' on my Yamaha receiver also adds a large amount of compression, making quiet sounds much louder and loud parts much quieter and removes almost all deep bass entirely.

Re:What an interesting contradiction

[SpikeSpiff]

Another way to deal with too-loud sound effects it to up the volume of your center speaker. That increases the volume of dialogue, while keep the effects on the sub-woofer and sides more reasonable.

Re:What an interesting contradiction

[AnalogDiehard]

This sounds very interesting, but I have no idea what you mean by a "Compressor".

I'm not really interested in becoming an audiophile, could you just point me at the component you bought?

Google for Alesis Nanocomp, that is what I used. I believe it is out of production but easy to find used for under $50. It is a stereo compressor designed for musicians but it happens to work very well on DVDs and cable TV. You may need adapter cable from the 1/4" jacks to the RCA jacks of your TV/stereo.

Re:What an interesting contradiction

[The One and Only]

DVD's are designed to be watched in a quiet home theatre environment, where ideally, you do want dynamic range. While I saw it in theater and not on DVD, Minority Report is all the much better for the occasional gunshot being realistically louder than the low background level of dialogue--rather adds to the dramatic surprise, even.

Re:The alternative?

[RailRide]

Nope. I saw the video before this story. The compression being spoken of is the difference in volume between the loudest and softest sounds, not the data rate. That difference is being squeezed so the overall average volume can be made louder. That's what I learned from the YouTube example, and I'm nowhere near being an audiophile. You'll notice it if you watch the video.

---PCJ

One page view of TFA

[bdonalds]

http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/5429

DVDs example of why dynamic volume is unpopular

[JimboFBX]

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.

Re:DVDs example of why dynamic volume is unpopular

[Sam_Brightman]

I'd never investigated and just assumed my ears were failing. I always have to watch with subtitles! I wouldn't advocate ruining the experience for everyone just because of that though - surely it can be done in software?

Re:DVDs example of why dynamic volume is unpopular

[sherriw]

You are bang on when it comes to the volume in movies. I was watching Constantine recently and had to have the subtitles on for a quarter of the film in order to understand what they were saying- the background music was too loud compared to the voices. Why do film-makers forget that background music is supposed to be in the BACKGROUND?

Re:DVDs example of why dynamic volume is unpopular

[iainl]

Really? I'm not inconvenienced by it, because I know where my amplifier's 'midnight mode' is. Many DVD players can do it at that end, too.

Compressing the dynamic range for people who aren't in a position to cope with it is a hell of a lot easier than uncompressing it again.

I'd like people to mod pre-parent up ...

[freaker_TuC]

.. 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, ...

But compressing gets rid of most clipping

[shis-ka-bob]

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.

Re:But compressing gets rid of most clipping

[miskatonic alumnus]

Clipping occurs when you overdrive your speaker and it cannot have a response that is proportional to the applied signal.

Ahhh, but the sound engineers have made improvements in the art of clipping --- now we can get clipping through any amp at any volume setting, provided the recorded signal is clipped ... which it is on many CDs.

Re:But compressing gets rid of most clipping

[Yvan256]

I'm talking about clipping on the CD itself. You could have the best speakers and amplifier in the world and the volume set to 10% and you would still hear clipping. It's the source that's clipped, no the output itself.

Go see the zoomed parts of the graphics linked from people, you'll see. That's why it sucks - the very CD you buy (the only "master source" you can get, 99% of the time) is crap to begin with.

This is America!

[Floritard]

We have a solution to these sorts of problems. I hereby declare a War On Loudness!

Re:This is America!

[Nimey]

Wrong. It will be a War on /Some/ Loudness, directed by a Loudness Czar.

Volume Leveling

[sjaguar]

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.

Re:Volume Leveling

[iainl]

iTunes will normalise volume levels for you, and Audacity will actually renormalise the raw file. You could try one of those.

Does it matter?

[KiwiCanuck]

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?

Re:Optimised for radio, unlistenable on good syste

[Alioth]

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.

Re:what people want - what is music for?

[residents_parking]

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.

Re:The alternative?

[kb]

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.

Any software for dynamic range stats?

[russ1337]

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?

If The Music Is Too Loud...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The alternative?

[pembo13]

Seems like you totally missed the point. I didn't get it till I looked at the video demo.

Re:The alternative?

[Floritard]

With modern PC software you have all the tools you need to make a wretchedly loud copy of the disc and play it full bore in the old folks home with all the other deaf people. The opposite is not true, I can't pull a decent recording out of disc mastered at full loudness. Personally, I've never had any of my sound equipment at full volume and I hope my hearing lasts long enough not to necessitate such a measure.

I blame the GUI

[C A S S I E L]

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.

Re:I blame the GUI

[Paladin144]

I think you hit the nail on the head. The problem is that mastering engineers are using their eyes, not their ears. It's so easy to look at the waveform on the screen and say, "well, it looks a bit low here. I can actually see the background color" when they should be listening with their eyes closed.

I plan to buck this trend with my band's CD. It will be compressed, but not to the point of mush. I hope we don't suffer for the idea that dynamics are good.

Hmmm

[tkrotchko]

"the low-volume will contain much greater dynamic range and will sound much better."

http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=dy namic+range&i=42193,00.asp

Dynamic range, by definition, is the difference between the low volume and high volume.

Re:Hmmm

[g_rampage]

Right, and the sample with the lower max-volume will have a larger dynamic range than the sample with the higher max-volume. It made sense.

Re:Hmmm

[tkrotchko]

Still doesn't make sense, unless you mean that the sample with the greatest difference between the lowest volume and the highest volume is greatest. Just because something has a lowest high volume, that doesn't mean the dynamic range is larger.

All I'm saying is you need to know both high volume and low volume to make a judgment about the dynamic range. Knowing just one doesn't tell you anything.

Loss of dynamic range isn't a digital problem

[Mr. Underbridge]

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.

Dynamic range while driving

[charlesbakerharris]

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.

Dynamic dynamic range compression?

[Sam_Brightman]

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.

Re:Dynamic dynamic range compression?

[ambrosen]

I wouldn't think it was a big cost/unit issue. And some car stereos used to have it in the early 90s.

It is of course, a bit user complexity issue. Hence the problem.

Re:Dynamic dynamic range compression?

[Sam_Brightman]

Well you would think that having it on all the time, automatically adjusting the compression to deal with clipping or in proportion to volume or something would essentially keep it hidden from the user. Higher end equipment can have loads of knobs and dials as necessary.

Re:The alternative?

[Yetihehe]

No, this is not this kind of compression. You should just listen to it.

Re:Optimised for radio, unlistenable on good syste

[crgrace]

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.

Re:The alternative?

[operato]

it's not like it's costing extra? they recorded the song with fine detail then changed the settings to make things louder. the loudness kills the fine detail. how does it add to the cost? if anything making it louder takes extra time meaning it'd cost extra.

Like satellite radio

[tkrotchko]

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".

Re:Like satellite radio

[Bertie]

Ditto DAB radio here in the UK - it sounds like SHIT. Most stations are 128kbit MPEG-1 layer 2 streams, which is more or less equivalent to a 96kHz MP3, i.e. horrible. And to cap it off, apparently it takes six times as much power to broadcast the signal as it does for FM. But of course Most People think it's fine, because Most People are cloth-eared.

Progress, eh? New technology used to be about making things better, now it seems to be about making the minimum acceptable level of quality as cheap as possible.

It's so bad that they're quietly migrating to some sort of AAC-based codec, and new receivers will use this instead of the current standard, so eventually they'll stop broadcasting the MPEG streams. Of course, more than likely the broadcasters will choose to send out more stations at crap quality rather than give us the same stations that we have now at higher quality, but I live in hope.

Re:The alternative?

[Epi-man]

Show me what 'finer detail' a listener needs (or wants) in the latest Jay-Z or Sluttany Spears album and maybe that will justify the additional costs...

Which additional costs are you referring to? The additional costs of not having to do further post recording compression work to maximize the volume?

I understand your point, for today's prepackaged music it doesn't much matter if it is compressed to high Hades, but your suggestion that not compressing it costs extra is just plain silly.

Re:I don't understand music writers.

[chill]

Because most people -- like you -- don't really pay attention to detail? Did you read the article? The ENTIRE article? All the way to the bottom of Page 3 with the link to the multimedia version? (Hint, hint)

Yeah, that darned Beethoven

[tkrotchko]

He was always a problem.

Re:Yeah, that darned Beethoven

[Mex]

Plus, he was deaf, so that explains everything! ;)

Re:The alternative?

[jadin]

Maybe its my speakers, but I'd rather have the choice of volume than to be tied to one setting or another. I think you solved your own problem. Spend a little money and get a decent stereo, not a shelf system or boom box, but a stereo and two speakers. You can spend $400 new or even $200 used and wind up with a decent sounding system. My current stereo cost about $300 and while it isn't perfect, it is good enough to appease my audiophile instincts until I can afford a little better. There's a lot of cheap stereos (non-surround) that are great quality, available used due to people upgrading to surround.

Ironically you'll actually hear what the big deal is about in the loudness war once your setup is up to par.

Who needs sound quality?

[walterbyrd]

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."

Re:Who needs sound quality?

[Gunstick]

I love the THUD, THUD, THUD music. BUt the one played in the 90es. Nowadays it rather undalayd with wooOOOPPP...wooOOOPPP...wooOOOPPP... background music. In fact the background music, vocals, synthersizers etc ara all following the inverse volume of the main beat.
Not *that* is horribly awful.

In the future they could just remove the beat and put silence where it was, people would not notice as they are now used to having no music at all during each beat.

Re:Who needs sound quality?

[MikeBabcock]

Just to ruin your assumptions, some of the best audio recording I've heard lately is from Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. Grab his latest recording in DTS or SACD and enjoy quite good quality dynamic range and very interesting use of multi-channel audio too.

Re:Who needs sound quality?

[mrraven]

This has nothing to do with conservatism, I wouldn't want my Clash Sandinista or John Zorn Naked City compressed so I couldn't hear the dynamics dumbass, neither of these are conservative or tame by any means.

Web site that lists overcompressed CD's

[Danathar]

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?

Re:The alternative?

[kebes]

I'm not an expert in audio compression, so this is an honest question: How easy/difficult is it to perform "Dynamic Range Compression" in real-time. Is it really computationally expensive?

I see most of the comments here decrying compression, but a few reasonable arguments why it may sometimes be good/necessary (e.g. it's what consumers want, sounds better on low-quality sound systems, sounds better if you're forced to turn the volume very low, etc.). What I'm wondering is why we don't develop a digital audio standard that includes a "nicely mastered" track without compression. Thus the track has a wide dynamic range. Then, the meta-data for the file includes a few different "profiles" for dynamic range compression. The default profile could even be the "really loud" one appropriate for low-quality sound equipment. Most people would just hear the usual "loud version."

However, people who care about audio quality could set their equipment to automatically use the "higher dynamic range" profile. High-quality audio equipment could automatically select the most appropriate profile. In a more general sense, you could indeed have a "knob" (or software setting) that lets you adjust the compression to suit your tastes (even on a track-by-track basis).

I know to some extent this exists, because various music software have settings for "undoing" (as much as possible) the large audio compression that is routinely applied to modern music. Obviously it would be better to store the version with the higher dynamic range, however. So, unless it's too computationally expensive for something like an iPod to perform, it would seem that this would satisfy everyone's needs: Encode the songs with full dynamic range, and give people a knob (alongside treble and bass, etc.) to adjust the compression level to their needs.

(Again, not being an expert in such things, I welcome anyone who wants to point out by misunderstandings.)

Food analogy

[erroneous]

The same thing is being done to your food with sugar and salt.

Except not by the record companies, obviously.

Re:Food analogy

[NulDevice]

This is slashdot - EVERYTHING gets blamed on the RIAA.

This is why SACDs should have won

[sacrilicious]

This is why I was so sad at the demise of SACD... because among their improvements, SACDs go to eleven.

Re:This is why SACDs should have won

[iainl]

But that's the stupid thing about this. A properly mastered CD has all the audio quality you need to push most stereos. What makes SACD sound great isn't the extra sampling headroom to ensure that noises dogs can hear make it through, but that, as a product aimed squarely at the audiophile, they didn't do this kind of compression crap to it.

You've never listened to modern turntables

[Danathar]

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.

Re:You've never listened to modern turntables

[digitalaudiorock]

Yes, the frequency range is nothing like a CD, but the dynamic range is SO much better. Actually, the frequency range playing the original vinyl would be better than the CD, as 44.1 kHz digital audio is limited to about 22 kHz (as it takes as least two samples to simulate a wave). From this standpoint, vinyl has always been better than CD. The reality of course has been that CDs have been better than most peoples vinyl simply because of the durability of CDs vs the abysmal condition of most peoples vinyl (and the quality of their turntables).

The real factor in any digital recordings you make from vinyl is the quality of the A/D converter you use, and the bit depth and sample rate used. These days however I wouldn't doubt that homemade vinyl to digital recordings like yours would be better than most of the over-crushed CDs being released even using the A/D in a modest audio card.

Tom

Re:You've never listened to modern turntables

[Derf_X]

The issue here is about dust and scratches, not. I have listened at my father in law's house to some original 70's vinyl records on his Thorens turntable and the sound is amazing. The thing is that he cleaned is records (and needle) with some cleaner and carefully stores them. Vinyl records have clicks and pops because of dust and scratches. If you clean your vinyl records (and turntable needle) and store them carefully, they will sound very, very good.

Re:You've never listened to modern turntables

[mrjb]

Have you listened to a modern pressed record played on a modern (made this year) turntable? Yes, it was a modern turntable (it even was USB-enabled). Which doesn't necessarily say anything about its quality, of course. Yes, the frequency range is nothing like a CD, but the dynamic range is SO much better. Around 75dB for vinyl vs >90dB for CD, last time I checked. I don't dispute the fact that crappy CDs are made. But as a medium they are an improvement over anything that existed before it, (intended to be) addressing pretty much the entire audio range that the human ear of a normal person can perceive.

How much dynamic range is used?

[Aging_Newbie]

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.

Re:The alternative?

[dintech]

And which knob do you use to correct hearing loss from the wildly variant spikes in volume level? A compressed dynamic range is more constant and so is easier to control than a more erratic one. I to be able to protect my ears and yet still hear the 'quieter' parts of of the music thank you.

3: ???

[Colin Smith]

Yeah! Then you could charge $99.99 for the "Dynamic" audiophile version!!!

Misuse of term "loudness"

[msblack]

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.

Re:Misuse of term "loudness"

[CheeseTroll]

Thank you - I was just wondering if this discussion had anything to do with the 'loudness' knob (or single button, in some cases).

Replay Gain and Audacity

[tepples]

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? The article mentions Replay Gain software, which normalizes a track at a time based on an estimate of its average loudness. If you want to compress levels within a track to remaster it for a mix CD or a portable audio player, Audacity software can do that.

My own experience of it

[jpfed]

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. :(

Re:The alternative?

[bobschneider8]

Actually, the risk of hearing loss is proportional to both volume level and the time you're exposed. Louder but very short peaks but a lower average level (ie, like natural sound) is usually less risky than a higher average level but lower peaks.

That's the job of the playback device

[tepples]

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. Then why doesn't the playback device compress levels in these recordings?

Re:That's the job of the playback device

[SuiteSisterMary]

Then why doesn't the playback device compress levels in these recordings?

Home Theater audio works this way; your Dolby Digital, DTS or whatever track is recorded with a very large dynamic range; whispers are whispers, and ear-shattering kabooms are ear-shattering kabooms. The receiver, however, will have a 'Dynamic Range Compensation' setting (often called 'midnight mode') to, well, dynamically compensate the range.

Do it yourself

[tjwhaynes]

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.

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

Re:The alternative?

[TheRaven64]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't range-compressed music be less susceptible to information loss in terms of data compression? If you are recording 16-bit audio, then each sample is a value between 0 and 2^16. If you apply range compression, each sample becomes either 0 or a value between (say) 2^15 and 2^16; the top bit is always set to 1, or all bits are set to 0. You've thrown away 1/16th of the information. This means that you can trivially compress the data by over 6% just by using a smaller symbol to store each sample. Any FFT, DCT, or DWT-based CODEC should, at the quantisation stage, need to use slightly less signal bandwidth per sample before it starts losing quality in range-compressed audio as a result. I doubt this will be detectable by the listener at reasonable data rates, but it might for low-bandwidth encoding.

Of course, it's been a few years since I paid attention to audio compression techniques, so I could be completely wrong.

Re:Optimised for radio, unlistenable on good syste

[LWATCDR]

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.

Get an old dbx compander

[bobschneider8]

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.

Compression IS a useful tool

[Webcommando]

There are a number of good reasons to use compression. I'll grant that my style of music with heavy distortion (http://www.abandonatmyplace.com/) is obviously inline with modern music and this is not true for other styles.

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.

it's in all markets, refer to my post ...

[freaker_TuC]

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 ...

Re:The alternative?

[Frenchman113]

What you describe can and has been done. Dolby AC-3 and DTC audio (DVD audio) have metadata attached to the actual audio containing information that tells the player how to dynamically compress it. There are a couple reasons this isn't being done on CDs however. Like you said, it is *relatively* computationally expensive and not Red Book (CD-Audio) compliant so any CDs mastered this way will not work on normal CD players.

Then stop buying the CD's

[dbmasters]

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.

Correct

[PMBjornerud]

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.

Re:Try it for yourself! (Offtopic)

[morari]

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.

Glad it's not my ears then.

[clickclickdrone]

All recent music sounds flat to me - now I know why.

Re:Glad it's not my ears then.

[DaveV1.0]

It just sounds crappy to me. Music companies wonder why sales are falling. Could it be this coupled with crappy artists?

Re:The alternative?

[quanticle]

A higher "average" noise level does way more damage to hearing than temporary short term spikes. The compressed dynamic range on modern songs is probably doing more damage than your "wildly variant spikes".

Is MP3 louder than uncompressed?

[goombah99]

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.

Re:Is MP3 louder than uncompressed?

[Hatta]

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.

I find playing Green day to be painful to my ears no matter what I play it through.

Re:Is MP3 louder than uncompressed?

[Gazzonyx]

If MP3 compression works like VOIP digital analog conversion and compression, the sound clarity will decay exponentially as it heads north and south of the 'average' frequency band. That is to say, the higher or lower the frequency, the less accurate it will be. Check out the Asterisks manual for a diagram of what I'm talking about. I trust you can find it ;).

Re:Is MP3 louder than uncompressed?

[Kozz]

I find playing Green day to be painful to my ears no matter what I play it through.

Indeed. As a former band member, our drummer used to say, "You know, you can only 'Come Around' so many times..."

Re:Is MP3 louder than uncompressed?

[AeroIllini]

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. You must know some really smart laymen.

The real layman's description of how mp3s work is the black box model: CD goes in here, mp3 comes out there. It's smaller now.

Re:Is MP3 louder than uncompressed?

[earlymon]

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. Eardrum excites the hammer - so the ears are a half-wave rectifier. Naturally occuring sound is non-sinusoidal (excepting some pipe organs) - it's a series of attacks and decays (dissipations), best modeled as a exponentially damped (co)sine waves. Dynamic range is important because 1) duh - it was there in the original source, and 2) the ear-assembly as a half-wave rectifier needs (naturally-occuring) amplitude relaxation.

Clipped music means that the system can't reproduce the transition from wavefront to wave decay over time, so the top of the wave is clipped, or flattened - so, at that point, the system is putting out a biased DC voltage during that time, rather than AC. This causes nasty things in the amplifiers, nastier things in speakers and even nastier things in your ears.

Something like that, anyway.

Re:Is MP3 louder than uncompressed?

[RockModeNick]

It does to some extent, but less so, the use of compression this way is less significant than it might appear, as our ablity to hear well degrades as we leave the prime midrange, thus, compression in the bass and treble are less likely to cause audible artifacts and clipping outside of standard audible range is common for encoders.

Re:Is MP3 louder than uncompressed?

[SonicSpike]

Distortion is square waves which contain 3rd order (odd) harmonics.

Here's a good explanation...

[nocaster]

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.

Re:Optimised for radio, unlistenable on good syste

[Slashcrap]

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?

That's overstating the case.

[RealProgrammer]

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.

Re:The alternative?

[PMBjornerud]

As the post before you mention, it should be possible to adjust the dynamic range during playback.

Removing information is easy. Recreating lost information is not.

So why aren't dynamic range expanders common?

[Dr. Spork]

If you do a search for dynamic range expanders, you'll get lots of hits from ebay, because companies like dbx no longer seem to make standalone componenets for re-expanding the dynamic range that was squashed in the studio. And theoretically, the process is reversible, right? I mean, as long as there was no clipping but only squashing, a good processor should be able to undo it. In fact, that's how "high-end" radio used to work long ago: the station broadcasts a squashed dynamic range but then the radio at home re-expands it restore the natural range.

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?

Re:So why aren't dynamic range expanders common?

[swordgeek]

"The old arguments for why we should squash the dynamic range no longer hold."

The primary argument for DR compression still holds: Radio stations can only broadcast at a certain level, and compressed music sounds louder on the radio. Same thing with CDs, where there a specific range and 0db level. Louder turns more heads. Louder sells more music, which sells more ads. Uncompressed music is bad for sales.

Out of curiosity, do the DR expanders just apply a log (or other) multiplier to the level of the signal? That should be easy enough to do in software without even plugins, but I wonder if that really would do the trick.

Re:So why aren't dynamic range expanders common?

[MikeBabcock]

You can't generate information that does not exist.

Sure you can make quiet parts even quieter and loud parts even louder, but the compression of dynamic range is an easy task where the expansion of it can completely ruin the music. Dynamic range compression on DVD players is normal, and should be on MP3 players as well for the sake of people who want to listen to their music that way, but the studios shouldn't be compressing the range on the storage device -- it should be done (and is easily handled) by the playing device.

Re:So why aren't dynamic range expanders common?

[bigdavex]

And theoretically, the process is reversible, right? I mean, as long as there was no clipping but only squashing, a good processor should be able to undo it.

I don't think so. Once our recording has two samples with exactly the same value, how can a processor know which one should be louder?

Re:So why aren't dynamic range expanders common?

[VFA]

If everyone compressed the recordings the same way, say according to a certain standard, it would be possible to uncompress. This, I think was the case with radio stations. Some defacto standard was used by them to compress and then the high end radios could uncompress using this defacto standard. On the other hand the recording industry most likely uses non-standard compression techniques that make decompression impossible. If it's a simple log function, yes, you can undo the compression, but I doubt it's that simple. Once the signal is compressed, some information is taken out and without knowing how to reconstruct the missing information undoing the compression is guesswork at best. Very similar to data compression. Also, I am pretty sure that many compression techniques DO involve clipping and smoothing, so there is also that to contend with.

Re:So why aren't dynamic range expanders common?

[Dr. Spork]

I don't think that's right. I worked at a radio station and we had our own compressor that our signal got fed through. So did every single other FM station. There is no need at all for the CDs to have this compression on them, since the destruction of the dynamic range is very easy to do for a radio station.

Re:So why aren't dynamic range expanders common?

[Dr. Spork]

I agree about how it should be done, but I'd be surprised if the original dynamic range was unrecoverable from the modern recording. It's just that the differences in the levels were shrunk. They weren't completely destroyed. That's why I think they could potentially be re-expanded, and my question was: Why is there no common hardware or software that does this?

Re:So why aren't dynamic range expanders common?

[Dr. Spork]

But do they ever get to exactly the same value? Suppose they start off at .2, .4 and .7 and they get amped up to .6, .7 and .9. You should be able to re-expand these to their original values, right? Does it really ever happen that signals which start at different values get squashed to exactly the same value?

Re:So why aren't dynamic range expanders common?

[bigdavex]

But do they ever get to exactly the same value? Suppose they start off at .2, .4 and .7 and they get amped up to .6, .7 and .9. You should be able to re-expand these to their original values, right? Does it really ever happen that signals which start at different values get squashed to exactly the same value?

Well, yeah, I suppose it does. Even if we're using all the values, a CD has ~340 million samples and only 2^16 possible values.

Either the original format wastes bits on things we can't hear or the compressed format throws out things we can hear.

Re:So why aren't dynamic range expanders common?

[Richy_T]

If you have a glass containing 20 oz of fluid and one containing 8 oz of fluid and you add 12 oz to the 8oz and then give both glasses to someone else, how does he restore the original state of the glasses if he has no knowledge of the original state?

Important information has been lost. Possibly, someone could judiciously add dynamic range back in. But if compression has been applied to individual tracks *before* they are mixed then truly you are SOL.

Rich

Re:So why aren't dynamic range expanders common?

[DaleGlass]

Of course they do.

Suppose you have .2, .4, .7, .8 and .9, and want to make it louder by adding .3 to it. The maximum is 1.0. So you get: 0.5, 0.7, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0

Now how do you reverse the changes to those last 3 ones? They're all clipped at the top, completely identically. Information has been lost. This is precisely the problem.

Re:So why aren't dynamic range expanders common?

[NulDevice]

It's theoretically possible, but practically impossible.

If it were compression at just one standard setting, you could hypothetically have an expander that just reverses it.

But the limiting that goes on in final mastering has adaptive release times and other settings (and, god help you, often is done in multiband) so it's far, far too variable to just apply an single expander to. You'd need a lot more info about the original recording in order to know how to expand the compressed/limited version.

Re:So why aren't dynamic range expanders common?

[MikeBabcock]

Now, the question to anyone who really understood that... assuming we are not just seeing the high pass filter ringing, and it still has some effect with flat peaks as short as 10 samples or so... Where is the information coming from to do this?

The information is coming from valid assumptions about musical waveforms that we already know. It wouldn't work at all on some sounds (take a Nine Inch Nails track, peak it out, then try your trick -- it'll sound completely different), but on sounds that have original waveform patterns the high pass filter ends up creating, it should work (more or less).

Of course, this is similar to how lossy audio/video compression works in the first place -- make (hopefully valid) assumptions about how the ear/eye work, and then remove information that can be rebuilt more or less accurately later without actually storing that data (on top of all the other actual compression algorithm work).

Re:The alternative?

[Stooshie]

Surely it depends on how much data compression? If it quite highly lossy compressed then there is less info and therefore being able to tell the difference between 2 tracks (no matter what the actual difference is, even dynamic range) will be more difficult.

I could hear the difference, but it was for the benefit of those who dont appear to think it matters. If there is lossy compression then the difference between the two tracks is reduced and some people are going to say "so what?".

Shitty Analogy

[stewbacca]

It isn't the overcompression/undercompression/wall of sound/low quality mp3 that is making music suffer these days; it's the quality of the input and the quality of consumer demand. Consumers want shit and they are buying up all the shit they can get.

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.

Re:Shitty Analogy

[swordgeek]

I don't _quite_ agree, although you're close.

Consumer's don't want shit, they just accept it. The real problem is that they don't particularly want or care about quality. The studios work hard to promote shit because it's cheaper to create, and (more to the point) REALLY cheap to keep repackaging and reselling. Why write new songs that will take effort to sell, when you can resell the macarena as a country song (Achey Breaky Heart) or some other such crap?

I think the two biggest reasons that shit has become so prevalent in the past decade are that (a) rap music and (b) pitch correctors have removed all necessity for talent or ability. Now all the studios need to create and sell an album is a misogynist thug with bad fashion sense, or a half-naked slut with no clothes.

Re:Shitty Analogy

[stewbacca]

Achey Breaky came before Macarena, but otherwise, well stated.

Re:Shitty Analogy

[killjoy966]

I think the two biggest reasons that shit has become so prevalent in the past decade are that (a) rap music and (b) pitch correctors have removed all necessity for talent or ability.

Hold on there cowboy...

While the majority of commercial/mainstream/Billboard rap music is oftentimes equated with the moral decline of Western society, to use that sample of the broader category of "rap" as a basis of judgment for the genre as a whole is short-sighted at best and offensive at worst.

In fact, there are entire sub-genres of rap dedicated to the breaking of these stereotypes (and isn't an entirely new phenomenon either with respect to with relatively short rap history timeline.) Before you go off again spouting about the talentless hacks which comprise your view of rap music, listen to some well-respected masters of the art and see if you can replicate their "lack of talent."

As for the "Loudness War" debate, these issues affect me not, as I shun all recorded music and only listen to live acoustic sets from musicians I have paid to play at my request. What it lacks in convenience it makes up for in leet-ness.

Re:Shitty Analogy

[swordgeek]

I figured someone would jump on my rap comment, and I considered putting in a pre-emptive explanation of what I meant by that. Then I decided to leave it, because I didn't want to weigh down my original post with other material. Let me do some 'splaining here on my point.

First of all, I'm not unaware of the sub-genres of rap and hip-hop. I saw Arrested Development just last year, and I've seen Michael Franti a few times, one of which was a fairly hardcore rap set. (other times he's been downright reggae, which is pretty cool too.) Then there are the bands/artists who incorporate some rap and hip-hop into their regular music: Ani DiFranco and REM have both done this recently. (And in fact, Ani's Hat-Shaped Hat is a fairly brilliant 7-odd minutes of straight rap).

However, be that as it may, rap has never been a _musical_ genre. Its roots come from protest and street rhythms and percussion, not music and harmony. Some of those things have been added after the fact, but at its core, rap is fundamentally amusical--almost antimusical. That's just what rap is, without passing judgement.

HOWEVER, here's the key: Without musical talent or ability as a measure of quality, the industry can push anyone with a bad attitude and bad clothes as a rap artist, and don't have to spend money or effort on discovering and training talent. Add to this the fact that some (not all, some!) of the 'founding fathers' of rap never had the vaguest inkling of musical ability, and it's easy to encourage lack of talent as a selling feature.

Re:Shitty Analogy

[digitalaudiorock]

I don't _quite_ agree, although you're close.

Consumer's don't want shit, they just accept it. The real problem is that they don't particularly want or care about quality. True, but another factor is that many literally don't know what they're missing, because virtually nobody gets to hear the non-smashed version of anything except the mastering engineers before they destroys it at the bequest of the record company...and this is happening to good music as well, not just the crap.

Re:Shitty Analogy

[killjoy966]

Although it may not be entirely what you meant to say, suggesting that there are strict definitions as to what is "musical" will undoubtedly lead us down a path which is beyond the scope of this discussion. Further research is left as an exercise to the reader...

While I agree that the major label shills who pump out personality as product care very little (if at all) about any of the commonly held notions of talent, I found it curious you chose to single out rap. As unfortunate as it is, this is not a problem isolated to any one genre. I suppose rap does have some of the more high profile examples, but popular music of all styles has fallen prey to this same scam.

Serving the lowest common denominator is a very profitable business model when the customer base is significantly large. In reality, I believe the majority of consumers want to be fed music that tastes like fast food. They know it's no good for them but it's just so damn tasty (which is no coincidence). They don't just want the new Ashlee Simpson record, they yearn for it.

Disclaimer: In case I haven't made it abundantly clear, I am an avid fan of rap. Your bias may vary.

Well,

[Rudigger]

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 war?

[el_coyotexdk]

Noise Marines... yay Slaanesh. another step on a slippery path towards damnation (Warhammer 40.00 references!)

Re:The alternative?

[I Like Pudding]

Compression is one of the most important parts of audio engineering. Doing it dynamically with a shitty low-power digital algorithm results in a MUCH larger drop in audio quality than having the guy in the studio whip out his n thousand dollar vintage valve (vacuum tube) unit. The mastering engineers are also ninjas at squashing the dynamic range as much as possible while doing the smallest amount of damage.

Really, it's irrelevant

[keithburgun]

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.

Re:Really, it's irrelevant

[VFA]

Hey, finally a statement that makes sense. Tom waits is one of my favorite artists of all times, but alas, even he (probably) uses compression on his albums. It is very difficult to produce an album, especially the kind that is meant to be listened to in less than ideal environments (car, public trans, etc.) without some compression of dynamic range. Otherwise you would always be twiddling the volume back and forth and be annoyed that you can not hear the quiet passages and/or get blasted painfully during loud ones. So, just like any other sharp tool, compression is useful, but can be dangerous in the hands of greedy idiots (big business recording industry). My solution? Like you, I do not patronize the kind of music recordings that use compression extensively. That kind of loud featureless music is simply of no interest to me. I also do not watch commercial TV, I have decent home stereo system (not a 5.1, just basic good hi-fi stereo deal) and I go to listen to LIVE MUSIC as much as I can. If more people got off their asses and went to support their local talent and hear music live, there would be no market for over-compressed garbage out there since people would not even recognize it as music, but rather some elevator entertainment to kill a few seconds while being stuck with 15 other people in a tight space. So, don't buy or even listen to the over-compressed garbage, educate others to do the same and it will disappear from the marketplace because of lack of demand. Remember, in the free market place the crap that is out there is often (not always) an indicator of the dumbed down demand. Record companies do what sells them most copies. Period. People's understanding of what exactly is good sound is getting diluted by all the high tech stuff, that's just the times we live in. If you never heard music live, you have a very poor vantage point from which to judge what good sound is. Most people out there are not very discerning, so loud is one of the few sensations they understand in music. Hence compression wars. -- VFA

Re:Really, it's irrelevant

[keithburgun]

Ya. Well, it makes sense I guess that Slashdot people can't figure this out, that the problem is a much wider-scoped artistic problem, not some kind of technical problem. But yes I agree on your points about hearing live music, that's very true. -keith

Re:Really, it's irrelevant

[Jeremy Erwin]

Easy way to find out:

Rip a representative track into Audacity, play it, and watch the meters. If a track clips, the little light at the top of the meter will ignite.

Volume Normalization

[Frogular]

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.

Re:Volume Normalization

[VFA]

Normalization is very different from dynamic range compression. Not sure what the algorithms you mention do. Is there a better explanation? -- VFA

Re:Volume Normalization

[Frogular]

Replay Gain certainly do not fix the problem of dynamic range compression, since information has been lost. However, Replay Gain can normalize tracks with varying degrees of dynamic range compression, and make them sound equally loud; a partial, the-best-you-can-do fix.

mp3gain losslessly adjusts the data frame scale factor

wavegain calculates a scale factor for a PCM file which can be passed to the encoder (or it can scale the file directly)

foobar2000 does not modify the file but read-only scans it, and applies the correction at playback

Re:Volume Normalization

[VFA]

Understood. One thing, though. If these programs avoid clipping, then a file that has not been compressed and having a wide dynamic range will still sound quieter than a file that has been compressed heavily, so it is really no help, unless these thing compress. It is hard to deal with volume levels of content with various dynamic ranges without, well... compression. This is why it is used almost always in studio production (it is not a new thing. Using entirely too much of it is a new thing).

Re:Volume Normalization

[Frogular]

You raise a good point - since a file with a wide dynamic range cannot be normalized upward as clipping will occur, the file that is heavily compressed is normalized downward, instead. So everything sounds equally soft. You then turn the knob up.

Vinyl

[nurb432]

Yet another reason why vinyl is still better.

Re:Vinyl

[swordgeek]

Ah yes. Because they never used compression on vinyl.

Vinyl is NOT better. Good vinyl beats bad CDs. Good CDs beat good vinyl. I've got a pretty large vinyl collection and some modestly high-end playback gear, and I regularly listen to a lot of my records. However, it's simply not as good as CD. Pitch stability, wow/flutter, frequency errors, dynamic range, channel variance, crosstalk, IM and harmonic distortion products, rumble, and so forth are all enormously less on CD than on vinyl, if they exist at all (many disappear entirely in the digital domain).

What about the sound, though? Good sound is good sound. If you're missing that 'airy' sound that good vinyl has, then try this: Get a noise generator, and inject random-phase noise (I _think_ pink noise, 'though I can't remember for sure) at about -80db into the audio stream from your CD player. Suddenly, there's the missing piece.

Records were compressed just as badly as CDs in their heyday. I've got a few albums I've picked up over the years where there's about
10db total dynamic range. However, by compressing the audio and limiting bass response, they could put cut a tighter groove, and put MORE MINUTES onto a record, for greater sales.

Vinyl, CD, even MP3 aren't inherently garbage or great--they're just made that way by cheap record companies who can get away with selling shit-on-a-shingle. Great audio is possible in all of these formats (although MP3 has some caveats)--but it takes care and skill.

Re:Vinyl

[BubbaJonBoy]

>> Ah yes. Because they never used compression on vinyl.
>> Records were compressed just as badly as CDs in their heyday
So which is it? Never or just as bad?
Truth is compression has always been a factor as they needed to limit the cutting stylus excursion to fit within the ability of the the stylus to track it. This translates to a reduction in the top end of dynamic range *only*. The lower amplitudes were boosted to combat the other limitation of vinyl which is simply surface noise from the actual finish of the material. Thus most of the comprtession was on the louder passages. I still have my trusty Dbx 3bx dymnamic range expander to put some life back into the music.
Now digtal has only one of these reasons to compress the shit out of the recording - the upper end limitation established by the number of bits used to encode and playback, while keeping enough bits to accurately reproduce the lower passages (not that there *are* any of those anymore).
The problem is both the listeners of the popular music and our culture. Quite frankly most folks have no idea of the subtleties possible with well recorded music - the pleasant teasing and coaxing of the ear. Everything's fuckin fortissimo - the music needs to overcome car noise, traffic noise, co-worker noise - our ambient threshhold in itself reduces the bottom limit of the dynamic range allowable. People are now conditioned to think in terms of loud=better. I went to a Staind concert recently and it was freaking horrible. The sound was literally too big for the venue to the point where it was all just a barrage of fuckin noise. I got up and went outside and gradually increased my distance until I could once again distinguish the instruments. By my rough figuring the sound level would have been more appropriate for an area 6 times the size of the one we were in. Even my teenage son was disappointed in the sound quality (so there's my reality check).
The situation is like people who frequent bars where a drink is always mixed with way too much alcohol. They aren't really interested in the taste of a drink - just getting toasted. My guess is that much of popular music is similar in the respect they don't really give a shit about the sound quality or if their tunes come across at their best - it's merely wallpaper to the event itself.

Re:Vinyl

[swordgeek]

I guess I could have added some emphasis. Read that first sentence as;
"Ah yes, of COURSE! Because they NEVER used compression on flawless and holy vinyl!!!"

Or in other words, the first sentence was intended to be facetious.

As far as LOUD music, I saw Daniel Lanois perform a few years ago at a local folk festival. This was an open-air stage in the middle of a park of trees and grass, and the volume was cranked LOUD. You could feel the bass rumbling in your gut, and you could feel the drums smash against your chest. However, you could also hear Daniel whispering into the mic, and pick out every note on his classical guitar. That was just about a religious experience for sound quality.

As an aside, here's a great article about how Rush has devolved into the louder=better camp. Sigh.

(On the other hand, Kate Bush's new album is both artistically and acoustically fantastic, which is a nice change after her previous albums which were painful to listen to.)

Re:Vinyl

[BubbaJonBoy]

Yeah I know what you mean - it's really the soundcrew at live events. I attended a "two-fer" many years back of Ted Nugent and Lynrd Skynrd. Ted Nugent sounded awful. Before Skynrd went up I witnessed their roadies having an almost physical confrontation with the guys in the soundbooth. They won. They spent the next 15 minutes adjusting the sound panel and Skynrd sounded wonderful as a result. They took pains to assure the sound was balanced and of sufficient volume to rock the house but not to be a painful experience.
But that does not address the current environment of overcompressed bland wall of sound that permeats the industry today. I hardly ever see the level meters twitch. No nuance whatsoever. I blame this on teh recording engineers.

Short answer.

[juuri]

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.

Re:The alternative?

[Richy_T]

Which knob do you adjust to increase the dynamic range and re-add the lost information?

The recording engineer?

Rich

Re:I admit I've not used a TT since the late 80s

[Danathar]

Most people I know who buy records make a high quality audio digital recording of the record on the first play by taking the audio out and doing a high sample of it.

Re:The alternative?

[stewbacca]

Wow, I think you missed the entire point of this discussion. It isn't about "volume", it is about the lack of range within the recording. You can't fix the lack of recording range by turning your stereo up or down. By doing so, you'll only have loud or quiet lack of ranged music, and it will still suck from a recording stand-point.

Re:FCC RMS Volume

[GargamelSpaceman]

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.

The real problem

[antime]

You're listening to your favorite Pink Floyd CD on your home stereo when you accidentally hit the "change CD" button on the control panel. All goes quiet for a bit as your CD player urgently shifts to play whatever is in the next tray. With dread, you desperately reach for the volume knob, but it's too late--your speakers blast the latest Green Day album.

But that is unrelated to the loudness of the record.

Re:The real problem

[VFA]

If you have Pink Floyd and Green Day in the system, well... You make your bed, you speep in it.

Interesting video....

[mjb]

http://haha.nu/interesting/the-loudness-war/

Re:The alternative?

[kb]

Luckily Youtube, while being rather low quality, doesn't compress the audio beyond comprehension.

And actually with most modern audio compression schemes the volume curve of the sound is what is preserved most. So what you're proposing is more or less akin to not being able to tell blue from red in a bad jpg image (and you have to really, REALLY lower the quality setting until this happens ;)

Do they do that with classical music records ?

[unity100]

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.

Re:Do they do that with classical music records ?

[rivaldufus]

Yes, but not nearly to the same degree. Clipping is usually considered a bad thing in classical, but it's still present in some loud orchestral recordings. Compression is usually used much more sparingly in classical, but it is used in certain recordings.

The problem is usually that the loud passages require a lower level in order to avoid clipping during recording, but the softer passages may require a higher gain to catch all the details. In classical, this can happen all within an eight minute piece, so a little compression shrinks the gap between the loudest passages and the softest passages. It's certainly a compromise, but it's probably better to have a little compression and hear all the details during quiet passages than it would be to have no compression, but not be able to hear that pianissimo passage.

Excessive compression does sound terrible in classical recordings, however.

Re:Do they do that with classical music records ?

[unity100]

hm indeed, i have noted that in loud pieces i really wanted to turn it off, even with strauss, at the end of donau waltzer, the loud ending. i instantly want to switch it off despite the rest of the piece was good.

Re:The alternative?

[stewbacca]

Uh, good music stereos don't care about being "non-surround". Actually good music systems DON'T have surround, because surround is digitally altering the signal and is NOT used to make music sound better.

I think what the term you are looking for is a good sound stage with a proper "stereo image", which is achieved with good equipment, good recording, and good listening environment with proper speaker placement.

I would like someone to give a specific example of the loudness war, because I don't think I listen to the type of music that this is affecting most. I do listen to a lot of hard rock, but by nature, that isn't the most dynamic music on the planet anyway. I guess I could say Def Tones have a pretty great dynamic range on most of their recordings, but maybe this loudness war is more about hip/hop/(c)rap/Country/Pop-Punk?

The appeal of old records

[Prototerm]

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.

Re:The appeal of old records

[Reziac]

Your kid is no more of a freak than I am [g] -- I can tell the difference between MP3s made from vinyl (richer sound, more ambiance) and from CD (flatter sound, no ambiance). I find classical music on CD *unlistenable* because of this lack.

Re:The appeal of old records

[Burning1]

No wonder the new audio format discs haven't taken off.

This statement is 100% incorrect. Super Audio CD and in some cases, DVD Audio do not suffer from the compression problems so prevalent in recent CDs. This is because the primary market for these disks are folks who have better sound systems, and care about the difference in audio quality.

A while back I preformed a direct comparison between a CD and a SACD using Sting's 'brand new day' album. The CD was easily least 10DB (10X) louder, and completely lacked the distinct bass line of the SACD version. It was interesting to note that when played without eliminating the CD version's volume advantage (by ramping the volume up from the minimum during playback,) other listeners in the room felt that they liked the CD version better.

Re:The appeal of old records

[Archon-X]

I love my collection of vinyl. I'm a 20-something, and have a collection of 78s and a gramophone, and 33s and a lovely turntable.
Turntable goes through a delicious analogue amp, and the sound that a record produces in comparison to the 'same' CD is incomparable - warm, full, and delicious.

It's a pity that it's going the way it is, but the alternative is: I'm and elitist in the regard that I'm happy the 'best' is kept to a select few :)

The tech details

[__aaittv7720]

Here's a very good paper on the subject from TC Electronic's tech library:

http://www.tcelectronic.com/media/lund_2004_distor tion_tmt20.pdf

Although it's a couple of years old it's still very valid.

Maybe compression is good for protecting hearing

[jeorgen]

Many people crank up the volume. In music with low or no compression, the peaks are very much higher than the average sound, i.e. the perceived loudness. The brain does not "get" loud peaks the same way as the ear. The brain "smears out" (integrates) a loud sound over 100ms, but the hear does it at 10ms. So the brain does not appreciate just how loud a short sound really is (e.g a gunshot). The ear takes the full pain though.

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.

Re:The alternative?

[kb]

This is not really how it works. It's true that if you eg. double a recording's volume and clip the peaks you can safely assume the lowest bit of all samples to be zero and most data compressors should find this out. BUT:

You forgot that in digital recording studios the sampling resolution is way higher than on a CD. So if you crank up your 24bit recording before converting it down to the 16bit format for distribution, the lower bits that would've been thrown away otherwise suddenly play a role again and "come in" from the bottom. So even if you'd hard limit at -30dB and renormalize to make it REALLY REALLY LOUD, you'd still have values all over your range in it.

Re:The alternative?

[tcr]

I don't think that's putting any blame in the right place.
 
The recording engineer will try to get a decent signal down for a track ('on tape' seems like an anachronism now), but also want to leave some headroom for balancing tracks on the final mixdown.
 
It's the Mastering Engineer who takes the final mix and tries to polish it, maximising the loudness in the process.
 
Similar toys are often used by us ordinarly mortals too.
 
Ultimately, it's the record company execs who dictate that the CD must sound 'big'. They don't want it to sound 'weak' or 'thin' compared to the competition (that's their sort of terminology).

People are just plain deaf

[wsanders]

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.

What commercials?

[PRMan]

That's what a DVR is for. Your cable company probably offers one for less than $10/month. Worth every penny.

you just have to remember ...

[asleep79]

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"

Re:The BBC explained this once

[Abcd1234]

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.

Yeah... they sound louder because... get this... they're *compressed*, hence the whole point of this article. IOW, the peak amplitude of the waveform is still limited by the volume knob on your TV, but the entire waveform is running right around the peak, unlike the program the ad is interrupting.

Replay Gain on CD

[wiredlogic]

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.

Re:The alternative?

[Adambomb]

What additional costs? The procedures in question are already in ADDITION to the original recording which already has the quality the audiophiles are wanting.

Not doing this would actually reduce the costs.

Re:I don't understand music writers.

[Gunstick]

there you are: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

... the more they stay the same

[R3d Jack]

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...

How about adding compressors into the amps?

[Axmondo]

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?

Re:How about adding compressors into the amps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it would probably sound like crap, depending on the price. The best compressors are VERY expensive, and the cheapos make your audio sound like tin-can music coming through a telephone. (Well, maybe not that bad, but you get my point.)

Re:Optimised for radio, unlistenable on good syste

[man_ls]

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.

why the music industry needs a crash helmet...

[DragonTHC]

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).

multiple mixes?

[chocolatetrumpet]

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!

Re:The alternative?

[Rai]

It's not really about loudness, it's about dynamic range. Let's say the pre-mastered mix of the song has a peak of -1.0dBFS and an average volume of -9dBFS. Now what a lot of mastering engineers in the "loudness war" will do is limit the hell out of the song by setting the peak at 0dB (the loudest level a digital signal can be before distorting) and pump up the average until there's almost no different between peak and average volume. Some of them do it to the point of creating broadband distortion (there's a Jane's Addiction song that's notorious for this..."True Nature" I think.)

Imagine watching Star Wars where everything is as loud as the Death Star explosion.

Re:It's a conspiracy I tells ya!

[Bender Unit 22]

No it is so the next and more expensive audio media can sound better than the cd and justify the higher price.

Re:Try it for yourself! (Offtopic)

[Mister Whirly]

The same way that completely mainstream pop-rock is now labeled "alternative" or "indie". Alternative or independent from what - actual alternative and indie music??

Re:The alternative?

[colenski]

My 1996 Mystique had the standard Ford shitty CD player from the early 90's. It had a button mysteriously labeled "comp" - consulting the manual revealed that it stood for "compression" and it was explained that it made "soft passages louder" and "loud noises quieter" - so it could not have been that computationally expensive for a 3rd rate car manufacturer to put it on a fifth-rate CD player 10 years ago.

Needless to say, the button stayed in the OFF position permanently.

Re:The alternative?

[Movi]

To do it right is damn-near impossible. What you want is a real-time mixing deck for all the sounds that are in the track, and adjust them in real-time. Think of it as this : what the music industry is doing now, is during recording, on the mixing deck theyre turning up all the knobs to max. However, some sounds are naturally louder than others, so they can obscure the quieter ones. Also, the term 'crescendo' ceases to exist, because the music is constantly loud, and can't go louder. What would be needed to do, is to have every instrument seperate in the file and your "profiles" would mix them in real-time. Like amiga MOD-type files back in the days.

Re:The alternative?

[Movi]

>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.

Hmm, not exactly. I remember having a loud cassette that i converted to MP3 (192) and some crash cymbals would get lost in the file - you wouldn't hear them, although they were there on the cassette. Then when i got the CD and re-compressed that all details, such as the hi-hat were finally audible in the mp3 file. Then i tested, and yes. MP3 does selection based ALSO on the loud vs. quiet sounds in the spectrum - thus it's not MUTUALLY exclusive (which is what you would expect - on low bitrates, why compress something that is barely hearable vs something loud in the same time?)

It completely depends on where the music is played

[Britz]

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.

Re:Optimised for radio, unlistenable on good syste

[colenski]

lol MOD UP you beat me to it! Haven't listened to it for 10 years, never plan to again.

question from an audiophile

[commodoresloat]

Many people experienced improved sound quality from using a special pen to draw round the outside of their CDs. Where can I get one of these special pens?!

Re:question from an audiophile

[Ed Avis]

I will send you one of these pens for only $345 and as a bonus I'll include a copper magnetic bracelet which not only improves sound quality when wrapped around audio cables but can also alleviate arthritis.

Am I the only one that enjoys this?

[Vampyre_Dark]

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.

No, DVDs are done right

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:No, DVDs are done right

[iluvcapra]

Remember that on the DVD you are getting the theatrical soundtrack

Little point: we usually remaster the soundtracks for home theater and that's what you get on a DVD. It's just the theatrical printmaster tweaked a little bit, while monitoring through a near-field 5.1 setup. We do still do it in a quiet room, though.

Modern music == background noise

[jetxee]

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.

This is probably what is happening:

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:This is probably what is happening:

[hankwang]

the formerly-clipped flat edges will have had the edges rounded off [after lossy encoding] 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)

I doubt it. The clipping strains the ear because it introduces loads of high-frequency energy, but the encoder will nicely preserve most of the energy content, just redistribute it a bit over time. Rather than have it all concentrated on two samples (50 usec), it gets distributed over one encoded block (4096 samples = 185 msec). But it sounds just as horrible.

I used to make live recordings of (classical concerts) with a minidisc player (ATRAC encoding), and sometimes I had the recording level a bit too high which caused occasional clipping. Indeed, the waveform gets rounder around the clipped parts, but manually drawing smooth curves to undo the clipping wouldn't help much because the high-frequencies were everywhere, not just at the clipped parts of the waveforms.

Re:FCC RMS Volume

[RexRhino]

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. There is an objective measure of volume (dB), but there is no objective measure of 'loudness'. Loudness is subjective. The stations DO NOT crank up the volume of commercials - doing so would actually be illegal, and they could lose their broadcast licence. The volume of the commercial is always the same volume or lower volume as the show: digitize it, look at it, and see for yourself.

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.

Kids with cars

[iamlucky13]

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.

Re: Kids with cars

[Dolda2000]

I certainly understand that point, and very much experience it myself. If I don't turn up the volume on my own car stereo, the engine and road noise just drowns out too many important sounds in the music leaving me unable to appreciate the music to its fullest. However, the simple remedy should just be to crank up the volume. What I don't understand is why the record companies would want to do that for me while at the same time decreasing the sound quality when there is a perfectly good volume knob I can crank myself.

I mean, surely the reason isn't that people just appreciate the laziness of just not having to turn the volume knob too far. But then what is the reason?

Re: Kids with cars

[gregmac]

Two reasons:

They can turn it up more. If you go to 100% on your volume, a song recorded 'loud', averaging at say -9 dB is going to see much louder on your stereo than a song averaging at -16 dB. (You can only go up to 0dB, at which point the audio is clipping).

The other reason (now), is that everyone else is doing it. If you don't do it, then your record sounds bad compared to everything else.

My perspective

[satellite17]

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

Bassically

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

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.

Re:The alternative?

[jadin]

Uh, good music stereos don't care about being "non-surround". Actually good music systems DON'T have surround, because surround is digitally altering the signal and is NOT used to make music sound better. True.. But a lot of people use their sound systems for things other than music. Such as DVDs.. with surround sound. digitally unaltered. Uh.

No use.

[mattgreen]

Did you try a blind test? If you play the CD with the expectation that it will sound better and be less tiring, that's most likely what you will experience. You need to get two copies of the same song (an older one and a modern, squashed remastering), sample them to lossless audio files and get a friend to adjust the volume so that the newer remastering is not obviously louder. Then write a short program to play one of the two at random and ask you which one you think it is. Then you will find out whether you can reliably distinguish between them.

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 = .395, and $RandomGreekLetter = $TechnicalLookingNumber." If I felt the need to prove this sort of thing, I could have simply forged the test results already. (And if I had that sort of time to waste, I'd be on HydrogenAudio.)

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.

Re:No use.

[novus ordo]

This is actually quite easy on Linux. Use abxtest. Use it like this:

abxtest "aplay file.wav" "mpg321 file.mp3"

Now this will test if you can perceive the difference between file when it is encoded identically in both files. You can also muck with the statistical probability goal which is 0.5 or 50% by default. Have fun!

Re:No use.

[mattgreen]

That is pretty nifty. Of course, you have to have the WAVs laying around. That said, I tend to undercompress my music well beyond the perceptual threshold so I won't have to re-rip it in the future.

Compressing again?

[Safiire Arrowny]

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.

Available dynamic range is greater with CDs...

[uqbar]

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...

Re:Available dynamic range is greater with CDs...

[Nicolay77]

Technically speaking you're right.

However overcompressed sounds without dynamic range is the stuff that sells CDs these days.

Re:The alternative?

[compro01]

i would presume that is is computationally expensive for digital signals as opposed to analog signals. or maybe it is only computationally expensive to do it correctly.

iZotope Ozone

[jilles]

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.

Re:The alternative?

[digitalaudiorock]

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? Absolutely...once you've crushed that peak to average level there's no getting it back.

I have my own Protools based home recording studio. I get to experiment first hand with this sort of heavy limiting. Using a good limiter plugin (in my case a Waves L2) it's easy to make anything sound many times as loud as the original recording without introducing artifacts, but in addition to permanently loosing the dynamics, it becomes almost fatiguing to even listen to...and that's nothing compared to what mastering engineers are doing (against their own wishes by the way) at the request of their customers (the record companies). It really is criminal. The fact is that this sort of stupidity was impossible in the days of vinyl...the needle would have jumped out of the groove if anyone attempted it.

Re:Only solution? Not so. There is hope.

[RandCraw]

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

The true test of an audio system..

[TigerPlish]

...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

Easy solution?

[4D6963]

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.

Re:The alternative?

[Relic of the Future]

The cheap-o, bottom-line stereo that came in my '06 car has a "compression" option in its menus. So yeah, it's not that difficult or expensive.

If I buy a CD, I want as much dynamic range in the music as the artists intended it to have, so that if I'm listening in a nice, quiet environment, I can hear it like they meant it; if I want to listen to it in a noisey environment, like my car when it's going down the highway, then I'll compress it myself.

Re:The alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm posting as AC because I already moderated here.

I spent a year working for an absolute wizard at audio stuff; he worked at Bell Labs for 26 years and helped invent MP3. So I am not guessing at anything I say here.

Sound-level compression is not that hard to do in real time. There are several ways to do it. The best way is to do a pure digital EQ using a computer model of how the human ear perceives loudness, and that feature is shipping today as part of Windows Vista (look for "loudness equalization" or something like that, I don't know what it is because I don't run Vista at all). Doing loudness EQ this way is roughly as computationally expensive as decompressing MP3, i.e. not too expensive by modern standards.

Most sound-level compressors strictly use the power of the music to approximate the loudness of the music. This works perfectly when the music is sine tones, but doesn't work so well for real signals. Some parts of the music that hit your ear on a bunch of different frequencies will sound louder than their power would suggest; and these will be over-boosted by the sound-level compressor. (Most radio stations use a compressor on everything they broadcast, and you can hear "spitting" sounds when people say words with sibilants. Listen to a DJ saying "summer sales" and you will often hear spitting or hissing noises on the "s" sounds.) Some power-based compressors sound better than others (some audio engineers swear by really old-school equipment) but the digital loudness equalization really sounds the best.

I hope your idea comes to pass, and music gets encoded with a full dynamic range, and just has sound-level compression cues encoded as well.

But I also put hope in the Internet itself. With actual, physical media like CDs it would be too hard to sell multiple different versions, but with audio files sitting on a server for download, it would be very easy to sell the mass-market version and the "audiophile" version that has full dynamic range.

Re:The alternative?

[4D6963]

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, you can. Nothing is lost, only compressed, as in, packed together tightly. What a compressor does, an expander can undo.

Look at the first graph on that wikipedia article. That's a mathematical function, one that allows you to get the original sound back from its result. Let's say that originally, you compressed your sound by lowering every sample above the threshold level by a fourth of its level above the threshold level, as shown in the aforementionned graph.

How do you undo that, I ask you? By changing every sample above that same threshold level to twice its level above the threshold level. Effect undone, you get your original dynamic range back, and you can actually have such a knob.

Re:The alternative?

[4D6963]

By changing every sample above that same threshold level to twice its level above the threshold level

I meant four times, of course.

Re:The alternative?

[Altus]

I seem to recall old stereo receivers having both a volume and a "loudness" knob.

Thud? You need a better sound system!

[snowwrestler]

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! :-)

REO Speedwagon...

[hawkfish]

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.

Re:The alternative?

[Man On Pink Corner]

Wow, some real rocket scientists here.

How do you propose to tell the difference between a particular sample level that got that way as a result of dynamic-range compression, versus one at the same level that accurately reflects the recorded source?

That's what's meant by "losing information". When you compress the dynamic range of a signal, you reduce its precision. It cannot be restored.

Information theory. It's what's for breakfast.

The loud American

[mrraven]

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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

another shaker

[epine]

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.

Solution is simple: Let the listener decide

[GPS Pilot]

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!

Spanner in the works for film "resolution" figures

[Dogtanian]

First, 35mm film is equivalent to over 30 megapixels. So even that EOS 1-D is still over 10 megapixels short of the film for quality. By what measure? I'll admit to not being an expert in this area, but here's an interesting essay explaining why film's "resolution" is not directly comparable to that of digital sensors.

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.

The strawberry myth

[Dogtanian]

Guess what, many kids thought the taste one gets by mixing aroma with flavour-enhancer was more natural, then just mixing some strawberry with joghurt. You know something? Strawberries "flavour" is strange in that- actually- it doesn't taste that much like the original fruit. With most of them, you can see where they're coming from, but I just don't see that strawberries and strawberry flavour are the same at all.

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).

Good sound doesn't have to be expensive, right on

[mrraven]

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.

Re:Spanner in the works for film "resolution" figu

[TemporalBeing]

I'll admit to not being an expert in this area, but here's an interesting essay explaining why film's "resolution" is not directly comparable to that of digital sensors

To further show how much in arms this is...

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.

Maybe George Lucas has the anser? (re: THX)

[AgentBif]

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.

Re:Or maybe he'd even have an ANSWER...

[AgentBif]

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.

Re:The alternative?

[novus ordo]

Interestingly dynamic compression for the sake of getting things louder and data compression are almost mutual exclusive By compressing the dynamic range you are necessarily compressing the range of values your data can hold. That IS data compression. Kind of stupid data compression because you cannot then recreate the original data from it. You essentially lose all of the mapping between frequencies outside of your normalization envelope and map them to some other sound that is in that place(if there is sound occupying that space). That's what all that noise is--data that has been mapped to the same frequency. Maybe it doesn't make much of a difference when there are 2-3 instruments and they don't get in each other's way when normalized, but when you have sound and fury all compressed in a small space that's when you will really hear it.

As a side note it might be worth noting that it may be a way of making bad artists sound good. In a way you make their job easier with a smaller sound space they need to master. If you haven't noticed how some artists sound good on CD and they suck live this is the reason...not to mention other neat tricks they do in the studio but I digress...

Re:Spanner in the works for film "resolution" figu

[Dogtanian]

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. True, and I agree that film vs. digital is a lot more complicated than it would first appear (which was partly my point). However, regarding "I have a hard time finding film to be binary in nature", the author was- to be fair- discussing *individual* grains vs. each sensor pixel, rather than the overall effect. His point being that a given pixel could hold a range of *grey* values, whereas each grain really is on or off.

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.

More compression = "Fuller sound"

[bevoblake]

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.

Great Vowel Shift

[Nicolay77]

"I don't know how it happened, but it amazes me that Spanish is a completely phonetic language." This happened.

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.

Re:The alternative?

[4D6963]

How do you propose to tell the difference between a particular sample level that got that way as a result of dynamic-range compression, versus one at the same level that accurately reflects the recorded source?

Well, I guess you mean, how would you in practice determine where the threshold level is? Well, I have never really looked into compression/expansion in sound, but provided that sounds are actually being compressed the way I described, then you could do an histogram of the sample values in the entire track and when you would see holes (values that samples in the track systematically avoid) then I guess you'd have spotted your threshold level. But I have little knowledge of how it's actually done in practice by mastering engineers, so I'm the wrong person to ask to.

As for the loss of precision, you don't lose a lot of precision by compressing a sound because compression is information-friendly, in a way. What I mean is that, the highest the sample value, the more tolerant it is to imprecision. That's the reason why, in early numeric telephone standards, sample values were not indexed linearly (constantly spaced) by rather logarithmically, so it would have more precision for soft sounds than for loud sounds, which is comparable to compression.

Anyways, as I proposed in another post, it doesn't matter so much to know exactly how it's been done, here's something that would give a satisfying result : As indicated in the article, the level of compression is indicated by its average level with respect to the peak level, expressed in dBFS. So you could just analyze a track for its average level, and say we found a value of -6 dBFS (which means its very compressed), we could expand it to more reasonable levels around -15 dBFS, and we could have an audio player that would make this systematical, for example.. Of course it wouldn't give you a result matching bit-wise to the original uncompressed track, but it would suit your needs in that it'd stop the sound from sounding like some compressed crap. :-)

Re:The alternative?

[4D6963]

As for the computational requirements for real-time compression, they're fairly light and I think it could be done on an iPod in real-time. If I got the idea of how compression works correctly on an algorithmical level, it works on a per-sample basis, and, as the (B&W) iPod has two 80 MHz ARM7 CPUs, I think we could easily make such an algorithm work in less than 30 cycles per sample per CPU, which means I think it could easily run while taking barely 1% of the iPod's CPU time. That's how trivial it is.

As for automatic de-compression (also called expansion), you could easily have iTunes to profile each song and analyze how compressed it is (very simple, get the absolute value for every sample in a song, calculate the average, then calculate how much it is in dBFS), and then expand it in real time so that songs now have the same compression level, and in real-time, it's the exact same super-trivial algorithm you can use on the iPod.

So yes, we could very well have such a compression/decompression knob/software setting.

Re:The alternative?

[4D6963]

Absolutely...once you've crushed that peak to average level there's no getting it back.

In case you're talking about hard limiting, you're off topic, since it's not what compression is about (except for extreme compression, but no one actually does that for it's called amplification). Otherwise, you're just wrong, I explained why in a few other of my posts :-)

Re-Remastering

[mojoNYC]

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!

Re:Re-Remastering

[TrickiDicki]

Have you heard the CD version on the SACD release of DSOTM? It sounds *awesome* and just shows (a) how good the original recording was, and (b) what a phenomenal job can be done when mastering for CD these days.

What if it's lossy from a better source?

[bigtrike]

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.

Re:Wrong.

[MrMarket]

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.

Your so indie it hurts. When -- in the history of the radio -- have most kids not listened to what is fashionable among their peers. The difference now is that when they have their "almost famous" moment and start exploring their own music tastes, they are not limited to what's in the record store or their parents or older siblings records -- the internet gives them almost the whole world catalogue of music is at their finger tips.

Re:The alternative?

[digitalaudiorock]

In case you're talking about hard limiting, you're off topic, since it's not what compression is about (except for extreme compression, but no one actually does that for it's called amplification). Otherwise, you're just wrong, I explained why in a few other of my posts :-) I'm not sure I understand why it's off topic...are we only talking about compression here? Limiters are a huge part of the loudness war and are absolutely used in major studios and mastering houses.

As far as whether or not it can be undone...the point is that it certainly can't be undone on any equipment consumers are using.

Re:The alternative?

[digitalaudiorock]

Wrong, you can. Nothing is lost, only compressed, as in, packed together tightly. What a compressor does, an expander can undo. Let's not forget that the original compression is most likely done on 24 bit, high sample rate digital audio that never leaves the studio/mastering house. Without that, you're never undoing anything without serious loss of quality. The same is true if the compression was done on high-end analog gear before conversion to CD audio.

Re:The alternative?

[stewbacca]

...which has nothing to do with the conversation at hand. We are talking about studio music quality, not DVDs and not surround sound. Invoking surround-sound into the discussion only discredits the authority of an otherwise decent post.

Re:The alternative?

[ihope127]

If the CD's too loud, then depending on your volume control, 1 might still be too loud. Shame, really--what ever happened to logarithmic volume controls?

Re:The alternative?

[Verity_Crux]

And can I get some midrange with that dynamic range request? I don't understand the (common) mentality of cranking the base and treble knobs for no apparent reason. You lose the midrange when you do that. And the music sounds crappy when you do that.

This is what the music industry needs

[TrickiDicki]

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.

Rush comparison...

[7Prime]

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?

"Quietness"

[binarybum]

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?

Digital media

[TUT]

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.

But I want compression...

[SmilingSalmon]

...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.

Re:That doesn't make any sense.

[CTachyon]

That doesn't make any sense. What do you mean by "most significant bits"? And why would they be 0?

Breaking it down into itty bitty words because you're stupid:

Things are digital because they're made of 1's and 0's (digits a.k.a. bits). Digital music works by measuring how loud the music is, thousands of times per second, and writing that down as a number (called a "sample"). The number represents a fraction (how loud the sample really was versus the loudest possible sample) and is usually written down using 16 bits. One bit (the least significant bit) represents the the smallest possible change in loudness that we can measure. The next bit represents twice that loudness, and so on. The 16th and final bit is the most significant bit (MSB). If the MSB is a 1, that means the sound is at 50% volume or higher (again, versus the loudest possible sample). If the MSB is a 0, that means the sound is at less than 50% volume.

Now, connecting the dots because we've already established that you're very, very stupid (even for an Anonymous Coward):

Today's music is very loud. Grown-ups with fancy jobs called "sound engineers" are paid very well to do something called "dynamic range compression" to the music. "Dynamic range" is the difference between the quietest parts of the song versus the loudest parts of the song; compressing it means that even the quiet parts of the song are loud. Since the sound engineers made sure that the entire song is very loud, all or nearly all of the samples will be at 50% or greater volume. Therefore, all or nearly all of the samples will have a "1" for the MSB. Since we already know that the MSB is a 1, we don't need to write it down anymore, and we can save on space.

Ba dum bum. Now go play in traffic, or visit Digg, or something else more appropriate for your level of intellect.

Stupid people. Ruining jokes since 500kYA.

Re:Maybe George Lucas has the anser? (re: THX)

[klausboop]

>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.

"I'm jaded, and you should be too."

[mattgreen]

It must suck to bring that sense of resignation to your job everyday.

Its not like they KNOW whats going on and listen

[unity100]

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.

Re:That doesn't make any sense.

[MightyMait]

Since the sound engineers made sure that the entire song is very loud, all or nearly all of the samples will be at 50% or greater volume. If you're going to tear somebody a new butt-hole you'd best get your facts straight.

What you mean to say is nearly all of the *peaks* will be at 50% or greater volume. If you've looked at an actual audio waveform before, you'll notice that, for each oscillation, the waveform has to pass through *zero* (unless one has a really nasty DC offset). On the way to zero, the waveform most certainly passes below 50% of full-scale. So, you can't say that "nearly all of the samples will be at 50% or greater volume."

Re:FCC RMS Volume

[GargamelSpaceman]

Yes there is an objective measure of 'loudness' it's the Root Mean Square average volume. RTFA

Re:Maybe George Lucas has the anser? (re: THX)

[hurfy]

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.

Re:FCC RMS Volume

[RexRhino]

Yes there is an objective measure of 'loudness' it's the Root Mean Square average volume. RTFA No, there is no objective measure of 'loudness', since there are different psychoaccoustic properties to different frequences, and some people hear certain frequencies better than others. The percieved loudness can even be influenced by your speakers and room acoustics (something with higher frequencies will usually sound louder in a room with lots of reverb, than something with lots of bass in a room with lots of reverb, despite having the same RMS, due to the way the sound reverberates).

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.

Re:Its not like they KNOW whats going on and liste

[unity100]

you bastards !

Re:Wrong.

[Sciros]

Mod parent "insightful"

It's a great point, and it further drives home the idea that these days music "quality" takes a back seat to music "quantity." Why even bother trying to find a better-compressed version of a song if you can spend half the effort to find 2 other songs altogether? This is especially true because of the reduced bitrate (to reduce file size) that online music is sold in, and because downloading online is at the same time quite convenient.

Distortion

[SonicSpike]

"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.

Dynamic range of DVDs vs CDs

[SonicSpike]

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.

This is really significant in indie music

[ricercar]

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.

Re:That doesn't make any sense.

[CTachyon]

And that's why it was a joke rather than a serious suggestion. Duh.

Re:That doesn't make any sense.

[I(rispee_I(reme]

Stupid people. Ruining jokes since 500kYA.

It is actually the condescending bastids who feel an obligation to explain every joke to every puzzled idiot who are responsible for the spoiled humor you mention in your parting line.

While the clueless can and do add to the humor, nothing ruins a joke like explaining it.

Re:The alternative?

[4D6963]

Without that, you're never undoing anything without serious loss of quality.

Sure, if by serious you mean unsignifyingly low.

This is the ultimate...

[bandmassa]

It's the ultimate in middle class whinging. Music's too loud, turn it down.

Better yet, why buy major label music? Buy independent.

Re:The alternative?

[digitalaudiorock]

Without that, you're never undoing anything without serious loss of quality. Sure, if by serious you mean unsignifyingly low. I really wasn't going to reply to this, but given the condescending tone and the fact that you got modded up...

There's a reason that all DAWs used in major studios (and even home studios) use 24 bit audio. The difference in precision during digital processing is significant, even if the end product will be 16 bit. To say you can undo the excessive compression/limiting used in the studio well by processing 16 bit 44.1 KHz audio is just wrong. Even in the studio, I seriously doubt that compressing and then expanding would yield something the same as the original. And again, even if it could be done in theory, what's the point? No listener has any way to do so using their existing equipment.

Re:The alternative?

[digitalaudiorock]

Without that, you're never undoing anything without serious loss of quality. Sure, if by serious you mean unsignifyingly low. ...and while I'm at it...just how do you plan on reversing compression without even knowing the settings used when compression was applied? Compression isn't like a number from 0 to 10, where they turn it up and you turn it down. How do you know the attack, release, and countless other settings involved? Never mind the use of multi-band compression where different adjustable bands can be compressed in totally different manners.

Re:The alternative?

[4D6963]

I really wasn't going to reply to this, but given the condescending tone and the fact that you got modded up...

I didn't get modded up, that's Karma Bonus you see there, you must be new here ;-). You might understand where the condescending tone is coming from if you check out my sig, hehe.

To say you can undo the excessive compression/limiting used in the studio well by processing 16 bit 44.1 KHz audio is just wrong.

Far fetched at worst, but by no means plain wrong, well except for limiting, but at no point was it the topic, nor does the difference between 24-bit and 16-bit audio have anything to do with it. As for the loss of quality, I maintain that it shall be minimal, it's all about rounding "errors".

And again, even if it could be done in theory, what's the point? No listener has any way to do so using their existing equipment.

Unless we create a piece of software/equipment (I'd rather go for the software) that allows you to do this, which would be fairly trivial to make, algorithmically.

Re:The alternative?

[4D6963]

How do you know the attack, release, and countless other settings involved?

Well like I said before I have never been interested in compression algorithms before and I wasn't even aware that such parameters were needed for compression, but let me tell you, it doesn't matter that much. We're not trying to make things be exactly the same as they were before evil record companies compressed the hell out of music, but only trying to get something that sounds better, and all it takes is, as I mentionned quite a few times earlier, to detect the average level in a track, and to set it to an average of our choice which would offer us a better dynamic range, by reverting a fairly generic compression algorithm.

You can see this as utilities that attempt to diminish artifacts on JPEG images, it surely doesn't restore the images to their pre-compression state, but it helps.