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

[Maxx169]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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]

Its rediculus 2 loose you're temper over that.

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

[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

[Fnordulicious]

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

Example...

[Suicidal Gir]

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

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

[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: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?

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?

[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.

"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"

[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"

[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: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.

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.

Wall of Sound

[Purity Of Essence]

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

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.

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.

[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.)

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.

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

[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.

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!

[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: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: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.

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: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.

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".

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:[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, that darned Beethoven

[tkrotchko]

He was always a problem.

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: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: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.

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

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?

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?

[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.

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.

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?

[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.

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: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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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: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.

... 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?

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).

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.

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: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.

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.

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: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?

[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.

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: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.