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The "Loudness War" and the Future of Music
An anonymous reader notes an article up at IEEE Spectrum outlining the history and dangers of the accelerating tendency of music producers to increase the loudness and reduce the dynamic range of CDs. "The loudness war, what many audiophiles refer to as an assault on music (and ears), has been an open secret of the recording industry for nearly the past two decades and has garnered more attention in recent years as CDs have pushed the limits of loudness thanks to advances in digital technology. The 'war' refers to the competition among record companies to make louder and louder albums by compressing the dynamic range. But the loudness war could be doing more than simply pumping up the volume and angering aficionados — it could be responsible for halting technological advances in sound quality for years to come... From the mid 1980s to now, the average loudness of CDs increased by a factor of 10, and the peaks of songs are now one-tenth of what they used to be."
Amps that only go up to 7. Because 7 is quieter than 10.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Are TV adverts where they do exactly the same. It means I either have to muck around with the volume I was happy with or change channel. Obviously I do the latter.
Deleted
Here's a good video outlining what the record companies have been doing.
Wikipedia has a decent article on the Loudness War, complete with interesting graphics of the same song from newer and older releases.
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Which knob do you adjust to increase the dynamic range and re-add the lost information?
Oh that's right, you can't. You're right, it's not a tough choice is it?
I blame Phil Spector. Thank God he's been brought to trial for his crimes.
+0 Meh
There is your first problem. People who look at music as an elevated art that needs to be bowed down to.
Coming from someone in the field, paid by the people you all hate, and also holds undergrads in areas of perception and music and currently working on my final thesis beyond that, we are giving the listeners what they want. This has been well documented over the years that the loudness and distortion are only problems upon multiple listenings, and even then, only upon critical review, hence the idiots that want to know how Rikki Rocket blickemed the drum solo in the 1983 line up of Poison.
In other words, it doesn't matter.
What do listeners want? They want wallpaper. They want something even and uneventful that they can drive to. 95% of all music listened to these days is listened to in the car. That is what it is sold for. Drivetime radio, or burning iTunes tracks to listen to between 730 to 845 and then again at 530 to 645. Two hours a day.
Personally, I don't care much for what recorded music sounds like. I've had my share and I've never heard anything even remotely close to what I know it the real thing. I could care less that the RIAA is beating down teens who pass bad music, I think it is a lesson in aesthetics, not economics, because I don't know anyone in the music industry that likes the crap kids are listening to. This is why we all have our secret bands that we get signed for the fuck sakes of getting signed, promote them all we can, knowing none of the tin-eared teens are going to appreciate it, and take time away to personally make certain that the shit is recorded correctly. The rest? Who the fuck cares. I say jail anyone listening to it.
So if things are clipped and enloundened, you only have bad listeners and human psychoacoustic understanding to blame.
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.
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."
The same thing is being done to your food with sugar and salt.
Except not by the record companies, obviously.
erroneous: look me up in a dictionary
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.
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.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
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.
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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.
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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.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.