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The Loudness Wars May Be Ending
Hugh Pickens writes "Mike Barthel reports on a technique called brick-wall limiting, where songs are engineered to seem louder by bringing the quiet parts to the same level as the loud parts and pushing the volume level of the entire song to the highest point possible. 'Because of the need to stand out on radio and other platforms, there's a strategic advantage to having a new song sound just a little louder than every other song. As a result, for a period, each new release came out a little louder than the last, and the average level of loudness on CDs crept up (YouTube) to such a degree that albums actually sounded distorted, as if they were being played through broken speakers.' But the loudness wars may be coming to an end. Taking advantage of the trend towards listening to music online — via services like Pandora, Spotify, and Apple's forthcoming iCloud — a proposal by audio engineer Thomas Lund, already adopted as a universal standard (PDF) by the International Telecommunications Union, would institute a volume limit on any songs downloaded from the cloud, effectively removing the strategic advantage of loudness. Lund's proposal would do the same thing for any music you could buy. 'Once a piece of music is ingested into this system, there is no longer any value in trying to make a recording louder just to stand out,' says legendary engineer Bob Ludwig, who has been working with Lund. 'There will be nothing to gain from a musical point of view. Louder will no longer be better!'"
Aggregative normalization.
Now if they could just do this for Netflix, arg!
I thought that the overall issue is that the dynamic range of the highs & lows is being compressed. So even with a volume limit on the max loudness, would the engineers engineer the song any differently?
A second issue is that the listening environment is changing - music is being played on portable devices in noisy environments - this isn't a fine listening room. As a result, this may be a case where too much dynamic range is lost on the listening audience, as the listener just wants to be able to hear everything without having to fiddle with the volume every few seconds.
Nigel: Exactly. One louder.
Marty: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?
Nigel: These go to eleven.
Have gnu, will travel.
i suppose i understand why some people might not want to use it.
but client-side overall volume normalization eliminates any 'advantage' from having higher
overall signal strength and reducing the resolution..without depending on standards
enforcement
Music industry finds yet another way to shoot itself in the foot. But yeah, blame the pirates.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I hope this is able to transition to broadcast television broadcasts. I'm sick and tired of commercials being substantially louder than the program they're playing within. Every time a commercial break comes around I have to mute the fucking thing, which seems like the complete opposite of what they're supposed to be trying to accomplish.
iTunes (and Spotify I think) already do this by automatically matching volume levels through the equalizer.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Why would you really want to max the gain on everything!? That is just as bad as playing the same exact musical composition through both speakers! Remember when musicians used these techniques to actually create music?
Proposed solution: following a standard that limits loudness would remove the strategic advantage of loudness.
What will happen: the standard would be ignored.
This CD goes to eleven!
Now apply it to advertising too.
giggity
If you don't have soft parts, how can the loud parts surprise you? Isn't that one of the elements of music that we're throwing away? The element of surprise?
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Am I the only one that masters audio as loud as possible without more than .01clipping to take full advantage of the bit depth?
You mean the triangle ISN'T supposed to be as loud as the canon fire? :)
This was just another reason why I stopped buying music. You can't buy a CD and trust that it won't sound like shit, because odds are it will.
I know people will call me an audiophile, but I'm not. I'm merey a fan of music with a decent pair of headphones for my computer. You understand what this loudness war is immediately after listening to something properly mastered in decent headphones. You'll then realize yet another reason as to why buying music is one of the biggest scams going (for you and the artist).
It doesn't matter to me how loud a song sounds; I can always turn the volume down or use something like ReplayGain to lower the overall level. The real issue is the compression of the dynamic range used to achieve louder sounding music. This proposal doesn't address that: a volume limit isn't going to provide an incentive to expand the dynamic range, since producers are just going to make sure every song bumps right up to the new brick wall.
Dynamic range simply isn't important to most producers and consumers of popular music now.
I'm a production director of a radio station so I'm constantly working on commercials. Although I don't go so far as to brickwall things, I do use a variety of compressions, limiters, and EQ to balance out the sound of a commercial -- usually to even out a vocal performance or to make it work with music and sound effects better. There's a cookie cutter and hamfisted way to do it and then there is actually using your ears to do it correctly. That said, what was done with the 5.1 remasters of the Genesis catalog were a travesty. Any dynamism was lost because suddenly what was supposed to be a quieter acoustic section was as loud as the full band playing all out. That's not the way it's supposed to sound.
You can make all the recommendations and standards you want, but you can't force the studio engineers to obey them, nor can you change the studio executives who are demanding the loudness and writing the checks to the studios. There is a great deal of the attitude in the music industry that "I make a lot of money doing this, and you don't, so my way is clearly right!" So, this movement will probably involve a lot of independent artists. We need pop artists on board.
If we can somehow start a campaign to get people to enjoy an expanded dynamic range, maybe we can raise awareness of how much better music can sound. Maybe albums/tracks engineered correctly could have another small logo somewhere indicating such a thing - call it something like "HDR Audio" (High Dynamic Range) that makes people think.. "Ooh, HD, this one is better than the one without it" or "HDR is the popular thing in photography, so it's probably good with audio".
I'm all for more artists and engineers preserving the vitality of their music.
Is "the Internet" really so difficult to say or type?
'Because of the need to stand out on radio and other platforms, there's a strategic advantage to having a new song sound just a little louder than every other song.
Wait, what? If they're all doing this, then how is one still louder than the previous song? And what is this talk of the "radio" platform? You mean the NPR/baseball machine in my car can be used for streaming music? How retro!
One more reason not to listen to shitty pop music.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
It's not going to change. Because average joes will always hear louder as better. If you A/B the same track lightly compressed vs. heavily compressed, people are always going to think the heavily compressed one sounds better. And if you adopt any standard, everyone will just fight to be as loud as possible under that standard, which I doubt would be all that restrictive in the first place.
"loudness" is subjective, and there's a lot of money invested in processing audio signals to not exceed a certain dB level but sound "louder" anyway. Some of this processing is quite sophisticated and dynamic, and high-end processors can have fairly noticeable effects on songs that both average exactly the same on signal meters.
My suspicion is that what will happen as a result of this is simply an arms race between processing gear used by music producers and the de-emphasis and normalization algorithms used by the cloud. There's just too much profit-making incentive at stake for the producers to give up quietly on this.
(and yes, some of the processing some of those cowboys inflict on perfectly good music turns my stomach..)
Pardon my ignorance, but where in Thomas Lund's proposed standard does it introduce a volume limit on "songs downloaded from the cloud", or indeed on any kind of song at all? A cursory glance suggests the document concerns a means of measuring loudness rather than a means of regulating it.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Loudness just got replaced by something far worse.
We need to enact some kind of legislation against autotune. Or use the SAP channel for the non-auto-tuned version. I'm sure music is just going through a new synthesizer revolution like in the early 80s, and it'll eventually be used properly, but damn if pop music isn't insufferable right now.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Nigel Tufnel got new amps, you see.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
This seems to be no different than traditional broadcast which has guidelines on program volume levels, unless you're saying absolute peaks may not exceed a set dBFS and the RMS levels can't exceed a percentage of that. Even then, the paper at a glance seemed to be more concerned with intersample peaks than anything...
Otherwise, even if you say 0 dBVU = -18 dBFS and material will be rejected that exceeds 0 dBVU (can't exceed -18dBFS), the mastering practice will simply be to squash with a multiband limiter to get your RMS as close to your peak as possible, so you're peaking at 0 dBVU but your RMS levels are, say, -1, -0.5 dBVU... thus you're in compliance but the loudness issue continues. As it's been pointed out, the "loudness wars" is more about dynamic range and knowing that on average you've got 144dB to play with and you don't need to stay in the upper 20 dB exclusively.
what the article talks about is Dynamic range compression, where the loudness of the piece is bumped up, losing the less loud bits (generally thinner notes) in the process.
it causes 3 things :
- heavy bass/loud voices.
- lost clarity of the song
- ear tiredom over time by listening to such DRC pieces.
it can be amended by crystallizers, software or hardware to great extent - x-fi x-treme music cards have it in their driver, and it works to great extent. but not everyone may have x-fi. the solution comes in with the below software :
http://audacious-media-player.org/
audacious is free. it has linux and windows versions. works great. link to windows version here :
http://boards.audacious-media-player.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=491
download this, run it, and turn on crystallizer in the plugins. set it to 5 or 8 depending on your speaker setup. also turn on equalizer, and adjust it accordingly. (bump up middle ranges in between 100-800 hz, the human voice, and keep the 60 hz and down (bass) a bit low. you can bump up higher frequencies a bit more for clarity.
you will see that you were listening to music as if it was 'muddy' before. it makes that much difference.
on top of this, you can acquire srs labs audio sandbox, or hd audio sandbox ( or whatever they were calling it now) from srs labs. it is a postprocessor, and if you choose 'wow hd' in 'stereo' selections and then bump 'definition' slider all the way up, your music will be much much more clearer. dont forget to arrange your speaker size slider accordingly too.
Read radical news here
Mod parent up. Dynamic range (or lack thereof) is a matter of taste, and all this new standard does is give producers a new "brick wall" to run up against. However, since the new wall would be below the level of audio clipping, perhaps it's an improvement in that respect.
Eventually people will get tired of today's over-compressed sound, and will rediscover the joys of music dynamics. As a (very) small-time songwriter, I can appreciate the appeal of chest-thumping, all-11s sound, for a specific effect. But making EVERYTHING sound that way is like throwing away everything your crayon box except Magenta, and coloring everything one color.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
People actually still listen to the radio?
I was lazy this afternoon, and found myself regretting leaving my iPod in the office, and just listen to the radio while grabbing lunch. Old or New, its all bad. Do yourself a favor and get an MP3 or OGG player and listen to what you want to hear instead of what some drone is paid to convince you to like. DJs/announcers are worse actually than record execs.
is that we buy expensive equalizers to fix this and make it sound good again. It sucks because you could "clean" the music using programs, but then it's not longer the "original". Probably why people still listen to old pink floyd live albums.
It is not the volume or maximum level that is doing in contemporary recorded music - it is the assinine misuse of compression. I do a couple of radio shows a week on a local FM station (OTA and Streaming) and see the issue during every show. Most contemporary commercially distributed recorded music is horribly compressed to the point where the level indicators simply do not move while any given selection is played - dynamic range has been sacrificed in marketing interest of sounding louder that the next guy. This problem seems pervasive in all genres except classical and indie music. I've always wondered what the assholes who ruin music with compression would do if they were doing postproduction on something like the full length William Tell Overture which contains soft passages that are almost inaudible.
Simply limiting the volume is going to cause more problems without really solve anything. So you've limited me to 75% volume. I'm just going to put all my music right up at that 75%! But this time it will sound even worse because now I'll only be using 75% of my available dynamic range.
A system like ReplayGain is much better because it preserves all the dynamic range and fidelity of the original track. Instead of limiting the volume, it adjusts post-decode every album/track to have the same average volume. Overhead: a few tens of bytes for the proper ID3 tags.
The problem with the "Loudness Wars" is that it's not actually the loudness that we're complaining about, it's the lack of dynamic range. No volume limit or ReplayGain is going to solve this one. Dynamic range is awesome if you're listening in a quiet environment. You need low-volume parts for the louder ones to mean something. But in a car... not so much. Tracks with high dynamic range (example) can easily lose entire parts of a song if the environment is too loud for them to play over.
Perhaps some new tech is needed, similar to MP3Pro -- give a track with full dynamic range, and then some additional low-bandwidth bits that describe how to compress the dynamic range when you want it.
Stop unconditionally compressing the sh*t out of everything, and record the dynamics the way the musicians meant it to be heard. Some music is just meant to be in-your-face loud, and that's fine if it is the artist's intent. But dynamic range is often a big part of the emotional impact of music, and to strip that out in post-production is no less egregious than arbitrarily lopping off part of the frequency spectrum, or editing out one of the original band members.
I always wondered why they didn't already have an average loudness or max loudness limit on everything in order to preserve optimum fidelity on cd's etc and have an arrangement with radio stations to play new songs a bit louder for a set period, or at least just send the radio stations a louder edit.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
We get this problem with adverts on TV too.
Amazingly there are no results on ebay for `normaliser`; no one has made a hardware dongle to plug inline of the speakers to fix the problem:
http://www.instructables.com/answers/I-need-a-hardware-volume-levellernormalizer-for-a/
A blog I run for the wealth
Metallca's album "Distortion Maximum" (or was it Death Magnetic? I can't remember.) and how absolutely terrible it sounded.
Luckily, somebody at Guitar Hero managed to get a non-distorted version of the album for GH:Metallica, which was promptly ripped and released online.
Great example of when a "pirated" version ends up being far superior to the retail release.
This blog post has a nice graphic showing the difference in dynamic range between the retail album and the GH version.
Ha. Brick wall. Brick wall limiters. Haha. Was that intentional?
What effect will this have for music played amplifiers that go up to 11?
..they don't know what they're missing.
I recently listened to MP3s of a coworker, ripped at 320bit/sec but with the volume cranked up. With my 3-way-in-ears, I could hear accustic artifacts I couldn't explain given the nitrate. So I compared to the 30 second sample in iTunes... which was not as loud but had more detail and no artifacts.
Whoever did this *wanted* it that way, probably had lousy speakers and didn't know his MP3-player has a volume setting... *shudder* I like my music with lots of dynamic range. And yes, excellent earphones (I'm all for ultimate ears tipple.fi) tend to push you to old Pink Floyd recordings. ;-)
Compression is an old production trick. The new thing is to add more cowbell.
But making EVERYTHING sound that way is like throwing away everything your crayon box except Magenta, and coloring everything one color.
Obviously, throwing away everything but magenta would be silly. Purple, on the other hand...
Some of my college buddies were nightclub DJs and they had audio processors that would do this. They would also wire all the speakers in mono. The sound was horrible, but at 170dB with enough alcohol, it's impossible to tell the difference. No wonder I have tinnitus now.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
http://www.dolby.com/consumer/understand/volume-control/dolby-volume.html
It's the only CD I ever owned where I could hear the engineers turning the mikes down in the middle, because it had just gotten Way Too Loud. :-)
Almost every song, including ones that aren't "loud" are normalized to 0dBFS. The thing is that they have large dynamic range, so their average signal level might be -30dBFS thus making them "quiet" when played back at a given volume. If you limit the shit out of dynamics, it makes the whole thing louder at a given setting on the volume dial.
That is what people mean when they complain about the "loudness wars." Modern music can't force your system to be loud, I can set my receiver to -80dBref and no sound will be louder than 35dB since that is how it works. The song can't override the volume setting. The problem is that they have no dynamic range, and thus don't sound as good.
A song that has dynamic range you actually turn the volume dial up on. As the "ref" part implies my system is calibrated to a reference point, in particular the THX cinema reference of 105dBSPL for mains, 115dBSPL for the sub. So when I set my dial to 0dB, that is the limit. That is what I set it to for movies, and get a theater experience. However I don't blow out my ears since the average level in movies is usually 30-40dB below reference. So despite the limit being 105dBSPL, I am usually listening to things in the 65-75dBSPL range. That dynamic range is what makes it sound good, and is what lets big hits, well, hit.
Music is squashed down, so I have to listen to it at like -30dBref on the dial. ends up being about the same normal volume level, it just means there's no headroom, that everything is the same volume.
The solution is NOT a volume limit, the solution is to have dynamic range in the files themselves, and put a limiter in the playback device. That way if someone wants it limited, they can turn that on, but you can get full range when you wish.
Ever since DVD movies came out the dynamic range became too great. I turn up the volume to hear dialog and then a car horn or dog barking blows me off the couch. The normalizer setting on VLC is not what I want. I want something like this:
The volume is set to a certain level, that is the level I want and nothing should ever go louder than it. Is that too much to ask for?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
This isn't really "loudness", it's "compression".
And it's been done for years on commercial radio and, more recently, on TV adverts.
Every album you listen to has been mastered or mixed with compression of some sort on the master tracks.
A good example of how things have changed: listen to Violently Happy by Bjork for an example of when Compression is done correctly (i.e. subtle), then listen to any autotuned crap made within the last 2 years (Ke$ha) for an example of when not to do it.
http://xkcd.com/670/
In digital audio, nothing can be louder than 0dB. So, if you're an ambitious engineer, and want your song to sound louder than the rest, but you still can't go above 0dB, you employ tricks to make your song apparently louder. These tricks include compression (reducing dynamic range), but more sophisticated versions like multi-band compression where different frequency ranges are compressed differently, or look-ahead limiters that sample audio ahead of the playback to limit more smoothly. However, compression reduces dynamic range, throwing away information and resolution, and lessens fidelity. So if I'm an engineer and want to make a recording that sounds really good, with a wide dynamic range, it's not gonna sound very loud on the radio or CD player next to the other guy's highly compressed song. That means that in order to satisfy my client and have a song that's sufficiently "loud," I've got to compress the crap out of it. Of course, since no song can go over 0dB, that "loudness" is a subjective thing. Until now, it was difficult to come up with a way to measure it, and therefore a way to control it. Bob Ludwig is a famous mastering engineer, and to hear that he's involved with this effort tells me it's the real deal. I own a small recording studio, and I have to deal with clients all the time that want their music louder. Maybe I'll finally have some good tools to say "This is as loud as it's gonna get."
Of course, the problem is that your average consumer has been trained to like garbage.
Have you ever gotten into a rental car and taken a look at the audio settings? Invariably bass and treble are turned way up. And what's the first thing people in stores do when trying out a sound system? They turn the volume way up. If it's loud it's good, even if the speakers are clipping.
And how much dynamic range does your average pop song have anyway? Not much, it's just a wall of noise. And then if you're listening to stuff like hip hop then you're also dealing with low quality samples.
Wasn't there are article here on Slashdot several months ago about some survey about audio? Researchers found that the majority actually preferred the inferior sound of compressed audio?
So there's no incentive to improve audio quality. The problem is when this sort of crap spills over to good music.
So, they've been releasing crippled recordings for the last twenty years... but rejoice everyone, they are now planning on re-re-re-releasing the same music except without the awful mastering. And they wonder why everybody pirates their crap.
THE WHAT IS ENDING?
But making EVERYTHING sound that way is like throwing away everything your crayon box except Magenta, and coloring everything one color.
Oh, you must mean like the video for "The Perfect Drug" by Nine Inch Nails or "Blame It" by Jamie Foxx and T-Pain.
A cursory glance suggests the document concerns a means of measuring loudness rather than a means of regulating it.
If each track comes with loudness measurements, listeners will use these measurements in their playback devices to give all songs the same loudness so as not to have to turn the volume up and down when playing different songs. (See for example players supporting Replay Gain.) Songs mastered near the clipping point will be played back with reduced volume compared to, say, "Money for Nothing" or other tracks off Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits. The idea as I understand it is that labels will self-regulate because louder mastering no longer makes a track sound louder than other tracks in a playlist, and fewer albums will be destroyed like Californication by Red Hot Chili Peppers.
...from a bunch of loud songs is to make a quiet song.
Because of the need to stand out on radio and other platforms, there's a strategic advantage to having a new song sound just a little louder than every other song.
Seriously, this mentality is so stupid. It's like typing everything in caps and bold to "stand out", but when everything is caps and bold, the non caps and non bold is the only thing that stands out.
This is taught in every Design101 class under the topic of "contrast".
I got hung up on by a DJ in 1977 when the rock station went to a power format, and I asked why their signal suddenly became so distorted. Not much has changed. At least there is digital music that lives up to the promise, not all junky mp3
A lot of posters are missing the point. Running this algorithm negates the 'benefit' derived by turning up the loudness (properly, compressing the dynamic range). Once that becomes the norm, the hope is that the record producers will stop compressing the dynamic range for marketing purposes, and we can get decent quality recordings again. Note that this may not improve the overall quality of the music.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
I'm really hoping that the conclusion is correct, but I can't help thinking, if there is a standard maximum volume, wouldn't every song have the living, livid hell compressed out of it so that absolutely every sound was precisely at the maximum volume? I mean, doesn't this solution fundamentally misunderstand the problem?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It does nothing to prevent mastering engineers from applying maximum dynamic compression (which is different from lossy file size compression, a completely different topic). There is already a default technical hard cap, "exceeding" it simply results in unmusical distortion (other than that added intentionally).
And artists and label heads will never understand anyway. They will ask for mixes to be squeezed to the max.
So like the OP says, a voluntary standard that is unneeded, but unenforceable. And any streamer or broadcaster already has the capability to level out audio differences beforehand, it just actually takes a human to listen. But that involves money, which they would rather not pay.
Most producers and consumers don't care because the music is intended to be consumed on portable devices. Car radios, iPods, phones... Listen to a well done classical recording in a typical car, or on an MP3 player, and you'll be adjusting the volume up and down all day just to hear it.
With compression, you don't have those louds and soft bits. At home on your nice stereo, it sounds terrible. But on the portable devices, they sound. Terrible or not, you can hear it. That's the whole point, and why no one cares.
Also why the standard will not catch on unless it differentiates audiophile settings vs. portable settings. Personally, I'd love to have automatic range compression in a car audio system to even out the highs and lows a bit. But I'd like the option to turn it off when i want it off. No producer will let this be up to a computer, so we're stuck the way it is, for now.
I'll buy a low-oxygen magic audio cable that costs 1000 a metre. I'll get my "quality" back.
Home user: most people don't care anymore about sound quality. All they care about is CONVENIENCE. Whether it is brick wall limited or not, all they care is about whether iTunes has it, and that they can listen to it RIGHT NOW. Yes, audiophiles exist, but they are rarer than honest lawyers. I would conservatively guess that 1 in 100,000 music listeners actually care or are interested in quality audio.
Music producers: yes the interest in "natural" dynamic range doesn't exist anymore in non-classical (or classic jazz). There almost is no point is having 24 bit depth interfaces or 64 bit internal processing, since most producers will then compress the shit out of it to fit a 2 bit dynamic range. Classical/jazz producers might lightly compress, but it would be a technical concession only to be able to get above the noise floor of a certain format.
So yes Virginia, there no longer is no interest in quality audio. The fact that iTunes is the biggest retailer proves this. Like I said, convenience is king now.
Compressors in the amplifier. We've got these oldfashioned equalizer controls or their predecessor, the treble knob. If we had a dramatic improvement in those, with a compressor technology becoming available in the form of a few presets for the listener, and maybe combined with an appropriate music format, then there would be no need to compress the music upfront.
We do want compression. It makes perfect sense when you're listening in the car or with your lofi portable, otherwise a lot of the music is unintelligible. But now you have the same compression in the car and with your highend set at home. And that sucks.
Does your mix truly take advantage of the FULL 16 bits of CD dynamic range, going from -96 db to 0db?
Or do you compress the shit out of your mix to a 3db dynamic range and then simply normalize up to around 0db, just to have a "loud" record? If so, you aren't taking "full advantage of the bit depth". You are simply making a squashed record that is normalized up. Let me know your mastering business name, so I can avoid using you.
You want a "loud" record? Turn the volume knob up. You want a rich and dynamic record? Throw away your compressor.
Actually, I have pretty-much stopped buying music because when I do, I usually get somethng that i so over-compressed that it sounds terrible and tiring to listen to. Instead of being able to realax and listen to a whole album, I can only stand a few tracks before I think "I've had enough of that" and turn it off again.
Old albums, vinyl or early CDs feel like slipping into a deep warm bath that you could relax and soak in for hours. Recent albums feel more like having a power shower where you are subjected to a mild battering.
Stupid article poster points to a video with 47kbit sound to point out the difference between high quality and low quality, well Duh - that's not going to work is it.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
'There will be nothing to gain from a musical point of view
Motorhead would disagree with that sentiment
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
.... it does make the sound more like a square wave ... You get particular harmonic overtones which help give richness to a sound ...
Compression does *not* make the waves more like square waves. It makes passages with small sine waves into passages with larger sine waves and vice versa. As a result, it also does *not* make the harmonics you describe.
Unfortunately, the damage is already done.. the remaster campaign has already been in full swing ,, destroying (er,... 'remastering') all those classics that *Used* to have dynamic passages.. Hows about 'The Who' remasters ( 'A Quick One' will blow out your speakers it so bad ;=(.
Unfortunately Steve Hoffman simply couldn't save more than a few albums compared to the amount out there that were attacked by those grubby handed 'crank it mate'. producers/ engineers... so many will be lost to history.. at least the concept of dynamics , in them
Brick-wall limiting. Can you call that a technique if it isn't used to protect equipment (and ears)? It's more like they are abusing the (in principle soft, long-attack-time, look-ahead) compressor used in mastering and getting close to it.
Producers and publishers could produce and sell two-tier CDs:
One CD with compression though not as vile as today. It's ok for poor soundsystems and noisy enviroments. Car, iPod, work(?) etc.
Two: A well-mastered record. Preferably a DVD or Blu-ray with higher sample depth (24 bit) and frequency.
And in addition they can give the radio-stations a super-compressed version.
This requires more work of the Audio Demeneers, though.
urd
>>>Lund's proposal would do the same thing for any music you could buy. 'Once a piece of music is ingested into this system, there is no longer any value in trying >>>to make a recording louder just to stand out,' says legendary engineer Bob Ludwig, who has been working with Lund. 'There will be nothing to gain from a musical >>>point of view. Louder will no longer be better!'"
Ludwig is calling for an end to the "loudness wars" and yet he mastered Ozomatli's "Fire Away" CD, which is one of the worst-sounding, most heavily compressed and distorted CDs ever made?