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Mastering Engineer Explains Types of Compression, Effects On Today's Music
Stowie101 writes "Today is Dynamic Range Day, which is an event to educate the public about the 'Loudness Wars' that are compressing and harming the quality of today's music. Ian Shepherd, a mastering engineer and founder of Dynamic Range Day, explains why music lovers should avoid MP3 files. 'The one that springs to mind is to avoid MP3, especially if it's 128 kbps. Apple uses a more advanced technology called AAC, but if someone can get lossless files like FLAC that's a better place to start.' Shepherd says it's actually harder to make a good 'lossy' encode of something that has been heavily musically compressed. Very heavy dynamic compression and limiting makes MP3s sound worse, so the loudness wars indirectly make MP3s sound worse."
good luck finding the master tracks to even go to lossless. If you're getting your music from a CD, don't waste your time. Record all the music yourself?
Hearing the difference now isn't the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is 'lossy'. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA - it's about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don't want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.
I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange...well don't get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren't stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you'll be glad you did.
I've heard one engineer complain that he mixes the music correctly, with loud and soft passages, but the musicians then demand he make it sound louder. They are not satisfied until the quiet passages are just as loud as the loud passages.
So basically a CD with 90 db range is compressed to about 10 db (plus clipping off the top of the max volume scale).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
It's also known as ALAC. I don't believe that it's an option for the iTunes store, but if you own a CD and want to get it into your iDevice environment, it's a good option.
Hendrix liked feedback, and so did his fans. If bubble-gum popping 0.99 single buying kids like it compressed, let 'em have it that way. They can discover "Unplugged, fresh and undistorted" later.
Damn shame what happened to The Red Velvet Car (compressed into oblivion), but I guess I'm just getting older faster than the target audience the producers of my favorite artists are aiming for.
Neil Young made the same argument last month in Wired. The interviewer was a douchbag, so I'm not going to link to it, but Neil was right, and first.
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
>>>320kbps should be enough for anyone.
I actually use 32k AAC. With the tiny speakers on my player you can't hear any real difference, and it lets me squeeze more songs on the device. CD bought from a store is what I use for archiving.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know all this.
Problem is where is the support for the alternatives? Hardly any software really supports FLAC at all. I don't use iTunes, but does it support it? I know that Zune does not. Most standalone players don't support it.
Of course, every other technology I use takes advantage of MP3. Asterisk can't use FLAC. Which would be hilarious if it did because the standard codecs are about the worst way to transmit music anyways. A phone call is terrible for quality. Unless you are inside a closed system using HD codecs, forget about it.
I'll pick up and start using FLAC more often when the software and platforms I use actually support it.
All this switching back and forth between dynamic range compression and data compression makes my head hurt.
So to clear things up... dynamic range compression is a form of signal processing that is usually used to make the average level of a signal louder, hence the loudness wars.
Data compression probably doesn't need to be explained to this crowd. But you know... MP3s and stuff.
I am greatly enjoying 'Adopt an Audiophile... And Beat Some Sense Into Him' Month here on Slashdot.
Noted.
I've been a musician for many years, and I have a nice studio set-up so that I can hear music as clear as possible. Yet I have amassed... umm, through various ways thousands of mp3s as well as flacs and oogs. Do I like the quality of lossless files better, yeah. But does that make me want to get on some flac-only crusade and not listen to mp3s? Not at all. Maybe it's because I'm of that age where I remember scratchy records, or pressing a transistor radio against my ear to hear the latest Jackson-5 or Stevie Wonder cut that was playing on the radio. For me it's the notes, melody, rhythm, lyrics that matter, that's the true musical information. From my music collection I have grown in my musical sensibilities immensely. I don't think it would be possible to have the library I have if everything was lossless just from the standpoint of space and perhaps download time.
So of course, lossless is better than lossy by definition, but mp3s still bring me to where I want to me in terms of getting the music the artist wanted to convey.
It's one thing to encode your music as mp3 so it fits on a portable device, and another altogether to purchase it in that form. Sooner or later you will wish that you had bought the lossless encoding.
When I can somehow distinguish between FLAC and 192 mp3 VBR on equipment costing less than 2K, I'll consider it.
In addition to the diminished audio fidelity, the other sad part about the loudness wars is that they have likely contributed to the number of lower-quality consumer audio devices in the market these days. A quality recording (that doesn't have its dynamic range hammered into a corner) encourages you to listen at a higher volume overall, but raising the volume on a cheap audio device generally exposes bad quality components and noise in the signal path. If the average person was accustomed to listening to a wider dynamic range, we'd probably see an increase in higher quality parts being used in consumer audio devices.
How about some decent bands? What happened to good music? Don't call me old, I'm still young enough to not remember the great war... of '91. Music seems to be for teens and young adults now.
Just sayin'
Personally I wouldn't blame the degrading quality of modern music on compression. Even with a high dynamic range, there's a higher ratio of crap out there than during the disco era.. Of course, you may be standing on my lawn.
Due to the loudness wars, I'm surprised chip music (e.g. C64) hasn't taken off more, considering that the soundwaves always peak at the maximum floor and ceiling levels.
After all, louder is better, so Monty on the Run or R-Type on the radio or TV would be heaven! (Irony being they do beat 99.9% of pop today anyway...)
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
MP3s are still a wonderful compression and it's quite amazing how it has withstood the test of time. Large scale ABX tests have shown people are unable to tell the difference between a 256kbps mp3 and the original lossless recording. Over the past several years I've also noticed a trend for MP3s no longer to be encoded at stupidly low bitrates.
No I won't be avoiding MP3s. I much prefer an MP3 (even at 128kbps) than one of those wonderful "remasters" of an old album. Quite frankly there's nothing masterful about how the loudness war has managed to destroy modern music. The real shame is it doesn't end with the CD master. SACD, DVD-A and I guess now we can include the new supposedly magical itunes format have all tried to tell us the wonders of 24bit music, and yet the dynamic range of music rarely drops below -7dB.
When people download some backyard mp3 digitisation of a Red Hot Chilli Pepper's vinyl release of an album to get better sound quality, or when they download rips of the GuitarHero versions of Metallica songs to get some form of dynamic range you really know the industry has gone to shit.
I can't be the only one that tried to read the headline and thought "another screwed up Slashdot title", thinking it was a book title for "Mastering Engineering" or something other than an "audio" mastering engineer?
Couldn't the editors have put 'Audio' at the front of the subject to give it a point of reference?
Sheesh.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
The loudness wars have been a complaint of mine for some time now. The example video at the end of the article gives an EXCELLENT explanation. I only wish that more people would complain about this so that the quality of recordings would get better. Unfortunately most of the music of today sounds more like a Stephen Hawking lecture with distorted beeping and buzzing in the background and no actual music. When I was in school - music was part of the curriculum. I don't know if it still is but the kids of today are completely CLUELESS when it comes to music. They only seem to like songs about 'guns, money, drugs, niggas and bitches' because they SEE not HEAR these videos on MTV. They see some gun toting loser driving a ferrari, throwing stacks of cash around, surrounded by half naked crack whores and think - "Man that is the life I want to lead!" Their music tastes follow accordingly. If they actually listened to the lyrics - they might actually be disgusted.
When audio recording was first invented, quality was awful, but people loved it, because it was new and exciting, and nothing like it had ever existed before..
Year after year, quality improved.
We expected that someday, recorded music would become indistinguishable from live performance.
Then everything changed.
Convenience became more important than quality.
Storing 5000 mediocre quality recordings on an ipod became the norm.
Combine that with the excessive compression used to fight the loudness war, and it really makes an old-school audiophile sad.
You should be so lucky. These days most mastering engineers shoot for 4 dB of dynamic range at most because, otherwise, the soft passages will be lost in the car noise.
That is all.
but when I do, I buy the CD and make my own flac set from it. Then I can re-encode that to mp3 for portability, etc.
Wikipedia's article on the "loudness war" does a good job of explaining the problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
I used to work for JJ Johnston. He took a popular music track (I won't say which one) and ripped a .wav file from the CD, and then ran a simple Matlab script that tallied how many samples there were of each value. CDs use 16-bit samples, so there were 64K bins in this histogram. You would expect a pretty much Bell-curve shape to the histogram. With this particular song, over half of all samples were either +1 or -1 (i.e., 16-bit sample values of either +32767 or -32768).
That music is so horribly overcompressed that most of the wave forms are sawed-off into square waves. Square waves, in turn, add unpleasant harmonics, which make the music harder to enjoy, and make it louder (in the psychoacoustic meaning of "louder").
I'm hoping that "audiophile" versions of songs become available, not because I think I need all my music in 24-bit 192KHz but because I'm hoping the mix engineers will be allowed to do the mix properly, instead of mixing it far too hot.
I'm sort of afraid to buy remastered versions of old classic rock albums, because I'm worried they will actually sound worse than the originals!
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
and can probably prove it with an Etch-A-Sketch and 5 minutes of my time, but I can't take any of this stuff seriously. I listen to MP3s and they sound great to me. I listen to them on the bus, on the train, on my bike, in the city, all on standard earbuds, and it all sounds like it's supposed to.
It's just that after reading the absolute pure f**king snake-oil that some of the component manufacturers put out about their products in a vain attempt to justify charging ten grand for a pair of *wires*, as soon as anyone starts getting needlessly technical about audio, it all sounds like yet more snake-oil.
And so I end up grouping terms like lossless and FLAC and AAC with counter-spiral geometry, which is apparently why Audioquest can charge a thousand dollars a foot for a f**king power cable.
so much good music coming out - last thing I care about is these sound subtleties.
My favorite music medium to purchase now is this whole thing where you buy the vinyl and get an mp3 download code. I don't even own a record player but i get the tangible product which is undeniably satisfying and then the convenience of digital. It works out to be like $2 more than on itunes or the CD.
JP
An ever better idea would be more support for SLS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_SLS
Basically all current decoders can read the SLS files like plain AAC files, and skip over the parts with extra lossless information. Updated decoders can read all the information for full quality.
You can ship one set of files to everyone, and when people sync their portable devices, the SLS parts can be stripped if so-desired (to save on storage) without having to re-encode the files. It's also definable how much loss you can have: so you can choose between the standard AAC quality (e.g., on your phone), fully lossless (one's stereo or headphones), or anywhere in between (for computer speakers, which are often of middling quality).
Wouldn't it make more sense to use 192kbps files? That way you won't have to put them back on your player every day, just every week or so.
Hi,
Hopefully someone mods this up. There is a software product that's been in existence since 2007 that "UN-compresses" music to regain the frequencies lost due to loudness wars. Check it out: http://PlatinumNotes.com
My teammates and I built it to solve this exact problem. It works on desktop for Windows and Mac.
-Yakov
Makes it clearer and a multi-band look-ahead peak limiter is usually what is being used to squash the dynamics out. The Waves L3 would be a good example (http://www.waves.com/content.aspx?id=3173). So for dynamic range, call it dynamic range limiting. For lossy or lossless data compression, call it compression.
Helps keep it straight.
Y'know, there's always someone harping all day long about how MP3 takes a steaming liquid crap all over your sound, and I cannot agree with them. I have a mid-range yet respectable sound system, worth maybe $4000 new. I listen to a LOT of music with an unforgiving ear for detail, and what I often joke as "digital audio memory". Anytime I listen to something, I'm comparing it to a very precise memory in my head. If the pitch is off by a hundredth, there's subtle (dynamic) compression, or phasing issues, I know immediately.
Back when we were peddling 112 and 128kbps MP3s (y'know, 15 years ago), it was pretty obvious that our encoders sucked. You could hear the nasty phasing all over the high end. Today, with most dedicated rippers using "LAME -V0" or 256/320kbps CBR, I'll say that it is impossible to tell the difference on 99.9% of all music out there. Yes, you theoretically lose some high-frequency information above 19khz, but hardly any adults can hear those frequencies anyway, as our range of hearing degrades with age. At 32, I have supposedly great hearing, yet I can barely hear 18khz, and 19khz I can't really hear but just "feel" as pressure on my ears canal. The parts MP3 encoders discard, most people can't hear anyway, and even if we could, it's so high in the audio spectrum that it's just headache-inducing whine. In practice, many mastering engineers will filter that out anyway, because those frequencies are nothing but trouble, they can mess with playback on cheap (read: common) stereos, and are basically a waste of signal which could be better allocated to the mids.
The compression artifacts themselves, they are nothing like they were 15 years ago. If you really want to see how much sound is lost from compression, take an uncompressed WAV, convert it to MP3, then back to WAV. Pull a spectrogram for both the original and processed WAVs, and compare these in a graphics editor. If you're lazy, you can grab the screenshots from here instead. If you're using photoshop, change the blending mode to "Difference" on one of them. Any coloured pixels are the differences, while black means both images are identical.
So, that's digital compression. The other big thing audiophiles bitch about is dynamic compression, and that is an all-too real problem. This is the "brick wall" sound people often cite as the cancer that's killing music. It is the process by which quiet sounds are made disproportionately loud, resulting in the average signal level being louder across the entire album. Most common audio is stored as 16-bit data, this means there are 65536 different intensities available, from silence to maximum, across what is often quoted as 96dbfs of range. Most modern pop music crunches all the sound into the uppermost 6db, so you're kind-of getting 1/16th of the fidelity (yes my math is flawed). This makes crappy speakers and earbuds sound "better" (still shit), and good speakers sound equally shit. It's the sonic equivalent of turning the brightness and contrast on your TV all the way up, now everyone has bright red skin and look like cartoon characters. If you want a painful example of this distortion, cue up Metallica's Death Magnetic, the official CD or iTunes version. Then go find the Guitar Hero version of the same album on TPB and compare. The pressed version is brickwalled, the Guitar Hero version was mixed much more reasonably, in-line with past Metallica releases. Then if you want to hear the opposite, something with very wide dynamic range, try ZZ Top's Eliminator, or Van Halen's 1984. Björk's albums also tend to have good characteristics. You're looking for quiet sounds amid the louder ones - they might be the little squeaks of guitar strings or drum skins, or the long fade of a cymbal.
Back to our buddy boy Ian Shepherd... one of his recommendations for good dynamic range is Daft Punk's Tron Legacy soundtrack. This is pretty much an admission that the man is completely full of shit. Don't get
-Billco, Fnarg.com
CD bought from a store is what I use for archiving.
But who wants to re-rip every time they upgrade their gear?
I did most of my ripping prior to FLAC being a realistic option - heck even AAC was still considered synonymous with Apple lock-in - so I used LAME --preset extreme. I figure it's a good bet that MP3 will be supported in damn near everything for as long as it is useful to store your own music.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
MP3's have little to do with loudness or loudness wars. You can encode a quiet MP3, or one with soft and loud parts. The format has dynamic range.
The loudness wars are about manipulating music in the studio to make it, well, loud. As loud as possible within the number of bits per sample that go onto the CD (without compression!).
I have heard some albums mastered by Ian Shepherd. Several sound like crap with all the life compressed out of them. Pros that know what they are doing did stuff like you find on Mobile fidelity Gold masters. use ALL the dynamic range of the CD and make a recording that is BETTER than the Album. I have a copy of Supertramp crime of the century that will show anyone how good a CD can sound and how it can sound BETTER than an album. I have listened to raw tracks at studios on protools in the studio monitors that were incredible before they mashed them down.
99% of all CD's mastered in the past 20 years are utter crap with compression and dynamic range stomed so hard on them that the blood and soul was left on the floor of the sound booth.
Yeah, this man is no "expert" at anything but making a CD sound like shit. Otherwise he and his other "master" sound guys would tell the suits to shove things up their ass and make sure the dynamic range and life of the music was kept intact. Instead they say "yes sir, want me to turn up the autotune on the vocals and final mixdown compressor to 11?"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I for one welcome our lossless encoding overlords.
considering how many brilliant, sarcastic funny responses he has elicited...I espically like the acoustico gravity wooden knobs...
I upgraded my MP3s to AFLAC - not only do I get a better sound, but if I am off work for injury, I get paid cash to buy groceries
as a resident of Newton, MA, I'm sad to share my home town with Pear (typical of fly by night companies, there is no easy to find physical address - not even a mailing address on the website
So, according to this article, MP3's of music that's been heavily compressed don't sound good.
So maybe the problem is with MP3?
"Better" or "worse" when talking about digital music is highly subjective. There are some very interesting effects that can be achieved through manipulating dynamics.
Try to play an uncompressed recording at a dance club and see how it takes the air out of the room. What's good sometimes is not always good all the time.
Some of my favorite moments in recorded music came from things that sound "bad" to your average recording engineer or hi-fi enthusiast. The last person you want making musical decisions is a hi-fi enthusiast. And make no mistake, compression can be used very musically, from subtle effects that you don't notice except there's something about a song or recording that really gets you, to very non-subtle over-compressed aural assaults.
And I'm sorry if Bader Meinhoff Franfenfeurter or whatever the name of the guy who invented MP3 has his feelings hurt, but who cares if heavily compressed music doesn't sound good in Mp3? That's why God made flac. Plus, as the price of digital storage comes down, maybe we won't need to compress our files so drastically using lossy methods much longer.
Oh, by the way, if you're interested in remixing well-known recordings, you can often find uncompressed copies of the unmixed master tracks if you know where to look. They've been around "underground" for years. In fact, I learned the rudiments of digital mixing and musical post-production from a copy of Logic Audio and the master tracks from a bunch of Motown classic albums, starting with "Heard it Through the Grapevine" on an early PPC Mac (well, it was a new mac at the time). I can't give out any links because it would make me persona non grata in certain circles, but if you visit the right forum and you're polite, you might find someone to share the goodies with you.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You do realize, some of the best recordings I have ever heard were done in the 1980's. Both Deutsche Grammophon and Telarc recorded directly to analog tape. I have *yet* to hear anything digital that compares, no matter how carefully re-mastered. (classical music FTW)
C|N>K
Good Lord. Are people still confusing these two things? Words can have different meanings.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E5kCRsr4gQ
Did you take his FLAC of some song, and download an MP3 of the same song from a random website, and then compare the two? Because that means nothing.
No, here's what you should do... FLAC is a _lossless_ compressed format. So you can take that FLAC file and do a proper comparison with it. Just uncompress the FLAC into a WAV file, and feed that to the best MP3 encoder you can find, set for various bitrates (e.g. 192, 256 and 320). Then do your blind comparison using the resulting MP3 files.
Note, that if the FLAC file did not come from a real master, but is rather one of those crappy FLACs that somebody made by just decompressing an MP3 file and then re-compressing it as FLAC... then this test will still make the FLAC look better than it deserves because re-compressing the data (which has already been decimated by the first MP3 compressor's acoustic model) as MP3 will probably result in crappy sound quality.
But if you start with a real uncompressed sound source and run it through a quality MP3 encoder at 256kbps, almost nobody can tell the difference.
99.9% of people (not a scientific poll, just an guesstimation) listen to music with those crappy earbuds, while driving or on cheapo speakers.
Wonder how much of this mp3 vs flac business their ears can pick up.
Why even consider lossy compression any more? In the current world we have the luxury of plenty of cheap storage, so why not use it and just keep everything in CD quality. A 500 GB HDD can store about 1000 albums uncompressed (even more if you FLAC them).
This isn't a hardware issue, this is the issue of music fans thinking a CD is low quality if the volume doesn't red line their music player.
As an artist, if you make a recording and your CD/master is lower in volume than the typical commercial tripe people will assume it is of low quality. So you end up taking your CD/master to places like Music Masters where they apply the $50-60,000 compression units, and noise reducers to enhance its "red-line" potential.
This is the way the industry has been since at least 1993, and the only thing that has changed has been the introduction of lossy codecs. Lossy codecs have some interesting effects on their own where they tend to compress a sound, and ruin dynamics. Stuff that might only be a hidden layer on a CD can be very much front and center on an MP3/OGG.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
so that article links to a list of 9 good albums, one of which is Nirvana's Nevermind. note: the 2011 remaster is smashed to the wall, and, iirc, you could even hear clipping: http://i.imgur.com/i0Vag.png
Just look at the documentaries on how they made it. The recording equipment was really primitive by todays standards. Then there were the huge tape loops and other tricks that they use to get the sound that they wanted.
That will readily explain the 'sound shapes' you are seeing.
Ian Shepherd's mentioning that one should avoid 128kbit/s encoded MP3. This is leaving out a critical piece of information. Luckily he mentioned himself that heavily (audio) compressed music (data) compresses very badly. This will be especially evident if you force the encoder to only allocate a fixed number of bits to a section, called "Constant Bitrate" (CBR) in MP3 encoders. "Busy" sections will get the same data allotment as quiet sections. This problem can be diminished by using "Variable Bitrate" (VBR) mode when encoding, which encodes to a specific target quality rather than file size. With that, (LAME) MP3s can still sound good enough around 128kbit/s, since the encoder is free to allocate more bits to critical sections and less bits to non-critical section.
In short, there is no reason to use CBR encoding, unless your target device is unable to decode VBR encoded files, or you absolutely need to know the exact bandwidth requirement of a stream. It defeats the whole point of lossy encoding, which is to reproduce the original with highest possible fidelity, not reach a target file size.
I really don't want sound engineers bringing CDs back to the way they were before--that music sounded pathetically weak unless the receiver was turned up significantly, and the bass instruments were still somewhat muted even if the bass drum had dominant presence. Seriously, put in a compressed dynamic range disc, then listen to the non-compressed dynamic range disc
I'm aware of the difference, and I absolutely hate the compression and clipping that more than undoes the quality gain we had when the cd was introduced.
Why not let your audio playback equipment handle it, instead of adding the distortion in the studio, so that people who prefer an undistorted sound can have it? Not everybody shares your taste, not even all people who listen to the same genres you listen to. You should be able to make the decision for yourself without making it for everyone. What you ask for is to solve your problem in the wrong place.
Dynamic Range Day?
TODAY???
Good luck promoting that on your St. Patrick's Day parties....
"Hey DJ, can you turn the volume up and down a bit? It's Dynamic Range Day today...."
bickerdyke
There's a reason for all the compression in popular music, and that's the conditions under which people listen. Dynamic range is fine in a lab, but I listen mainly to eighteenth and nineteenth-century music with very broad dynamic range and find that unless I'm in a nearly silent room, I her only a little piano and nothing pianissimo or softer. In a car, forget it, most symphonic music is completely unlistenable unless you keep turning the volume up and down. The very narrow dynamic range of most pop music makes it audible and enjoyable even when played on cheap equipment in noisy surroundings. As for the loudness of the mixes, well, there's no excuse for that.
MTV still broadcasts music videos? Where? All we (The Netherlands) get is My Super-Sweet-Jersey-Pranked-Pregnant-Circus. I vaguely remember MTV playing these "video-clips" in the past though.
What does the average joe want? Booming bass and vocals mangled by whatever that weird pitch effect is almost every popular track seems to have these days
I've tried sharing 64, amiga, and Super Nintendo music on facebook but most people think it sounds like junk. They don't appreciate that electronic sound. (shrug).
Try sharing some remixes instead. Listen to http://slayradio.org and download the remixes from http://remix.kwed.org/
btw. Slayradio is great for coding :).
For the most part, the actual sound quality is not the problem :)
Joking aside, 99%%of the population cant tell the differences. Also, convenience always wins out over quality.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Does Amazon even sell lossless, or must one have plastic shipped in order to lawfully acquire lossless files?
In the same vein, there's a lossless MP3 format.
The excessively loud tracks remind of the old Wall of Sound production. LPs and AM radio had lousy dynamic range, so they blasted you. CDs have excellent dynamic range, WoS sounded awful, and the most effective CD recordings were the raw, almost live-sounding recordings.
Now with MP3 and loudness wars, we're back to WoS. I didn't like it then. I don't like it now. ...laura
Since limiters are what are being used in the loudness wars. Compressors are used in music production, but they aren't what is used to drive levels to the roof. It is look-ahead peak limiters, that Waves one I linked to being one of the premiere tools. You can squeeze the shit out of a track with it before it ruins the sound completely.
I'm speaking as someone who actually owns and has played with said tools. You can use a compressor, if you like (a compressor, limiter, expander, and gate are all the same thing from a programming standpoint, just different values being fed in) but a peak limiter is what you do use because it is easy and gets the results you want. In the case of the L3 just drag that far left slide down and everything gets louder. The other settings can change the timbre, or allow you to further optimize to squash it even harder.
And record companies wonder why they aren't doing well. Reduced dynamic range, too-slow sampling rate, cookie-cutter songs. Recipe for fail, baby. You can only sell the sizzle so long before your customer gets hungry and goes elsewhere.
Somebody above mentioned crappy speakers are the rule these days, not the exception. Its true, they -are- crappy. When you play music that's been badly mastered and had all the life compressed out of it, with a low sample rate, stored with a lossy codec, it already sounds boring. Play that boring record on a pair of crappy speakers that have hot-spots, dead spots and no high frequency response, driven incidentally by an amplifier which ALSO has no decent frequency response and is noisy, you get boring-squared, and in the end you can't even tell who's singing. Prince sounds like Britney Spears, and they both sound like Lady Gaga yelling into a pillow.
So people are going to -pay- to hear that mush? NO, they download it instead or get it off their friends, duh. That's the record biz in a nutshell these days, pedal to the metal for bankruptcy.
You can't fix stupid.
show me a $20 portable flac player and i'm on board. aac? wtf. why would i be getting music from itunes?
it's sad that my kids aren't able to appreciate the full depth and resonance and dynamics of their favorite vocal stylists chanting obscenities in an angry monotone.
Dynamic compression overuse kills the natural breathing when you listen to music, the recording rapidly approaches white noise and looks like a solid rectangle when viewed with an audio editor.
Obviously people listening to overcompressed music for long periods are getting in trouble. The problem is the labels keep demanding sound engineers to produce this crap.
When you leave the dynamics in your music alone, you can listen comfortably for hours. Compress them away and your head starts hurting quickly... And they wonder why sales are going down...
Artix
Your Linux, your init.