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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."
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).
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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.
Of course. Cars made of plain, cheap, sheet steel might look great when you first get them, but store them in a leaky garage for a few years and they'll be rusty and broken, and a real problem to drive. Cars made of "Exotic" materials like Aluminium and Carbon Fibre are more expensive to purchase initially, but if you left them in the same leaky garage there would be no (or at least fewer) problems with rusting or breaking down.
Does this fulfill my nerd quotia for the day?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>>>soundwaves always peak at the maximum floor and ceiling levels
Hardly. The C64 has a volume control. 0 to 255 if I recall correctly, so the music could range from soft to loud (not maxed-out like today's CDs). Ditto other "chip music" produced by Atari 800s or Commodore Amigas.
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). BTW http://www.lemon64.com/ let's you hear 64 music directly over the web.
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PS did I say monster cables? I meant Pear Cables. I would have written that correctly, but I forgot to drape my pear cables around my keyboard.
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).
I'm sort of afraid to buy remastered versions of old classic rock albums, because I'm worried they will actually sound worse [youtube.com] than the originals!
They do. I used to use the oscillosope plugin for winamp, and you could directly see the effect of range compression. I think I did a comparison of new vs old versions of the same song, and it wasn't pleasant. For sure, the old, unmastered albums (like Dark Side of the Moon) had interesting structure even visually on the scope. I compared it to a modern album and it looked completely tortured on the scope.
The worst I ever heard was a green day greatest hits album (I know, I know, blank CD), which was so distorted that even as a non-audiophile, I couldn't even listen to it.
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
Anon Cow has a point, if not blunt. Most people have non discriminating ears till you really get some square waving going, so mp3 is fine for cd. It will get blasted from average home stereo speakers, 6x9 car speakers and crammed into Wal-Mart earbuds after being ripped with the V.U. pegging the red zone anyway.
I've listened to scratchy 78s , old 45s, modern vinyl, reel to reel, 8-track,cassette,DAT and hard drive on everything from audiophile to crap to P.A. systems.
Audiophile music has survived popular culture thus far. Mp3 isn't going to harm anydamnthing. The sky isn't falling. Relax.
I do however expect flac to become standard for bands smart enough to give away their music to promote themselves. What balls to fly in the chin of the music industry who doesn't dare pull a stunt like that.
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Hearing recovers just fine, given time. The ear is much better at healing than had been thought at one time. What does NOT heal with time is the brain's ability to process sound. The brain cannot learn to distinguish sounds it never gets the chance to hear. Give someone who has poor sensitivity long enough exposure to quality audio systems and they'll KNOW there's a difference. They may not be able to quantify what that improvement is, but they WILL know that there is a difference.
Bring someone up right, from the very beginning, and the difference will be so great that low-quality sound will be painful for them to hear. As it damn well should be.
Anyone can be inured to crap, and lose their sensitivity, but that doesn't make the crap any better. It makes the person that much less.
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Indeed. And it can lead to strange effects. The other day I was listening to some music on the radio (I forget what) where the singer started out with what was probably a quiet solo. After a while the orchestra swelled in the background. The singer's voice should have increased in volume to sing over top of the orchestra, but because the music was so heavily compressed, their voice actually diminished in volume while still being over top of the orchestra. The overall volume stayed the same.
I remember thinking, "Well, that's bizarre". It completely ruined the song. The soft, quiet part was annoyingly loud, with the singer's voice piercing my eardrums, and as the song built momentum and energy, the singer kept getting quieter and quieter.
Hey, I'll have you know girls LOVE the bass player buddy! Its not our fault them damned whiny guitarist and pretty boy singers keep getting in our way and hogging all the spotlight! Oh and ladies? just remember those whiny little guitarists are all rush rush rush and singers will fight you for the mirror, but we bass players are great with our fingers and now how to build a nice slow groove. Just sayin, something to think about. Just don't think about it around me as my Cherokee princess is liable to scalp my ass. Word of advice fellas, ain't nothing more scary than a NAP (Native American Princess) with a case of the green eyed monster, talk about feeling like Custer!
Oh and as for earplugs? can't wear 'em, they throw the tone off so damned bad it makes me literally trip over my own fingers. I really need the full range of the 5 string to be able to groove and with the earplugs you lose the low mids, it sounds like you are trying to play while you have water in your ears, so not fun. I've learned not to stand anywhere near the crash and to put my bass amp cocked off to the side instead of blasting at me and instead have a custom mix in a monitor so I can control the volume a little better.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
While heavily compressed MP3s sound worse than FLAC, even FLAC doesn't sound like a recording of natural music. And that's because of the simple fact that a 44.1 KHz sample rate isn't fast enough to catch the details of sounds like:
Go ahead and mod me down again for being able to identify and tag the difference between live music and 44.1 samples again. After all, just because you can't hear it must mean I'm "delusional."
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
First, if people ever give you shit about being a bass player, show them Victor Wooten. Too many bass players just jam on one string, move down a note, and repeat. There's a lot of potential with the instrument.
Secondly, the idea isn't to block out the music you're playing - it's to block out the volume. The standard solution I've heard of is to have noise-cancelling headsets with everyone's instrument piped into them but at a much lower volume. The point is volume reduction.
I see very, very few musicians that actually give a shit about their hearing, sadly.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)