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Quiet Victories Won In the Loudness Wars
Stowie101 writes with a few pieces from an article on what's been happening in the fight against over-compressed radio music and deafening tv commercials: "The first major step towards the elimination of heavily-compressed music could be the International Telecommunications Union's ... measurement of loudness that was ... revised in 2011. ... Acting to rectify the problem on the broadcast side of the issue, many European and Asian broadcasters are adopting loudness standards that are based on the criteria first introduced by the ITU. Here in the U.S., the federal government has also been proactive to improve the quality of broadcast television. By the end of 2012, the broadcast community will have to follow the CALM Act that requires commercials to be played at the same volume as broadcast television. In terms of music and recording, these broadcast standards do not apply. But Shepherd theorizes the measurement standards will be applied to the production of music. 'Measuring loudness, in general, isn't easy. Now the ITU has agreed on a new "loudness unit:" the LU. You can measure short- and longer-term loudness over a whole song. They've also agreed on guidelines for broadcast; what the average loudness should be and how much you can vary it. The recommendation has been made law in the U.S. for advertisements and is also being adopted in the U.K. and all over the world. All the major broadcasters here — Sky, the BBC, ITV — have agreed to follow the standard.'"
You mean, by making choice between Company A, Station 1 and Company A, Station 2?
Man, are naive, idiot or just a kid?
it's true! once we get rid of invasive state copyright protection, we'd be one step closer to true competition among broadcasters.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
We really don't need all this extra layer of oversight here, the industry is capable of regulating itself once people have had more time to make their opinions known and choose stations whose practices they agree with.
Because that worked so well in the past. This "Self Regulation" is what caused the problem in the first place.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Sorry I ran out of breath to laugh any longer.
I have a decibel meter app on my phone and I've seen levels go from the middle 50s during the program to the upper 60s during the ads.
The app isn't probably that accurate but that is a really big jump, enough to cause me pain sometimes. There is one ad from a local lawyer that jumps up to 70 at one point.
Guess who I won't be calling for legal services.
The industry has listened to and ignored citizen complaints for 50 years. What makes you think they will change now?
Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro
This is the perfect example of what is wrong with the US system. This does not belong as a law. There is no harm to people. It tramples on free speech.
But someone found it annoying. And now we have another law. More costs. Less freedom. And no real gain.
The public's airwaves, the public's rules.
Don't like it? Don't use public resources to distribute your speech.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
And no real gain.
Less gain is the whole point.
The law was passed because too many audio sources had excessive gain.
If you want music, you're pretty much restricted to getting it from one of three big companies. All three companies have already demonstrated a concerted "need" to make their music louder than everyone else's, even if it's not "top-40 crap". And there's little point saying "Get it in CD form, rather than a DRM'd MP3 download, then", because they're using brick-wall filters on CDs too ("Metallica - Death Magnetic", anyone?)
The Loudness war, in both music and TV/Radio ads, has been brought up before. The consensus then seemed to be "If you don't buy the compressed crap and they'll stop compressing it". That hasn't worked at all, which means it's time to legislate. Remember, they had to legislate to get seatbelts and airbags in cars.
"By the end of 2012, broadcast televisionâ¦"
Broadcast what?
Oh, I think I've heard of this. It's like YouTube if you could only choose one of 6 videos to watch, someone else decided when to hit "play" and they made you watch 3 minutes of ads for every 7 minutes of video.
more a matter of "no regulation". just a medium with a defined peak and no consequences in hardware for driving the average too high.
vinyl had physical limits that would make the music sound like shit if they were exceeded, and in extreme cases would cause the disc to be unplayable. CDs don't have that problem. they can be 16khz, fullscale, 100% of the time and pass verification, but will pass the hardware problems down the line (to your tweeters in this case - they'll burn even if the speaker is running well below it's rated max power).
things were made worse considering people in the pop music target audience would often brag about blowing their speakers up...
This exact same line of reasoning has been used to support the notion that there are certain words you can never say on television.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
I have a right to speech. I do not have the right to scream in your ear at the top of my lungs in order to get my spittle on your face and make sure I'm the only one you can listen to.
Hearing damage has a cost, increased stress levels has a cost, annoyance has a cost.
Telemarketers have free speech too, you know. I don't hear you complaining about us passing laws saying that they can't call us. Cause they're fucking annoying.
My kingdom for a donkey!
free speech? what are you smoking?
i'm sure police will arrest anyone who takes a marshall stack out on the street, maxes it out, and exercises "free speech" through a microphone...
the act simply says you have free speech, not free shout.
More significant is that CALM is based on a model of accoustic perception which is much more complex than peak/RMS amplitude. For one, human hearing is more sensitive at specific frequencies (e.g. speech and crying babies, and probably any resonant frequencies of our skull). For another, sharp/percussive peaks tend to be perceived as quieter (or at least less annoying!) than equal-volume sustained tones. So compressing a drumset beat and some attorney's voice to the same "average" range means that the music will sound quieter than the advertisement. So whether CALM normalizes at the broadcaster or at the end-user, it should be strictly better because its measurement more accurately models perception and should have less error inherently.
Also, piling in against the free-market spin doctor: broadcasters are granted a form of monopoly due to limited resources for transmission. They should be regulated and hand-slapped for what appears to be blatant disregard for their government-granted customer base.
more a matter of "no regulation". just a medium with a defined peak and no consequences in hardware for driving the average too high.
There have been consequences in software though.
MythTV has been using the difference in loudness/dynamic range to identify and skip commercials. I hope these measures don't compromise that, I'd hate to have to start watching adverts again...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
If you want music, you're pretty much restricted to getting it from one of three big companies
Ok, this calls for one huge WTF? The big labels are the LAST place to go for good music. They are there for the clueless masses. You're a slashdot reader, so probably smarter than the average clueless Joe - you deserve better! I can't tell you what you like, but there's a whole WORLD of music out there that never touched RIAA hands. Explore it. Most actually good music does not come from the big labels. Stop listening to what you're told to. Start thinking with your own mind.
That hasn't worked at all, which means it's time to legislate
If it hasn't worked at all, then most people don't mind it, and legislating uncompressed music is the wrong thing. Let the masses have their compressed RIAA shit, and move on - never mind what the media tells you to listen to. If you don't like compressed music (I don't either) then do what I did: stop listening to it. You'll find much better music, made by real artists not "produced acts" with autotune and the like.
The summary is conflating so many issues.
Yes, loud commercials are obnoxious.
Yes, overly compressed music diminishes it. In a good listening environment a nice dynamic range is good.
But compression isn't inherently bad. Large dynamic range stinks in my car, which is loud (I need to do something about the gasket by the driver's window). It stinks on the crappy speakers on my netbook and the built-in speakers on this display I'm using now.
It can help (with a limiter) in having to keep going to the volume bar too, or for watching a movie at night when you don't want to wake the kids.
If anybody wants some automatic control for PulseAudio I hacked up a workable solution last summer, just 'cause I got annoyed one day. PA makes it a bitch to install these things, but I've got an SRPM at least for the library. Need to write a short doc and send the patches upstream still, but drop me a line if you want it anyway.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This exact same line of reasoning has been used to support the notion that there are certain words you can never say on television.
Yep and those laws are pretty well established.
I'd prefer a system that didn't reserve airwaves for big spenders making the airwaves more democratic, but until that happens, here we are.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Yes, the public has been ignored, research even ordered destroyed when it didn't support the pre-determined outcome.
The story
http://web.archive.org/web/20090123153744/http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/09/18/senator_says_media_study_suppressed/
The suppressed report
http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-267448A1.pdf
Some PBS coverage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEoKXKUnLsY
PBS transcript
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11162007/transcript5.html?print
more PBS info
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11162007/profile2.html
Info related to Providence Equity (where a former FCC chair went)
www.sungarddx.com/pdf/Data_Exchange_Fundraising.pdf
Loud commercials have been addressed before. If the ad agency has used aggressive audio processing, and uses less energy at bass frequencies, the station actually needs special equipment to sense the higher average energy and compensate. The peak voltage value can be the same with a large difference in loudness.
To those that think so-called market forces make things good, explain why we've now got those half-hour infomercials, 18+ minutes of ads an hour instead of 9 to 11, and far less depth and diversity in news coverage. The same former FCC chair that Bill Moyers talks about taking a job at a major communications-oriented venture capital group has since become head of the cable-tv industry group that pushed for the Comcast/NBC/Universal merger. Cable companies don't want broadcast tv to be excellent.
I'm a broadcast tech at a license-funded TV station in Norway, so we don't have to deal with advertising volume jumps, but in general, we aim to follow the already-established EBU recommendation 128, which specifies loudness.
Indeed, the spec is publically available: http://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf
toresbe
If you had read the article or the title, or summary, you'd have read that the article is about the volume of commercials, not the content or material being sold.
If you want to turn this into a free speech issue, you have the right to speak about whatever you want, but you don't have the right to grab someone by the ear and then scream into it.
My kingdom for a donkey!
Great. Now what are they gonna do about the loudness wars being waged every day by the children in my neighborhood? I finally got the brats off my lawn, now can they get 'em to STFU? It's like living in the Amazon basin next to a colony of howler monkeys.
Well, by all means, enjoy the smug self-satisfaction you seem to derive from a personal taste in music with no room for pop, but - what if you're an audio engineer with a well-developed ear rendering over-compression as very jarring, but you still like pop music?
I loves me some ABBA, and not only does the technical production not get in the way of my enjoying their stuff, but it's pulled off so well that it's a not-insignificant part of my enjoyment.
toresbe
Less gain is the whole point.
The law was passed because too many audio sources had excessive gain.
Gain is a meaningless term in the context you're using it - gain specifies a signal amplitude relative to a reference. In amplifying circuits, gain relative to the source signal - and when used to measure amplitude, the gain is relative to either a set voltage (dBm or dBu) or in the digital world, relative to full amplitude (dBFS).
The problem is amplitude. At what stages any gain was applied is not the issue.
toresbe
dB needs no baseline. from mid 50s to upper 60s is 12 dB (just to assign a number to it). That difference is 8x as loud. Absent any other information, it's not unreasonable to assume that to be correct, and there's no need to know what the TV was set at, the 8x difference would likely remain the same, unless it was reaching the mechanical limits of the system on either end.
Learn to love Alaska
^^^Agreed. Some of my favorite bands are big label bands. Other favorites are indie label bands...
Why limit your musical taste based on the frickin record label? Seems retarded if you ask me...
Lets not forget we are NOT talking about file compression here but audio Compression that adjusts the gain on an audio analogue input.
Leaving out the discussion of Ad loudness, I always marvel at the many different ways that compression can be used in audio production. It's so easy to get it wrong and I always give it a lot of attention when I produce audio. There is aart in it :-) and the thing about using compression right is not to crush the transients that give music dynamic range. It terms of an emotive response this is the difference between turning music up (because it's exciting to listen too) or down (because it's a compressed moosh of noise).
Talking Heads "Stop Making Sense" and Tool's "Anima" are great examples of compression used properly but even these recordings can be butchered by a crappy psychoacoustic file compression. I think the differences are what produce many differences of opinion on this subject. Waveforms such as crash cymbals and ambient sounds are generally ruined by this processing especially when it is close to a more significant transient sound. I do listen to a lot of music so I may be more sensitised to it than most but the lossy way mp3 (and other formats) makes me wonder when we will start to have a conversation about the quality of this form of compression.
It would be great to be able to start talking about the music again instead of the media.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It's not about debt or anything that complicated. Just restoring regulations THAT WE HAD YEARS AGO would help immensely. Same story as with banking. Those regulated pushed to do away with the regulations and then really bad things happened. It's all about greed.
A fair amount of freedom in running businesses and healthy competition is usually good. But the changes made in broadcast ownership REDUCED competition. And if investment bankers want to be involved in high risk investments it should be only with fund owned by those willing to take the risks, not with taxpayer insured depositors money from traditional savings/checking banking.
Broadcasters traditionally have an important role to serve the public interest. If we did away with PAID radio/tv political ads, using only fairly doled out community service time, there'd be far less money inviting corruption in campaigns. Obviously limiting fund-raising has failed. But doing away with a major part of the spending would really help.
Has anyone noticed that Christmas season ads start at Thanksgiving or even Halloween, and they didn't years ago? Blame the FCC rule change on ads. Stations used to voluntarily pick a limit on how many minutes an hour of ads they run, and could exceed that two weeks a year. So ads would go nuts before Christmas (and elections when held). Now that insanely heavy level of ads has become the norm.
But discomfort is wildly subjective, and "sudden discomfort" may be reported as "pain" even without triggering any pain sensors.
Learn to love Alaska
If less gain was applied, less amplitude would result.
Learn to love Alaska
The issue is that human hearing is more sensitive at certain frequencies, and a mechanical sum of loud doesn't properly represent the perception of loud.
Learn to love Alaska
Everything should just be produced/engineered/mastered with the Replaygain 89 dB target in mind. All albums should come out needing zero correction to meet that, leaving all the more dynamic range intact. All TV soundtracks should be that loud, too. Movies used to follow a similar standard, and should again.
We really don't need all this extra layer of oversight here, the industry is capable of regulating itself
Yeah, we do. There are a lot of really stupid people out there that will fuck everything up for everybody if they think they can make a quick buck doing it. I like having as much freedom as possible, but this is yet another case that has already proven to to require the government to step in and tell the retarded children to quit playing with the gain knob and just focus on hawking their crap.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
There doesn't really need to be outside competition for a company to change, at least in theory. If the A company notices that station 1 and 2 are doing things differently and that one is getting more ears, they might want to know why. They might find out it's because station 2 doesn't play loud commercials, and people like that, and they'll get people listening to both if they limit the noise.
There's always competition with radio even if all the radio stations are owned by the same parent company: you can turn it off.
I'd disagree with GP in any case though: consumers aren't that smart. If I listen to station 2, whether or not it's owned by a different company based on how annoying their commercials are, I'm going to be outweighed by people who don't care.
Gain is a meaningless term in the context you're using it
Not in the chosen context: a humorous bad pun.
But if you want to be a stereotypical humorless pedantic nerd, I also happen to be an electrical engineer. I'll define the reference as the output level of the musicians' microphones. The overall signal gain of the music industry system between the musicians' microphones and the consumers' DACs has been set too high.
Awesome post... but I have a nitpick, sorry::
For one, human hearing is more sensitive at specific frequencies
yes, this is absolutely true
(e.g. speech and crying babies, and probably any resonant frequencies of our skull).
no, I don't think any of these are examples.
Human speech ranges from 300 Hz to as high as 3.4 kHz, but most commonly and generally hover between 800 Hz and 1200 Hz. Humans don't perceive 1kHz as being louder, but 4kHz always sounds louder and sounds at this frequency tend to cause the listener ear fatigue.
A baby's cry is closer to that 4kHz loudly percieved and tiring frequency, but at around 3.4 kHz at its highest, it's below it enough that I'm nearly certain that's not the reason a baby's cry sounds louder. I believe the reason we hear a baby's cry as louder has more to do with the evolution of the hypothalamus and less to do with the actual frequency of a normal baby's cry. If we pitch shift the frequency of a baby's cry, or even reduce the sound pressure, it still stands out against a background of random noise, such as sounds of lots of people talking or a cacophony of wild animal sounds, because we have evolved to recognize the timbre of this sound, which is more distinct than its natural frequency range. The hypothalmus allows us to filter perceptions... but filtering out a baby's cry is universally accepted as being nearly impossible (I'm sure it can be done, but the mere fact that most find it unsettling or irritating and before long will seak to quell it speaks volumes).
The human skull has been shown to resonate at frequencies between 500Hz and 7.5kHz... so that's pretty much where we hear everything... we certainly hear below 500Hz and above 7.5kHz, but that's such a huge chunk of our normal hearing spectrum that it's unlikely there is any particular frequency we hear louder because of skull resonance.
Regardless of this, again, nice post.
The Admin and the Engineer
Untrue. Vinyl imposes lots of additional limitations, and is much more complicated than a binary "too loud" "not too loud". The louder you cut a record, the wider the groove is. The wider the groove is, the fewer grooves you can physically fit on the record, and thus the less music you can fit per side. If you cut an LP as hot as a typical modern CD (And I'm not even talking a LOUD modern CD, just an average one), you could only fit 12-14 minutes per side. A hot track, and that number will be more like 10 minutes. Whereas with the (sane) mastering common 40 years ago, 20-21 minutes per side was typical, although there were some compromises there too...optimal quality peaks at about 17 minutes per side or so. A recording without a lot of dynamic range, with the loudness turned down a bit (like a live album), and 25 minutes per side isn't at all unreasonable.
TODO: Something witty here...
This exact same line of reasoning has been used to support the notion that there are certain words you can never say on television.
The FCC exists because 100+ years ago, assclowns with radios were making false distress calls, cursing at people on the airwaves, and faking naval messages.
In 1912, power to regulate the airwaves was given to the United States Secretary of Commerce and Labor
In 1927 it was handed over to the newly created Federal Radio Commission and
in 1934 it was handed over to the newly created Federal Communications Commission
/Early regulation of the airwaves is a textbook example of regulatory capture.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
for audio sensitive individuals everywhere! wink wink nod nod
because 70dB is well below the threshold of pain.
He mentioned a "local" ad from a lawyer. I would imagine even at 1db it would cause pain. Possibly even with mute on.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
A section of historic FCC rules for radio is here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=Sbw8AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA150&lpg=PA150&dq=steps+shall+be+taken+to+preserve+dynamic+characteristics+of+music&source=bl&ots=B2uXF56uEj&sig=K4gC8p4b1LaXyTTt6VsgnNFpdO4&hl=en
The phrase "However, precautions shall be taken so as not to substantially alter the dynamic characteristics of musical programs" was removed after being in the rules only a short time. Many broadcasters protested, wanting to use very aggressive audio processing. Sometime it was to sound loud than the competition (doesn't work when everyone does it), sometimes it was to help hide the noises present with a marginal signal.
There were past loudness rules for ads. Here are the full details of what's being proposed for DTV now. DTV audio has generally been better and more dynamic. However when programs are dynamic, the average loudness is lower, making commercials stand out even more.
https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2011/06/03/2011-13822/implementation-of-the-commercial-advertisement-loudness-mitigation-calm-act
Has anyone noticed that Christmas season ads start at Thanksgiving or even Halloween, and they didn't years ago?
Mostly I've been noticing people saying that. Every year. For the 20+ years i"ve been paying attention.
Maybe 30 or 35 years past it was that way - and it would be great if it were that way again - but that wasnow literally more than a generation ago.
Music is compressed because it's played in crappy environments: low end players, cars, etc. These days, cars come with compression features in their sound systems so that you can listen to something more high-end such as classical without breaking your ear drums in the loud sections in order to hear the quiet sections at all. Back in the day there was an astute observation that rock should sound great on a crappy radio.
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/10/12/03/1512249/House-Passes-TV-Commercial-Volume-Bill
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
Maybe the AC is not aware that the Supreme Court has only ever recognized limited constitutional protection for commercial speech.
I wonder if AC is signed up for the National Do Not Call Registry.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
And if they could force those aholes who crave attention on their bike toys by making so much noise it rattles you in your own home to reduce it to reasonable levels I'd really appreciate it. You can ride a bike without being a bone rattling prick.
You seem confused as to the definition of regulatory capture. Nothing that you have posted shows that FCC regulations are made to favor incumbent interests. Simple expansion of laws to cover new circumstances is not "regulatory capture" it is, at worst, scope creep.
> And no real gain.
Except pre-recorded music that doesn't sound like shit on quality stereo gear.
This is actually an example of *good* legislation. The whole reason the "loudness war" happened in the first place was pressure from upper management on recording engineers (who, by and large, knew why doing it was bad, and who were mostly forced to go along with it if they wanted to remain employed) to make their next CD a little louder than everybody else's, until we got to the point where a 2004 pop CD was quantized to levels once exclusively the realm of a Telarc *DIGITAL CANON* in a recording of 1812 Overture whose main purpose was to show off your kilowatt-RMS amp and array of subwoofers. What the government did in this case was let the engineers off the hook. When management asks them to "pump up the volume", they can say, "Sure, I can do that. But no radio station in the country will play it, and all the money we're spending to promote the artist will be for naught. Do you still want me to do it, or would you like me to master a recording that sounds good and that radio stations will be able to play?"
I want immersive, clipping-free digital audio back like we had when I was in college. If it literally takes an act of Congress to ensure that 95% of the audio on a 16-bit CD quantizes to an absolute value of 0x3FFF or less, so be it. Now get off my lawn, or I'll have to remind your parents what digital canons sound like when you have a kilowatt (RMS) amp and a pair of 18-inch JL Audio subs in the trunk...
I bet you're a hit at parties.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I'm sorry. It was 6AM here at work and when I read the comment it had not yet been moderated as funny. I simply didn't perceive it as being intended humorously.
toresbe
i'm aware of these things.
but even a dumb, unweighted RMS over 200ms measured _at the output_ would be more useful than -20 EBU-R128 LUFS measured on the tape before it goes to the broadcaster. get my point? in the latter scenario, the broadcaster has free reign to turn the volume up as much as they want. in the former, that's taken into account, because they're measuring the loudness that goes into the viewer's TV.
> This already exists, it's called RMS (Root mean square).
The problem is, a given amount of power doesn't produce the same perceived loudness across the entire audio spectrum. The LU calculation deprives the music industry of its former ability to game the system by focusing the most energy on the narrow band of frequencies that are perceived as being the loudest.
RMS is a nice, simple concept that works well for measuring amplifier power of a 1KHz sine wave at a given max percentage THD, but it's too easy to game when using it to predict loudness. Unless you want popular music to devolve to little more than powerchords striving to emulate the "The Deep Note" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtIOhYqrr00) and throwing everything they have at the range of human hearing that gives them the most loudness per watt, we need something a little better than RMS.
a baby's cry can be ignored... but the baby will just try again, and louder (MUCH louder).
i'm so glad my 13 month old is so well behaved.
It never would work that way. Basic game theory always predicts that rational agents engage in a 'race to the bottom.' Just like how the Prisoner's Dilemma puts both players in prison, if some underhanded technique even has the potential to make one firm more competitive, it is guaranteed to become an industry standard. "Voting with your dollars" doesn't work. It can't work.
Economics 101 should be mandatory.
RMS and loudness aren't the same thing.
His data may not be perfect but it is good enough for relative measures. You'd have to be living under a rock with your head in the sand (or profoundly deaf) to not notice the way the volume jumps at each commercial break.
And that's even discounting the dirty tricks like compressing the commercials to the point of terrible sound quality to squeeze a bit more loudness out and other dirty tricks with the audio to fool TVs with 'smart volume' type systems meant to limit the loudness jumps.
.
Movies have started to improve with THX certification. Over compressed crud doesn't pass muster. Now if we can get THX certified CD recordings to match.
An explosion sounds impressive in the movies due to the dynamic range. An explosion on McGuyver does not rattle anything because it is compressed so talking is loud enough. If TV didn't compress programs, the commercials would be at explosion levels.
The truth shall set you free!
Sure, but have you called them up and told them that. It's much more fun to go out of your way to say that you'll never contemplate using them because of their obnoxious advert.
What is needed is the capacity to run custom software on our hardware. let me explain.
Why not make it easy to run software developed to control the loudness of audio? A dynamic volume button if you will.
This can be useful in other domains, like censoring explicit content from my children from an otherwise good movie by using software to identify and black out screens, mute, etc, on criteria I supply to my personal censor tool.
The point. Put the free market at work by opening hardware.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Sometimes. The world is not black and white.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
People need to remember that one of the reasons the "loudness wars" started in the first place was producer/label/artist A wanted his song/album to sound "louder" than producer/label/artist B. The question is, why?
A very simple answer: "louder" is almost always perceived as better. It's about standing out above the rest.
Take for example - given a set of 20 songs played in a club, all at roughly the same "loudness". Along comes one track which is "louder" than the rest. Chances are very high that more people in the club will take notice of this track. We're predispositioned to perceiving anomalies in our everyday lives, so something that is out of the ordinary (e.g. the louder track in this example) grabs our attention more than the other tracks. And at that point, the crowd would go "man, that track is really pumping".
The other issue is that the mastering engineer (who makes these kinds of calls about how "loud" or "hot" a track is before getting burnt to the master) is being paid to do something according to his client's needs. So if the producer wants the track louder, and is the one footing the bill, then there's not much the mastering engineer can do. So if the paymaster wants a loud track, that's what he will get. If mastering engineer A sticks to his guns, the producer's just going to go to another mastering house, which will mean revenue lost.
Another way to put it - if the customer wants to buy Windows NT and is dead set on this, no amount of enlightening by the consultant about the benefits of a Unix-based platform is going to change what the customer wants.
So yeah, these two factors combine and the result: the loudness wars.
The Wknd Sessions - Malaysian and South East Asia independent music
Actually the customer already did: They complained enough to make it a regulatory issue.
Why go for the symptoms if you can also go for the root (or at least closer to it) of the problem.
That's a very fitting description; "the old and the dull". I could not agree more, that's exactly how I view people that watch TV these days. My parents generation still watches TV, but everyone else I know and my siblings stream/torrent their content.
I remember reading this article about an ABC executive and her daughter, it described the new reality very well:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/business/media/04hulu.html?_r=1&ref=global
It's not about debt or anything that complicated. Just restoring regulations THAT WE HAD YEARS AGO would help immensely
Yeah, the Government should decide how we listen to music. They sure have had some great ideas about Internet privacy. Power to the government! Sorry I couldn't resist a little snark :P
I'm unconvinced. Myself, I'd rather not have regulation that says we need to regulate the Internet like a series of tubes. How about, we all just listen/buy the stuff we like, and ignore the lame? It's not like we don't have literally millions of entertainment sources. When you involve regulation and Government you get the politicians and Big Money involved. I don't think those guys have our best interests at heart...
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
There's an old quote from the late 1800s where someone grumbled that Christmas seemed to start earlier every year - so early, they said, that barely has december started than Christmas takes over. Christmas today starts at the beginning of October, when the first advertising starts. So that's an advancement of two months per century. Extrapolating wildly, that means by the year 2500 Christmas will be in effect continually.
Such a tool was actually ruled illegal in the US, prior to 2005. Then congress passed a law, the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, to overturn the court decision and thus make 'parential controls' legal, under pressure from the pro-family crowd and a sympathetic group of republicans. Including Hatch.
But, being a Hatch bill, it also increased the penalty for noncommercial copyright infringement with a three year jail sentence if the work infringed was not yet published for public distribution. Ten years for repeat infringement... and that in addition to all of the already-existing civil and criminal penalties.
Just a little harsher, and they can start on the executions.
The broadcasters have a state-given license to use a scarce resource (certain frequencies). Damn right citizens are entitled to put conditions on that. If the broadcaster doesn't like them he can transmit inside his own property.
Dilbert RSS feed
There's an advert for Go Compare, a car insurance comparison site in the UK, which has people across the nation running for the remote and the mute button. The person who sings in it has received death threats. Even has his own hate page on facebook.
As a fellow Norwegian I wonder how long it will matter? While your employer, Norwegian Public Television and Radio (NRK) is very innovative with its open source, free BitTorrent and multi-platform content streaming I foresee a bleak future. I imagine the costs are simply going to skyrocket with the future demands for streaming and development.
Small European public broadcasters like ours are bound to either lose their access to license funding, have to accept commercials or must ask parliament to introduce new licenses that cover online media and platforms such as smartphones, PCs and other devices.
I don't see that happening in Norway at the moment due to public opposition to such "unfair" taxes. It would be far better if it was done over the national budget without the extra cost of invoicing students, families and the elderly. As one of the many that don't have a TV, don't pay the TV license and rarely watch your content, I strongly oppose more licenses. I would not mind paying a fee if I actually watched your content.
If you don't like compressed music (I don't either) then do what I did: stop listening to it. You'll find much better music, made by real artists not "produced acts" with autotune and the like.
Autotune has nothing to do with compressed music. It hasn't even much to do with the quality of music. It is just a way to manipulate the human voice.
Sure, it is often abused to 'fix' bad singers and similar, but it can do so much more. I've heard it being used to transform voice samples into musical notes. Sure you could sample the artist singing every single possible note and harmony, but you can also just do a subset and use autotune to fill the gaps. The singer in question has a almost 4 octave range (operatic), as well as perfect pitch, so it is certainly not to fix a bad singer. It was to achieve an effect where you can produce a song with full musical backing and yet it's still basically acapella because it's all just the singers voice in various forms. No instruments.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Even has his own hate page on facebook. I for one, am very glad to hear this! He deserves to be exposed to an endless stream of his own work. I never even watch TV, and don't own a car, but these adverts still drive me crazy, as they are so loud you can hear them 3 doors away!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I agree. A regulation is not what is needed.
What is needed is the capacity to run custom software on our hardware. let me explain.
Why not make it easy to run software developed to control the loudness of audio? A dynamic volume button if you will.
You want them to broadcast some sort of signal that lets you know when the adverts are on?
So...DVRs can automatically cut out the adverts by looking for the special signal?
Good luck with that.
No sig today...
Thing is...they ALL do it. The media is controlled by very few players and if they all have a mandate to broadcast adverts with compressed sound then you're stuck, there's nowhere to go.
Radio, too. People don't sit down in special quiet rooms to listen to broadcast radio. People mostly listen to the radio in their cars or use it as a background noise (eg. at work). The difference between compressed/uncompressed in a car on the highway is massive so they compress the hell out of it. Even in a world of over compression most songs have a special "Radio Edit" where they compress/distort it even further.
No sig today...
Yes, but you know the name "Go Compare", right? You probably even know the URL....
No sig today...
Replaygain isn't RMS. It uses RMS as a starting point for its calculations - but it also takes psychoacoustics into account. One thing it does is use sort of an equalization curve while measuring the loudness, that compensates for how humans perceive different frequencies. We perceive a tone measuring x dB at 1 kHz as being louder than a tone of x dB at 15 kHz. Just as 1 example. It also takes into account variations in loudness (aka dynamics) within a track - louder and quieter segments of music. I'm not sure of everything the algorithm takes into account, but it's way more intricate than a simple RMS measurement. Feel free to look up the spec for yourself if you want the specifics.
I also find that it's generally very good. I have a large collection of music (180 GB) that's all RG scanned. Everything from ambient music, to classic rock, to metal, to hip-hop, to Britney Spears. ReplayGain does an amazingly accurate calculation, so good that I can put my player on shuffle and not run into loudness problems.
I also frequently make "mixtape"-type playlists for people and like to put all tracks to the same volume. I use ReplayGain's data for this. Very rarely do I need to make any manual adjustments - never any more than 2 or 3 dB on a track. Without RG, you're talking about variations of up to 12 or 14 dB between tracks from different albums.
I remember some case against a company which edited movies themselves. That is clearly infringement. But automating my mute button?
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
"Some people are actually ripping vinyl because some labels are releasing vinyl with more dynamic mastering."
I've seen this. The last few Rush CDs were sonically crushed. I just got their latest (Clockwork Angels) on vinyl, and the dynamic range is practically back to 1980s levels. I also got The Cult's Choice of Weapon (a nifty set with one full LP plus a 12-inch 45-RPM EP on white vinyl) which is a bit compressed, but definitely not crushed. It's faintly ridiculous that LPs are becoming the premium format, even though I'm quite sure that CDs can sound better when mastered properly -- but okay, at least it's possible to get my hands on a non-crushed version of the recording. I'll take it.
As far as detecting advertisements, nudity, explicit language, well there may be a number of ways to do so. Pattern recognition, speech recognition algorithms, reading the closed caption text, etc.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Judging by your UID and username, I'd wager we are about the same age. Christmas ads, displays, etc started the day after Thanksgiving when I was a kid. Now they start before Halloween.
We ran a TV ad for our company 12 years ago. Instead of screaming at our customers, we went the exact opposite way, and had dead silence for 30 seconds, with a bit of simple text on the screen. It was amazing the reaction we got. I guess on TV, silence is deafening.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
I'm going to be outweighed by people who don't care.
These are the same people who don't seem to mind closing a popup window for every single youtube video they watch.
I'm always horrified when I see Youtube without adblock. It's one of the most popular sites on the 'net and it can put a popup advert across every video without losing any viewers? Idiocracy isn't far away.
No sig today...
"Big label" often translates to "mainstream pop music", because that's where the most money is. IMHO mainstream pop music is also the most produced-to-death kind of music, so GP has a point there. ;-)
If you happen to like other kinds of music where not so much money is involved, there is a much better chance to find something unspoiled by the industry. Of course, the low budgets also tend to limit the recordings in other ways - you may sometimes run across something that sounds like a garage recording
C - the footgun of programming languages
Same basic thing, really. Different means, same end.
Yes, I did.
On more than one of the most egregious of them I called their 888 or 800 number and complained to the poor powerless little girl that answered the phone. One insurance company called me back, some VP and asked what the problem was and I told him. About a week later all of a sudden the ads got quieter.
Before my complaint I had to come in from the other room to mute their ad because it was too loud. The lawyer never bothered to call me back.
Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro
Carry on then.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Yes, that was my point as well, I am very aware of their excellent streaming and the NRK Beta bittorrent offers. If I were interested in using them I would not mind paying, as I mentioned in my first comment.
NRK has in fact asked for a license fee on all PCs, capable smartphones and TVs for this very reason. I understand the logic behind that request. It was denied and for good reasons. It is not "fair" to require non-users to pay for a service they don't want. The current license is tied to the ownership or possession of a TV set, and has no ties to actual usage or [TV] content provider preference.
I cannot understand why you would even contemplate extending this license to cover other boxes, that is if I understand you correctly? What my device is capable of is irrelevant in my opinion, if I don't drive on toll roads should my car still pay for it? I realize this is how we finance public road works, but toll roads specifically only charge an access fee when you use it.
In my mind it should either be fully financed over the national budget or entirely commercially funded. We have very capable commercial providers already. The public broadcaster role is culturally valuable, but very expensive for a small nation. Perhaps too costly when we consider the public purse's shortcomings? I would rather have access to the PBS content on demand at a fair price per item/time period.
Wrong on all counts. A 12dB increase is not "8x as loud." It's not even 8x the power, but 16x the power (power doubles with every increase of 3dB). Either you don't understand what you're going on about, or you're just wrong and don't realize it (because any answer resulting in the number 8 is always wrong in this particular scenario).
Loudness, as perceived by humans, is generally considered to double with every 10dB of increase. Hence, the convenient unit that is the Bel: 1 Bel == double the volume == 10 deciBels. (And also conveniently, a 10dB increase requires 10x the power.)
So, more properly: A 12dB increase might be appropriately described as being "a little more than twice as loud," once it's all said and done.
And IMHO "a little more than twice is loud" is still waaaay too much difference between program material and advertising material. There's no need to exaggerate what the numbers mean.
Kid-proof tablet..
"CDs don't have that problem"
Digital has physical limits that make music sound like shit too, CD's are not any different they just sound like different, worse shit than vinyl when the limits are exceeded.
Sorry but I greatly prefer lack of dynamics and distortion to the *BANG* *SCREECH* *WOBBLE* and suddenly you're listening to a different part of the song than you were because your needle jumped from the groove.
Vinyl had limits. It also had very serious consequences when the limits were exceeded such as tracks hitting each other on the discs and needles skating across the surface of the disk.
Not really the fault of the medium. It is much easier to avoid hitting the limits by accident on the CD.
If you leave, say, 20 dB of headroom for really loud peaks, you still have a signal to noise ratio better than 70 dB. That is more than the entire dynamic range for vinyl.
The problem is (again) with the loudness wars. If you don't leave headroom, but master a CDs as loud as possible, you get indeed more nasty clipping than with analog equipment. Producers and sound engineers abusing the CD give it a bad name
C - the footgun of programming languages
Although I agree with your main point, I gotta ask: WTF are you going on about? What is a "*DIGITAL CANON*"?
They were real cannons, recorded separately and mixed in later. Indeed, the original Telarc recording shattered some of the windows of a nearby building, as discussed in the liner notes. Telarc has historically been very open very open about explaining their recording processes...especially when they're particularly unusual or amusing.
I own this CD, and if I could be bothered to find it I'd post the verbiage verbatim.
That all said: I once heard a Telarc recording of the 1812 played over a reasonable PA system at a 4th of July fireworks show at a campground. Things were good until the first cannon shot audibly mangled the woofers, and the second disabled most of them (subsequent blasts took the rest of 'em down).
It was the grand finale, though, so I guess it was all in good fun.
Kid-proof tablet..
a ... bad pun.
You must be a member of Tautology Club.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
The French "Television Regulator" finally put this on paper too.
In the early 90's the first move was to convince non public TV Chanel to stop changing volume on advertising It clearly improve but that wasn't perfect
Today the new regulation (thanks to Digital terrestrial television) is for channels to stop changing volume and to harmonize volume between all channels
Thanks for the correction. I'd been ignoring Replaygain based on misinformation, it seems.
There was something very wrong with your turntable's set up. I've used vinyl (still do) for 35 years and the only time I ever had anything like that it was a badly set up turntable (I trusted the shop to set it up for me. After a couple of weeks of creeping around the room to avoid jumps, I set it up myself and it was 100% fine after that)
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
The problem is not that we are missing some metric to calculate the loudness, that is pretty easy to define, and has been used to develop counteracting measures in ReplayGain and EBU R128 compliant loudness scanners.
The problem is that the production of music is so atrocious, most of popular and metal music is compressed into such a tiny dynamic range. Some is even clipped to digital fullscale, leading to horrible artifacts when listening. This is nothing which can be fixed by a law, it is simply (deliberate?!) bad engineering. As long as this keeps up the loudness war will not end.
From the last few pop(?) albums I listened to (Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Mars Volta), it seems that we, the listeners, are still losing big time.
"If you cut an LP as hot as a typical modern CD (And I'm not even talking a LOUD modern CD, just an average one), you could only fit 12-14 minutes per side."
Nope. Got Alice in Chains 'Sap' and 'Jar of Flies' dual vinyl demo. LOUD AS FUCK. 26 minutes per side.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Well, now it's time to nitpick on YOUR post. First of all, the ISO 226 2003 revision curve shows the peak right at 3kHz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lindos1.svg - the older version did use to have it at 4kHz, however... It doesn't really matter. at 60dB it's only a half-octave boost of about 3dB which is negligible as far as total loudness is concerned. Try it yourself: Get a parametric equalizer and boost any mid frequency 3dB with a "Q" of 2 and see how much louder it is (ie. almost negligibly so). Do also consider that real world sounds are broad spectrum, not particularly concentrated at their fundamental frequency. Finally, skull resonance doesn't have any significant effect on hearing as the meat it's filled with acts as a pretty good damper but, even if it did, "between 500Hz and 7.5kHz" means that a few frequencies in particular that happen to fall between those values will resonate, not everything between 500Hz and 7.5kHz, so yes, if skull resonances weren't damped, we probably *would* hear some particular frequencies significantly louder because of it. Now to wait for someone to nitpick on my post.
Fresh-cut Vinyls have a dynamic range of typical 80dB, with a theoretical maximum of 120dB.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
That's probably on purpose. Perhaps Go Compare even set up the hate page.
I recall an interview with the CEO of some company here in the Netherlands, about winning a "prize" for most annoying ad. He replied that he was well aware that they might win that when they recorded the ad, and at the time he even warned the guy they asked to do the ad (some semi-celebrity) that he might be nominated for most annoying personality as well. The guy knew full well that annoying ads stand out, and may well be tuned out or muted on subsequent airings, but they will be talked about as well. Any publicity is good publicity, as it turns out.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
About 60% of the US gets radio stations owned by only three companies (and maybe a religious station or two, which is also owned by one of those companies in many cases). Five years ago, it was four companies, but two of them merged.
Yes, you must be a kid. Probably an undergrad who's just read Atlas Shrugged and thinks he's got it all figured out.
You are welcome on my lawn.
More time?! You mean that 90 years wasn't enough time for consumers "to make their opinions known and choose stations whose practices they agree with"? How much time do you suggest?
He is actually a serious opera singer, too - not just an actor in a silly costume. I don't know what drove him to lower himself this far.
Day late, dollar short, Congress. I asked DirecTV for this years ago. They blew me off. The next thing I did was to cut the cord. Haven't watched a lick of TV since. My wife and kids complained at first, but after 3 years of pure on-demand shows via Netflix, they can't bear "real" TV anymore. On a recent vacation there was a TV with cable in the room. My wife clapped her hands and switched it on. In the middle of a blaring commercial break. You should have seen her scramble after the toddler, who had walked off with the remote, in the rush to switch the set off again.
I have read that millions of others have cut the cord, too. If that trend continues, it won't be long before cable is forced to change or face total implosion.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
Vinyl had limits. It also had very serious consequences when the limits were exceeded such as tracks hitting each other on the discs and needles skating across the surface of the disk.
The issues you describe are because of a crappy stylus, tonearm or turntable or because of a worn, damaged or abused record, and not because of an inherent problem with the format (other than the fact that the format lends itself to being easily damaged and abused).
My dad had (actually, still has) a record of some symphony playing Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture which concludes with a recording of a real civil war canon being shot. The deflection in the groves when the canon goes off was incredible and other groves in that area of the disk needed to be spaced out quite a bit to account for it. There was even a big warning label on the disk itself that you *had* to turn your volume down during that track or risk blowing your speakers. This album was apparently (in)famous for blowing a bunch of people's speakers. Anyway, my dad's turntable never had an issue tracking that disk or any other disk for that matter.
Yeah, the industry will choke itself to death. I quit FM radio years ago b/c I got tired of the screaming car commercials... and all the stations timed their commercials so you couldn't change stations. I started listening to XM, which in turn added commercials to their premium channels. So now I simply listen to music from my mp3 player or audio books on my drive to work. If everyone did this, the industry would slowly die... and perhaps on their way down, they fix what caused their market to shift away from them. We don't need government oversight b/c the industry will eventually regulate itself even if it kills itself.
Just don't listen to the 2005 or later remasters, they've been compressed to shit. The 2001s are perfect. I still don't understand why or how they allowed the 2005s to exist.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
We DVR everything we watch and skip right over the loud commercials. Now instead of watching commercials, I don't even pay attention to them. The advertisers have shot themselves in the foot. Next thing you know, the TV stations will start playing more commercials per hour. Oh wait they do. 52 minute episodes of Star Trek TOS are pared down to less than 45 minutes now.... AND the TV stations begin the next show with the credits of the previous show in a PIP window. Good for them.
That would explain why the I couldn't find another TV like the one I had in the 90's with audio leveling. I thought that was the best feature ever, and I didn't understand why I couldn't find it when shopping for my next TV.
Now if they can only do something about all the sounds they add into commercials to get your attention. Many commercials are peppered with random door bell and phone rings, some even now 'feature' that buzzing sound of a phone on mute.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Oh, I agree, there's no doubt that public broadcasters have an important role to fill, that is if they are financially and politically viable. I am not certain the costs are justifiable.
It is clear that commercial channels would never be interested or able to produce the same content. Their track record has proven as much. I personally have no particular interest in any of them, I am only interested in [some of] the studio-produced content they purchase and broadcast. It's only that content I wish to purchase/view on demand at my leisure and device of choice.
News and other reporting is perhaps something that should be separated from the public broadcaster's role as a source of entertainment? I see no reason why purile reality and quiz shows have to be produced by the public broadcaster. TV2 has already taken upon itself the 24h news channel role.
It is my opinion that the "independent" role will be less important in an online media age where the alternatives are free and numerous. NRK may retain its status as our premier and official news source, I see few threats to that status regardless of party politics and who dominates parliament at any given time. The license hardly guarantees that role, but I do see your point. I believe it is a more fundamental aspect of our society; trust and reciprocity.
I feel we should explore other options and evaluate a commercial business plan for NRK. One that would increase revenue without the "tax" label in ordinary consumers' eyes. Feel free to charge customers the present amount for the same service if people choose to purchase this service.
Full disclosure: I vote for the Conservative Party, but I have no desire to change our present political system or societal course. The beauty of the Scandinavian system is its stability and lack of short term political fluctuations.
Maybe the vinyl as such. But another limiting factor is the pre-amplifier stage for the signal from the magnetic cardridge.
Back in the 1990s, MM cardridges with cheap pre-amplifiers used to have a S/N ratio of around 50 dB. I remember how turning up the volume without actually playing a record produced sigificant noise in the speakers.
Some expensive equipment offered a few db more of dynamic range due to less noisy pre-amps, but I cannot remember a review of an amplifier that provided a S/N ratio of 60 or better. Maybe there has been some progress in low-noise amplifiers since the 90s, but to be honest I have not followed recent developments...
C - the footgun of programming languages
Yes? That's why I oppose any such tax... that's what I wrote above.
I do not want them to charge anyone a license fee. It's either done over the national budget or not at all.
Hobby Lobby started putting out Christmas decorations this month. In June. I've decided not to shop there until they take them down.
There's also that place in Disney World that's new year's eve every night, so it's got a good precedent.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Very wise. Agents only regulate themselves if there's a reason for the regulation. If all the incentive is to do Option A, they will only ever pick Option A. Regulation becomes necessary to make Option B a viable choice.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Exactly. RMS is a lot hairier.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I agree. A regulation is not what is needed.
What is needed is the capacity to run custom software on our hardware. let me explain.
Why not make it easy to run software developed to control the loudness of audio? A dynamic volume button if you will.
That's not going to be enough.
There is no magical postprocessing that can de-artifact music that has been overcompressed into clipping.
Yeah it's real hard for station to broadcast a commercial at the same audio level as the program....*eye roll*
And yet it is. Hence the need for regulation. Markets cannot regulate themselves - see the Financial Services industry.
Corporate shill....
So if you watch another station (B) and buy products they advertise because you are voting with your dollars, how is the original station (A) going to notice a difference if the same product is advertised on both?
That doesn't change my view of the TV as a very limited and passive device. I'm sorry if I offended anyone.
I would also like to point out that in my country most people have access to plenty of bandwith at very reasonable prices (Scandinavia). We have Netflix-like services and PVR/DVRs here as well.
Pleasure Island. It wasn't really for the same reason retailers are pushing Christmas earlier and earlier, more a "every night it's New Years so let's all get smashed!" Plus they stopped doing it in 2005 (I hadn't been there since the late 90's and just learned that myself), and they closed it completely in 2008 due to declining attendance. Seeing as how it was a part of Disney World, and geared towards adults, I'm not surprised. The drinks at the various clubs all cost a freaking fortune even 15 years ago when I last attended...
I should have been more precise, it's slightly unfair to claim it's just "old people". It's not just about age obviously, my apologies.
While people on Slashdot are generally more technologically capable, the general population is less so. Age is a factor as well as income and education. It would perhaps be more fair to say that [within the general population] the oldest and poorest are both more likely to use traditional television services. They might not be aware of the possibilities or simply don't care.
Like you I'm not wasting my time or money on services I don't want. If I want access to Discovery, NatGeo or BBC documentaries and programmes I want those and nothing else. For now I'm content with my iPlayer and BitTorrent access. It would be better for everyone if I could pay and access the content directly [at a fair price].
The "loudness wars" were already lost when BitTorrent made content without ads easily available to people in general. Heck, I generally don't like loud music or noises in my TV-shows, so I wrote a little script...
It's not like we don't have literally millions of entertainment sources.
But those 'millions of entertainment sources' are increasingly being owned by only a handful of players, and when you have only a handful of players in a given market, it's a lot more likely that Company A will increase their volume, which will lead to Company B and Company C doing the same, followed by Companies D-F, and then in a very short time everyone's got their ads that much louder. Than Company A increases theirs a little more and the cycle continues...
Major Record Labels, for instance, as soon as 1998 it was the 'Big Six': Warner Music Group, EMI, Sony Music, BMG, Universal Music Group, and Polygram. Then Polygram was absorbed by UMG. Then Sony and BMG combined. Now EMI is being absorbed by UMG. In just 15 years we've gone from 6 major labels to 3. So when Sony increases the loudness of all the tracks they produce, how long does it take for Warner and Universal to follow suit?
The free market only works well when there are enough choices out there in the first place. You can't "vote with your wallet" when everything is a subsidiary of a handful of companies because they're getting the money in the end anyway. This is a fundamental problem with this "let the free market handle it" problem that I haven't seen any of it's champions really address, so I'm really starting to wonder if you guys want to live in a future where the entire world is basically run by a handful of extra-national megacorporations that make everything from breakfast cereal to fucking spaceships, all while we pat ourselves on the back for not letting those damned "regulations" get in the way of that progress.
I'm always horrified when I see Youtube without adblock. It's one of the most popular sites on the 'net and it can put a popup advert across every video without losing any viewers?
Ditto. Whenever those friends and family try to show me Youtube videos and ads play I'm like "Why the hell are you living like this?!?!?!!?"
When I first installed Adblock Plus for my father it was like the scales fell from his eyes. Seeing his favorite pages (mostly major news sites, which tend to lay the fucking ads on thick) without all the bullshit was like a whole new internet for him. Now I just need to teach him how to use NoScript and we'll be good to go...
Still, though, I find a ridiculous number of people that don't use adblocking extensions. Some poor, misguided souls are still clinging to that "But, we have to watch their ads or they will take their website down!" nonsense, others think that adblock opens up roads for viruses and trojans to infect their computer. Where they got that ridiculous notion, I have no idea...
You honestly think that the only way anything positive happens is as a result of regulations?
No, sometimes a company does the right and proper thing all on it's own.
By the way, can you pass me the crack pipe now? You've been holding it too long...
Because mashing the fast-forward button requires too much physical effort. What is this, Wall-E?
I still don't understand why or how they allowed the 2005s to exist.
I believe the answer you're looking for is 'money'.
My dad owns like 6 copies of Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall by now, including multiple CD's. I bet they can sucker him into buying a couple more re-re-re-rereleases before he finally gets to the point where he's not ambulatory enough that I can stop him from doing that shit...
Or even better:
HEAD-ON! Apply directly to the forehead!!!
Riiiight, you mean they can choose between clear channel and...clear channel? I guess you didn't get the memo but mainstream radio is now owned by a couple of corps that simply play the RIAA playlists in permanent rotation. hell the DJs aren't even allowed to deviate from those playlists anymore, at least from what I've been told by the ones I've met. Ever since they struck down that law that said a corp could only own a certain percentage of any single market you've seen the megacorps gobble up all the stations so good luck hearing anything but the RIAA playlists on any mainstream stations.
As for TFA, as a musician allow me to say yay! One of the nice things about going the indie route is not seeing your music crapped upon and one thing i'll give the local studios credit for is they are all run by guys that actually care about how a song sounds and not how LOUD it is. Personally I've never liked over compression and can't stand listening to over compressed music for any length of time without it just feeling draining so if this means we'll actually have dynamics in songs again i'm all for it.
Because while i'm all for having some compression on my bass to even string response having the whole song compressed? Yuck.. Compression like any other effect can be overdone and having every instrument compressed as hell just so they can get the signal as close to redline as possible just makes the whole thing sound like crap to me.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Judging from the rhetoric, I'd say shill.
Loudness is not one control. It is many. With compression and limiting you can make something sound much louder even if the peak volume is not that high. There are parameters for compression and they don't automatically, universally restrict volume to a desired dynamic level . . . or if you try, you'll get a lot of unlistenable noise.
Better to enact standards for broadcast dynamics. As others have noted, the industry sure doesn't have a problem passing laws to make their lives easier. Why is that not an option for the consumer?
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
Oh come now. He was making an illustration that was still vastly simplified so as to be accessible to the majority of readers, not detailing an exactly flow chart of input to output signals. There's no need to be insulting, and he's right - the statement was made in the context of a bad pun, not a technical discussion. Treating it as a technical treatise is disingenuous.
Right now he's ambulatory enough that you can't stop him. So you need to wait until he's not ambulatory enough that you can't stop him.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Ha, I wasn't after magic. I did not mean to improve sound quality, but do audio leveling of loudness. Yes detecting loudness is not straightforward, but I bet can be accomplished with a good detection algorithm.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
This is regulation of technical quality. If it causes crappy sound to come out of my speakers, it is a technical fault (even if done intentionally). It certainly lies in the scope of what the regulators should be doing.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Well I'm not sure if you have kids, but mine watch way more youtube, Netflix and online games (I know, technically they don't watch the games...) than they watch TV or radio. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is and will continue to be more and more user generated online content as people become more savvy. This process will continue to expand the market, and the idea of asking our pathetic political class to 'fix' the problem with more regulation scares the crap out of me. I believe they need to keep their stinking hands off the Internet. YMMV.
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
Ah, you have the facts to fill in my fuzzy memories. I was there as a parent-escorted teen in the early 90's and couldn't enjoy much, and wasn't even allowed to step away from the group of adults. Other than going to the comedy club and the new years shtick, the only thing I remember at all is a big screen or projection of a band playing techno music - something I wanted more of but that was nearly impossible to find in small-town Indiana.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
a baby's cry can be ignored... but the baby will just try again, and louder (MUCH louder).
Clearly we need to have the government regulate baby noise emissions, for the sanity of adults everywhere.
That sounds similar to a CD I had of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. The CD I had was based off of one of the older recordings and wasn't messed with and that had some great range especially when the bass drum hit in O Fortuna as it actually had impact and stood out even during the loud part. My only complaint about that recording was that it was based off of an old reel-to-reel recording and had a bit of hiss. Unfortunately that CD was stolen and later versions I got were ones that were mucked with and lacked the impact and range. The live performance I saw of it, after purchasing the crappy copies, still had the range and impact of that old CD so I doubt it was related to the performance. I really wish that CD wasn't stolen as I can't remember the finer details that would allow me to purchase a new unmucked with copy.
Time to offend someone
Survey Says...
money!
"Loud as fuck" well that definitively settles that.
Loud as in I can't turn my receiver up past 2 before my speakers begin distorting. That's with loudness off and the speakers placed far from the turntable, with the turntable sitting atop dynamat to absorb some vibration.
It's cut LOUD. a simple 3x magnifying lens lets me see the grooves rather nicely.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Obviously you need a new amp that can go to 11.
It wasn't like this when I was was a bit younger...wtf happened ? i don't know since I don't watch that much tv (netflix, streaming and more). but today, it's getting ridiculous, the volume levels are over the roof when it comes to commercial, I actually have to turn the volume down or use mute since it's really annoying me. This marketing tactic shouldn't be used in the first place.
If anything you might expect less Christmas promotion in the US than in some places. The US at least has other events late in the year - Thanksgiving, Halloween - that in principle could serve as distractions to break up the Christmas takeoff run. Here in Australia we don't do either of those - or much else, Australia's really quite a boring place from the point of view of festivals - but my impression is that Christmas nonetheless starts rather later here than in the US. Anyone have a theory why?
We tried 2 copies of the 1812 overture on 7 different players. 2 of them had the needle take off.
It's not only a function of poorly setup players. The goal of a record player was to record sound with the minimum of force while being bounced around. We did get both players to play through the disc without issue ... once we exceeded the recommended needle weight, so not a good outcome if you don't want to go replacing your cartridge every year.
The fact of the matter is it is possible by mastering alone to make the needle launch out of the groove. Obviously this is a quite bad outcome so a lot of effort was put into preventing this from happening.
Which is exactly the tune which launched the stylus. Some turntables were *properly* setup with new styluses and still had issue playing certain masters of this song. It wasn't the Telarc copy which works just fine on every player I've tried it (except my own but that really WAS a crappy setup :-/ and was fixed by a quick trip to the local audio store). It's a matter of physics. Turntables were designed to put a minimal amount of pressure on the disc, just a few grams, so any significant sudden turn of the needle can bring it out of the groove.
It is one of the fundamental limits of mastering records. You should go visit a grey haired recording engineer some time, they have quite some stories to tell of technical problems they've worked around over the years.
Suspension of disbelief is an essential ingredient for any kind of storytelling. With any film or TV series, the viewer has to ignore the reality that they are viewing a two-dimensional moving image on a screen and temporarily accept it as reality in order to be entertained.
Watching or even skipping adverts breaks that suspension and drags viewers out of the diegesis on screen. For a lot of TV that's not important, and I wouldn't care, but for a show I want to be absorbed in, it's a deal breaker.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Most digital TV's already have a DSP built in, why can't we just have them normalize the audio instead of lawyering up?
Let's go further. What about dropping the volume on over-compressed sound in proportion to how compressed it is? This would solve the problem in short order. Put the feature in "new high fidelity" radios too. Apply everywhere and the loudness war will end in a whimper.
I come here for the love