Music Into Noise: The Destructive Use Of Dynamic Range Compression part 2

DEAR MAINLINER

NAJO,DUDE YOU LIKE ROCK BUT COULD YOU LIKE TURN DOWN OR I"M NOT GOING TO BUY THE REISSUE OF MELLOW OUT.

LOVE
BRG30

it IS a problem, especially in more commersh type shit, but compression or even heavy compression is not inherently evil. actually, i find it equally annoying that i have to turn the volume up and down on a bedhead record, following the dynamic contour of the song.

but yeah v informative.

Exactly why we're recording, mixing, and mastering our next CD ourselves.

If you really want to hear for yourself the difference, listen to first Coldplay's Rush of Blood... (in terms of levels and mix) and then listen to Sigur Ros' Agaetis Birjun (levels and mix) and you'll realize that Coldplay's album maintains a sort of "stasis", whereas the Sigur Ros album has a wide variety of different levels of tone and clarity. Even if you don't like Agaetis Birjun, I think it makes for quite an excellent example of using digital techniques but without over-compressing everything into one chunk of sound.

And my #1 problem with "nu-metal"-ish bands is that, thanks to overcompression (even moreso than stylistic similarities between bands) they sound IDENTICAL on record.

I miss quiet parts.

Over-sqwozed tracks sound horrible. It works for some genre's (nu-metal, happy hardcore etc), but as a general rule it's a pile of poo.

If you're after a loud track without utterly raping your dynamics then I recommend the Waves L-1 or L-2 Ultramaximiser. It's the less noticable one I've found. It still takes time though, a lot of tracks are ruined not by compression, but when it's done lazily with no thought to what the track actually needs.

Have you considered buying a compressor? (No, I'm not being a wiseass) Some people do like them for home listening, though I'm not really one of them.

listen to Sigur Ros' Agaetis Birjun (levels and mix) and you'll realize that[...]the Sigur Ros album has a wide variety of different levels of tone and clarity.

Heh, that's funny -- one of my biggest problems with A.B. (as I recall, anyway -- I haven't listened to it in a while) has always been that it sounded too compressed to me!

i still say it's completely up to the artist as to how they handle all this...

it's a shame a band like rush would let people screw their sound up cause i imagine they would probably rather have their record sound undistorted as opposed to the opposite.

it's my opinion that some audiophiles care too much. no offense, but a little distortion and white noise doesn't turn my ears off. i find it a little ridiculous how annoyed this guy is. (and i constantly complain about how loud commercials are as opposed to television shows... so i maybe i can't talk.)

good production will never make a bad record good.

bad production doesn't always make a good record bad.
m.

You know, there are many decent albums that have been ruined by excessive compression. I would like to nominate The Prodigy's "The Fat of the Land". A friend commented, it's a great album to vacuum to" because you can set it at a suitable volume and depend on that volume never changing! And you know what I hate most? it's those albums which fool the quotidien critic. They go, 'hurgh hurgh, it's loud, it great', give it a good review, we go and buy it, and feel like fools because, like an excessively loud, obnoxious and stupid guest, an overly compressed record quickly outstays its welcome.

Never Take Maxim to elegant places
he lacks all the social graces
He'll dance on the table
Whenever he's able
and giggle at you, making faces.

Will any death metal fans have any idea why this matters?

Probably not many, but death metal is style where 'hot' mastering is very difficult to pull off, as the typically thick, full-bass-full-treble sound of the guitars is extremely hard to preserve when you use to much compression - which is why most nu-metal (= produced for radio/tv so lots of compression needed) uses those thin sounding, all-mid-range guitars instead.

Please please please read my piece and the Rip Rowan one and everything else I've linked, and talk about this phenomena everywhere and anywhere. Because it's fucking important.

Hopefully there won't be some crazy no-compression backlash. Compression + normalization are important - the problem is getting engineers and producers to use them with discretion in the right circumstances. By the time you hear the effects of compression, you've probably used too much. Not surprisingly Albini's had some choice words about this over the years.

Those wanting to delve in can get more info at the usual gearhead hangouts:
www.electrical.com
www.tapeop.com

Not to mention weezer. The blue album is really compressed, but I don't think it can hold a candle to The Green album and onwards.

the guy we mastered with was also complaining about "multi-band" compression, in which you can go through and compress different spectrums of the sound at different frequencies separately

Yeah, that's what they do. They can be quite handy, though. I recorded this really cheap toy glockenspiel once, and the high frequencies were painful to listen to. Slapped a compressor on just the highs, and bam, it sounded pleasant.

yeah, he definitely uses it, and actually used it on one of our songs that had a deep dub bass thing going on that was sort of problematic, but I think he was just saying that it's become sort of a crutch for some people.

Isn't that what EQ is for?

No; EQ will cut or boost a frequency range by a fixed amount. A multi-band compressor will compress a frequency range by a given ratio.

It amounts to the difference between simply turning down the volume, which keeps the shape of the waveform intact, and compression, which squshes the waveform.

It's a very different discipline seeing as you're literally cutting a record, with all of the attendant restrictions on how low or hot you can go with that particular piece of plastic at that rpm and with that running time.

You don't have to worry about sub-bass or phase issues or summing to mono below a certain frequency or wild dynamic shifts when mastering for CD; it seems to be because of (rather than despite of) these limitations when mastering for vinyl that so much more care goes into making it sound as good as possible. You know the CD will take anything you chuck at it, so why not max the thing out? Shame...

That said, this:

Compression is like audio crack - sure it feels good but it can destroy your life.

Is just a weeeee bit hyperbolic.

But I’m still troubled by some aspects of the article. First, I think the article sometimes compares apples-to-oranges. Some examples of properly compressed music cited in the article seem to be more subtle and textured to begin with, e.g., the songs on Talk Talk’s “Laughing Stock,” while some examples of over-compressed music cited in the article seem to be less subtle and more blunt, flat and loud to begin with, e.g., songs by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Queens of the Stone Age. A true apples-to-apples comparison would be two songs in the same genre, one with proper compression and one with over-compression, or – better yet – two versions of one song, with the only difference being that one version is properly compressed and the other version is overly-compressed. I suppose the latter comparison can be done by comparing a song from the original disc with the same song remastered on a reissued version of the disc.

Second, the article wisely notes that being able to hear proper compression in music is akin to being able to taste or smell individual notes in wine. If you’re a connoisseur, you can detect smoke or chocolate or earthy flavors in a given bottle of wine; if you’re not a connoisseur, it can just taste like a big, bold red. Similarly, I have trouble hearing over-compression in songs without a connoisseur’s guidance.

So what are some examples of properly-compressed and overly-compressed current music, and what tells you that the music you cite is properly or overly compressed? Since I like indie-rock, I’d greatly appreciate some examples in that genre.

lol factual error.

well said

the anecdote about "this isn't as loud as the new Paul Simon" was just bonkers.

I love how the QOTSA CD is totally squashed.

--Compression lover

BUT over-compression kinda rules when it comes to hip-hop. madlib goes crazy on the compressors, to the point where the bass drum just cuts everything else out of the mix, but in his case it totally works as an aesthetic. same with jay dee's donuts and people flipped on that.

Analogue:

- More tendency to record instruments together, get the mix right before comitting to tape.

- Low noise recording. Noise being both aural and visual.

- More emphasis placed on what goes in!

Digital:

- Record a million different versions in a million different takes. Recordings treated as source material rather than performances.

- Lots of distractions. Operating systems, screens, the hum and whirr of a computer. (this is just my experience, but a poor understanding of signal chains. like how to best get a mic into a computer using available resources)

- More emphasis on fucking with it once its in there.

However, I don't think these factors are dependent on whether you are using digital or analgue recording gear. Its more about the approach of a producer. You can use traditional analogue approaches using digital gear and get the same the results.

i'm thinking of recent loose fur and some of his own stuff. very clean, seperated recordings where stuff has obviously been re-jigged, and fucked around with. he seems to strip the source material of any life and create a new ambience/soundworld when re-combining sounds. i remember people hating the drums that sound like they've been recorded in a cardboard box thing, but i love that sound. its very fake, but when done sympathetically can really re-enforce the song.

(I know I comp vocals like nobody's business with hard-disk recording but just aim for one good, complete performance with tape).

I know I comp vocals like nobody's business with hard-disk recording

Oh yes.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/06/for_editors_is_music_too_loud.html

i hate people like this.

she has written an article to declare her ignorance in being unable to tell the difference between new dynamically-compressed recordings and old ones.

WAHT'S NOT TO LIKE?

the way shes boiled it down to the old bollocks old farts vs youngsters today argument. and all for the sake of having an opinion (at least im guessing shes just being disengenuous and knows the deal, although worse, she might actually not).

has been discussed on this thread: Music Into Noise: The Destructive Use Of Dynamic Range Compression

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17777619/the_death_of_high_fidelity

funny, I was thinking about this thread when I read the RS article last week.

http://www.irdial.com/scum.htm

That's a rubbish article on the Irdial site - look, look, Sony are now agreeing with us that CD is crap! Yes, because they're trying to sell a new format, you divs.

haha it also rails against 44.1 PCM and calls it unlistenable, then encourages people to illegally download (I assume) MP3s, as if they sounded any better.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17777619/the_death_of_high_fidelity

Hahaha, someone beat me to it!

The answer to this and the post about Virgin and other record stores closing is the same: Ban all iPods, iPhones and similar!

geir OTM

Burn down churches and gas Jews while you're at it?

http://turnmeup.org/

That's ancient, Geir, and been posted before.

I also think you don't actually understand this phenomenon AT ALL or you wouldn't be so fucking dumbstruck by the likes of Coldplay. You LIKE compressed, shiny, smooth, undynamic music. You fucking love it.

You waste. You little man.

the vinyl vs. CD of "ga ga ga ga ga" by spoon still blows my mind how different that record sounds, i honestly cannot listen to the CD, but it sounds good on vinyl

Still tempted to pick it up on vinyl.

Yeah, it sounds amazing on CD so I'm wondering how much better it'll sound on vinyl.

i mean, it's a well produced record....i just think there's so much more space and less of that harsh hi-end on LP

Going back and listening to A Series Of Sneaks shows up Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga massively; the songs are stronger, arguably, but ASOS is just so much more pleasurable (on CD at least) to listen to.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/personal_tech/article5847674.ece

Effortless slip from one sort of "compression" to another midway through that article without any attempt to explain the difference. Kind of expected really.

He suggests that iPods may have changed our perception of music, and that as young people become increasingly familiar with the sound of digital tracks the more they grow to like it.

He compared the phenomenon to the continued preference of some people for music from vinyl records heard through a gramophone. “Some people prefer that needle noise — the noise of little dust particles that create noise in the grooves,” he said. “I think there’s a sense of warmth and comfort in that.”

Cannot fathom why anyone would listen to vinyl because it sounds like crap. I also don't see any correlation between the two "phenomenons" he points out.

What he doesn't realize is that except for music nerds most people don't give a shit how well their music sounds enough to tell the difference anyway.

Cannot fathom why anyone would listen to vinyl because it sounds like crap
Badly phrased;What I meant to say is I don't believe there are people out there who listen to vinyl for the "noise" or whatever.

also it often does sound like crap. well pressed records are harder to find than most people are prepared to admit

A lot of recent records have often been mixed differently for vinyl. Then, why don't they just use the vinyl mix on the CD version too? It will probably sound better than the version mixed for mp3 players.

A lot of recent records have often been mixed differently for vinyl. Then, why don't they just use the vinyl mix on the CD version too? It will probably sound better than the version mixed for mp3 players.

From the comments:

Encoded at high bitrates, I'm not so sure there's much apparent difference between a digital copy and a CD. What is grating, as the report says, is the brash loudness and lack of dynamic range in new recordings.

Actually this is kind of OTM. I have also noticed that - even if they are just as loud - remasters of old 70s/80s albums usually sound less flat than the recent ones. It isn't only about making the music louder, it seems today's music is compressed even more than just what it has to be as a result of getting louder.

But there is a backlash against this thing now, at least in part of the music scene. A lot of fans reacted very much against the clipping on the recent Metallica. Also in the trend indicated in my thread about Acts with LESS compression on their most recent release than the one before

“Now there’s a constant race to be louder than other people’s records,” said Stephen Street, who has produced records for Blur, the Cranberries and Kaiser Chiefs. “What you are hearing is that everything is being squared off and is losing that level of depth and clarity. I’d hate to think that anything I’d slaved over in the studio is only going to be listened to on a bloody iPod.”

God forbid we hear a Kaiser Chiefs album on anything less than pristine, crackly vinyl!!!

Ken Nelson, producer of Coldplay’s first two albums, said: “An example of overcompression is the last Green Day album. If you try listening to it from beginning to end it’s hard work. After three songs you need to put something on that’s been recorded in the 70s.”

Because those first two Coldplay albums are shining examples of proper, listenable production... right???

The only Coldplay album that has obviously way too much compression is the third one. The first two are not at all bad sounding.

Makes this cd labeling system a bit difficult

http://lovelypackage.com/music-cd-labeling-system/

While we're on the topic, has anyone heard the vinyl pressing of "What's the Story (Morning Glory)"? Is it mastered any better than the CD?

A tru fan would just own it on both media.

More of the same:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music.html

While we're on the topic, has anyone heard the vinyl pressing of "What's the Story (Morning Glory)"? Is it mastered any better than the CD?

I sincerely doubt so. Oasis want to sound that way. They even sound that way live. So that is their own wish, not some wild idea by some guy in their record company.

I've said this time and time again, Geir; most artists who make big loud compressed records are NOT made to do so by "some guy in their record company" - they choose to do so themselves because they're dickheads. Show me the evidence otherwise; I researched this, wrote about it extensively. It's not an Artist vs The Man dichotomy; it's uneducated artists not knowing what they're doing.

so you're in agreement!

Argh, no; Geir always blames the record company guy, hence why he's used Oasis as a counter-example in this example.

OK, gotcha.

Where are 65DOS when you need 'em, eh?

Actually, I'd be well up for a new 65DOS album. I'd imagine they're currently working on it.

it's uneducated artists not knowing what they're doing

underlined.
i have discussed the excessive compression issue with a few bedroom producers (one was signed to 4ad !), and the feedback was 'i know little of that side of things'.

Why are people so fucking bothered about HDTV when they don't give a shit about stereo sound.

because more people watch tv than sit around listening to music?

Give a perfectly sensible answer, why don't you.

xpost
true but i don't think that's really the thing.

just coming from video games and the way it operates, it's been my opinion that one of the reasons that the music industry has suffered more than others (aside from the obvious -- small data footprint), is that while games and movies have generally moved towards better fidelity - both audio and visual fidelity - the music industry has pushed in the opposite direction. it's ridiculous. there's absolutely no reason for things to sound worse than they did 20 years ago, but that's absolutely the case...just another way that i feel devalues music for people, even if they don't actively realize that everything sounds sort of grating and tinny, i think there's a lingering feeling of cheapness about how a lot of stuff sounds...ie dylan's famous quote "it ain't worth nothin' anyway" wrt file sharing.

I think that encapsulates my worldview pretty neatly. And depressingly.

Why has this happened?

"there's absolutely no reason for things to sound worse than they did 20 years ago"

Except there is actually a very good reason why they do (hint: it's called convenience.)

The bit about iPods sounding worse than cassette tapes is challoping of the highest order.

none of the music i like sounds grating or tinny to my ears

Except there is actually a very good reason why they do (hint: it's called convenience.)

― Alex in SF, Tuesday, March 10, 2009 3:53 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

when I can easily download stuff on Xbox live that's as complex as say a Fallout expansion pack or GTA Lost and the Damned you meant to tell me that shitty MP3s are a necessity?

flatscreen tvs are way worse than crt oldies imho.

btw I look forward to the future of lossless digital music with actual quality servers, we're just stuck in this hellish period right now

The bit about iPods sounding worse than cassette tapes is challoping of the highest order.

― Hreidarsson The Storm (Matt DC), Tuesday, March 10, 2009 4:00 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

cassettes (and 8 tracks) are sort of a contradiction, but still right now the average person's little bookshelf CD stereo system of 15 years ago sounds way better than their ipod dock now.

flatscreen tvs are way worse than crt oldies imho.

― FREE DOM AND ETHAN (special guest stars mark bronson), Tuesday, March 10, 2009 4:07 PM (40 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

what? no.

"when I can easily download stuff on Xbox live that's as complex as say a Fallout expansion pack or GTA Lost and the Damned you meant to tell me that shitty MP3s are a necessity?"

So you download lossless stuff to your iPod?

i don't really use itunes much

if i'm going to pay for stuff i'll buy it on cd or vinyl

any illegal DLing i do i usually only get off blogs and stuff cuz i don't do limewire or any of that stuff, don't see a lot of lossless stuff i guess, but i'm not that great at searching stuff out

do they have lossless stuff for sale on itunes?

"but still right now the average person's little bookshelf CD stereo system of 15 years ago sounds way better than their ipod dock now."

The average person isn't 1) going to notice the difference and 2) is psyched that they have 500 albums on that iPod.

i only care about my own interests, i'm not saying people have to care. i just want a future with music that sounds listenable to my ears. other people's shit is their own shit.

i listen to an ipod every day, yes it's convenient. i get it.

I think people generally value image quality more than sound quality because visual media by default requires more commitment/not as portable

Well above you are posting like you can't understand how we mysteriously got to this point. If you get it, you get it.

I understand how we got to this point, i just don't like the point and I think there are ways that could easily combine the interests of good sound and convenience....I swear too that different Ipods sound differnt, like my wife's mini seems better than my 60gb one, you never know how they structure the analog stage of it etc.

Basically i got to this point when i first joined ILM and stuff where i was downloading a lot of stuff and just listening to my ipod etc etc and all of a sudden i would get this sense of not wanting to listen to music at all....it just seemed sort of annoying to have all these MP3s and etc to be listened to all the time...I ended up deciding to buy a nice stereo and got back into buying vinyl and it sort of restored me to a degree, being able to hear detail and not have that aggressive edge to everything, it seemed so much more human....

one of the only legal services I've stumbled across that has lossless downloads is boomkat.com. since they're UK-based the exchange rate isn't very favorable, tho.

It's a bit like organic food really - if there's a significant demand for lossless files then it'll take off, and I fully expect it to do so at some point. For everyone else, well, good enough for them is good enough for them.

just sell me the pig (masters) and i'll slaughter it myself

back on topic, I'm hoping that overcompression is a production fad associated with the 00s, like in the 80s when everything was drowned in echo/reverb.

i just ordered a marantz CD player that does SACDs have always been curious about them, there's stil quite a few being made that i found on some online sites, all pretty much jazz and classical.

btw at $249 you cannot beat this deal with a BAT if you still think you'll be listening to CDs for a few more years:

http://www.musicdirect.com/product/73832

I think neil young did a bunch of SACDs

"notable air and rhythmic drive"

wtf does that mean

i have never owned a dedicated cd player, by the way! i know you all were curious about that.

Lossy MP3s isn't really the issue, I think; lossless rips of stuff that sounds shit in the first place are still not at all desirable to me.

So the records sound shit, the CDs sound shit, the lossless files downloaded from the web sound shit, etc, yeah I can see how that would be undesirable.

i would def take a 256 MP3 of a good sounding record over a SACD of a bad sounding one.

i think people are specifically mastering for MP3 now which may be part of why stuff has been pushed in a bad direction

Pretty sure this trend precedes MP3 by a good few years but maybe that's just me.

i was hanging with an engineer/musician friend in nyc over the weekend, he was saying that pretty much any conversation with his go-to mastering guy ends up being about compression. when his own band got their new record mastered, the dude gave them a jazz-style version with minimal compression, a brick-wall pop version, and an inbetween one that tried to balance loudness with dynamics, and they were able to compare the three. it would've been interesting to hear the difference that directly.

Why buy that Marantz when you can get an Oppo DVD player that does the same thing AND has DivX AND USB 2.0 inputs for like $169?

http://www.oppodigital.com/dv980h/default.asp

thank you crazy eddie

i dunno, i go to the stereophile forums sometimes (nerd alert) and one of the dudes their said that the marantz was one of the best values at $500, let alone $249, better than the oppo.

i'm not going to use it as a DVD player, it will be in a room where i don't have a TV

Oh, well then in that case. I just cherish the divx support.

I do wonder, if I ever decided to flog all my audiophile gear, whether the CD-only player would have any takers at all. The amps would still fetch a few quid (judging by eBay), but a huge hulking thing that only plays one format?

i've been looking at used stuff and certain cd player models are still in demand used...what do you have?

back on topic, I'm hoping that overcompression is a production fad associated with the 00s, like in the 80s when everything was drowned in echo/reverb.

In the 80s, it was mainly guitar based music that as drowned in echo/reverb. Today, it seems all kinds of music is.

But props to some people who steer clear of it. Steely Dan and Becker and Fagen's solo albums have not been overcompressed, and this is a very important issue to them (and to their fans, one might suspect). Also, largely anything Eno, Lanois or Nigel Godrich have been involved with haven't suffered from the overcompression.

I also wonder why this is why I have enjoyed more Norwegian music in the noughties than ever, because Norwegian acts are less hard on the compression than UK/US based acts.

Anyway, what one might hope for is that the mobile phones and PCs and internet connections of the 2010s will be so big/fast that compression is not needed. Then sound quality will become better again.

Nigel Godrich have been involved with haven't suffered from the overcompression.

??? OK Computer is smashed to fuck!

Geir never has a fucking clue what he's talking about, just ignore him.

hail to the thief even more so (doesn't bother me though)

xp

plus nigel doesn't master his own stuff (or i would imagine he doesn't) so i don't necessarily put it all down to producers anyway.

Kids Prefer Poor Quality MP3

Not at all surprising that perception of "good sound" is a learned behaviour. I've always said I prefer CD to vinyl because it's what I grew up with, how I got into music.

What confuses me is... I like big speakers and a powerful amplifier (or high-end headphones), and I like to turn it up reasonably loud; if you do this with stuff that sounds "bad" (as I perceive bad), it physically hurts me and gives me a headache. That seems like something more than just learned behaviour to me. Maybe I'm wrong.

Could we arrive at an Orwellian future where any critical listening or observation of sound quality is treated as an adverse psychological condition?

i agree that people who prefer mp3s are fucking retards, but, well, you know.

more detail needed praps: what kinds of music was the guy playing? with music that uses a lot of compression at the production stage, eg ringtone, idk if there's a whole shit-ton of difference between mp3 and cd.

That's the other thing, the two different kinds of compression. Animal Collective sound shit on CD and on MP3.

and live and on vinyl ahahahahahaha dys

Something interesting I've noted, though; if you change your ripping /importing preferences on iTunes, it affects the bitrate of stuff you buy from them as well as what yu rip from your own CDs. I dunno if it's all the time, but I've bought stuff and it's come through at 256kbps same as I rip it, and one time as 128kbps when I'd forgotten to change settings after ripping something lower.

don't think animal collective sounding shit is anything to do with compression

i think stuff you buy from "itunes plus" is 256kpbpbbpbs and normal itunes is 128?

Something interesting I've noted, though; if you change your ripping /importing preferences on iTunes, it affects the bitrate of stuff you buy from them as well as what yu rip from your own CDs. I dunno if it's all the time, but I've bought stuff and it's come through at 256kbps same as I rip it, and one time as 128kbps when I'd forgotten to change settings after ripping something lower.

― Sickamous Mouthall (Scik Mouthy), Wednesday, March 11, 2009 1:06 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

there's a little '+' symbol next to the higher bitrate tracks

Ah. I don't buy stuff off iTunes anywhere near often enough to have noticed that.

??? OK Computer is smashed to fuck!

"OK Computer" is around the average volume of 1997 albums. Which may be slightly too much, but not even remotely like the madness of today.

Beyond its average loudness though Geir, it just doesn't sound that good. Radiohead records don't.

I was put off buying things from iTunes after I bought the entire 2007 UGK album and it was virtually unlistenable - I have a HIGH tolerance for bad sound but this was just utter shit - every time the bass drum hit, there was a mysterious lack of any bass yet this lack also managed to crunchify and degrade all the other bits of the track as well. the whole thing sounded like it had been chewed up, spit out, left to bake in the sun for several weeks, been vomited on and then covered with a hard candy glaze, eaten again and then shit out into a steel bucket

xxxpost

Yeah, the iTunes Plus tracks are DRM-free, 256-kbps AAC. They don't sound bad at all, provided the source track is listenable in the first place.

What depresses me is that even with cheap storage and ever-faster broadband making lossless music files more practical for the mass market, I doubt there'll ever be enough demand for an major online music retailer to offer any.

but yeah, Tracer, the old 128-kbps stuff, yuck

My understanding is that music labels are responsible for encoding the tracks they submit to the iTunes store, not Apple. Seems like there's a lot of variance in quality for some stuff.

Yeah it's weird, I have tons of 128K files and most of them sound pretty OK to me - I don't know what the hell they did to that UGK album

i've been looking at used stuff and certain cd player models are still in demand used...what do you have?

Copland CDA 266.

Audiolab amps have retained some of their value (esp the original UK-made gear, before Tag McLaren took them over) - a pair of 8000M monoblocs and an 8000Q (sans remote control - lost that years ago) could well fetch £500+ on eBay.

I have these idle notions of flogging the lot from time to time when completely broke. I barely get a chance to listen to anything at home now but I know Pam & the kids have music almost all day (but some kind of streaming device plus the Cyrus amp and B&W monitors we've got in the loft would more than suffice for that; in fact, it would be miles better in terms of sheer convenience and footprint).

I can't really imagine moving all this stuff (or the vinyl/CDs) ever again, so, at some point in the next 5-10 years, it'll all go...

By the way I think we all need to stop and appreciate the greatness of this image, which accompanies the audioholics article linked above (I hope this displays properly):

http://www.audioholics.com/news/industry-news/kids-prefer-poor-quality-mp3/image_mini

it must be really awful to notice music sounding 'shit' the way some people here do. my sympathies.

i've pretty much switched to VBR when ripping so wouldn't mind buying tracks with varialble bit rate either as long as the average was high enough (256 probably OK)

It seems to my ears like the sound check feature on iTunes compensates for differing loudness to some extent (as it's supposed to). For instance, it makes the peaks from an Esquivel disc mastered in 1994 sound louder than tracks from Sleater-Kinney's The Woods. It's not quite the same as a built-in compressor, but it would theoretically make it possible for music to be mastered dynamically while allowing listeners to have relatively consistent overall volume among different tracks.

But maybe mere consistency of volume isn't what people actually want, if they do prefer the overtly harsh sound.

Since this thread is about both kinds of compression, a good example is something like an early Who single. Kit Lambert and Pete Townshend would have compressed the hell out of it in the production stage as an artistic choice for impact, punch, sound good on a transistor radio etc.

Afterward, it would be mastered for 45, LP, comp LP, early CD, remastered CD, digitally remastered audiophile vinyl, SACD, original analog tape proper digital remaster/remix, surround sound HD DVD-A.

All I want is the full dynamic range high resolution reproduction of what the band heard in the playback the day they sent their final mix off. Or maybe I'm looking for an exact reproduction of what the 45 sounded like on a normal record player.

I don't know how anybody could even determine if Radiohead sounds bad or not, it's a completely manufactured music. The only thing that could sound wrong is if someone at the factory messed up what the creators sent out. Or if the label destroyed the sound during a format shift. Meaning, unless I hear a band member complaining about a failure, I assume every sound on an OK Computer CD including compression artifacts is an artistic choice and only right or wrong as a matter of taste.

A low bit-rate after the fact reproduction, on the other hand, diminishes the intent, and I think it is too bad that many people don't know the difference or care. Ipods will play higher resolution music either through itunes or third party software, and can still hold and play more music at one time than any one can listen to in a reasonable time period. You bought it though, so use it as you like.

OK Computer is supposed to have a flat shiny modernistic plastic sheen over the whole sound. That's kind of the point.

Indeed it is. Sadly a lot of people copied it without realising the semiotics of it.

In Rainbows though I would say is simply too loud, too bright, mixed with elements in odd proportions. To me it's a pretty standard example of what's wrong with modern mainstream rock sound. There's delicacy inherent in many of the tunes, melodies, and arrangements, but it's really not there in the actual physical qualities of the sound.

Johnny Greenwood has been very keen to point out at various points that he's not an audiophile, that they're not a band into high fidelity sound. This is not surprising.

Not sure if anyone cares, but I know Mouthy enjoyed 'Open Season'. Encouraging news on BSP's 'Man of Aran' soundtrack:

http://yanbsp.wordpress.com/2009/05/20/further-notes-that-i-don’t-mind-if-anyone-reads-or-don’t-reads/

"Basically turn up your volume. Because it sounds quieter but is in fact louder."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/arts/music/28pare.html

Current R&B is “crushed” for radio play, Maxwell said: “It’s made to have no peaks, no valleys. And we wanted, like, landscape. I wanted the music to sound like, ‘Oh my god, I’m looking at a vista, like I see a mountain over here, and water, and some clouds.’ “ As the album was about to be mastered, Maxwell decided that it had already grown too compressed — its ups and downs leveled out — and sent it back for a remix.

!!

nick do know retribution gospel choir? (sparhawk from low's new band)

anyway that record is BIZARRE sounding...i'd be curious if you've heard it

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b276/oliver8bit/comparison_powerless.jpg

I did a needledrop recording the 2xLP vinyl "Embryonic" and at left is the vinyl and at right is the CD. The vinyl sounds much better to me, and as you can see above is less compressed. If you're curious you can find my rip on the d3m0n01d.

Were you trying to post waveforms there?

The new retribution is mixed by a guy who has also mixed britney spears, vanessa hudgens, avril lavigne. I think Alan is friends with the guy and thought it would be fun to have a more glossy amped up sound as RGC is his more 'rock' project. fwiw i think it kind of sounds like boston in places - and i mean that in a very good way, it's a really fun lp although the mix probably goes a little too far in the compressed direction for my liking.

No mention of this followup article, here?

hey adam thanks, i love embyronic but frankly find the CD tiring to listen to....will definitely buy it on vinyl based on your post, was kinda on the fence about it

"Embryonic"'s vinyl mix should be released on CD for maximum sound quality in every possible way.

(x-x-post) That's a very encouraging article.

There's a DVD audio release of Embryonic as well but I haven't checked it out. I wonder if the compression/volume is different on that as well. After reading that article (and thanks so much for posting it!) I suppose not. I do know that mastering for vinyl you must take volume into account to prevent the needle from jumping during overwhelming passages.

Embryonic on vinyl not only sounds right but _feels_ right, like it's some lost artifact of experimental 1970s prog.

That is a striking difference, in terms of all that peak info being lost on the digital. Just so I am understanding this correctly, you do set a recording level when ripping the vinyl, right? I can see the differences in the peaks there, so they are obvious, but it seems like the *absolute* volume levels aren't comparable since presumably you are adjusting the level when it goes into the computer. But clearly the peak info is lost in the digital in this case. I think sometimes people post wave forms from vinyl vs. CD here without understanding that you have to set the peak at close to the same level to get a look at the differences in compression.

Yeah you're totally right there. Thing is I plugged the audio out straight from my turntable's RCA jack into the line in on my computer and had the volume set at 100%. Anyways I just loaded the files up and amplified the vinyl WAV by 190% and the top volume looks close to the CD version. Here's the new comparison:

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b276/oliver8bit/comparison.jpg

Yeah, that is a huge difference in dynamic range there, need to get this one on vinyl!

lolllllllllllllllll:

http://blog.winamp.com/2010/01/19/how-to-make-your-mp3-sound-like-vinyl/

http://www.blogcdn.com/blog.winamp.com/media/2010/01/izotope-vinyl.jpg

LOL (Would want to fiddle with the year button)

"Of course, in this case sound quality means making it sound realistically bad, and we spent significant time tuning models and samples and developing 64-bit signal processing for noise shaping, distortion, EQ and dithering."

Holy crap, this is the George Bush of software applications. We are slowly sinking into the sea.

"Crackling Noises OK. Do Not Correct!"

um, dithering anyone?

it's kinda funny how much people are amazed when they come over and i put on a record that's new or in good condition and there's hardly any noise or crackles and stuff...

they should have marketed that winamp thing as *izotope noize*. for budding merzbows.

that response article is interesting. quick question, does mp3gain do the same job as replaygain? is one better than the other?

now you can make your own Gucci Mane 78s

no wax cylinder option no credability

that response article is interesting. quick question, does mp3gain do the same job as replaygain? is one better than the other? ― NI, Tuesday, 16 February 2010 17:26 (20 minutes ago)

iirc, there are differences between the two- for instance, in terms of where the gain information is written (At least last time I read about it). There are posts about it on hydrogen audio forums and in the FAQ.

ok, looks like I mis-spoke and should have checked before I posted. Anyhow, 'replaygain' seems to be a generic term for the process, whereas mp3gain and the 'replay gain' scanner in foobar, and specific implementations. As for how they can differ- browse this

ARE specific implementations

I don't think the peaks being visually more prominent in the vinyl-to-digital transfer necessarily means that the overall dynamic range is greater. Any time you transfer from vinyl, even if the source for the vinyl master is basically the original CD master with the volume turned down, you'll see peaks that look more "natural."

Waveform Plots Considered Harmful

excellent link, thanks! I didn't know any of that stuff.

lol at this:

Audio engineers use an "RMS" value that is conceptually about the same as ReplayGain, and shares its faults. However, it is an acceptable figure of merit proving that Iggy Pop is a crappy producer.

The-Dream, "Fancy"

http://i47.tinypic.com/xp77zm.jpg

i feel it's only fair as a patented annoying vinyl fan to give a great big shout-out to all the people who made AMAZING sounding CDs that I heard last year. digital rules! seriously, i heard so much great electronic and electro-acoustic music on cd last year. there are people who really know what they are doing when they make music for CD. the problem is a lot of them are making music that not a lot of people hear.

Dynamic range day is on my 'stag do'.

http://productionadvice.co.uk/dynamic-range-day/

<3 the "fancy" crescendo

I like the way the Phoenix record sounds

i still don't think this is a widespread thing at all tbh - i mean if you only listen to radio hits or songs built for radio play, maybe, but who does that? sometimes you want beyoncé, sometimes you want maxwell.

No, it's widespread.

Not all records are necessarily totally brickwalled and clipped to unlistenability, but the vast, vast majority are considerably louder than they need to be, with flatter dynamics. it's a very subtle thing but it does make a difference.

The Phoenix record does sound really good, but it could be quieter and more dynamic and I think that would make it sound even better.

If you use something like Scott walker's The Drift, or Kate Bush's Aerial, as a sonic benchmark, pretty much everything else sounds louder and less detailed than them, and there's no reason for it. Even radio-focused stuff like Beyonce doesn't need to be louder than Kate Bush; radio stations run everything through massive compression anyway.

I know I'm banging head against brick wall here.

nick as far as i know you don't listen to the artists i'm referring to anyway - how would you know whether erykah badu, maxwell, sade or any of the techno/dubstep/funky/bobbins i listen to are over-compressed?!

and yeah how would i know whether phoenix or whoever are over-compressed but i don't really give a shit about them so

Well I may not have listened to the latest badu, maxwell, or sade records, but I do listen to quite a bit of techno and have been known to dabble in dubstep a little; plus you said "this isn't widespread" not "badu, maxwell, and sade aren't overcompressed" so I assumed you were talking about a wider range of artists than that!

That waveform for the The-Dream track does look absolutely fine though.

well, do you think the techno/dubstep you listen to is overcompressed? b/c in the main, i don't, or at least i don't hear it in those genres, in the slightest, the way i do in eg an alexandra burke radio hit.

i basically mean "a large proportion of all the artists i listen to" and just gave those three as particularly well-known examples in lieu of actually going through my last.fm profile and listing everyone whose music i think doesn't sound overcompressed.

the more generally electronic (inc. rock guitar) the music/genre sonically the more likely it is to be overcompressed perhaps. i'd be surprised if hard dance music played in clubs was not also affected by this. more organic/trad productions are less likely to be affected.

I think a lot of electronic music that I've listened to since 2001, say, of all different stripes, from Burial to The Field to Nathan Fake (especially him) to Vitalic to The Knife to Lindstrom to Four Tet, even (many of these I absolutely adore) are all louder and less dynamic than they need to be, in pure absolutest terms. Some of the time this doesn't bother me that much (The Field), some times it means I get rid of records cos I can't stand them (Nathan Fake). I think the new Knife album is WAY better than Silent Shout, for instance (Fever ray is also way better than Silent Shout, though still a little too loud ion absolutist terms).

Tell you what isn't, though, and what I wish a lot of other electronic records sounded like in terms of mastering levels; the DJ Sprinkles album. Fucking amazing sounding record.

It's not that The Field is ruined by being overcompressed, for instance; just that I think it could be a LOT better.

the dj sprinkles record sounds really nice but i'm not hearing the "fucking amazing wow wow wow" compared with any other given deep house (either in terms of quality or sound tbh)

the knife's monochrome flatness is a kinda integral part of their aesthetic surely? can't imagine anything about their music isn't a deliberate decision.

listening to the field is like being smothered in cotton wool but i ascribe this to his limited sonic palette and apparent ignorance of this thing called bass.

everything i've heard by lindstrøm has been a+ and spot on when it comes to production.

I think the new Knife album is WAY better than Silent Shout, for instance (Fever ray is also way better than Silent Shout, though still a little too loud ion absolutist terms)

do you just mean from a loudness/compression pov? because the only reason i can think why they may have toned that down since Silent Shout is because they're less dance-orientated (which is interesting). haven't actually heard "Tomorrow, In A Year" yet tho

Lindstrom IS A+ spot-on with production, I don't dispute that, but mastering is a DIFFERENT thing, which is what I think a lot of people don't get.

Steve; yeah, pretty much just from a loudness/compression POV, but some of it might be down to aesthetic production choices. I dislike a lot of the drum sounds on SS for instance, yet on TIAY they're AMAZING; the reason they're not as nice (to me) on SS could be either mixing / production compression or mastering, it's difficult to tell. I just know I don't like it.

I think the loudest, most compressed records I have on my MP3 player are Justice - (Cross) and Times New Viking - Present the Paisley Reich. In both cases, it seems like a deliberate choice and I guess it suits the type of music. Usually jazz and vocals records have better dynamic range than rock/electronic/pop, in my experience.

I listened to Vapor Trails the other day and really noticed how disastrous the level of compression was. The guitars become a little less distinct every time the bass becomes more prominent etc.

DYNAMIC RANGE COMPRESSION IS MUSIC PRODUCTION'S EQUIVALENT OF CAPS LOCK!!!!!!!

fuck this shit,

good read

http://www.sfxmachine.com/docs/loudnesswar/loudness_war.pdf

"Lindstrom IS A+ spot-on with production, I don't dispute that, but mastering is a DIFFERENT thing, which is what I think a lot of people don't get."

yeah yeah but ime it isn't mastering engineers who are responsible for making everything louder, it's the artists/producers compressing the shit out of everything because in isolation it sounds great.

also, a lot of people don't "get" mastering because mastering isn't really a thing

you get quoted in that link above nick

Nick/Scik Mouthy of this very parish on dynamic range compression in 2011.

Just came here to do that myself...

from apple: "Any boosts in playback volume are designed to be protected against clipping by iTunes' build-in limiter."

If only there had been a clear definition of who got to do the limiting at the very beginning between Mastering Engineers, radio stations and the system you're currently using.

My ears are fatigued.

thought that the Kanye album was an accidentally shipped set of demos or something. Gash. Can't listen to the thing.

I am getting the impression with the music I like best that this was worse a few years ago than it is today. A lot of American indie acts (and probably also hip-hop/R&B although that is not really my cup of tea) need to cut down the compression and volume considerably though.

The Beatles remasters were just perfect. Far from clipping or anything, but at the same time (unlike a lot of 80s/early 90s masters) loud enough not to sound tame on modern phones, iPods or portable CD players.

Hey nick thanks for writing about this stuff, its really important.

I'm glad you brought up games in the end. Working in that industry I think its ludicrous how music is the only industry that'd turned its back on fidelity

I'm no tech head but I think this article at RA may be a nice supplement - use of VU meters, also (especially!?) to monitor digital recordings.

ctrl f - bob katz 'mastering audio'

Not sure if this has ever been linked to, but it's also a good read:

http://www.chicagomasteringservice.com/loudness.html

(Chicago Mastering Service is co-owned by Bob Weston from Shellac)

How long will it take for people's computer hardware (including smartphones) to be of such a quality that Spotify may become all lossless? It would be a very important change because it would mean the kids would get used to more dynamic sound again.

YOU'RE STILL DERANGED

yeah, you can losslessly hear how the recordings sound like ass soup.

i always forget that this is a thing that's meant to exist until these threads are bumped

have never noticed it while actually listening to music

How does lossless/lossy encoding make sound more or less dynamic?

it doesn't

You mean Geir might be wrong sometimes?

What's your usual listening setup lex?

tbh given what lex listens to, it's probably the audio equivalent of those fish that live at the bottom of the sea and can thrive under thousands of pounds of pressure

have never noticed it while actually listening to music

― lex pretend, Wednesday, October 12, 2011 10:27 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

wake up sheeple.
shit is hella obvious

what is the singular of sheeple?

sheeperson?

what, ewe don't know?

How does lossless/lossy encoding make sound more or less dynamic?

The more compressed, the less difference between the loudest and most silent parts. Because the most silent parts become less silent. Extensive use of dynamic range compression is just like USING CAPS LOCK ALL THE TIME.

data compression is not the same as audio compression

It has much of the same effect on the audio. Today's recordings are being compressed because the kids are used to hearing badly compressed mp3s and expect music to sound that way.

you do not know what you are talking about

Geir, you're confusing low-bitrate-encoded files with brickwall-mastered audio.

They can both sound bad, but neither necessarily so. There's some truth to the idea that kids are being trained to accept poor fidelity by both low bitrates and extreme (distortingly so) audio compression, but this may only be a passing phase in the grand scheme of things. Data compression is just the natural result of low bandwidth and storage limitations, but those are receding by the month. And audio compression has, in part, come from the fact that everybody listens to music through chintzy headphones with high impedances that require a high average level (the "RMS") to give a listenable level. Which should change, too, if more slowly.

Things that are well mastered can still sound pretty good even at 128kbps. Depends on the music involved. And many things sound fantastic when the audio/dynamic range is seriously compressed. There's no single rule to cover this. I'd say that more important than data or audio compression is EQ—whether the piece in question is well balanced across frequencies. If it is, it can be pushed pretty hard, just as a well balanced car can be driven harder than one that's off kilter.

Of course, a lot of music these days is marred by both too much data and audio compression.

What's your usual listening setup lex?

at home, mp3s through laptop plugged into this stereo system (sony ss-cpx333)

http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS7iBmSTn8Dx2qEY2BvOSit-Fp2BSoIIdNHp1rgj_TnCq3MHSZODiQpYmPQ

while out and about, ipod with these headphones (sennheiser px100)

http://www.dansdata.com/images/3senns/px100640.jpg

tbh given what lex listens to, it's probably the audio equivalent of those fish that live at the bottom of the sea and can thrive under thousands of pounds of pressure

what are you saying about sade??

i love how deej can come out with "it's obvious" despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary

no, audio compression is entirely audible. download the greatest hits version of sugar ray's 'every morning' from amazon, then download the album version. they remastered for the greatest hits. the difference is entirely noticeable

What evidence to the contrary? Once you know what limiting sounds like, it's impossible not to notice it.

One track that always comes to mind for a really really horrible brick-wall job is Girls Aloud "Can't Speak French". Listen to the instruments in the background and hear the way they are constantly pulsing in and out when the drums and vocals push them into the background, only for them to come steaming back in afterwards. I quite like the song, but listening to it just gives me a headache.

download the greatest hits version of sugar ray's 'every morning' from amazon, then download the album version.

why in god's name would I do either of these things much less both

zing!

Ignoring the choice of music, this video gives a good demonstration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

Geir's thoughts are like imagining that changing a richly-formatted Word doc to a plain .txt file also changes it to all uppercase.

man i love old analog word docs, the mids in the punctuation is so creamy

I only listen to mimeographs now.

that'll make sense that you don't hear the effects of highly compressed music. it's designed to bang on consumer hifi stuff. a lot of music relies on that clipping-in-ur-face thing

i don't have a problem with music that's mastered too hot, i just wish there was an alternative

has anyone come across any labels offering 96k 24bit audio files? it'd make sense for techy dance stuff aimed at djs who are going to stick in some software and play it out

xpost

yah my friend just faxed me a bunch of old jug band mimeos from the 20s, great stuff

Ignoring the choice of music, this video gives a good demonstration:

http://www.youtube.com/v/3Gmex_4hreQ&fs=1&hl=en

― Chewshabadoo, Thursday, October 13, 2011 12:27 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

uh that video has it wrong...he's just making the track louder, not compressing it to do so, which is missing the point. the dynamics remain intact with what he's doing.

One track that always comes to mind for a really really horrible brick-wall job is Girls Aloud "Can't Speak French". Listen to the instruments in the background and hear the way they are constantly pulsing in and out when the drums and vocals push them into the background, only for them to come steaming back in afterwards. I quite like the song, but listening to it just gives me a headache.

haven't heard the song, but this sounds like it might be intentional use of sidechain compression at the mixing stage, not necessarily the result of the mastering job?

even if it is sidechain compression, it is still a symptom of the need to fill the dynamic range to get your music to stand out, just at the mixing stage not the mastering.

Audio compression = a typed document with less and less spaces between words and no punctuation so that there is very little variation between lines and it becomes difficult for the reader to stop reading once they start.

Data compression = a typed document that uses as little printer ink as possible but still allows the text to be read.

24bit 96k files are becoming more popular as people want something that sounds better than CD and now that buying a few terrabytes of storage is affordable. However it is very much a specialst market with a small range of albums. HDtracks offer the most well known stuff, but I have been hearing that they often take the left and right channels of a surround mix, so you end up with less instruments in much higher quality.

Holy shit on the RMS levels of the 1997 remastered "Search and Destroy" from that Chicago Mastering Service article.

i know! that article was really cool

i don't know why anybody would be proud of not being able to hear this sort of thing. Being tin eared isn't a positive

even before i knew the science behind it, even back in my formative musical days, i just knew that some albums were really hard work to get through. It's a physiological sense as much as a facet of your hearing

I'm not sure if you're trolling or not Jordan, but if you think those two clips sound the same you've either got cloth ears or cloth speakers.

i was mostly watching/skipping around the video before to see what he was doing, but i just went back and listened through the whole thing.

the audio examples are good illustrations, yeah, but i was thrown off by what he's doing with the waveforms. it looks like he's just dragging up on the waveform, which in any DAW just increases the gain (turns up the volume), and he doesn't mention (or visibly apply) compression at all. not the most clear visual representation of what's going on imo.

why in god's name would I do either of these things much less both

― wrestlingisreal420 (crüt), Thursday, October 13, 2011 12:20 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

song is dope fuiud

Was listening to Braids' "Lammicken" yesterday (dope song fuiud etc.) and was thinking of this thread.

Song is this kind of slow-mo 4/4 pound with female vocals like a less songy version of Glasser's "Mirrorage". Anyway when there are vocals the kick drum recedes and then when the vocals cuts out the kick drum gets massively louder and more intrusive.

I have no idea whether it's a deliberate effect (if you assume it's deliberate it totally works) or if it's just a result of dynamic range compression. Possibly it's even a combination of both, like they noticed what was happening with the kicks and then decided to accentuate it.

What evidence to the contrary? Once you know what limiting sounds like, it's impossible not to notice it.

the fact that only a tiny minority of music fans notice it?

Consciously notice it. I suspect its subconscious affects are pretty widespread.

you don't think people notice that new releases generally sound louder than old releases? I noticed it before this whole thread/topic came about.

I don't tend to notice corrective autotuning but I accept that a lot of people can spot it immediately (and it often bugs the hell out of them).

People listen to and for different things in music.

I don't tend to notice corrective autotuning

jesus

I mean, like, I know people come from different musical perspectives but I didn't realize the human listening/sound-parsing experience was anything but universal

to the extent that people wouldn't notice something like autotune, anyway

If I focus and/or it's pointed out to me, then yeah, but otherwise it doesn't really leap out.

Obv I notice post-"Believe" distortive aututone.

oh, I thought that's what you meant. lol. that's why I was so shocked.

haha yeah i thought that might be it.

like i've said before, i know people - music fans - who can't tell the difference between a 128kpbs and 320 kpbs mp3, and that shocks the hell out of me.

when i say i don't notice dynamic range compression, i mostly mean that despite listening to music in 90% of my waking hours, i never have cause to think about it - there's just nothing about how the music sounds that bothers me or sounds wrong.

i mean, it made sense as a concept when i first read about it, but all these years on it doesn't remotely impinge on my actual listening, and i'm way more inclined to just disbelieve it. it's not there. it is literally just not there when i listen. the music sounds fine.

It might be so ubiquitous now that it'd take its absence (especially if you were listening in a car, or through cheap headphones) to catch your attention. That music would sound wrong to you without it....

when i say i don't notice dynamic range compression, i mostly mean that despite listening to music in 90% of my waking hours, i never have cause to think about it - there's just nothing about how the music sounds that bothers me or sounds wrong.

― lex pretend, Friday, October 14, 2011 6:46 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i guarantee you've noticed it, you just didn't recognize it ~as dynamic range compression~

Ears adapt very quickly. You'd have to A/B something with and without the compression/limiting to hear the differences in audio compression. The easiest way to do this is to grab a cd from the late 80s and compare it with a reissue from the last few years. The REM or Feelies reissues spring to mind. The original tracks will have average levels (rms levels) at around -17 db; the stuff done in the last couple of years will be around -11. It's way louder and punchier. Flattened a touch. Sometimes sounds great, sometimes not. But it's obvious.

Though if you're talking about data compression (320 kbps vs. 128), that will be more a matter of the equipment you're listening on and its resolution. Crappy headphones? Noisy car? Computer speakers? Not a big deal. Real stereo? Studio monitors? It'll be there, but more instantly audible will be the mastering job and the levels. It'll be mostly in the highest and lowest frequencies, especially where the sound is busiest, that you'll hear more data compression artifacts, but again, only with better gear.

i listen to old CDs (ripped to mp3) and current mp3s, don't notice any particular fundamental difference. older CDs are quieter but that's just a question of turning the volume up or down, nothing fundamental about the sound.

i have noticed, weirdly, that in my new room it sounds like the bass on my stereo has been turned WAY UP even though all the settings are the same - this is the case even with DBFB turned off. acoustics are weird things. i presume it's because my old room was carpeted and the new one isn't.

Lack of carpet will do that, also having speakers in corners of rooms, too close to rear walls, etc etc.

The "old CDs need turning up, new CDs need turning down" thing is exactly what dynamic range compression is, btw, so you have noticed it. The problem comes when new CDs are so loud that they distort, that they lose any movement from naturally quiet passages to crescendos. With r'n'b ANC hop hop and some dance music it's not so much of an issue as minimal music can be made much louder before losing clarity of individual instruments, but it severely fucks up very dense, layered, or acoustic / live sounding music.

yeah my new desk is in a kind of wall nook, maybe moving the speakers out of that will help it. or maybe i just will never be bothered.

but just turning the volume down seems to be the solution then? like, i don't notice any fundamental difference in how the music sounds. including on the dense/layered/live-sounding stuff i listen to.

like, it doesn't seem to affect the rock artists i love eg hole, ashlee simpson...

Maybe not on your stereo at low volume, but I suspect if you played it on my system and tried to pump it up loud you'd be horrified.

Play Electrelane and then Ashley Simpson back to back and see which you prefer turning right up.

Basically it makes everyone sound like Oasis.

well happily i don't have your stereo then!

i enjoy turning both electrelane and ashlee up

of my many objections to oasis, "too loud" has never been one of them

It's not "too loud", it's "no dynamics", no move from quiet to loud.

The "old CDs need turning up, new CDs need turning down" thing is exactly what dynamic range compression is

well you imply that it is a question of "too loud" there?

i hear dynamics in most of what i listen to.

Because that's the easiest consumer-end solution to it, turning it down. But music sounds crap when it's loud, amplifiers and speakers perform better when they're turned up.

Most of what you listen to will have dynamics because of the arrangements, and specifically, the way the beats are put together.

I don't know why I'm replying. It's obviously as useless as talking to you about cooking or changing a lightbulb.

Argh, music sounds crap when it's QUIET, not loud. It sounds BETTER loud.

It's not just dynamics, it's that the difference between the loud and quiet part is made narrower. In older records the quiet parts were quieter and loud parts louder, so there was a bigger dynamic difference between the two. This is the reason why your old records you have are mastered at a lower volume level than the newer ones. But like Nick said, I suspect most of the stuff you listen is in genres where the dynamics are such that compression doesn't change the music that must. But for people who listen to jazz, experimental/minimal electronic music, classical, etc, it can be a big deal.

(xx-post)

"that must" = "that much"

To put it in another way: compression doesn't matter so much in types of music where the aesthetic is that it should sound CONSTANTLY LOUD. But in genres of music where musicians want to create a dynamic between the LOUD and quiet bits, compression can damage that dynamic.

lol @hearing dynamics in a ashlee simpson record

i hear dynamics in most of what i listen to.

but when going from, say, an intro to a drop, is it going from less dense -> more dense (or maybe less low frequencies -> more low frequencies, or a narrow frequency range -> wider frequency range)? or is it actually going from quiet to loud?

and again, some kinds of music sound better with more mastering compression, others not so much.

ashlee's "autobiography" (song and album) is one of the most obvious offenders of limited range. just listen to the beginning of it, which you'd think would get louder once the guitars come in, but it doesn't.

The definitive article: http://www.sfxmachine.com/docs/loudnesswar/loudness_war.pdf

This paper was presented to the Audio Engineering Society last year. It's a bit of a dry read, but for those interested, it covers pretty much all the issues, and proposes specific actions. It could probably benefit from smart people in the media passing on a sort of "executive summary" version that would stir up more popular demand for the actual decision-makers (labels, bands, producers, engineers) to change behaviors.

ashlee's "autobiography" (song and album) is one of the most obvious offenders of limited range

but the thing is, this didn't stop it becoming one of my favourite songs of the past decade. listening back i guess i can hear that but it doesn't bother me in the slightest, it sounds fine to me? i think the song and its production sound fantastic. it doesn't sound weird or inadequate in any way.

like, i assume all of ashlee's music is mastered like that, but i still hear loud.quiet dynamics in it, and in 7 years of listening to it have never found it exhausting to listen to. i cannot hear what the problem is meant to be. i also guarantee that most music fans would think the same.

i just talked to most music fans, they disagree with you, you owe me a beer

i guarantee a lot more people would like it if it was mastered properly

like, its good in spite of mastering, not because of it

i think it's a weird audiophile fetish that you could only care about if you have super-expensive listening gear, which most people don't, so...ehhh

no what you said is not true, i can hear the difference between, say an old police song and a new green day song on my local FM station easily

i think it's a weird audiophile fetish that you could only care about if you have super-expensive listening gear, which most people don't, so...ehhh

― lex pretend, Monday, October 24, 2011 5:19 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is absolutely untrue! you can hear the difference on a pair of earbuds, dude

agreed, you can hear it even when it's going through some other kind of shitty compression (like youtube or radio).

i can't hear the difference unless a specific moment in a song is pointed out, and then it doesn't make any difference to how much i enjoy the song!

like in my everyday listening this just doesn't cross my mind at all

it does, though -- you're just refusing to acknowledge it. you dont have to be consciously aware its happening

um are you actually telling me what crosses my mind there? taking deejian mind reading to new levels there

i couldn't tell you whether any of my favourite albums this year are over-compressed or not

lex yr insistent philistinism would be lolsome were you not a professional music writer. and i'm not even talking about the compression thing, I mean this exchange:

i have noticed, weirdly, that in my new room it sounds like the bass on my stereo has been turned WAY UP even though all the settings are the same - this is the case even with DBFB turned off. acoustics are weird things. i presume it's because my old room was carpeted and the new one isn't.

― lex pretend, Thursday, October 20, 2011 9:44 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Lack of carpet will do that, also having speakers in corners of rooms, too close to rear walls, etc etc.

― Sick Mouthy (Scik Mouthy), Thursday, October 20, 2011 11:49 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah my new desk is in a kind of wall nook, maybe moving the speakers out of that will help it. or maybe i just will never be bothered.

There is no global warming, too.

i don't understand what's so wrong about the room acoustics exchange?

i know nothing and understand little about science and technology, it's less philistinism and more ludditism

um are you actually telling me what crosses my mind there? taking deejian mind reading to new levels there

― lex pretend, Monday, October 24, 2011 5:41 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

no, im saying that whether or not you realize that compression is the source of how it sounds, you hear that it is compressed

okay but why should i care if it doesn't affect my enjoyment of the music?

yeah i'm not sure philistinism was the word i was looking for. i'm not saying it's "so wrong" of you not to move your speakers to get rid of the boomy bass problem, but i think it wd be worth the effort as presumably you listen to a lot of music and not only for work purposes.

you are however totally wrong about the compression thing! not sure how to convince you otherwise beyond what Sick Mouthy has already posted. it's definitely audible tho, including in the stuff you are into. i can't profess to know much about Ashley Simpson but there's a reason Rihanna's last album was called LOUD.

xpost boomy bass sound is affecting yr enjoyment of the music from what I can make out?

rearranging my entire room would be kinda hard work? if i move the desk i have to move the bed, the wardrobe etc too. i've put magazines, books and towels under the speakers and either it's made it better or i'm acclimatising.

i think my argument about the compression thing is that it may or may not be there but it's not obvious enough that i can hear it without being told - as i said i've no idea whether it's a problem on the albums i've played most this year (katy b/beyoncé/pj harvey), no idea at all - and even when i am told it doesn't lessen my enjoyment of the sound so...what exactly is the problem, the scandal, whatever?

lol no need to go moving your furniture around on my account lex. i'm genuinely baffled that you can't hear this but y'know whatever.

the problem/scandal re compression afaic is that:
- dynamic range is a part of music and that gets lost when everything's uber-compressed, which is a pity
- the "war" part of "loudness war" is justifiable imo to the extent that there is a constant escalation. we're now at the stage where so many records are so cranked that (unintended) distortion is an issue.

lately tho i'm coming to the view that time will heal all wounds / music will move on... over-compression will come to signify the sound of the 00s/10s, same way lashings of digital reverb make a record sound 80s.

as in, *calling* it a war is justifiable cos etc., sorry that wasn't so clear

I tend to think that volume constancy through compression has the effect of making everything more like electronic music and less like ensemble playing. On that Simpson track, the distinction between the clean guitars and the distorted guitars is only timbral, so they're like presets on a keyboard.

(That's not an across-the-board criticism of the strategy, by the way.)

Lex is clearly very proud, for some reason, of not being able to cope with certain things, be that changing a lightbulb, cooking a meal, or critiquing pure sound. I'm assuming this is because these are all practical / technical activities rather than aesthetic / hedonistic / emotional ones in his perception, and therefore not matching up to the strictures of the persona he has created. So outright denial, a la climate skeptics or holocaust deniers or Geir Hongro occurs, because the persona cannot develop or change for some reason.

Oh, come now.

Ha! I really like Lex and the above is (I hope clearly) written for parody and reaction, but there are times when his reactions are so strong and didactic and predictable as to feel like a construct rather than a real person. i.e. like Geir!

we're now at the stage where so many records are so cranked that (unintended) distortion is an issue.

really?! which ones? i don't hear "distortion". not even in the ashlee simpson record. i actually love how the guitars sound in that, so clean. i wish more guitar-based music was produced like it.

nick you're not answering my basic point, which is that 1) the effect of this is so minimal that i can't tell it's there unless it's pointed out, 2) even if it is pointed out it doesn't affect my enjoyment of the music in the slightest.

I like your posts on this thread lex -- I have to admit that I find what mixers & engineers are capable of doing these days with compression in pop is actually very impressive to me, everything literally sounds louder than everything else, it is music that is designed to sound that way intentionally and so I am not surprised that it doesn't bother listeners -- it is modern music. Not all of the transient distortion is unintended. It is absolutely put there on purpose in the same way that musical engineers have always found ways to creatively add distortion.

I do have a problem with older records being remastered to the same loudness standard as an ashlee simpson record, but I'm ready to admit that certain people will even prefer that.

Just got back from NYC and went to the AES panel on audio mastering. Nick have you heard about the new ITU-R 1770-2 loudness measurement / the -16 LUFS dB cap about to be mandated in broadcasting at the federal level? A definite sign that all of this is being taken very seriously.

What do you mean by the guitars on Ashley's record sounding 'clean', Lex? Because I think part of the issue here is communication; the words used to describe sound are often very impressionistic and subjective, so what one person understands / describes as 'clean', another person understands / describes as 'distorted', simply because we have different frames of reference. Unlike visual mediums, there's no physical thing which can be paused and pointed at and isolated (like artefacting on a jpeg or lens flare on a movie or whatever) and qualifiably recognised in explanation by both parties (at least not easily), talking about sound ends up being very, very nebulous indeed, and often results in people getting upset and frustrated.

Lex, you HAVE recognised the 'problem' and can hear / identify one of its clearer manifestations (older CDs needing to be turned up; newer ones needing to be turned down). Clearly, judging by your responses, it's not an issue for you and that's great - I wish it wasn't for me because it means I very seldom listen to certain albums / songs that I otherwise would very much enjoy the songs / arrangements of, because the pure sound offends / upsets / hurts me on a physical level (some stuff just can and does give me a headache).

However, just because it doens't bother you consciously doesn't a; mean it doesn't bother you subconsciously (you hate a lot of modern indie rock, much of which REALLY suffers from this, way worse than r'n'b / dance / pop, for instance), b; doesn't mean it isn't a big conscious issue for a lot of people who want something done about it, and c; doens't mean it doesn't affect loads and loads more people on a subconscious level - so many behaviours in terms of people's reactions to and consumption of music these days seem to me to be related to this, directly or indirectly (lack of monetary value ascribed to music; increased emphasis on portable and live music rather than music in the home; propogation of computers as listening devices, etc etc etc etc).

I've drawn these before but I'm not sure I've ever put them up here. This is basically how I hear compression, manifested as visually as I can muster (in 5 minutes on MSPaint). They are MASSIVELY OVER SIMPLIFIED.

Each coloured shape is a musical instrument or voice in the mix of a song; when you play music back via speakers or headphones, they each sit in a specific space relative to each other (I should have done some large and some small, rather than them being pretty uniform in size). Turning the volume up on an amplifier makes the entire canvas larger, including the white space around each element (which is needed to be able to hear each element clearly and understand their relationships with each other), and keeps their proportions the same.

Compression makes each element larger within the same size canvas, and also makes them all the same size, altering their proportions and relative positions. It also squeezes some bits outside of the canvas (distortion / clipping), and overlays some elements over other elements at various points (side-chaining).

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/compression1.jpg
So this might be a bit of really minimal techno or hip hop.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/compression2.jpg
You can compress it without really affecting it too much in terms of the elements' relations and proportions.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/compression3.jpg
But do the same with something that has a lot more elements, like several guitars, a piano, several vocal tracks, drums, percussion, strings, synths, etc etc...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/compression4.jpg
...and you lose the shapes, space, and relationships.

that's why i used ashlee simpson as an example of a guitar-driven rock act.

i think it's the extremeness of your position that i take issue with (it also comes with an implication of "i'm a better listener than you"). i mean, i certainly haven't felt physically nauseous when listening to ashlee over the past 7 years, i've felt glorious! she's hardly the only act with live instruments or non-minimal arrangements that i listen to. you've heard the katy b/pj harvey records this year - is this an issue with them? i've caned them this year and couldn't have less of an idea.

(lack of monetary value ascribed to music; increased emphasis on portable and live music rather than music in the home; propogation of computers as listening devices, etc etc etc etc)

1) old man shaking stick at cloud, i'm so bored of all of these arguments, 2) other way round surely? compression comes about BECAUSE of ipods etc, because music now has to be eg louder than the tube. (was talking about this with k8 on twitter - both of us ended up listening to britney's latest album way more than we thought we would this year because it's perfect tube listening.)

britney is good music for tubes?

yeah you can basically hear everything

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-sxSd1uwoU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bar9e4_C8I

I have to admit that I agree with Lex here. In theory I'm appalled by all this overcompression (and waveforms that look like bricks make me a little sick to the stomach), but in my day-to-day listening I haven't ever been bothered by it. I have to say that I hardly ever listen to music on headphones, so that might explain something, but I also recognize it from watching movies and tv:
I am bothered very much by visual defects like edge enhancement and digital noise reduction on DVD and Blu-ray, and stretched people on widescreen TVs, but my wife will happily watch everything on anything, whether the actors all look like John Goodman or have their normal figure. It's pretty much the same with dynamic compression.

the loudness war was started by FM radio stations competing for the best signal that would break through the traffic and city noise of NY. So this is mainly down to commercial music wanting to be heard in an outdoor/loud environment. You can say iPods & bad headphones are an example of this...

The actual amplifiers people use for listening are now smaller and more likely to form part of a laptop/ipod/dock rather than in the 70s where most people had HiFi stereos for listening in the home.

So people mastering serious music know they could get away with dynamics in the album (and that vinyl could not have that wide a dynamic int he first place) now whats odd is that everything is mastered like it needs to be heard in a city junction roadworks site..

I'd say with those Britney tracks, the track has been produced from the beginning with compression is used as an effect, to create a certain sound. The problem for me is when you have acoustic and electric instruments, stuff that has been mic'd (rather than electronic sound sources), and then after it has been recorded, there appears to have been limiting added further along the mastering stage.

This to me is an example of something with many guitars and acoustic-sounding drums, which has some very painful limiting put on it later:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvtsBLPqAR4

If you listen to those Britney tracks, the arrangement is very minimal, there are rarely any moments with many layers of different sounds playing at the same time. To put it into the earlier visual metaphor, there is a lot of white-space in the sound design, and very little scope for sounds to clash with each other at the limiting stage.

i've spoken to a number of non music geek friends about this and they don't give a fuck how something sounds, music to them = a story + a melody + a fashion. so minimal arrangements, bashing you over the head with signifiers, vocal right up in your face, having the track duck in volume to give the vocal more prominence. it's not going to go away unless there's a mainstream shift in how music is used/consumed.

not that i really think it should go away, for certain musics it works, it's just a shame there isn't an alternative offered.

I'm more with lex on this one than, uh, I'm not with lex on this one

but I also recognize it from watching movies and tv:

ha, i know you're making a visual comparison here, but i often find myself wishing that the audio tracks on movies had a little more dynamic compression, at least when i'm watching at home (esp when watching with my girlfriend, who is less deaf than i am). sacrilege maybe, but it's annoying to constantly turn the volume down during action/heavily-scored scenes and then have to turn it up to hear the dialogue.

also lex, i can't remember if you like lcd soundsystem (i think you hate them?), but think about the first track on their last album. it has a ton of dynamics that make for a really big moment when the beat drops...if it was mastered differently, that whole intro would be the same volume as the drop. it wouldn't necessarily be worse, but it would definitely be a choice.

XP: I think my AV receiver has a special 'late night' setting that does exactly that.

huh interesting i actually hate having the tv on because i find it too constantly blaring and loud, and in fact i do feel ill and a bit tired if i'm in one of those houses where they have it on in the background all the time. i always put that down to my being brought up in a house where the tv was only occasionally on, and consequently never having been into watching tv as a pastime.

i love old lcd soundsystem singles like "yeah" and "tribulations", never heard the last album cuz i hated the lead single so much.

this is a great example of what i meant when i said i loved how clean the guitars sound on ashlee simpson songs - like, you can hear every instrument and it's just so polished and perfect, and it really sets off the still-unexpected courtneyesque rawness of her voice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8JJO36w2KA

(one of my favourite songs of the 00s, that)

youtube quality not quite the best there tho :(

Lex, tv ≠ film.

I tend to think that volume constancy through compression has the effect of making everything more like electronic music and less like ensemble playing. On that Simpson track, the distinction between the clean guitars and the distorted guitars is only timbral, so they're like presets on a keyboard.

i think this is otm and a big part of why lex likes those ashlee simpson guitars. they're meticulously edited and compressed on their own (in addition to the whole mix being compressed pretty hard), they might as well be samples. total pop/dance approach.

youtube quality not quite the best there tho :(

LOL

With TV it's usually the adverts that are a massive sinner - a drama might be mastered quite dynamically to generate atmosphere, and then CADBURYS CREME EGG or NESCAFE GOLD BLEND or VOLKSWAGEN GOLF comes in and threatens to break your eardrums.

The 'late night' button on a home cinema amp is exactly the same kind of thing as the Sound Check function on an iPod / iTunes - it equalises and levels dynamics. Radio (and TV, to a lesser extent) do this too, compressing stuff for broadcast. So leave the original source / master relatively dynamic (unless it's a deliberate aesthetic choice, which is totally valid in some cases), and let people choose. That's all I want. People aren't stupid.

Jordan's comment on the comment about compressed guitars sounding like dance/pop music totally OTM.

Levels AND dynamics.

expanding, when i listen to those ashlee guitars i find it really expansive - like, it evokes wide open spaces, a car with the top down, being outside - which of course is partly the melody but i think it's the sound.

idk what that stray "expanding" is doing at the start of that post

your post was expanding like Ashlee's guitars

I think a lot of this comes down to how people use music, which we were discussing the other day on another thread (can't remember where, now). I don't need to use music on the tube (and if I did, I'd probably get isolating earphones again, like when I used to commute on a train); but I do like to sit on the sofa with big speakers and have music wash over / blast through me. You need very different types of music for those two uses. My problem comes when music I want to have wash over / blast through me is mastered for tube listening, which I generally think comes from an artist's desire to get on radio (and misunderstanding of what works on radio) (although it can't always come from that).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spjaA8rZEXM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCeZzW54a2o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMWeKEmuqU0

a couple of other guitar-based songs i've loved recently - non-pop - that i also love the production/sound of. and again, i can't tell whether they're over-compressed?

compressed sounds evoke being outside

huh

I wouldn't call that Santigold song "non-pop", personally.

or that pistol annies tune! which is funny because it's evoking this rootsy, acoustic country sound with total pop mixing and mastering. the snare drum sound is hilarious in how huge it manages to make the brushes sound on the backbeat.

the first two sound fine to me for a pop approach, it's only the third one that sounds unpleasant to my ears, maybe because it's going for this epic chorus but the dynamics don't really go anywhere. there are also more instruments in the mix.

can't we just get Ashlee Simpson to play acoustic guitar and sing directly into a crackly old gramophone horn with no post-production whatsoever

Give it a few years.

actually banjo would be preferable

why would she be singing into a banjo

you don't understand, banjo is my dog's name

b.a.n.j.o.

why would she be singing into a banjo

resonator chamber iirc. better than using the "inside of a banjo" reverb plugin setting.

i feel like this debate is turning into something no one on 'my side' intends it to be which is about whether or not ashlee simpsons music is good. you can love her music, even, and still hate that its horribly compressed. it would be more effective to her fans!! if it wasnt like this

i don't hate that it's compressed. i love how it sounds.

I think we got that already.

lex is sort of the living embodiment of this principle that if you raise a child on a diet of shit, it will think that that's what food is supposed to taste like

"what do you mean it's shit? tastes great to me! more please!"

Dynamic compression is clearly the slow road to fascism.

Constant volume was pretty standard with, say, Spector, classic Motown, etc. Dynamic range becomes more of a preference in the later '60s and into '70s. Given that I like Spector and Motown, I don't think a two-to-three minute pop song necessitates dynamic range or that the lack of it necessarily means that fatigue is going to be an issue. Over an album, probably, but not over a single.

The question for me is more to do with whether it's being done well or whether modern records are just taking a post-'70s style of arrangements and divorcing it of some of its nuance so that it can be loud.

I hate to be the only person talking about how awesome the ITU-R 1770-2 measurement algorithm is on this thread, but it is definitely going to impact this conversation by early next year in the broadcasting field:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudness_Mitigation_Act

Once it passes there, anyone mastering CDs with a dynamic range of 1-3 dB simply in order to compete in the broadcast arena are going to be wasting their time. Anything that goes out with an average energy level of -16 dB LUFS is simply going to be turned down anyway. It's going to help people take a deep breath and stop feeling like they need to be crushed just in order to compete.

sorry rephrase:

Anything that goes out above an average energy level of -16 dB LUFS is simply going to be turned down anyway.

Cross your fingers with me

I can only hope that this has a knock-on affect in the uk.

Constant volume was pretty standard with, say, Spector, classic Motown, etc. Dynamic range becomes more of a preference in the later '60s and into '70s. Given that I like Spector and Motown, I don't think a two-to-three minute pop song necessitates dynamic range or that the lack of it necessarily means that fatigue is going to be an issue. Over an album, probably, but not over a single.

The thing is, that is "designed" contant volume, so that different sections will sound like a similar volume. But, you still have comparatively very full dynamics on instruments. However with brick-wall limiting, the volume of sound changes from micro-second to micro-second - this is what causes the fatigue, rather than a lack of quiet sections.

^^^

Well, let me ask this. The objection, then, if I have what you're saying right, is to the volume of individual tracks or instruments constantly going up or down throughout a given piece of music in order to keep the overall mix within its dynamic limits?

Isn't this done already in the mixing process, though? Even in the old days, engineers would ride faders during a mixdown. Nowadays with software, you can specify increasing and decreasing volume levels for every track throughout a given piece of music. In my own experience, it often behooves you to do so because it can just improve the mix - bring things out where you need them or push them back.

I understand that the volume of individual instruments or tracks might be going up or down more randomly, however, when limiting is applied to an overall mix. Is this the problem?

the problem as I see it is a very broad, general "pop music folks don't know how to mix/master anything that comes from a live instrument and not a synthesizer"

i don't hate that it's compressed. i love how it sounds.

yeah but you're just going to say this no matter what at this point in the argument; your heels are dug in. it's been pointed out to you that you might hear more of what you like if compression hadn't flattened the dynamic range, but you seem to think that admitting that would be betraying ashlee simpson or something, so you just say "I like this sound." but the sound you like is allowed less space to play in because of range compression. however, in the end I am with you in that I cannot & will not betray ashlee simpson.

She's a hoe

i don't know, several people in this thread have also said that they can't hear it/it doesn't bother them, and the fact remains that i can't tell if something's compressed if it's not pointed out (is the katy b album compressed? beyoncé? pj harvey? WHO KNOWS)

i assume live performances aren't compressed? but often i enjoy the sound LESS there, because venue soundsystems are so often shit

EVERYTHING is compressed (effectively, in the realm of pop/rock/dance/hiphop/r'n'b), it's just a question of how much.

There will be lots of compression used in live-shows, pretty much anything going into the mixing-desk, and then there will be some sort of compression between the mixer and pa, if only to kick-in to protect the equipment. Also, a lot of venues will also have some kind of volume limiting, to stop them breaking any local sound restrictions.

There's nothing wrong with the right amount of compression to fit the sound you're after, and most modern genres wouldn't sound 'right' without it. Indiscriminate 'hot' mastering to make the sound give (and if ever there was a correct time to use the phrase) 110% on everything is what this thread is talking about.

OTM.

if i turn up the volume on a cd to hear how it sounds loud (you know, a reasonably loud level that my speakers and receiver have no problem handling) and it distorts then i never play that cd again. to me, its a faulty product.

i've heard so many horrible examples, i kinda wonder how people even know which "remastered/expanded/remixed" CDs to buy. "remastered" on the cover of a new version of an old album almost seems like a red flag NOT to buy it.

"remastered" on the cover of a new version of an old album almost seems like a red flag NOT to buy it.

unless you can find evidence to the contrary, that's a safe bet.

Unfortunately that is true. Just recently I ripped my fancy Virgin Prunes remaster/reissues on Mute, and I thought I'd clean up a track or two in my wave editor. Everything was overmodulated, and there were 1-2 second spots all over that were total squarewave crushed misery. What a disgrace. My vinyl rips sound way better.

Also see New Order, where the "remasters" were sourced from bad vinyl at first.

This is a long, long thread. Is there a post somewhere on here (or elsewhere) that lists recent albums that do not have destructive range compression on them?

Here it is:

•

then how come i enjoy the sound of music just as much as i always have done? i'm even more inclined to say this is nonsense now

or at least if it exists it doesn't MATTER because it's impossible to notice

or, you know, you can carry on shaking sticks at clouds and i'll carry on enjoying modern music

"enjoying"

lol

well isn't that the crux of this entire argument? you lot contend that no one's really enjoying modern music, and you get to tell us this because you're ~better listeners~. bullllllshiiiiiiiiit.

Ah, I found one myself

http://www.dr.loudness-war.info/index.php?sort=year&order=desc&page=1

no, it's that people are enjoying good music in spite of some harsh audio treatment, and that if it was mastered better they would enjoy certain kinds of music, in certain contexts, more, and for a longer time.

xp

~better listeners~. bullllllshiiiiiiiiit.

lex's argument is like some climate change denier weirdness

"I don't notice it, therefore it isn't happening"

It's all scientific hooey, that's what it is!

dudes, i am almost always in disagreement with lex but what he's saying here is "I don't notice it, therefore why should I care?" which is a different argument.

on the other hand, i'm not sure why he's arguing about it so persistently if it doesn't affect him.

because he feels everyone is telling him he should?

i dont understand the liking it just because its modern angle though. Same with someone i know who only listens to music before 1990 and only on vinyl because it sounds better and modern recording/mastering is inferior to 70s music.

it's obvious lex doesn't care. hurrah for him. that does not mean it does not exist.

Hum, looks like war here ! I have the feeling you guys take all this way too agressively.
To me some tracks sound better with a lot of compression (a danja track, or daft punk, mgmt's "time to pretend", some animal collective tracks on "merriweather"...) And some music not at all. I don't really think it's all or nothing/black or white (not the MJ track !).
I also disagree with the idea that all remasters are evil. The beatles ones, for instance, are good.
But I don't want to interrupt your fight !

the flip of lex's position is that he thinks everyone who hears this is listening wrong

youre saying that about the lex though too!

I am and I'm not denying it. It's a two-way street.

like good for you lex, your ears are so fucked you can't notice something that is "proven by science" (lol), acknowledged by the people who actually make/record/master music as being put into practice, etc. Because you can't hear it does not mean that others can and do. Given the mass consensus throughout the recording industry about DNR you might stop, for a second, and ponder why all these other people - including the people who actually make the music - hear this and you don't.

xp

instead of calling it "nonsense" and "yelling at clouds"

lots of people don't hear it!

the reason i seem to care so much is because i find the implied assertion that "we are better listeners" to be completely obnoxious

is that why you make it yourself

also not hearing /= saying it does not exist, as you do.

no one is saying compression is evil, compression is one of the most important tools in the entire recording process!

i mean it's been my impression you want a little in-line compression on a lot of stuff in the mix, like bass drum, bass guitar, vocals etc

DNR /= all compression

analog tape compression etc.

like, that's a very different thing. DNR happens at the mastering stage.

DRN argh

lol I appear to just be making up acronyms now

DRC!

i think lex attitude probably just reflects 99% of humanity. in that they don't care about this shit.

beatles CDs should have been called Remixes. that would have been more accurate. or Reconfigurations or something. need some new term for stuff like that.

in that 99% of humanity does not care about the quality of music, you are probably right

some people just haven't tried music bareback yet

I seriously think there's an awesome interdisciplinary PhD in here, crossing psychology, sociology, and economics. I think it's fascinating.

beatles CDs should have been called Remixes. that would have been more accurate. or Reconfigurations or something

Was there something so different in the mastering process for the Beatles CDs that they were *altered* in some way that they were not altered in other mastering jobs?

Of course, every mastering job results in some alteration of the sound coming off the master tape.

just realizing how weird it is that this process is called "mastering." and if you're mastering something from something, surely the thing you're mastering from isn't the master?

not weird i guess, just... racist.

/troll i kid i kid

you are creating a master

^^^

when you make a record, you are recording etc

glad recording isn't racist

you can't make a master without making a slave

lex is racist?

Hum, looks like war here ! I have the feeling you guys take all this way too agressively.
To me some tracks sound better with a lot of compression (a danja track, or daft punk, mgmt's "time to pretend", some animal collective tracks on "merriweather"...) And some music not at all. I don't really think it's all or nothing/black or white (not the MJ track !).
I also disagree with the idea that all remasters are evil. The beatles ones, for instance, are good.
But I don't want to interrupt your fight !

― AlXTC from Paris, Thursday, October 27, 2011 11:30 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you dont 'get' this argument fyi

Not that anyone's necessarily arguing this but I think it's worth pointing out that a lot of electronic/dance music is neither compressed nor suited to compression. There's a lot of dance music where the listener's ability to spatially differentiate between different components (i.e. the listener's sense of the music comprising the interaction of different sounds/instruments within a given physical field, however imaginary this actually is) is very important.

Like I'd hate to imagine the effect of dynamic range compression on the second disc of New Forms.

Though perhaps the common element for the above is dance music that either uses live instrumentation or (more commonly) very "clean" samples from music made using live instruments.

^^^on point & true of lots of rap music too.

you dont 'get' this argument fyi

oh ok, maybe, it's true I haven't read the whole thread.
I'll leave it to you experts, then !

but just one thing : is it a consensus with audio experts that all remasters are shit ?

No, not at all. Some are, some aren't, same with new records.

ctrl-f equal temperament with overly compressed music:

"I've learned to hear equal temperament music as a kind of aural caffeine, overly busy and nervous-making. If you're used to getting that kind of buzz from music, you feel the lack of it as a deprivation when it's not there. But do we need it? Most cultures use music for meditation, and ours may be the only culture that doesn't. With our tuning, we can't.

My teacher, Ben Johnston, was convinced that our tuning is responsible for much of our cultural psychology, the fact that we are so geared toward progress and action and violence and so little attuned to introspection, contentment, and acquiesence. Equal temperament could be described as the musical equivalent to eating a lot of red meat and processed sugars and watching violent action films. The music doesn't turn your attention inward, it makes you want to go out and work off your nervous energy on something."

sorry, find and replace, or whatever

that's from kyle gann writing about just intonation btw, and it's an excellent read, love that dude

the thing is lex for you this is about social positioning - about you asserting, "I enjoy my experience of music, so this thing you'll telling me decreases it is somehow an insult to my claim." It's not, though, any more than...like, there's no doubt that mass agriculture has decreased the quality of some vegetables. I still enjoy those vegetables! but when I get a better one, from a farmer's market or something, I don't pose and go "oh you guys are saying this tomato is so much better" because that would be FRONTING. whatever your favorite pop record of recent years is - literally, whichever one it is - I could take you & the original files into a mastering studio, tell them to master w/o range compression, and you - you, Lex, lover of music - would say "fuck - this sounds so much better." this is a fucking stone guarantee - I've had mastering engineers walk me through how records are mastered now. it is decreasing your enjoyment of the music you like, that's a promise. I know you don't want that to be true because it'd put you in tiresome old man company or something but what you're basically saying here is "how do you guys know I don't like the taste of dog shit?"

Tim in re: dance music is especially otm - crescendo & build is so important to a good night out, this is why many DJs still prefer vinyl isn't it?

Would pay top dollar for Aerosmith remasters of Girls Aloud.

smithy, if you dont mind me asking, do you get your vinyl releases mastered differently from the cd version? I've seen quite a few albums on vinyl saying they do just that. And do they sound better?

aero otm.

fyi the main engineer at this place is the best mastering engineer in the US; people say "no records are made w/o range compression now" but it's not true - if he mastered it, the mastering is great even if the original production sucks. I don't think pop lovers will find much to love on their list of credits but as far as good mastering goes there are a couple of houses people can turn to if they actually want their record to sound good.

xp yeah, there's always a different master for vinyl - just slightly different though, has more to do with cutting the lathe than with anything you could hear on the files. The European pressing of the most recent Aerosmith album incidentally is hand-to-God the best cutting I've had in 20 years on the job, it sounds fucking fantastic.

haha i hate farmer's market evangelists too. farmer's markets stress me out even more than supermarkets.

i don't know how "the music you love = dog shit" ISN'T an insult tbh? i find a lot of your claims completely weird and extreme - nick saying he feels ILL when he listens to compressed music! - and y'know, i just don't feel that or hear that in any way. it's a bit batshit.

also i realise i am in the minority in this particular thread - even though other posters have chipped in in support, so i'm not alone even here - but MOST MUSIC LISTENERS DO NOT HEAR THIS/DO NOT CARE

It's inaccurate to say most music listeners don't hear it; EVERYONE hears it! The "DO NOT CARE" part is way more defensible.

by "not hearing it" i mean "i can't tell when it's reached egregious levels or not"

i honestly don't think everyone hears it, that's insane

my gf listens to a track and after one listen will know the melody and all the words. if i then play her the instrumental version of the song, she wouldn't immediately recognize that it's the same song. she finds it insane that i don't hear the words to things.

Lex got what I meant; the original position is analogous to saying "I've never German" while watching archival footage of Hitler's speeches. You're talking about something that is an intrinsic component of the sounds you are listening to; recognizing/identifying it is a different question from hearing it.

i am pretty close to your gf on that crackle box - unless an instrumental is really striking it'd take a lot more listens for me to recognise it in isolation than to remember the words/melody - it always astonishes me when people say "oh i just don't listen to lyrics" - like how can you not, they're RIGHT THERE!

plenty do though. Some people prefer the music. Some are more into lyrics and some prefer both.
Sometimes the lyrics are completely unintelligible or so bad you just don't want to know them!

I don't really listen to lyrics most of the time.