Music Into Noise: The Destructive Use Of Dynamic Range Compression

you're both wrong

explain?

Considering that, like, 90% of albums are affected this way, my guess would be that the proportion of good albums affected is about the same as the proportion of good albums to total albums (no matter what your definition of good is).

UNLESS your definition of "good" is "highly compressed, lacking in dynamic range, lightly dusted with digital clipping, and a bit tiring to listen to for more than a minute and a half."

Upthread someone posted a waveform of "Umbrella" which clearly shows what we're all talking about here. Bearing in mind this song is probably the most loved song on ILM this year, what, exactly is the problem? "highly compressed, lacking in dynamic range, lightly dusted with digital clipping, and a bit tiring to listen to for more than a minute and a half" just doesn't really describe it.

(a) "Umbrella" is not the only song in the universe
(b) Folk records should probably not be mastered like "Umbrella"
(c) So long as you're looking upthread, please read extensive discussion of why this kind of mastering can work for short radio singles with small numbers of moving details, but is a very poor technique for giving people the opportunity to comfortably enjoy albums
(d) The fact that people like a song does not mean that every single thing about its production and mastering are necessarily good ideas, even for the song itself, much less for the entirety of recorded sound
(e) "Umbrella" IS highly compressed and somewhat lacking in dynamic range -- it's just lucky that, like a lot of similar singles, it's built for that, that's the intent from the beginning (I have not noticed any digital clipping on it, but again, please read discussion upthread of why a song like "Umbrella" is not going to clip the way a modern-rock song might)

Fair enough. But I do think that the amount of good tracks that have been negatively affected by this is fairly small. I recognise the phenomenon but it's just not that big of a deal to me because the bad side seems pretty rare, plus the fact that good songs like "Umbrella" are "built for that" is great. They probably sound best on laptop speakers or headphones. It's the current way of producing music, just like Brian Wilson trying to make records that sound good on monophonic car radios, or Pink Floyd making records that sound good on stereophonic record players. It defines our times.

http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/2581958/2/istockphoto_2581958_exasperation.jpg

you guys aren't getting it. Mastering isn't the music, its what happens after the music has been recorded.

if you were in germany in world war ii, nazism defines your times but it doesn't make it good

lol nazi reference in internet argument

I don't mean this in a mean way, but I'm skeptical that you recognize the phenomenon if "Umbrella" doesn't sound compressed to you! It's a "current way of producing music," yes, and it suits some types of productions, but it's also a "current way of producing music" that a massive number of the people involved don't want to have to do, one that intensely diminishes the quality of huge chunks of recorded music, one that in most cases everyone will admit means trading the best treatment of the music for the demands of marketing and iPod volume settings. Even your timeline underlines a problem with it: Brian Wilson recording for mono car radios, Pink Floyd recording for stereos, and those same people today optimizing their recordings to ... sound loud on shitty laptop speakers? To keep up with everyone else by making music loud enough that you don't have to go through the inhuman ordeal of turning a volume knob? This is not just audophile bullshit: the standard level of mastering today blares and pounds to an extent that it can be rough and tiring even to listen to music you enjoy, whereas I can pull out a quieter 90s mastering job, turn the volume WAY up, and be drawn into the sense of space and definition and clarity even in music I don't particularly like. It's not some arcane, subtle thing -- there's a world of difference.

I love nabisco.

I've probably only heard "Umbrella" two or three times ever actually - in a mall or something like that, so I've not really listened to it close enough to hear what it sounds like. I'm just judging that waveform upthread and I've had tons of experience looking at these waveforms and know what the sound on the tracks will probably sound like. I am very familiar with the sound of modern over-compressed recordings. I hear it clearly on things like the Fratellis (who make music I dislike anyway). The thing is that their audience don't give a damn. They listen to it blaring out of their laptop speakers and like it. Stuff like that is very popular (though weirdly no-one on ILM dares defend it).

There's an enormous great meme, on here and elsewhere, that says 'song is all', and within that, that it doesn't matter what you do to a song, there's some kind of platonic essence of the song's greatness that will withstand it. Now the popist and rockist might disagree slightly as to quite what comprises that 'song' (popist says production, hook, vocal performance, rockist says chord progression, guitar solo, whatever), but they're both broadly in agreement that a good song is a good song, and you can bend it, compress it, limit it, overdub it, reduce it to an acoustic strum, whatever, and as long as the basic essence is still there, the song is still good. Well that may be the case, but I'm increasingly of the attitude that there's a LOT of songs, and for most of them, in terms of the platonic essence of how good they are, there's not that much in it, to be honest. So the key thing for me becomes how well I can listen to it. The form of it. The physical form. Sod the platonic. To a degree. And if that means that... the difference in qualitative terms between Radical Connector and Andorra is that Andorra is easier to listen to, and I listen to it more, and enjoy it more, as a consequence, then to me it is better. Likewise Electrelane and Queens Of The Stone Age or LCD Soundsystem and Simian Mobile Disco or Guillemots and Keane or 65daysofstatic and Muse.

xpost

I think this issue has been particularly nagging to me in part because of the type of music I was listening to during the 90s period of really dynamic mastering* (though I wonder, often, whether the types of music popular then might have had a lot to do with the possibilities of mastering). A lot of the indie stuff at that point had a hell of a lot to do with sound. There were the height and the tail end of shoegazing, and endless attention to perfectly blurred guitars. There was the point where efficient, rough-and-tumble rave music spawned home-listening stuff that was really interested in the sonic field, making strange noises and textures dance around each other. (Not just IDM, but the sound of proper dance stuff, turned up nice and loud, could be amazing.) There were all kinds of comfy, drawly slow-ass bands, and others who used recording to create precise, dreamy pop worlds (like late Stereolab or Pizzicato 5). Most of these things put a lot of attention into sounding great. The mixes would be clear and tactile and full of space and definition, to the point where the elements of it seemed to have a distinct spatial arrangement in front of you. I can remember hearing a Spring Heel Jack EP turned up loud on a good hi-fi -- possibly the first time I encountered anything coming out of the jungle or d&b lineage -- and feeling physically amazed by the sound, which was this distinct, complicated presence in the room, airy and deep and crisp and solid where it counted. A lot of what I got out of listening to music was listening deep into mixes like that, being amazed by the organization of them, the way it felt like you could step into them and look around their depth.

I rarely get that from any record these days. I like good songs and interesting ideas, but it's rare to hear a recording I'm actually drawn into that way. And it's because they're not about drawing in -- they're about bursting out, loud and flat. I'm not begrudging the loud, flat burst to exciting radio singles (they often sound fantastic), or brash modern rock bands (that can capture an energy, too), but as a industry standard it's acutely painful -- even the records that want to sound natural, that have poured thousands of dollars into studio time to make their music rich and deep and inviting, wind up shouting you back to arm's length, all flat surfaces and squeezed-together messes.

(* = also because I record music -- I'm not great at it, but I do -- and that makes you interested in the possibilities of how things sound, and familiar with the tools that get them that way, and I'd bet nearly anything that if you had the knobs in your hand you would never choose for the music you're working on to get squished, I swear it!)

You've got me there. I completely identify and agree with what you're are saying in the first paragraph. I still hear that in newer recordings but really only in more house music or some electronic things. Guitar music is pretty much dead for me, partly because of what you're talking about, maybe?

I record music too and never, ever use any kind of compression. But the music I'm recording doesn't lend itself to that kind of thing. Maybe if I was making techno music I'd use it.

There are occasional new records that do it, that have space that you can climb around inside of. But not enough. I blame Tony Blair. And Noel Gallagher.

Compression's great and indispensable during the recording and mixing processes -- it's when you're brick-walling it to pump up the mix that it starts to seem like a really lousy plan.

But ha, yeah, Everything, I'm glad we can agree on that thing that's been a little lost there. I'm just hoping the kinds of acts that want to make That Kind of Album will just get comfortable with fighting for their music to be mastered a lot quieter than, you know, "Umbrella" -- I mean, if you're a laptop folk act, or something, and aren't planning on breaking Clear Channel, there's just no good reason to be chart-loud anyway! So maybe people will get annoyed with iPod volume readjustment and take you off shuffle -- you'll still have made the album that sounds head-and-shoulders above the others when they're listening at home.

Face into glass wasn't me, I'm afraid!

-- Scik Mouthy

The face-on-the-glass analogy, which is good for explaining compression to people who can't conceptualise it easily, is engineer Steve Hoffman's:

"Finally, think of compression visually like this. You are standing on one side of a sliding glass door. Someone is on the other side, and as you watch, starts pushing their face against the glass. The face doesn't get any closer to you, it just starts to look squashed, like a good 90mm camera lens will do. You don't want the person's nose to look really long and unnatural, see? You want the perspective to be "flattened" so it flatters the person's face. Well, same with music."

I think Tim didn't like the analogy much, but it is a good place to start, in the sense of directing attention towards the effect in a piece of music.

how does this impact on playing music in clubs?

Depends what kind of club. If you're playing shiny vocal pop/r&b/hip-hop singles, it works out fine, because they blare out really hot over club PAs, and they hit you very viscerally and make the whole place feel loud and chaotic and bursting with energy, which is not a bad thing in a club playing pop/r&b/hip-hop singles. Very "serious"-type dance music, on the other hand, has held back a little on the loudness, at least in spots, because it's still interested in the music being tactile and filling space in interesting ways, and having some rises and falls -- plus if you're talking about an 8-hour night out, the music can't blare at you too much. (There are also some differences involved w/r/t vinyl mastering.) But maybe someone who spends time in Berlin and such could say more about how that one works.

Keep in mind that overcompression works somewhat differently with "artificial" sounds like synths and samples, because there's not a lot of extraneous natural sound information to get flattened out. (The producers also have control over all the sound they're using, so they can work with a loud sound in mind from the beginning.) The place where you notice the hell out of this is when it comes to familiar instruments -- say, when an acoustic guitar or a natural-sounding drum recording has been all squished up to the point of sounding just ... off.

If you're playing shiny vocal pop/r&b/hip-hop singles, it works out fine, because they blare out really hot over club PAs, and they hit you very viscerally and make the whole place feel loud and chaotic and bursting with energy

i dont know that i necessarily agree ... a lot of times it prevents them from impacting as viscerally as they should

Well, I'd usually prefer them airier, but just saying: if you're playing three-minute pop singles in a loud, crowded bar, people are a whole lot less likely to mind if they come out brash and blaring. (Though you may in fact give them the impression that your pricey club sound system is actually really crappy.)

This isn't really about dynamic range compression but Nick's penultimate post seems rather disingenuous. For a start there is a lot more than the song to I think the majority of listeners, I think both the popist and rockist positions are both based on abstracts rather than actual musical content. I mean your one time peer Dom Passantino has made a career of never talking about an artist's actual music. And just saying it's about "how well you can listen to it" well to a degree, sure it works in the present but it seems like this stuff is the only thing affecting your choices. I came across an old thread where you were saying you didn't see the appeal of The Velvet Underground which struck me as odd as to me they are one of the best sounding bands ever: that beautiful distortion that make it sound like your speakers are collapsing in on themselves, the vocals on the 3rd album that seem to be a couple of feet away from you, the crispness of the fourth album. Digression much. You know I agree with you on this, but you seem to be suggesting it's the only factor dictating what you listen to. Which seems odd, odd, odd.

I perhaps didn't balance myself enough in that post. The physical sound of something isn't the ONLY factor, far from it, or I'd be listening to Diana Krall all the time.

What I mean is that where there are two things that are similar in terms of quality of song-content and composition, and I don't mean the order of the notes or such, I'm not musicianly enough to discern that level of content, but in style, in aesthetic, in emotional impact, in cultural niché, in reception, then I'm going to side with the one I can listen to better.

Like... there's not much difference, to me, in terms of the quality of songs on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga vs Girls Can Tell, but Girls Can tell is easier to listen to, so I'm gonna choose it above Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.

Am I making more sense?

The way I listen compared to the way Dom listens is probabyl very different. Our tastes only cross over very slightly, and that's because we want different things from the experience of music. Hence we write about it in different ways.

I'm... not bored, but... well, I am bored, but it's... I'm not arsed by image and cultural baggage much these days. In fact if they're of considerable import to an artist, I find it intensely off-putting. I have very little interest in an artist's personality these days, unless I really like the music, and then my interest is only very very small and tangential. I doubt I'm going to be sucked into being really interested in and really liking an artist's music because of their persona or image or such these days. Of course this might change. I don't watch, and never have watched, music TV. I don't really listen to music radio.

Of course, saying I doubt I'm going to be sucked into being really interested in and really liking an artist's music because of their persona or image or such these days is disingenuous because a non-image is as much a marketable, target-demographic factor of appeal as a heavily stylised image, and I'm not trying to be pious and "you're all duped by the media" about this - I'm just not interested in it at the moment.

The way I listen to music is, I think, more conciously at least linked in with the artists personality. Well, the personality the construct or something. Anyway it may sound like I'm having a go but I think this is so important in how the Dynamic Range stuff is argued. We've already had that idiotic Guardian article and that thread were Lex agreed with it. It's happening on this thread! The thing is it's not an audiophie thing really and when it starts to look like the thing that only affects a certain type of listener's experience then BAD.

The Killers sounded amazing in indie clubs in 2004 though. WOOOOMPH WOOOMPH WOOOOOMPH.

I do wish that more bands would take an interest in how their records are mastered. Brick-wall compression can be a valid aesthetic choice (for instance on Velocity of Sound Apples in Stereo went with an ultra-hot compressed sound which suited well the distorted fuzz-pop sound they were going for) but too often it seems to be just the default choice, and it doesn't always serve the music well. Music with very little variation in volume can be nice for listening in the car or on an Ipod - to cut through ambient noise - but it comes out sounding flat and monochromatic on a nice stereo at home when you're listening for detail and nuance. The emotion communicated by the sound can be stifled.

I heard ZZ Top's "Sharp Dressed Man" on the radio this morning. HAW HAW

Remasterers can also be guilty of this. For instance, I was surprised how different my old vinyl copy of Steely Dan's Can't Buy a Thrill sounded from the recent CD remaster version. Besides punching up the bass end and making the drums louder, they have flattened out the dynamics a bit. On the one hand, the new remaster sounds less dated, on the other, it lacks that airy, open, early-'70s sound of the vinyl.

I sometimes wish the discourse about this phenomenon used the term "limiting" more in place of "compression."

From one of the Mondeo Pop threads:

Gonna get all Sick Mouthy here but was Mondeo Pop the first casualty of Dynamic Range Compression? Mondeo Pop was on the whole rather light but when you compress that sort of sound it doesn't quite work. Way back in 2002 a woman who I knew who had produced records for 911 (?!) pointed out to me that the acoustics guitars on contempoary records by Mark Owen and Darius had been compressed to such a degree you couldn't hear the actual strumming. I guess it just took a few years to filter into mainstream rock by which point it had taken it's first scalp with Mondeo Pop.

-- acrobat, Wednesday, 5 September 2007 15:28 (37 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

If you compress an acoustic guitar the right way it can enhance the sound of the strumming.

see T Rex

it's all the iPod's fault (again) !

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118953936892024096.html

St3ve Go1db3rg are you familar with the Darius ouvre?

I spent last night with my mate and his band at a studio in Newton Abbott where M@lcolm T0ft, who engineered Hey Jude and Space Oddity and stuff, was mixing their record. It was very interesting hearing a compressor being applied to just one instrument (the bass) as the guys and the engineer debated which was better. They went without the compressor in the end; it sounded more like someone playing an actual bass guitar, whereas with the compressor on it just sounded like a low bass emission, with no sense of fingers on strings, or of Dan (my mate) playing harder into the bridge and drum breakdown. Very interesting.

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too hot mastering, as 'artistic statement'.

re: compression in clubs, the thing i have experienced has generally been a nauseating use of over-compression, but this has stemmed from running the signal from the source into the red on the mixer, before sending to the power amps, which results in a harsh and unlistenable sound that would be so much easier to listen to if they'd just take it out of the red before sending to the PA, and just turning the PA up a little.

i have heard that this is a more british club thing than a US one--US clubs apparently largely do the latter.

one exception was the bongo club (?) in edinburgh, which had one of the nicest sounding setups i've heard for a long time--the ability to actually make out the nuance of the songs i was dancing along to increased the enjoyment of said songs one hundred fold.

That is a very different thing, Nick, and not something I have a problem with. Either way it's an aesthetic choice and depends on a lot ofthings - how the bass was originally played, amplified, mic-ed up, eq-ed and so on - as well as the desired end result. Generally, a little bit of compression makes it sound tighter. Obviusly it also depends massively on the compressor, whether it's hardware or a software one lovingly simulating some ancient thing.

I think you're getting dangerously close to the reductive version of high fidelity that sees the whole recording and reproduction process as just aiming for the exact sound of an acoustic instrument.

I totally agree with your general point, though.

Tissp - go to Plastic People near Old Street in London - best-sounding club I've ever been to. I couldn't agree more, though. Your ears just get tired and you can't hear anything any more after a while.

Jamie OTM - I think worrying about the use of compression at the individual instrument level isn't really what you should be worried about. Use of compression at the gross level in the mix is what you're quibbling with, surely?

I use moderate compression on the guitar quite a lot, both live and in the studio. I just think of it as an effect that I choose to modify the sound of the guitar (more focused/more sustain on some guitars/increased volume of single note work when mixed in with chords) and which has no real knock-on effect in the mix.

individual track compression is u&k for decent mixes; over-compressing the master bus is the big evil here

Oh I'm not positing it as the same thing, although obv. it's related - this thread just got an oddly timely revive and I thought it was an interesting observation, is all. John Bonham wouldn't be as revered as he is without a compressor, I'm fully aware.

too hot mastering, as 'artistic statement'.

OTM. What could have been their best album was ruined by the mastering. No dynamic range whatsoever. None of the, ahem, drama I've been craving.

St3ve Go1db3rg are you familar with the Darius ouvre?

Nope. Fill me in?

I think worrying about the use of compression at the individual instrument level isn't really what you should be worried about.

Well, bad things can certainly happen there, too. But also good things. There are many variables which interact with compression (all of the compressor settings, i.e. attack, release, ratio, threshold; the specific compressor's characteristics; the attributes of the track being processed), and sometimes it gets even more complex with parallel compression (mixing a compressed an an uncompressed version of a track) or serial compression (using multiple compressors on a track). Lots of things can happen. Some of them are sounds we know and love, some of them are more unfortunate.

If i have my ipod on shuffle and a Sleater Kinney track plays, a little bit of wee comes out of me

I kind of wish that someone with audiophile-ish tendencies would write regularly about new releases with an eye for this kind of stuff. It seems like the kind of thing a normal reviewer wouldn't want to mess with unless it seemed glaringly important, but I find it interesting enough that I'd read something focused on it.