Music Into Noise: The Destructive Use Of Dynamic Range Compression

I mean, I can't fathom the ten-seconds thing because' it turns music into Burger King, but that's beside the point almost. I cannot fathom why anyone who 'loves' music would find it objectionable to spend £300 on a stereo to play it on, why anyoine who loves music wouldn't want to experience music as well as possible; it's a really exciting, sensual, indulgent thing to do and it's wonderful! Unless it's not listening to music you're into but rather 'having listened'; casting judgement. Which I'd think goes against your ethos?

Double X.

From a technical point, the more minimal music is, the more you can compress it without losing much clarity or space or excitement - I'll draw a diagram on MSPaint later to show what I mean, but I have to go out of the office now for a bit.

also i am not spending £300 on a hi-fi

-- lex pretend, Wednesday, June 6, 2007 8:48 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

really? ffs you're a music critic! i spent that much when i was fucking 16 years old! i'm no way near as much of an audiogeek as southall but you really don't have a clue what you're missing.

£300 isn't very much.

today on the current our local public station which plays mostly indie rock, they played some band called the Fratellis (sp?)

it struck me just how horrible it sounded.

possibly the most obvious set-up of all time.

well decent headphones would do the job, no?

how on earth did you have £300 when you were 16?! this is like when students in my year spent all year whining about how broke they were, then buggered off in the summer to go travelling. i can afford £300 easily now but all the years of that being a ridiculous sum to spend on anything are far too ingrained now - i have a workable and decent hi-fi, it's not a shitty plastic all-in-one thing, as long as it works i'm not replacing it.

and really i'm not even at home enough to justify it, i review most things off headphones-listening.

how on earth did you have £300 when you were 16?!

paper rounds, childminding, weekend work... i had more disposable then than since rly :/

well decent headphones would do the job, no?

-- 696, Wednesday, June 6, 2007 9:16 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

not w. dance music & so on surely?

The comment-box beatdown in that Graun space-filler is encouragingly righteous.

There's headphones, and there's headphones...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/Headphones%20and%20hi-fi/IMG_6751.jpg

i have no idea what headphones i even have. there is no point in me getting expensive ones b/c i will inevitably break or lose or tread on them within three months anyway. i do know someone who absent-mindedly cut his headphones in half with scissors, though, i have never done that.

The ones on the left cost me £28 and come with a lifetime guarantee; you have to send them to America, but they'll repair or replace. They've also got the kind of bass response that I imagine would tickle your fancy muchly.

it's not about the quality of the headphones -- i just don't think you can feel music properly through them. i say this as someone who atm only listens through headphones, via a computer.

I'm split 50/50 between whether I prefer headphones or speakers; they're very different experiences.

tbh the music listening i most value is on headphones because it's then, when i'm commuting, that i give my undivided attention to the song - i notice and realise a lot more about the music then, as opposed to on my better speakers at home when i'm usually doing something else while listening.

I've almost given up listening to music on the train for the opposite reason - I can't concentrate on it. Sometimes it's OK, on an Intercity with some damping, but on a local sprinter train there's no point unless I use my Shures and I've gone off them. I prefer to read or, at the moment, play Animal Crossing on Nintendo DS...

you can play computer games on trains???

i have a convenient 45mins/1hr unbroken commute which would be unbearable without music. there's nothing else i would want to concentrate on!

1hr! i didnt know you lived so far out! thats the same time as my commute

books

Animal Crossing hardly constitutes 'playing a computer game'. Wander around, steal some apples, talk to an anthropomorphised duck so that it cries and stamps its feet, pay your mortgage. It's not like you need reflexes.

My train journey's only twenty minutes, but door-to-door my commutes between 45mins and an hour.

It could be that much of what Lex likes...I would hesitate to say "benefits from"...but isn't perhaps quite so ill-served by hard-limiting and heavy multi-band compression as the sort of stuff Nick likes.

I'm thinking of guitar-bass-drums combos, for whom the recording techniques were honed in the late '60s/'70s and for whom hyper-compression and flat dynamics don't really work. If you take away the space and contrast from recordings of guitar-rock you tend to eliminate the illusion of liveness, which I think is part of its appeal.

The different listening environments is another factor too, of course.

True. And the dance / electronic stuff I'm into is mostly of a more maximalist than minimalist bent - Orbital being the starting point. Basically, the more elements, the more space is needed; less elements = less space = hard limiting not so bad. Also the idea of the 'psychedelic', climbing inside music, needs space and dynamism, and again that's what I'm into.

ha, well, my favourite dance music is minimal, and my favourite r&b is minimal! one of my favourite songs this year = 1x808 bleep + r&b babydiva singing 1x note + bare ghost of beat. and that's it.

1hr! i didnt know you lived so far out! thats the same time as my commute

your commute is about 10mins shorter.

I like lots of elements, lots of texture and timbre, and lots of little sounds. I like to hear horsehair, fingers on strings, rattling wires in a snare drum, the hum of the electricity in a sequencer.

(I find I'm shelling out an extra £6/week just to enjoy the sleek, quiet new Southern trains and avoid the noisy air-con/engine cooling system/whatever on the bus so I can listen to music on my MP3 player [£60 + £30 headphones]. The £I-can't-bear-to-say-how-much stereo doesn't get the use it deserves these days. Bloody kids.)

ha, well, my favourite dance music is minimal, and my favourite r&b is minimal! one of my favourite songs this year = 1x808 bleep + r&b babydiva singing 1x note + bare ghost of beat. and that's it.

You should still hear it through Chord amplification and a pair of ATC monitors before you die, Lex.

Whoever said the new Bloc Party is a good example of the current trend of over-compressed, badly- mixed albums is OTM. It's unlistenable - everything forced into a loud, flat plane where all the details are lost.

Why can't people let records breath a bit - why be afraid of having a bit of space in the mix. Right after I listened to Bloc Party I listened to the Rezillos ' Can't Stand The Rezillos' from 1978. It's a bare, functional production - just the band playing pretty much live with few overdubs, but it LEAPS out of the stereo and grabs you by the nuts whereas the Bloc Party just drones on unengagingly.

And that leads me into another issue - why can no-one record guitars any more? On the Rezillos album you can hear every nuance of Jo Callis's playing, you can tell it's a Telecaster from the first note. Just listen to a Generation X or Televison or Rain Parade record, or Led Zep II - that's how to do it. Today something like the Artic Monkeys is just an over-compressed sludge-wall with too much gain to allow any kind of articulation to come through. Partly it's production and partly is the guitarists' choice of sound, but together the combination is pretty hard to listen to.

Similar comments apply for drums - I want to hear wood, not a fucking crispy crackle.

The last New Order album had great material, great arrangements, but sounds distorted on every device I've played it back on. There is too little dynamic range - I'd love to hear what Martin Hannett would have made of that material.

^^ isnt it you that disapproves of hannetts production on bummed?

Yes gareth it was me, but by 86/87 Hannett was pretty fucked - everything sounded like it was recorded in an aircraft hanger e.g Bummed, the Stone Roses stuff he did.

I still kind of feel though that the problem with Bummed is actually with me and that I'm still missing something. It's been nearly 20 years though, so it ought to have worked its magic by now! Maybe I'll have a listen this afternoon.

http://i13.tinypic.com/5zf8pw9.jpg

(not mine, found somewhere else)

that jpg just about nails it

I think lex's comments are, as usual, not only terrifying but very succinct and dead on. you don't notice what's being done to the dynamic range if you don't have a halfway decent stereo or quality headphones, and most people don't! the audiophiles are in the minority here, and the argument needs to be very carefully put so's to not sound all moonbat. lex's comment "i have noticed the 'flatness' you describe at times obv but assumed it was down to me not liking the music" is about as close to a sympathetic response as you can expect from most music fans who've only owned basic level consumer gear and literally take offense when you tell them they should spend more money if they really love music

I don't know, I think the notion that you need to be a super-audiophile or have really fancy equipment to notice overcompression is false.

Sure, lots of people (most people, probably) don't consciously notice it now, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't if they were made aware (as many people seem to be doing, for example in the comments section of any of the various articles on this subject). I think it's more likely that people don't know how to listen for these things rather than that they're simply unable to hear them.

And I was also just thinking that it's kind of a shame the way "audiophile" gets used to mean people who are obsessive about their audio gear and want to have the biggest baddest stereo on the block or whatever. I think we should all be audiophiles, as in people who love good-sounding things and care about sound quality. As above, I believe that lots of folks may be latent or subconscious audiophiles; I think people respond to sound quality on a visceral level, whether or not they know what it is they're responding to.

But that's just an unscientific theory of mine, I guess, based on my own observations and such.

In my experience, everyone I've played music too through a 'big hi-fi' has really enjoyed it, noticed the difference, and, in several cases, gone out and invested themselves.

the quality of the average pair of speakers or headphones has actually gone up a lot compared to past decades; the problem is sound isolation is impossible in a world where everywhere you go has the ambient sound pressure of yr average urban streetcorner, we have TVs blaring in the office, computer fans humming away, people playing video games or whatnot plus their OWN music leaking out of their headphones, every store and pub in sight has speakers blasting tunes on top of PA systems calling for so and so and this and that plus everybody just yells all the time now so they can be heard above said racket.

dynamic range leads "important parts" of the music to become inaudible when trying to "enjoy" a recording in any modern environment besides your own home, assuming you have thick enough walls and keep the windows shut.

also people who listen to lots of different types of music, esp old jazz or any classical stuff ever, are probably a little more likely to notice this as they're now forced to adjust the volume a lot more than they used to

CF even just listening to 1990s IDM vs listening to any of that garbage lately BRANG BRANG BRANG

good version of the divine comedy there, nick.

Are there some good examples of recently remastered/reissued albums which suffer from this over-compression? Other than Raw Power, where it seemed to be the whole point of the exercise.

xp
yeh, newer classical discs, paricuarly of symphonic repertoire, can really piss me off with loud climaxes

I think lex's comments are, as usual, not only terrifying but very succinct and dead on. you don't notice what's being done to the dynamic range if you don't have a halfway decent stereo or quality headphones

This isn't really true. Hot Fuss sounds flat to me played through my tinny computer speakers or my shitty iPod earbuds or my car stereo w/busted right speaker. It sounds just as flat through good speakers or headphones. I think it does partially boil down to the music the lex listens to because minimal hip-hop doesn't sound terrible through hypercompression (though I can't say the same abt the pop and R&B he's into -- that would probably benefit from improved dynamics).

i notice it even in rap, the clipse last album was tiring as hell to the ears.

Yeah, well I know that a difference between me and some of my peers is that listening to music is its own activity for me. I try to avoid "background music," but that's what compression does, really - it makes everything into background music.

I've heard lots of people say that they don't mind compressed music for listening in the car, because they need to drown out the road noise or whatever. But all you have to do is turn it up loud enough so you can still hear the quiet bits over the road noise. Now the consequence of that is that the loud parts become really loud, meaning you can't have a conversation with someone in the car. That's fine with me - I'd often rather listen to music than converse on a car trip. But I know not everyone feels that way. (He Poos Clouds is not very good road trip music)

er, multiple xposts there

I think the music is compressed by frequency range to some extent as well -- that's probably why it seems more convenient for car listening, b/c just cranking up an uncompressed record means that you're getting a lot more unwanted piercing treble. (Or something, I'm just talking out of my ass on this one.)

I like lots of elements, lots of texture and timbre, and lots of little sounds. I like to hear horsehair, fingers on strings, rattling wires in a snare drum, the hum of the electricity in a sequencer.

Let's not go overboard here, I think what you're talking about maybe has more to do with recording (and mixing) techniques than mastering compression.

he's not saying that it has anything to do with mastering compression -- he's just saying the kind of music he likes is the kind of music that is harmed most by hypercompression

Are there some good examples of recently remastered/reissued albums which suffer from this over-compression? Other than Raw Power, where it seemed to be the whole point of the exercise.

-- everything, Wednesday, 6 June 2007 19:45 (10 minutes ago) Link

There's a whole audiophile-ish subculture based around comparing different generations of CD reissue, which has a tendency to get very anal, tends to automatically decry any new reissues, or so it seems to me, and it's a bit snake oil-ish/follow the guru-ish as well. I believe the last lot of Roxy Music remasters were pretty bad, but I didn't buy them, so can't report 1st hand.

I'd be interested to hear from anyone who purchased the new versions of Pulp's mid-90s albums or something of that nature. That seems to be the kind of music that suffers from this. Also, "This Is Hardcore" was the first album I remember thinking sounded terrible.

Some of the Cocteau Twins remasters were pretty horrendous.

Re: Pulp-- Rest assured their final album isn't compressed much, since Scott Walker was the first person I ever read decrying compression. It was in some article around '97 or '98 where he was asked what he thought about Radiohead, and he replied something like "I think they're really good, but they use too much compression just like everybody else."

I can't get a handle on Pulp's last album, soundwise. Sometimes I think it's great, othertimes I think it's shit.

fig 4 Rihanna ft. Jay-Z - Umbrella

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1119/533686637_55de8ef108_o.jpg