Music Into Noise: The Destructive Use Of Dynamic Range Compression

Is there a technique for cleaning out some of the overcompression on a WAV file ripped from a CD?

i am grateful for this trend in CD mastering because it means more things are listenable on it.

in other words: mixing things to sound as good as possible on radio play ISN'T INHERENTLY BAD YOU FOOLS

Non-technop0rn answer: No.

Once those transients have been squashed flat there's no way to restore them because there's no information in the signal to tell you what they were and when they were - it's irreversible.

*However*, one of the clever tricks Pacific Microsonics developed for their HDCD system (20-bit resolution on a 16-bit CD, goes the spiel) was just such an embedded code - HDCDs played back on a regular CD player had slightly compromised dynamics (but supposedly great sound due to careful mastering) due to low-level compression and soft-limiting. Played back on a HDCD-capable machine (the HDCD decoder being part of the reconstruction filter in the DAC chipset), this compression would be undone, and the transients unpacked.

I'm not sure how well this works; there was a lot of fuss recently on one of the audio newsgroups about a Roxy Music re-issue. It was proposed as a shining example of the improvements in digital technology: the 1999 HDCD version allegedly sounding miles better than the original late-80s CD issue. Someone then pointed out that the new version had actually been compressed to all hell (in the modern manner), which led to moments of stickiness wherein it was kinda implied that maybe a few audiophiles had fallen for the 'louder = better' trick. Ah, but HDCD *restores* these squashed peaks, yes? Looking at a ripped WAV isn't going to tell you the whole story - you've got to record the thing in the analogue domain to capture what the HDCD decoder is doing. Well, I had a go and it didn't look much different to the digital rip. Inconclusive. By this time everyone had moved on to arguing over cables again.

(Oh, and if yr thinking "20 bits resolution on CD? We can do that in critical narrow-bands with dither and noise-shaping from higher-res master". Well, yes you can. But HDCDs make the little green light on my CD player come on!)

We've had record labels sending us both radio cuts and 'normal' versions of singles, with the only difference being that the radio one would sound flat and horrible. As for getting our own releases on the radio... well, 'not compressed enough' was a handy excuse occasionally trotted out.

A feeble one. That's what radio stations have compressors for, surely.

Your definition of 'listenable', then, seems to approach my definition of shite.

in other words: mixing things to sound as good as possible on radio play ISN'T INHERENTLY BAD YOU FOOLS

It is when what you are doing is compressing a record to the point that you are compromising its quality- in this case its dynamic range... (the range from the 'lowest' to the 'highest' sound)..The music for your radio is going to sound like shite whether it is produced for a high end audio system OR for radio... since the output is shite.

But the trend continues because for the most part, the public listens to shite, on a shite system or in the car.. while talking on their cell phone, making reservations for their Tai Bo class....

Oh and related to another post.. the term 'compression' as it is used here has nothing in common with the way that MP3s are 'compressed"-

(I'm lazy)

http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windle_c/e_index.html
.. such as "Warning: Pink can be dangerous for health!"

Thanks for the synopsis ....

----

LOUD AS POSSIBLE AT ALL TIMES

The exciting crescendoes get flattened out...the drums lose their impact and punch...nothing "jumps out of the mix" anymore...nothing can build up to a climax because there is nowhere left to go...isn't this crazy?!?!

It is a pity that in the past few years this race to have the loudest CD possible - sacrificing dynamics and rich sound - is spreading even to artists whose CDs will never be played on the radio nor ever have to "compete" with loud-as-possible commercial products...not to mention that more compression on a CD doesn't make it "louder on the radio" anyway, but that's a different story...

The technology used to make our standard 16 bit, 44.1 CD continues to improve: better A/D converters, better bit rate and sample rate converters, quantum leaps in recording software quality etc... thus making it possible to produce better sounding CDs than ever before. The trend for hypercompressing the final master in order to make it as loud as it can possibly get means that most of these sonic advantages - which can give us better sounding CDs - are simply thrown out the window in favor of LOUDness. (Yes there are some kinds of music which do work best when the whole mix is flattened out dynamically, and I am a big fan of lo-fi and wrecked sounds...but that's done for musical reasons, not simply out of fear that your CD won't be the loudest in the CD changer. )

Compression is a great thing. It can be used to create very cool sounds and can help make the sound more "electrified" and exciting, it can make an ordinary sound into something completely new and strange. The problem today is overdoing the compression of the final mix for the "unmusical" reason of making it as loud as possible...only so it can "compete" with other CDs which have sacrificed sonic quality for sheer loudness. Artists, recording engineers, mastering engineers and producers have to start standing up for better sound as opposed to running the sonic equivalent of a steamroller over the music in order to flatten it out simply to make it as loud as _______(fill in the blank loud CD).

I could go on and on about this problem and why I think it is stupid and sad, but mastering engineer Bob Katz has already written some excellent articles on the subject:
Digital Domain (click on "Articles", then "Compression".)
Here is another good article by Rip Rowan on the same subject:
Over the Limit. This guy is obviously a very big Rush fan, so put up with his glowing comments about them because he uses their albums to clearly demonstrate the increasing problem to very good effect.

Bob Drake, December 2002

Like the Jazz/Classical section in your Virgin megastores?

Because itd be funny to compare that to like, the new Bon Jovi if Bon Jovi actually was LOUDER.

Flicked thru Uncut in the newsagents and their's an article on this issue. SOUTHALL TAKES THE DAD ROCK MARKET!

Where I lead, IPC follows. TOOK THEM A YEAR.

wow i fucked up there and their there.

You certainly did.

It'd be better if you'd fucked up they're and their there, tough.

What a cunt I am.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article1878724.ece

Whole lines of that are lifted from Imperfect Sound Forever.

There's also this - http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/news/newsbeat/galleries/1593/1/#gallery1593

article is slightly more telegraphed & technically incomprehensible, but it gets it's main point across

also good to see the times cover that story about the consumer's personal data getting watermarked in those 'non-DRM' files

fig 1

pavement - summer babe (winter version) 1992

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1125/530522654_2611bab03f_o.jpg

fig 2.1

the hold steady - stuck between stations 2006

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1089/530522686_8b81c63f4c_o.jpg

fig 2.2

the hold steady - chips ahoy! 2006

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1013/530522668_b28cfe6cc2_o.jpg

fig 3

ame - fiori

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1062/530536134_4f59fb4151_o.jpg

To what extent do the complaints about loudness/compression apply with vinyl releases of albums in the past decade or so? How often are different mixes used for vinyl? Do vinyl releases seem to have better dynamics than their CD counterparts (despite the limitations of the medium), or are they just not as loud overall (since they can't be)?

I'm trying to think of examples I know of. The Fall's Marshall Suite, pretty darned loud on CD (in a pleasing way, to me at least) is actually also quite loud on vinyl. But since vinyl isn't generally made for commercial radio stations to play from and since it is in some ways an audiophile format these days (heavy vinyl pressings never used to be so ubiquitous, anyway), one would expect LPs to be as well-mastered as possible.

Apologies if this has been addressed elsewhere.

i have personally noticed from doing transfers from vinyl that a lot of vinyl is fairly heavily compressed. not quite to the levels of many cds nowadays, but way way louder than most 80s and early 90s compact discs. compression is a lot more important for vinyl mastering to help keep the audible surface noise relatively low.

the guardians take on all this

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. It's really bizarre, especially when I turned up the car stereo, everything gets this very unpleasant quality...really hissy...the symbols and the vocals are audibly hitting this weird "ceiling" (sorry I don't know the technical terms)...also I've been involved in mixing a few records and we always think about "Front to Back" depth, the idea of not just right-to-left stereo panning but a depth to the mix, and there is NONE here...everything is on this same flat plane...then when i got to work i listened to an old Stax Delaney & Bonnie record w/booker t and the gang as the band....it's amazing just how much BETTER, more human and pleasing to the ear everything sounded....songs aside, just the quality of the sound was better to listen to...

also, i'm not surprised to see that hold steady record on there, that new one sounds atrocious. same w/the third strokes record in comparison to the first and second.

That Guardian blog piece really upsets me.

it upsets me too (over-compressed CDs don't seem to bother those people at that live concert!) but it's got a point

recorded music is traditionally engineered to sound best on the most popular playback system of its day. 78's sound horrible on a Technics turntable, but play them on a horn and it sounds pretty great. 60's 7" singles have no bass and a shrill top end, but play them on one of those portable 7" turntables with a built-in speaker and they just belt right out. 70's album rock sounds incredible on hi-fi systems, 90's CDs sound pretty great, and... hyper-compressed music sounds better on an iPod (at the expense of those masters sounding good on a home stereo, but... who cares)

it's worth mentioning again -- anyone presented with a louder signal in an A/B 30-second listening test will choose the louder signal, even if it's incredibly distorted -- in fact usually the distortion sounds like pure energy and is preferable, and many of today's engineers are not being _forced_ to compress or limit, they are intentionally introducing that energy into their songs. to them it is irrelevant that most people over 20 can't listen to more than 11 minutes of it without burning out -- people who want to listen to albums these days are in the minority, and they're going to be told they're old if they try to speak up

I'm surprised this pushback didn't come sooner actually

I accept that, but, for instance, the new Electrelane sounds a damn site better even on cheapo headphones and an iPod than The Good The Bad & The Queen; the LCD Soundsystem similarly sounds better, more exciting, moe involving, than the Simian Mobile Disco; the Electrelane and LCD aren't quiet, they're just more natural, more preicse, more detailed.

I dunno. Sometimes I feel like I'm fighting for a cause no one else even knows exists, let alone cares about. Which is the case...

I do almost all my listening from my ipod through Grado SR60s with most files ripped at 192. All these sonic issues definitely still exist in this scenario. Though maybe not so much if I was using the comes-with earbuds.

Link?

http://web.archive.org/web/20060612221324/http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/imperfect-sound-forever.htm

Oh, thanks! :-)

I've read the article more than once; I have the issue of Best New Music it's in. Just looking for the Jarvis bit. I'm going to go searching.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00qhrx6/Jarvis_Cockers_Sunday_Service_31_01_2010/

55 minutes in

The Loudness Wars: Is Music's Noisy Arms Race Over?

For genres like pop and rap that already used heavily-processed sounds, this wasn't a big problem, and some say limiting has been a productive tool. For music that uses live recordings of drums, guitars, and piano, however, such processing arguably ruins the experience of listening to music made by humans. The biggest furor surrounding loudness centered on Metallica's 2008 album Death Magnetic, a piece of music so loud that some fans called it "barely listenable" and prompted one person to complain that "to hear this much pure damage done to what was obviously originally a decent recording, in the mistaken belief that it sounds good, is hard to stomach." At the time, the outlook seemed bleak. If there was no impetus to get quieter but every advantage to pushing volume to the maximum level technology could achieve, why wouldn't the trend toward increased loudness continue forever?

To counter this seeming economic inevitability, some critics of loudness turned to legal remedies. Audio engineer Thomas Lund has been working in Europe to lobby for governmental regulations on a standard loudness limit on all CDs and digital music. (The limit has so far been adopted as a universal standard by the International Telecommunications Union, which describes itself as "the UN agency for information and communication technologies.") You already have something like this at home if you use iTunes: Just check the box that says "Sound Check" in the preferences menu and the volume level on all of your songs will be equalized. Lund's proposal would do the same thing for any music you could buy.

Taking advantage of the trend towards listening to music from the digital "cloud"—via services like Pandora, Spotify, and Apple's forthcoming iCloud—the proposal would institute a volume limit on any songs downloaded from the cloud, effectively removing the strategic advantage of loudness. "Once a piece of music is ingested into this system, there is no longer any value in trying to make a recording louder just to stand out," said legendary engineer Bob Ludwig, who has been working with Lund, in an email. "There will be nothing to gain from a musical point of view. Louder will no longer be better!"

But while the proposal has seen some success in the EU, it seems unlikely that audiophiles could rely on the US government to take a similar stand, in large part because it isn't a matter of public concern. "I don't see it happening," wrote Greg Milner, author of Perfecting Sound Forever: The Aural History of Recorded Music, in an email. "I think the general increase in awareness regarding the issue is more than counter-balanced by the fact that, by and large, nobody (in a sweeping, generalized sense) cares about music sounding 'good' in some sort of rarefied way. It's more important that it be heard above the noise of everyday life, since we hear so much of our music on the go."

Indie songwriter Owen Pallett went so far as to record all of the vocals for his 2006 Polaris Prize-winning album He Poos Clouds without compression, a step not taken since the early days of sound recording.

this is a weird and out-of-place detail. I'm no expert on sound recording technology, but surely recording without compression and mastering without compression are two completely different processes. and applying dynamic range compression to individual vocal tracks is different from applying a uniform level of compression to the final mix (vocals, instruments, and all). the loudness wars brouhaha is only really concerned with the latter practice.

besides, it's not even true, according to Owen:

He Poos Clouds is uncompressed, except for one note. (The timpani hit right after "I'm just made" on the title track).

― Owen Pallett (Owen Pallett), Tuesday, August 1, 2006 12:06 AM (4 years ago)

Whoop. I lied. We did compress the vocals. But everybody compresses the vocals, it sounds weird without it.

― Owen Pallett (Owen Pallett), Tuesday, August 1, 2006 2:24 PM (4 years ago)

yeah, vocal compression is almost necessary.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/02/mastered-for-itunes-how-audio-engineers-tweak-tunes-for-the-ipod-age.ars

That's one for the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" files.

Format conversion, dithering and compression are different beasts than "dynamic range compression". Still, an interesting article.

I had a WTF moment when I ripped Youtube audio for a DJ set and decided to tweak the EQ in Logic. I was surprised at how muffled the track sounded compared to the other songs. Flipping on the frequency analyzer, it seems that Youtube audio contains NO audio information above 15 kHz.

ha, i did the same thing recently. did you use it? i overdubbed some tambourine and lasers.

Smart! No, nothing as cool as that, I used a gentle plug-in called Vintage Warmer, which simulates tape saturation. It didn't *really* do the trick, but I went with it.

Then I e-mailed the friend who'd played the track for me originally and asked him for a copy of the CD version.

(The track was "Jon E Storm" by Dog Ruff. Good track! I don't even know where it came from, some German electroclash compilation.)

here's the one i used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzQ_xGsxgvs

but since the mix isn't yet, you inspired me to get a legit copy, so thanks!

WHOA! Sounds muddy as anything, what a mess. (20% suspicious that the problem might be in the mix entire.)

I mean, his ssss's are all there but Magnolia sounds like she's shouting in the basement; the drum machine and high end on the sawtooths are non-existant, etc. Youtube audio! Fuggedaboutit.

i think it might be a radio rip too - i downloaded an mp3 that sounds waaaay better.

https://gist.github.com/kylemcdonald/1fab024c9878106b486deb1a26bc2079

http://i.imgur.com/UoQIzG8.png

the tempo plot is super interesting btw

http://i.imgur.com/0wNMcw9.png