Music Into Noise: The Destructive Use Of Dynamic Range Compression

MASTERER of puppets LOL

DEAF magnetic

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

now it makes a lot more sense to me (though i could hear the problem with certain releases, i couldn't really figure out what was going on in regards to the mastering process)

no doubt you'll tell me this aint the crux of the issue, but hey ..

Coo - Jarvis Cocker just quoted a bit of Nick's Stylus essay on Radio 6.

Someone else told me this; what was the context, which bit did he quote?

i genuinely have still never noticed this

though i know someone who swears down he can't tell the difference between a 320kbps and 128kbps mp3, which is just completely o_0 to me, so maybe it's like that

I think he was reading a bit that was quoted in Perfecting Sound Forever?

It's about an hour and 10 mins from the end of the show if you look it up on iplayer anyway.

How very bizarre to hear Jarvis speak my name on the radio. My mum will be thrilled; she's from Sheffield and knows who Jarvis is!

I can't say I've ever consciously had a big problem with this but that Iggy experiment is pretty blatantly obvious.

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