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

I know I'm blanketing but I never hear this production style unless the $$$ factor is at the top

UGH THE DOLLAR FACTOR HAS BEEN AT THE TOP SINCE AT LEAST THE 17TH CENTURY this is a non-issue here

its almost like things are the exact opposite now to how they once were. in the analog era the big companies broke ground and made jaws drop and now it seems like the tiniest labels are the ones revolutionizing digital. the experimental/mod classical/electronic niche labels. i wish michael mayer produced death metal.

No, obviously, caring about, thinking about, and talking about sound quality is somehow antithetical to the idea of beautiful pop music flowing thick, golden and democratic from cheap sound sources clutched by beaming children. Every time you complain about a squashed transient, an innocent pop listener feels a chill from your creeping decrepitude. Stop hurting people.

i wish michael mayer produced death metal.

the decline of death metal production and the effect of range compression* on the genre is the saddest thing. finding a band whose production and mastering hasn't ironed out all the air is like finding a needle in a haystack.

*would people please note: this is not the same thing as "compression." Compression is awesome! Tape compression is hugely important in the history of pop music! "Dynamic Range Compression" is a discreet phenomenon, different deal.

Aero, Scott: I would LOVE some recommendations on beautifully recorded death metal records.

yeah, its rough. and i lied before because i DO hold on to metal CDs that sound terrible because i like the bands and music.

and yeah compression was a 70's rocker's best friend. need to make the distinction.

x-post

UGH THE DOLLAR FACTOR HAS BEEN AT THE TOP SINCE AT LEAST THE 17TH CENTURY this is a non-issue here

― available for sporting events (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Tuesday, February 26, 2013 10:17 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Is there no distinguishing factor between the core motivations of artists and labels in the pop landscape?

skot/smithy what other metal genres do you think are shitty recorded now? (or indeed well recorded)

I think doom bands are the ones paying the closest attention to sound. then USBM bands, which makes me wish I gave a shit about USBM. European black metal is stuck in if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it mode, which is fine I guess, it's just impossible to stay interested. Ride for Revenge records sound awesome though. However from your classic clarity-of-sound standpoint they sound like absolute shit.

I'm listening to a new record recorded at albini's and dmm at abbey road, so good, so rocking

Kurt Ballou has a rep for basically doing one thing, but he does it really well. Also, Zeuss mixed the new Suffocation record and it sounds terrific - much better than their previous album.

yeah i was gonna say doom too. maybe they are more old school in general.

i'd still say if you were gonna record a death metal album save your pennies and head to sweden. or finland. or somewhere else cold. they just seem more sympatico there. there are people there who only do metal. or do lots of metal anyway.

I love the way Embrace the Emptiness by Evoken sounds. I just picked it up on vinyl recently... Lots of space, clarity, but still thick.

i was a big fan of kurt's early non-converge stuff. kinda lost touch with newer stuff he's recorded. he knows how to do loud well.

yeah Evoken records sound fucking badass, agreed.

france too. you could go to france. some great metal production from there. its harder and harder to find actual LABELS that consistently care about how their releases sound. again, the smaller the better. the truly tiny forest/folk/acoustic/doom labels. people with some sort of aesthetic that includes sound as well as design. its a big reason why Utech is my favorite american record label of the last 5 years or so. great music first, but also great unifying design and sound aesthetic.

My problem with a lot of the old-school DM I've been getting into is that it sounds TOO thick. I want a little more sharpness and nimble-ness in the sound.

Metal needs a Blue Note/RVG

i think it would be cool if more bands found people who could do nice well-balanced analog recordings and then just transfer that to cd. or just find studios/engineers who are more well-rounded.

there's a guy i know near me who does great analog and digital recording. he's equally adept at both but i love his analog atuff that i've heard. he's recorded friends of mine - bunwinkies and fat worm of error - and he gets a great sound. he does all of dinosaur's stuff and the witch stuff. and i think he did the new thurston album. anyway, there are people out there who do great stuff people just need to think outside the box. he's not a "metal" engineer or producer but i bet he could do an amazing job with a metal band.

Obliteration's Nekropsalms is a beautifully recorded death metal album

we're scaring lex and the others out of the thread by talking about metal

That Fat Worm record sounds amazing. Main problem with analog, especially for bands at that level, is the cost. Tape is pretty pricey.

oh and tarfumes before i forget i have it right here: the who disc is from 1996 and the reissue was produced by jon astley, remixed by andy macpherson and jon astley, and remastered by bob ludwig.

Yep, that's the one a lot of people can't stand. I kept my copy for the handful of additional Moon bits the remix revealed (a cymbal tinkle in "Acid Queen," a tympani fill in "Overture"), but the sound, ugh. I think the 1989 remaster is supposed to be good, though (single disc, faces in the artwork).

its pretty demented, sound-wise.

but, you know, if that's the only one you've ever heard/owned it doesn't matter, i guess. that's what the album is to you. that's how it has always sounded.

Hm, I definitely would not say that "Penny Lane" has flat dynamics on the 2009 stereo remaster of MMT.

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Monday, February 25, 2013 9:49 PM

Listening to the mono mix, I just don't hear a lot of change in the overall track volume level despite constant changes in the instrumentation.

As to the "Da Doo Ron Ron" waveform not being just a big rectangle: Yeah, but the volume peaks are weird. Like the bass drum that's really loud or some vocal peaks or something. Basic backing track is pretty much a sound mash imo.

Re: that chicago mastering article above (which is very good), I took a look at a MP3 of that Radiohead song in Audacity, and my version shows a lot of clipping. I ripped it from the CD ages ago, not sure which program I used (I no longer have the CD). Can an encoding to MP3 introduce distortion?

Pop, rock, and dance music, even some jazz, doesn't need to have dynamics to rival classical music. That's not the point, and I don't think anyone's arguing about it. My main issue is the way that impaired sound quality - through clipping and muddy, over-stuffed mixing and general lack of clarity - is often a side-effect of things being very flat and loud. I'm a lot less militant about it now that I was six years ago, partly cos my tastes have changed slightly and I'm listening to less stuff that's really impaired, and partly cos I think a lot of people have realised they don't like this. But I still think that a lot of modern records sound very, very samey and boring, because they're so loud; things like Aerial and The Drift just sound absolutely bizarre and brilliant and avant-garde to me, and that's wonderful.

Interesting list of 'worst offenders' here:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LoudnessWar

the ability to have infinite tracks of overdubs is by far the worst thing about digital recording

then again on the first cars album they used like 5000 vocal tracks for the harmonies so maybe people should only use 5000 tracks per song.

cuz that album rules.

the ability to have infinite tracks of overdubs is by far the worst thing about digital recording

otm. I feel like digital compression is used most commonly as a way to glue meticulously separated digital sounds together.

that vs. something like "Da Doo Ron Ron," where the wall of sound (iirc) comes from all instruments being played into the same room simultaneously. the "compression" is partially shaped by a real acoustic space.

I guess, whatever they did, I think of the Cars as the opposite of a cluttered band. I'm more talking about the generation of kids who got convinced they were studio auteurs by The Soft Bulletin, ”kitchen sink” indie

this is for tarfumes. sweet early german pressing! yes i know my camera isn't very hi-fi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7sp73OlTD4

Beautiful! Thanks, Scott! I have a later German pressing (from the Phases box) that sounds pretty good; I'll have to dig it out.

happy Dynamic Range Day, folks! be sure to celebrate this awesome Day by letting your friends know how music is too loud. It used to be quieter, now it is too loud.

LOL at that "worst offenders" list linked upthread. Somehow a guy named Kevin Gray has finally done justice to Iggy Pop and David Bowie's work. I guess no-one would've ever heard of Raw Power until he decided to turn up the guitar slightly.

Giorgio Moroder weighs in.

"My son helped me to get the screenshots in Audacity" - sounds weird coming from Moroder. You'd've thought he'd be good at computers.

I dunno, I wouldn't expect that necessarily.

Maybe. It's just funny, a rubbing-together of eras.

An addendum

Whatevs. These don't demonstrate anything. You need to be able to compare apples with apples. What are these songs? How long are these waveforms? Only the "Get Lucky" waveform shows the tracklength. 30 secs on Audacity could make the 1977 one look like the 2013 one. Also, the Get Lucky one is too weak. If you put that in a mix you'd have to boost it up. If that's really the unadjusted waveform of the new song then they fucked up.

Also, I have worked with thousands of commercially released songs in Audacity and you rarely, if ever, see something like the 2013 thing (unless you specifically want it to look like that).

you're talking out your arse

No, I'm not.

I guarantee that that will not be the waveform for Get Lucky.

you better check again man, cos you're showing all the signs