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

"when I can easily download stuff on Xbox live that's as complex as say a Fallout expansion pack or GTA Lost and the Damned you meant to tell me that shitty MP3s are a necessity?"

So you download lossless stuff to your iPod?

i don't really use itunes much

if i'm going to pay for stuff i'll buy it on cd or vinyl

any illegal DLing i do i usually only get off blogs and stuff cuz i don't do limewire or any of that stuff, don't see a lot of lossless stuff i guess, but i'm not that great at searching stuff out

do they have lossless stuff for sale on itunes?

"but still right now the average person's little bookshelf CD stereo system of 15 years ago sounds way better than their ipod dock now."

The average person isn't 1) going to notice the difference and 2) is psyched that they have 500 albums on that iPod.

i only care about my own interests, i'm not saying people have to care. i just want a future with music that sounds listenable to my ears. other people's shit is their own shit.

i listen to an ipod every day, yes it's convenient. i get it.

I think people generally value image quality more than sound quality because visual media by default requires more commitment/not as portable

Well above you are posting like you can't understand how we mysteriously got to this point. If you get it, you get it.

I understand how we got to this point, i just don't like the point and I think there are ways that could easily combine the interests of good sound and convenience....I swear too that different Ipods sound differnt, like my wife's mini seems better than my 60gb one, you never know how they structure the analog stage of it etc.

Basically i got to this point when i first joined ILM and stuff where i was downloading a lot of stuff and just listening to my ipod etc etc and all of a sudden i would get this sense of not wanting to listen to music at all....it just seemed sort of annoying to have all these MP3s and etc to be listened to all the time...I ended up deciding to buy a nice stereo and got back into buying vinyl and it sort of restored me to a degree, being able to hear detail and not have that aggressive edge to everything, it seemed so much more human....

one of the only legal services I've stumbled across that has lossless downloads is boomkat.com. since they're UK-based the exchange rate isn't very favorable, tho.

It's a bit like organic food really - if there's a significant demand for lossless files then it'll take off, and I fully expect it to do so at some point. For everyone else, well, good enough for them is good enough for them.

just sell me the pig (masters) and i'll slaughter it myself

back on topic, I'm hoping that overcompression is a production fad associated with the 00s, like in the 80s when everything was drowned in echo/reverb.

i just ordered a marantz CD player that does SACDs have always been curious about them, there's stil quite a few being made that i found on some online sites, all pretty much jazz and classical.

btw at $249 you cannot beat this deal with a BAT if you still think you'll be listening to CDs for a few more years:

http://www.musicdirect.com/product/73832

I think neil young did a bunch of SACDs

"notable air and rhythmic drive"

wtf does that mean

i have never owned a dedicated cd player, by the way! i know you all were curious about that.

Lossy MP3s isn't really the issue, I think; lossless rips of stuff that sounds shit in the first place are still not at all desirable to me.

So the records sound shit, the CDs sound shit, the lossless files downloaded from the web sound shit, etc, yeah I can see how that would be undesirable.

i would def take a 256 MP3 of a good sounding record over a SACD of a bad sounding one.

i think people are specifically mastering for MP3 now which may be part of why stuff has been pushed in a bad direction

Pretty sure this trend precedes MP3 by a good few years but maybe that's just me.

i was hanging with an engineer/musician friend in nyc over the weekend, he was saying that pretty much any conversation with his go-to mastering guy ends up being about compression. when his own band got their new record mastered, the dude gave them a jazz-style version with minimal compression, a brick-wall pop version, and an inbetween one that tried to balance loudness with dynamics, and they were able to compare the three. it would've been interesting to hear the difference that directly.

Why buy that Marantz when you can get an Oppo DVD player that does the same thing AND has DivX AND USB 2.0 inputs for like $169?

http://www.oppodigital.com/dv980h/default.asp

thank you crazy eddie

i dunno, i go to the stereophile forums sometimes (nerd alert) and one of the dudes their said that the marantz was one of the best values at $500, let alone $249, better than the oppo.

i'm not going to use it as a DVD player, it will be in a room where i don't have a TV

Oh, well then in that case. I just cherish the divx support.

I do wonder, if I ever decided to flog all my audiophile gear, whether the CD-only player would have any takers at all. The amps would still fetch a few quid (judging by eBay), but a huge hulking thing that only plays one format?

i've been looking at used stuff and certain cd player models are still in demand used...what do you have?

back on topic, I'm hoping that overcompression is a production fad associated with the 00s, like in the 80s when everything was drowned in echo/reverb.

In the 80s, it was mainly guitar based music that as drowned in echo/reverb. Today, it seems all kinds of music is.

But props to some people who steer clear of it. Steely Dan and Becker and Fagen's solo albums have not been overcompressed, and this is a very important issue to them (and to their fans, one might suspect). Also, largely anything Eno, Lanois or Nigel Godrich have been involved with haven't suffered from the overcompression.

I also wonder why this is why I have enjoyed more Norwegian music in the noughties than ever, because Norwegian acts are less hard on the compression than UK/US based acts.

Anyway, what one might hope for is that the mobile phones and PCs and internet connections of the 2010s will be so big/fast that compression is not needed. Then sound quality will become better again.

Nigel Godrich have been involved with haven't suffered from the overcompression.

??? OK Computer is smashed to fuck!

Geir never has a fucking clue what he's talking about, just ignore him.

hail to the thief even more so (doesn't bother me though)

xp

plus nigel doesn't master his own stuff (or i would imagine he doesn't) so i don't necessarily put it all down to producers anyway.

Kids Prefer Poor Quality MP3

Not at all surprising that perception of "good sound" is a learned behaviour. I've always said I prefer CD to vinyl because it's what I grew up with, how I got into music.

What confuses me is... I like big speakers and a powerful amplifier (or high-end headphones), and I like to turn it up reasonably loud; if you do this with stuff that sounds "bad" (as I perceive bad), it physically hurts me and gives me a headache. That seems like something more than just learned behaviour to me. Maybe I'm wrong.

Could we arrive at an Orwellian future where any critical listening or observation of sound quality is treated as an adverse psychological condition?

i agree that people who prefer mp3s are fucking retards, but, well, you know.

more detail needed praps: what kinds of music was the guy playing? with music that uses a lot of compression at the production stage, eg ringtone, idk if there's a whole shit-ton of difference between mp3 and cd.

That's the other thing, the two different kinds of compression. Animal Collective sound shit on CD and on MP3.

and live and on vinyl ahahahahahaha dys

Something interesting I've noted, though; if you change your ripping /importing preferences on iTunes, it affects the bitrate of stuff you buy from them as well as what yu rip from your own CDs. I dunno if it's all the time, but I've bought stuff and it's come through at 256kbps same as I rip it, and one time as 128kbps when I'd forgotten to change settings after ripping something lower.

don't think animal collective sounding shit is anything to do with compression

i think stuff you buy from "itunes plus" is 256kpbpbbpbs and normal itunes is 128?

Something interesting I've noted, though; if you change your ripping /importing preferences on iTunes, it affects the bitrate of stuff you buy from them as well as what yu rip from your own CDs. I dunno if it's all the time, but I've bought stuff and it's come through at 256kbps same as I rip it, and one time as 128kbps when I'd forgotten to change settings after ripping something lower.

― Sickamous Mouthall (Scik Mouthy), Wednesday, March 11, 2009 1:06 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

there's a little '+' symbol next to the higher bitrate tracks

Ah. I don't buy stuff off iTunes anywhere near often enough to have noticed that.

??? OK Computer is smashed to fuck!

"OK Computer" is around the average volume of 1997 albums. Which may be slightly too much, but not even remotely like the madness of today.

Beyond its average loudness though Geir, it just doesn't sound that good. Radiohead records don't.

I was put off buying things from iTunes after I bought the entire 2007 UGK album and it was virtually unlistenable - I have a HIGH tolerance for bad sound but this was just utter shit - every time the bass drum hit, there was a mysterious lack of any bass yet this lack also managed to crunchify and degrade all the other bits of the track as well. the whole thing sounded like it had been chewed up, spit out, left to bake in the sun for several weeks, been vomited on and then covered with a hard candy glaze, eaten again and then shit out into a steel bucket

xxxpost

Yeah, the iTunes Plus tracks are DRM-free, 256-kbps AAC. They don't sound bad at all, provided the source track is listenable in the first place.

What depresses me is that even with cheap storage and ever-faster broadband making lossless music files more practical for the mass market, I doubt there'll ever be enough demand for an major online music retailer to offer any.

but yeah, Tracer, the old 128-kbps stuff, yuck

My understanding is that music labels are responsible for encoding the tracks they submit to the iTunes store, not Apple. Seems like there's a lot of variance in quality for some stuff.