Music Into Noise: The Destructive Use Of Dynamic Range Compression

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.

Just off Portapros the issues exists. Bundled earbuds, maybe not...

Was in an HMV recently, new Arctic Monkeys album being played - sounded atrocious, as if the music (which I like) was being immersed forcibly in a bucket of water; would that be an already heavily compressed signal being further compressed courtesy of the in-house DJ systems ... ?

Possibly, but just as likely a really shitty in-house Bose system that sounds shitty anyway and is probably fucked from over-use at loud volumes. The system in our local Virgin Megastore used to be utterly intolerable at anything above 'quiet' volume, such was the atrocious state of the speakers.

Wow that Guardian blogger is a complete ignoramus & blatantly misses the point.

and... hyper-compressed music sounds better on an iPod (at the expense of those masters sounding good on a home stereo, but... who cares

yeah i disagree totally...the delaney & bonnie album i just mentioned i was listening to on ipod/earbuds and the fratelli's track was in the car...it's the quality of how the instruments sound, the character of the song, not a volume thing...

yeah that guardian thing was horrific.

i have a friend who masters records professionally, and he says there is a lot of pressure from some accounts to master louder, which he resists as much as he can.

her main point is 'music sounds fine to me, and you guys sound old complaining about this'

slightly unrelated anecdote -- when missy's 'under construction' came out, I brought it over to my step-nephew's house who was a huge fan and I mean a huge fan. he asked if he could rip it, I said 'oh sure'. he put it in iTunes and pre-screened the album, listening to the first ten seconds of each track, and if a track didn't grab him in ten seconds, he unchecked it -- didn't even rip it. each track had _ten seconds_ to make an impression or else he didn't even want to come across it again later.

that's how important the first ten seconds of a track has become for these KIDS these days

and part of me sympathizes, the flood of free music coming in is so vast part of me understands the urge towards pre-screening before the thing even reaches your iPod -- make your quick decision now. but these listening habits are precisely what over-compression is attempting to overcome. you're definitely not alone and I really appreciated your article, Nick, it was the first one coming from a music-listener standpoint and not an audio-engineering magazine editorial or message board -- I think you should continue to state the importance of how people who like to listen to albums, or listen to _anything_ for more than 30 minutes are getting shafted. but you are going to sound old if you don't anticipate the counter-arguments, which range from very well thought out to 'you sound like an old man'

That's one of the recurring problems with this issue: people don't actually follow the description of what's happening, so they just pretend to understand by turning it into some other issue they know how to feel about. The comments box for Nick's Stylus article on this was occupied by at least one person who kept framing this as an analog vs. digital debate; plenty of people who comment on it seem to think it's just a strict and simple issue of loudness (or, worse, an "old people don't like loud music" issue). It's actually equally ridiculous for people to say "oh well, the kids these days don't seem to mind it," because the adults don't follow its existence enough to mind it, either. But what you do find is that anyone who actually pays attention to these things and understands the complaint -- in all age ranges, in all styles of music, just anyone with some knowledge of the topic at all -- sees the problem, even if they don't think it's a huge one yet.

I am young & I support your cause completely Nick. Records sound horrible these days.

And Milton your step-nephew is mental. Why couldn't he just rip the songs, listen to them later, and delete them (or just not listen to them) later if he didn't like them? I say this as a "kid these days."

I listened to the new Shellac today, and the lack of compression was very noticeable. Too bad they didn't write any songs.

obv. downloading has a lot to do with it, but i think this type of mastering is a big reason music is so "disposable" now...it's so harsh sounding that it wears you out after a few listens...

i've been thinking about this a lot, esp. as someone who works in the video game industry, and music is odd that it's the only major entertainment media that's run headlong into technically WORSE presentation. Like, for example, video games now have a lot of thing - like texturing, sound design, hi-res displays, that are just BETTER than the previous generation of console's games...same with movies - DVDs are just BETTER than VHS as a home playback form...whereas music is running towards MP3, which is just - on a base level - a less representational, worse playback format than LP or even CD...I sometimes wonder if that's a hidden cause of at least some of the industry's woes....it devalues the product, where video games have made a big effort to improve the presentation of their art form in a number of ways.

(actually maybe the cassette format was a precursor to that - a portable, easily to copy format that was much lower in fidelity)

The number of errors in the first two paragraphs of that Guardian thing is kind of dizzying. You don't really know where to start.

As to devaluation of the format, I think cd played a role as well--small size kept cds from taking on the fetish value vinyl records had.

But music as an art form is more fluid and varied than video games in general. There are more people making music than making video games. These days the creation of music is practically as accessible and immediate as the consumption of music, whereas creating video games takes much more effort and is primarily a capitalist/corporate endeavour rather than just doodz hangin out jammin. Obv. there is a market for DIY video games but it's much more obscure than DIY music.

I guess "fluid and varied" is the wrong term, I mean more like "democratic"

and re: movies and television: you forgot Youtube, which I think follows the same trends that you're describing about CD->mp3

Eh, posted a reply to the Guardian piece ("ColleenMoore"), much good it'll do, probably.

Why couldn't he just rip the songs, listen to them later, and delete them (or just not listen to them) later if he didn't like them?

I asked him that, and he basically said "if something I hate comes up in shuffle on my ipod I have to reconnect it to get the mp3 off again so why not just save time?" I tried to explain that there's a lot of music you don't like the first time you hear, and he said 'this isn't art music, you like pop or you don't'. He considers himself a real music-head as well, I was shocked at how little having an intact copy of the album seemed to mean to him.

funny thing is all the songs he unchecked are the ones I usually skip as well

anyway sorry to digress but for all the talk of engineers being forced to overdrive, I've also heard a few records where the final mastering's overcompression was absolutely a part of the aesthetic of the entire record, it wasn't inflicted. it's exhausting to listen to these records all the way through, but the quality of the distortion is unlike any music I've heard before -- as modern as it gets (as one engineer put it once, "who cares if the mix sounds good, does it sound new?"). so though there is a trend here, it's just as dangerous to speak in critical absolutes when there are a few people doing creative (if brutal) work with this sound.

make no mistake, I think what's being done to records with mastering these days is mostly a crime, that's why it's important to fine tune the argument especially now that conversation seems ready to break on a wider level

and re: movies and television: you forgot Youtube, which I think follows the same trends that you're describing about CD->mp3

-- Curt1s Stephens, Tuesday, June 5, 2007 11:09 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

yeah that's a good point, but at least most people i know tend you use youtube more for dicking around at work, watching funny videos, etc, or maybe using it as a last resort for something they couldn't find otherwise....like i watched the office finale on there because i missed it, forgot to record it, and then realized NBC didn't have full episodes...most people i know are still upgrading to hi-def TVs and everything w/good surround sound systems, it's not like youtube is replacing that...

great reply Pashmina!

a few thoughts. 1. this issue needs some of that ole Frank Luntz magic, i think. the term "loudness" - however accurate it is from an engineer perspective - is infelicitous, inviting mental images of old codgers bemoaning the rambunctious music of the youth. maybe "flatness" would do the trick? 2. why is it always 30+ writers who bring up the "you're just old and grumpy: the kids looove this stuff"-argument? 3. i totally disagree with those of you who claim that heavily compressed music sounds comparatively better through headphones. i have the exact contrary experience.

The Guardian is the worst.

I think "flatness" is the perfect term Jeb - it captures people's instinctive understanding of the problem. "Loudness" is more techincally accurate, given that the main issue is the reduction of headroom and the squashing of transients, but flatness makes more sense to frame it. And - as you say - it doesn't let the problem get confused with other stupid shit.

As far as Milton's nephew - I do that too when I'm in a record store going through vinyl at the listening station. I'll skip through, giving each track a few seconds in it's middle, and if it doesn't grab me it's history. There's just so much to get through to narrow it down to the few excellent things.

PS: also, yes, that Guardian blogger is fail

great illustrative video here:

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

That Guardian article was crap. Nick, your article was getting passed around on the Tape Op message board recently. The video that Johnny links to was posted there as well, and I agree that it's good.

But I would caution folks against being too quick to blame everything on the mastering enginners. I know a lot of mastering guys these days get handed projects that have already been heavily compressed during tracking and mixing. And once something has been compressed, there isn't much you can do with it. It's sometimes possible to uncompress, but it's difficult. And lots of times the band are the ones asking for it, too. The idea that something doesn't "sound like a record" until it's been squashed flat is going to be difficult to shed completely.

But I think awareness is building, little by little...

Aye, one of the things I was keen to point out in my article, and that I mentioned on my blog (titled after this thread, in a backwards manner) recently and in the 65dos interview, is that it's not evil mastering engineers or even evil record company people - it's stupid musicians doing this, a lot of the time.

Also, the over-riding effect of over-compression, beyond things like clarity and spatial placing of instruments and that 'serious audiophile' stuff, the real deal-breaker (or maker, depending on your angle) is the fact that it makes music boring and monotonous - a big part of the reason Coldplay are boring is because their songs don't change, for instance. Same with Keane. It's the reason the latest Bloc Party album is so fucking dull.

nick's article is interesting - i can't say i've noticed this at all, certainly not to the blanket extent nick has; i do get annoyed at poor sound quality but this is usually either a) crap mp3s or b) ironically enough, old cds which aren't loud enough. and though i'd like to be one of the ADD-riddled kids who makes decisions based on 10 seconds alone - this strikes me as a rigorous and entirely admirable approach to music - the fact is that i DO listen to albums (cos that's the format stuff gets sent to me on), and to music generally for hours at a time, and i don't feel any of the nausea described.

i have noticed the 'flatness' you describe at times obv but assumed it was down to me not liking the music - stars, for instance. and yr point about coldplay songs being dull because they don't change - they would be dull even if they were mastered like you want! but the point about wine buffs hit home.

this, however:

I think music journalists have a responsibility to listen to records on at least half-decent equipment

would you like to buy me a top-of-the-range hi-fi system, some expensive speakers and headphones then? i dunno, i think that's a fairly obnoxious thing to say.

also, i think it was eppy who said somewhere that a lot of modern hip-hop and r&b sounds great precisely because of blocky compression, which makes the spare beats and vocal out front sound even better.

and really, i do suspect that this is a problem you'd only notice on expensive equipment. i - and MOST PEOPLE - don't own expensive audio equipment, and nor am i likely to in the foreseeable future. maybe a better solution would be for you audiophiles to listen through computer speakers more?

and i think the grau piece is perfectly fair because my immediate reaction was also "well, i can't hear this at all", and it still is to an extent.

I think most of what you've just written is pretty obnoxious, but there you go, Alex. This, for instance, just boggles my mind - i'd like to be one of the ADD-riddled kids who makes decisions based on 10 seconds alone - this strikes me as a rigorous and entirely admirable approach to music.

You don't need 'scary expensive equipment', either, that's a myth. A pair of Koss Portapros will set you back probably less than £30 and are absolutely terrific headphones. This isn't just an audiophile issue; like I said above, the main concern isn't so mcuh loss of clarity (although that is a conern too, obv, for me), it's loss of movement, of dynamic, of excitement. In the original piece when I said 'half-decent equipment' I'm not talking about £10k's worth of hi-fi; I'm talking about a £300 Denon mini system or a £60 pair of headphones. Once you tune in to what compression sounds like you'll notice it everywhere on almost any equipment.

Film critics, as I said, would be laughed out of the building if they reviewed films based on Youtube viewings.

x-post - you can't hear it cos you don't know what you're listening for yet. You quite like Electrelane, yes Alex? They're a fucking tremendous example of an uncompressed sound (or a 'not-over-compressed' sound). Play some Electrelane back-to-back with some Coldplay, as distasteful as you find Coldplay, and the difference is in the quiet bits, the loud bits, the fact that you can hear the instruments.

i do think electrelane are 'well-produced' (though sadly it doesn't stop their new album from being unlistenable) but most things i like are also well-produced - this is why minimal techno and r&b appeal to me so much, because so much care has been taken over the production in comparison to people like coldplay or simian mobile disco.

re ADD-riddled kids - there is too much new music to take in otherwise and too limited hard drive space, as it is i still feel honour-bound to listen to the entire track before making the delete/keep decision. 10 seconds would make it all so much more efficient.

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

You terrify me, Alex, and I mean that with utter sincerity.

actually look upthread i posted a waveform of a track by ame, who i think lex likes. anyway, look how much space there is compared to the indie rock tracks.

ame are fucking incredible