I like to read the "louder is better" discussions, when sound engineers themselves are talking about it :

http://www.musicplayer.com/ubb/ultimatebb....ic;f=3;t=006746

interesting reading there.

after reading loudnessrace.net i had wondered how much of it was assumption or truth... looks like i know now.

*hugs tweeters* you'll be allright...

Pio, thanks for the link. It's very interesting to hear the pros discuss the whys and wherefores of this hypercompression mess. Also enjoyed their little side discussion about MP3s. I wish someone could set up a blind ABX test using Lame aps with these guys.

If you come across any more articles about this subject, please post the links. It's amazing how the record companies are destroying the sound of their CDs, the John Mayer being one of the worst offenders.

I've not bought a mainstream popular release album for quite some time so I cannot really comment on this business of the loudness race. All of my music I purchase is indie released and these releases do not seem to suffer from this loudness race what so ever. I’m actually going to rip some of the louder titles soon to actually see (via Sound Forge) whether or not these releases are overly loud as well.

If I were running a business, I’d go and sue my customers who steal from me(not just simply have the law punish them), and then on the law-abiding customers, release sub-standard products with little to no alternatives. You wouldn’t think I’d be in business long. Too bad the popular music industry still is…

We should always keep in mind at whom these overcompressed albums are aimed (sales-wise) ... the average listener will most likely use some kind of design compact stereo system with a lack of rms power (which is needed to respond to dynamic music) but lots of blue lights and shiny face-plates instead - still the majority of all sold stereo systems (at least where I live), but soon to be replaced with cheap home theatre compact multichannel systems that show the same disadvantages.

Imagining the low overall loudness you could produce with a high-dynamic album on these systems, it is a logical decision (marketing-wise) to apply dynamic compression during the mixdown process - since loudness sells in this specific marketing segment.

Personally, I would always vote for a "twin release" ... one compressed album for compact systems and a more audiophile or dynamic mixdown for people whose stereo systems are able to properly reproduce these dynamics ... I would also go that far to pay a slightly higher price for higher quality.

Great idea captain! The record industry might very well go for that. Perhaps we should start lobbying to this end.

sure, every label will pay for a second mastering with less compression

They just might, at that... since they'd effectively only have to ask for a good mastering first (which most engineers would be happier producing anyway), with the understanding that a second pass of that master would be squashed. Remember that the film industry has taken to releasing separate "Widescreen" and "Fullscreen" DVDs.

- M.

That's one hell of an idea! I like it!

Perhaps an online petition is adequate for lobying, but I don't know how to set that up neither have any hosting at the moment. I'm sure this will gain support quickly!

I'd be very interested to test this theory.

By large dynamic range, I don't mean a K-20 mix - just a K-14 or K-12. Remember many current CDs are K-6 or less. (see www.digido.com level practices articles if you don't have a clue what I'm talking about!)

I think that a K-14 mix (turned up) would sound better than a K-6 mix (turned down) on almost any equipment.

For that matter, I've played Chesky DVD-A discs (usually about K-20) on some awful equipment, and they still sound (comparatively) wonderful.

Cheers,
David.

If they do it, they probably will have the shiny new DRMed DVD-A or SACD or whatever new format they love the HQ version, and keep putting the bad one with the CD format they hate and want to make dissappear.

In this scenario, the people will just have to become more and more expert in extracting/ripping/copying the music from the "HQ" but user unfriendly media into the format prefered by the people, which currently would be a mix of /CD/HD/DVD audio/data with audio/Video without video just audio/ media that could be played anywhere without restrictions.

As for the labels practices, they can only do what they do because they control the governments of the "first world". The day people regain control in those contries, you will see what will happen to these parasitic slavers. Elsewhere they are already on retreat

Remember, "for profits" seek revenue, not quality. For them quality is always second to revenue. See Microsoft, American railroad history, etc. Europeans seemed a little more pushy in the quality realm, but they are losing ground everyday to what "america" dictates.

There is a much more simpler solution ! Release all albums in audiophile quality, and include cheap dynamics compressors in low end audio equipment. My old cassette recorders of the 80's, with no recording level adjustment, had such a dynamics compressor built in for recording. With nowadays DSP chips, it should not impact the price significantly. No more than the presence of Dolby B on Walkmans.
As an example, PowerDVD 5, the software DVD player, includes a strong dynamics compressor that you can enable in the advanced sound properties.

Yes, you are referring to automatic level adjustment on cheap cassette decks ... and even my MD walkman has this feature which is very useful for live recordings ...

I think Bob Olhsshon makes an interesting point. I hope it's OK if I quote his full post:



If this is true, then the situation for SACD/DVD-A will be quite the same and they will be just as loud.

[Highly_Off-Topic_Political_Rant]Or look at Nike, Adidas, Gap, Ford, Calvin Klein, Dockers, Ecko, Shell Oil, McDonalds, etc, etc, etc. It is part of the "New Economy," the brand matters more than the product, all this stuff is total shit.


HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, yea right. Sorry but, if you hadn't noticed the majority of people in North America are heavily indoctrinated by the millions of pieces of propaganda that hit them everyday from the PR industry. If you are thinking that Nader has a prayer in the upcoming US presidential election, or that the Green Part or NDP have even a shadow of a prayer in the upcoming Canadian election you are sorrily mistaken. There is no sign of the status quo running into difficult times any time soon in North America. As well if your nation has any valuable resources (I'm not up to date on Venezuelan economics) and they are as free from corporate rule as you say expect the US government to sponsor a major terrorist group in your are soon, or organize a coup and make it look like that a local tyrant came to power on his own, a tyrant totally subservient to them.[/Highly_Off-Topic_Political_Rant]
[SIZE=1]edit: typo (changed upcome to upcoming)

Personnally, I dislike the idea. Most CD's are overpriced, and have been. I'll eat a snow-cone in Hades before I pay more for what I should be getting anyway. Couple that with many CD's containing so much filler, and it just isn't worth it sometimes.

Ranting about companies producing low-quality in favor of profits aside (it's not an American invention by the way), they get away with it because it sells. So stop buying it. I'm with the poster that said they bought indie music. There is a lot of very good indie that is produced properly. Not all of it, but a lot. I too have heard indie music produced in living room sound better than a great deal of major releases.

I'm surprised that noone wrote a driver for a virtual soundcard yet, which would relay the incoming audio data untouched to some diskwriter tool. I think once DVDA/SACD become common incl. PC based players, this will happen, unless someone cracks the scheme (again).

i can think of "total recorder" and "Virtual Audio Cable" at the moment.

Isn't that what they've got in mind with SACD?

I still maintain that the crappy/compressed sound of these discs has little to do with 'marketing' them or 'appealing' to anyone in particular, precisely the reverse in fact.

And it 's working, people are losing interest in CD fast, however you slice it. Bad sound is bad sound, no matter what it's played on. I just don't buy the notion that this "noise with a beat" sounds good to *anybody*, no matter how cheap and crappy the playback equipment.

George Graham, mastering engineer;

"Where the current pressure is coming from is unclear, but several prominent mastering engineers have complained that they are being pushed to make the CDs they work on as loud as possible. The digital audio medium also has its maximum upper limit in level, in this case all digital "ones." So to make the music sounder louder more of the time, that means adding compression, just like the bad old days of 45s."

There must be some *serious* pressure originating from way up the corperate ladder when even doyens like Bob Ludwig start producing discs like these.

ciao,
RF

I have several friends who, after slamming their favorite hard rock CD in the car player, crank up the volume and boogie down the road. Rampant noise from the combined CD compression and speaker clipping doesn't phase them a bit. All the while, I cry like a baby because it's killing my ears...

Prior to coming to this forum, I didn't know anyone complaining about it. If all the people I know could be considered the "average consumer", then the average consumer loves CD's. In fact, outside the audiophile world, I would say most people still think CD's are the ultimate in audio.

That's not to say they aren't "priming" us so that SACD sounds better. Just that I think that's too subtle of an approach for most consumers. Who knows.

[another_Off-Topic_rant]


I assume this was directed at me?

No this wasn't originally an American invention, but I was speaking of something more specific . The "new economy" which is based on the idea of marketing (branding) over producing goods. This has the effect of lowering the quality of the goods the companies produce and helping the modern trend of leaving the production up to whoever will give them the goods for the least amount of money. This ends up being factories in third world countries who pay their (usually) 15-25 year old (they usually end up dying at a young age due to the intense work, brutal working conditions and lack of enough pay to eat two decent meals a day, let alone all other costs of living) female employees starvation wages.

The pioneers of this idea were Disney and Mattel, both American companies. Originally it was thought that this brand over product take on things would only work on children, because adults and teens would see through the superficial ads and spot the bad products. Nike (another American company) was the one to prove them wrong.[/another_Off-Topic_rant] Feel free to split this if you feel it should be split admins/mods

edit: typos

/offtopic/

music_man_mpc-

I don't know if you have read it or not, but I'd highly recommend a book called "No Logo" by Naomi Klein. It's all about branding, job markets, third world countries etc.

Hmm, I always thought Total Recorder uses the WhatYouHear channel. Thanks!

Except that same site has an honor roll list with K levels next to each entry, and from listening to and analyzing a couple of the CDs in it I'm more inclined to believe that this value is closer to the overall maximum RMS of the material (choruses are an example of what "overall maximum" refers to). Therefore, K-9 or 10 would be a closer match for most current CDs, at least from my observation.

HEEEEEEEEEEEELP!!!

What that "K-somenumber" thing means? dB below FS??

My apologies if this is a FAQ...


Sergio

It doesn't have to be killing somone's ears for them not to like it. I can listen to a lot of L2 bricks without flinching and actually enjoy the music, but it doesn't mean I don't long for a better, more lively recording of the material.

You also have to realize that most people DON'T KNOW what's actually being done to their music. They actually might very well be annoyed by it in some way, but since they don't know that it's caused by the sound being pushed flat against the digital limit, they probably assume it's them being picky or "just another one of those poorly produced CDs like Justice) rather than an actual, legitimate problem and phenomenon and therefore can't and don't complain about it.

I bet if you showed the average consumer a waveform from a CD released 10-15 years ago and then a waveform from one of their new millenium-released CDs they would jump in shock and horror, too.

The good news is that the numbers of informed people do seem to be increasing. Four years ago you couldn't find ANYONE talking about hot CDs anywhere except audiophile and audio technician websites. Now we're starting to see articles about it on non-audio-related websites and discussed on non-audio forums (it's actually become recurring topic at the SomethingAwful forums since a couple years back). We just now had an article in Wired; I wouldn't be surprised to see one in Rolling Stone a couple of years down the road.

the only effective way to fight this epidemic is to have mastering engineers refuse to work on CDs that are excessively loud before the mastering stage. the consumer can help as well. stop buying music CDs until the recording industry changes its practice.

Thank-you, tigre.

I'm rushing to buy a new pair of glasses...


Sergio

we need to see this in Rolling Stone, NOW. it's a bit disgusting. no, i don't have audiophile equipment now, nor will i have much soon, but i want to be able to enjoy what little american pop i'll have when i DO get some. this is NOT cool one bit...

Just have to add this tidbit, because it made me smile. I was bored and occupied ripping all these promo-CDs lying around here. When I ran into Britney Spears' Toxic single. Here the RG results.

The original:

replaygain_track_gain = -9.02 dB

The remix from Armand Van Helden:

replaygain_track_gain = +0.34 dB

The remix is actually mastered properly, as opposed to the official version. Sad, isn't it? I'm probably going to run into more of these.

--edit: removing misplaced word.

I think by 'horrible equipment' he meant $10-computer-speaker horrible?

If you were to alter the distribution of the PCM samples from say a uniform distribution to a normal distribution (as in the statistical normal function), couldn't you re-shape the music to be less dynamically compressed? Sure, you'd lose some resolution, but it could improve the apparent audio quality some.

I made a post here making a plugin request for something like this, but so far noone's said anything about it. Am I just being unclear? Or is it not feasible?

Hmm AFAIK that would introduce too much harmonic distortion. That'd be like a dynamic expander plugin with 0 attack and decay time... you really want a full featured dynamic expander with configurable attack and decay to undo the damage of the compressor. Maybe a de-clipper to undo the damage of limiting too...

one could possibly get some effective expansion by analyzing the spectrum... for example look at 1 sub-band and watch how it's intensity flutters up and down, at the same time dismissing sudden jumps as statistical error (transients). you could follow this envelope across several bands, take some kind of average, and apply a gain to the original signal that follows the inverse.

if you examine the spectrum of a squashed song, you can observe this pumping effect, so theoretically you may be able to recover _some_ of the original dynamics with a clever enough processor.

please, somebody with more than qualitative experience in this stuff correct me, but i think it could be a good idea.

Interresting thread, i don't rip many cd's, but i have seen some really "maxed out" mp3s, you know, the ones who are cut of/go into red all the time). On the other hand some mp3s which are very good, i rip with eac and encode into mpc(insane), because *I think* mpc(at q 7) doesn't kill the music(you keep the little things, like touching instruments and such). There's still a lot of good music, as long as you stay outside the mainstream. I'm not a pro, but this whole loud thing, could be to push sacd/dvda(to make people think the difference is much bigger). I ripped the audio of a concert dvd once and on (burned) cd it still sounded very good, it could easily match the best of cds we have here at home, if not exceed. Cd's still offer very good audio quality as long as their done properly, but then again, some people still think mp3@128kbps with a bad ripper still sounds good. I sure hope this loud thing comes to an end, because it ruins music for those who really want to listen to it.

Edit:
Sorry for inclearly stating that this post contained my opinion and not facts. My Opinion is not meant to start a discussion.(or be part of a discussion)

Very well, but be careful about such statements as




This is not what is discussed there, so it's not very important, but if you want to take part in a sound quality discussion about codecs, always remember that any statement about sound quality, like this one, is only allowed together with blind test results in order to back it up. Otherwise, the discussion will be closed.
You can read why in the FAQ (Hydrogenaudio.org's basic rules on listening tests).

Hi,

I believe they should only release one high quality mix, like they did before the 90s and still do for most Jazz and Classical.

Why they could not have a partnership with hardware company to include an AGC (of the DSP kind) that simulate something like the old CBS Audimax Volumax Pair ! on some player.

So when you want to party then just it that squasness button!

Now you can squash it the AM, FM way and beyond !

Thank You

ok, so i've read that clipped audio is really bad on tweeters, or at least high(er) end ones, but are they equally bad on a good pair of headphones like Senn HD580/590/600s? (before you get your panties in a bunch, i should say i like the heavier-on-the-bass 590s i've heard at stores and unfortunately have been lucky enough to hear 600s, and the 570s are just kinda sucky)

No, I think not. The reason clipping is bad for tweeter is that when the amplifier clips, it produces more energy in higher frequency harmonics. When playing a piece of music cleanly into a speaker at 100W, maybe 20% of the power (20W) is going to the tweeter, and the tweeter is happy. Say we do the same with a 50W amp. It is now producing a square wave with 100W of power. This square wave contains a lot a power at tweeter frequencies, maybe the 20W it had before plus another 30W of high frequency harmonics. Now your tweeter cooks itself with 50W of power. Bang.

Most dynamic headphones contain a single driver. This driver's impedence is almost purely resistive and hence it dissipates the same amount of heat irrelevent of frequency. Which means the harmonic effect of amplifier clipping will not lead to their demise. However, the average power effect described here: http://sound.westhost.com/tweeters.htm will be what cooks them.

Probably not, but it MAY be bad for your ears!

Perhaps it would be a good idea to create a "HA.org proper audio mastering tutorial".

I understand the damage that can be done applying compression without restraint, as I have already done it with some of my recordings, and at first they seemed to sound better, but then I came to realize that they caused fatigue.

So, any pros out there, help us out on this one.

As can be seen in the discussion which the first post linked to, it is not in the hand of the mastering engineers. The clients request they overcompress.

nowadays the clients make sure they get squashed dynamics by actually doing it themselves before delivering the project to the mastering facility. this whole loudness issue is really out of the hands of mastering engineers. i noticed some album don't even have mastering credits any more. mandy moore's latest album is one of them. no mastering credit, it certainly doesn't sound like it's been mastered by a professional, yet every track is 100 dB SPL. budget cuts? but hey at least it's loud..

That's exactly why I think it would be useful, if non-mastering engineers knew a little bit more about the reasons why they shouldn't squash the sound, they would stop requesting that or doing it themselves.

I myself have done some homerecordings of groups that I know, and had a hard time understanding all of the mastering process, but now that I know a little bit better, I won't ever over compress in any future projects.

From my experience, indie music also suffers to a large extent from this loudnessrace. Not top40 compression but not far either. Non commercial metal, goth metal, industrial, alternative etc: most releases are louder and more squashed than the ones before. I have lots of replaygain data to back this up too.

But there's also music, which just is loud.
A Converge album will always get a rather high ReplayGain and that's has comparably little to do with shitty mastering.
I have to admit that even indie labels/bands have been following the trend, but I have come across relatively few horribly mastered CDs.

Mainly, my indie collection is progressive rock stuff. Most of it is relatively mastered quite well. There's a difference with an album just being loud and an album being loud and constantly clipping. I'd say that most of my indie progressive metal releases are completely squashed and horribly over-loud (Opeth for an example). I do see the trend that pretty much every release suffers from a louder master nowadays, but I really don't care if the music is just loud, as long as it's not clipping or squashed.