Ironically the really "loud" albums doesn't sound loud at all, because the constant high level causes me to turn the volume down, and eventually turn it off/leave...
It irritates me even with hip hop, I want dynamics and separation I don't want the vocal to merge with the beat and become one ear-tiring blur. I'm talking specifically about compressing the mix as a whole, using it on separate elements to make them punchier in moderation can work really well.
Yeah, try to listen to Death Magnetic by Metallica through headphones. Can't do it. I love the Songs, they're great, but the terrible overcompression kills them. Literally makes it a pain to listen to.
Yeah, same here. Whenever i hear any overcompressed audio i turn it down coz it sounds too loud but then my ears try and adjust again and then it feels like I need to turn it down again but at that points its obviously just the way they compressed it.
Old comment, but sadly this is true. It causes ear fatigue. I used to think that I was just out of touch and not liking modern music. Turns out its just the loss of the dynamics in the audio that has turned me off.
I am a sound engineer myself and i have one golden rule: "the art of leaving things out" and that includes loudnes.....every instrument deserves a spot in depth!!!
It's ironic that 24 bit audio is now available to allow more dynamic range than 16 bit CD but most new music released have very compressed dynamic range that 24 bit audio has no meaning.
there is absolutely no need to use even the whole 16 bit dynamic range unless you're recording classical music with extreme loudness differences. If it were let's say rock music that sort of dynamic range is NOT something people would want from music. It would be just as fatigueing as overly compressed and brickwalled post-loudness war albums. Also the vast majority of microphones, even the most expensive ones have the dynamic range that is lower than 16 bit. For example, the $3500 Neumann U87 has a dynamic range of 69-82 dB (depending on how you measure it), which is way below the dynamic range provided by 16 bit (96 dB).
@@comrademartinofrappuccino Yes but you won't hear it commercially. Any commerical music will be slammed and as loud as possible and over time things are getting louder which is scary
That is why I always try to find first pressings of both vinyl records and CDs, they've most likely been mastered the right way. Reissues often mean that the music has been remastered which seems a positive thing but in most cases it simply mean they've increased the loudness of the track thus compressed it and crushed its dynamic range as a result.
I used to peak limit/compress my mixes. I always used to hate the fact that the dynamics would disappear. Now, i use ZERO limiting. The dynamics in my mixes remain, and with zero distortion. Want it louder?? Use your volume knob.
If you have a super fast transient poking out then just use a transient shaper on that sound or turn that one channel down. Stop using limiters to just chop it off so you don't have to actually control the dynamics of your instruments per track if you don't want to be called lazy.
There's a movie called "The Sound of Silence" that came out 2019 with Peter Sarsgaard and Rasheda Jones that I'd highly recommend and make you think about the affects of sound and frequency, vibration affect the mind, body and soul and how those in power use it to work against you since the early 1900's. This changed the way I live my life.
Hey! What do the record companies have to lose? Bad sound? Here's a re-remaster! And then... a re-re-remaster! Buy it! Buy it! After the Loudness War, they can sell re-re-re-mastered music! Labeled as being a "full dynamic range edition" or whatever.
+fredontube But i'm too lazy to turn up the brightness and contrast on my screen---oh god how else will i even see the image? (pretty much the loudness war situation.....)
+jorgepeterbarton Except the reason is not laziness but "it's what the audience wants" or "what the market demands" -talk. Independence and taste, where are you?
Its like watching a movie, Wonder if you take the loudest part of the movie and make the whole movie like that, you would probably walk out after about 20 min. going from quite to loud real quick will have more impact on a scary scene.
Dynamics are an important part of speech, singing, and music. With all the super-compression and increased loudness, what the producers have basically done is to make every recording sound like a commercial. And more and more, people are ignoring music now for the same reason they ignore commercials. They're mind-numbing, tedious and difficult to listen to for more that a minute or two.
If everybody makes everything stand out, then in the end nothing stands out, you just get the same mindless output. The most important thing is artistic integrity - imagine applying Technicolor to the Mona Lisa? Do it to copies, but NEVER the original. So radio stations will often compress when broadcasting, but when I go out and pay hard cash buying the album, I want what the artist intended in concert with his recording engineer, or else I am cheated. We are all cheated and worse, the choice has been taken away from us and the artist. It is disrespectful and smacks of Big Brother.
Yeah um, what does big state oppression have to do with big money oppression? How is ripping you off Big Brother? 1984 was about being spied on and beaten.
It seems that dynamics in music have gone out the window! Modern recordings are hard to listen to as compression squashes everything and takes the life out of it.
fuck them all, when these managers will die in agony from brain cancers, WE GONNA ENJOY dynamics again. Fuck you, dirty fucking labels, who ruined lots of great music. Fuck you, modern artist for being so stupid and not ordering engineers to produce more dynamic mixes. Lord GOD Jesus Christ will cut off you balls and make you eat them. Die die die die die you fuckers. Burn in fire, cocksucking modern record prouction. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Every record producer who does compressed record = cocksucking little dirty cunt. Fuck you all - facebook geration fucking silly dickheads
@@Clay3613 bruh... it doesn’t matter if it’s the volume on your device or the levels of the recorded audio. Hearing damage just has to do with volume in decibels at your ear. The loudness here is because of being compressed so there’s no loud or quiet it’s just a wall.
When I'm mixing and mastering, I do not crush it on the mastering phase. I really would rather have to turn up my volume knob than have my music come out sounding like one big wall of sound rather than something that moves the soul.
The number one reason I don't buy much music nowadays is the dynamically compressed 'loud' music. It sounds awful on any quality audio system, be it a Hifi or even phone with reasonable earphones/headphones. I have even written letter of complaint to production company after listening to artist live on TV (BBC) and loving it, then buying her album and hating it - the same song compressed, clipped and horrid. That artist I thought had a great career ahead of her - now? Don't hear a thing and I for one would never buy her album again. Sad how the decision makers on song mixes are killing enjoyment and sales of the music that is their business.
You are absolutely right! For some music like club music a relatively lower amount of dynamics is completely OK, but the argument of artistically freedom is often abused to hyper-compress beyond good taste just for the sake to be the loudest. That´s what we´re talking about
The subject is very serious. As a group, we try things out during the recording sessions. It happened that the sounds were incredibly too compressed and we thought, "Well, that sounds good!" .. After that, we tried to clarify it and we made fun of ourselves .. Crazy and silly ideas we had. When we listen to other bands, we think they could make a big effort on this compression. A lot of work on the dynamics. It may be strange to say, but the best results we got were, mainly, by live recordings! With a long experience of recordings, after errors & huge mistakes, we returned to the essential: The sound and not the volume! Thank you for this excellent video..
Considering 98% people listen via headphones, having sound so loud just fatigues the ears & brain... I Hate It, It ruins the music... I make a decision that all my music gets redone / turned down 1-2-3 notches using Adobe Audition. The difference in dynamics is amazing.. Cheers from Electronic80s, Sydney, Australia..
The record company executives are in the money making business. A record company would rather put out crappy cliched music that would make millions as opposed to truly original music that would make half as much.
The issue w/loudness is the lack of training and education in the Music industry for most artists and producers and therefore artistic audio ignorance.
The loudness war started in the 1980s in the broadcast industry. Many radio stations tried to be the loudest station in town. Every program director "knew" that more listeners would listen to the loudest station. In fact, this is caused by a physiological effect that, DURING A COMPARISON, a louder signal will tend to sound better. Dishonest speaker salesmen use this tactic all the time. And radio program directors tend to sit in their cars, punching buttons and comparing their station with the competition. Up to the early 1980s, the broadcast industry did not reall have the tools to "declare war". They were working with audio processors like CBS Audimax/Volumax, Gates StaLevel and SolidStatesman, which while they screwed up the dynamics, they did not apply a lot of raw clipping. In the late 1970s a guy named Bob Orban brought out a revolutionary audio processor called the Optimod. It was revolutionary because its waveform clipping was integrated into a multistep equaliztion circuit which provided the required pre-emphasis, low-pass filtering, and waveform clipping in an integrated fashion. This reduced overshoot, which allowed a louder overall sound without much loss of quality. There is no doubt about it, the Optimod could be adjusted to sound very good; I've set up both the original Optimod 8000 system and the Optimod 8100 system, and in both cases, I was able to make the respective stations by far the best audio quality in town, although not the loudest. However the Optimod could also be adjusted to sound loud and clipped, if the program director so desired. Driven by their button punching comparisons in their cars, they demanded more and more loudness. Orban obliged them, developing accessories like the XT multi-band processor chassis, and, with the introduction of these tools-of-warfare, the loudness war took off. Orban was by no means the only company. CRL (Circuit Research Labs, or as I call them Crude Rude Loudness) made many of the tools of the early loudness war. I removed all the CRL gear from one station because it generated too much distortion even when in "proof" mode, when all the clipping was supposedly disabled, and replaced it with much better sounding Orban gear. I built one cable FM station where I modified an Orban 8000A to modulate to 200% (150 KHz deviation), not so that it could be louder, but to allow 6 dB more peak level before clipping. Needless to say, it sounded very good. I curtailed my broadcast activities when program directors started ordering me to make our station(s) the loudest in town, because I just couldn't deal with crapping up the good audio I worked so hard to achieve at the studio before it went to the transmitter. In the 1990s and beyond, the same loudness war moved to the recording industry.
Parsons, Dodd, Bolas and the others are masters of the craft. Their job is to make the music sound as great as possible, through capturing the natural dynamics of the musician's performances - from the "in your face" kind of impact, to the quietest nuances. Music that is too loud for too long becomes fatiguing, and when the dynamics are lost, so is the art as it was intended to be heard. Many broadcasters are now following certain guidelines and standards ( LUFS, R128, etc) where if the final product is too loud in perceived volume, it will either get turned down, or in some cases, they might even refuse to play it. Dynamics needs to come back. Loud doesn't always equal "Good". Preserving the dynamic range in music makes it more enjoyable to listen to. If everything is always equally loud, then you lose the affect of parts that are supposed to be loud. You can't have black without having white, or left if there's no right. Accordingly, a loud passage won't be as effective as it is intended, if you don't also have quiet parts as a contrast, too. FWIW, - d.
Someone once asked me why I buy cd’s either out of the cheap bin or look for 20 year old cd’s. Out of the cheap bin I find a lot of time these cd’s haven’t been remastered. Second point more or less speaks for itself (before they turned up volume to screeching levels).
The worst thing about this is that I have bumped into quite a few “remasters” of old albums that had obviously been butchered by compressing them, and even brick-wall clipping them just to make them somewhat competitive with the latest pop hits. Luckily this guy seems to be somewhat right with his 10 year prediction, because we're 10 years later now, and I seem to be noticing more dynamic range in recent music.
Most everything remastered is, from artists as disparate as Amy Grant and Gordon Lightfoot, the waveforms look like a child's coloring book where everything is filled in, 😥
always had a tremendous respect for producers and engineers. It is something that must take an enormous amount of sonic knowledge and I wouldn't even know how to begin a career as one (I wouldn't want to as I think I would suck at it)
Budding audio engineer here. I'm going to take the advice from this video and master songs with amole dynamic range. If the recordings are properly gain staged at lower levels in the first place, we should be able to preserve DR while mastering. Provided all mixing engineers follow suit with this workflow and then hand it over to the mastering engineer to get the preserve the large crest factor in the signal.
right on. let me turn it up to 11 if i want it to be louder, don't ram it down my throat. i use canalphones and i now have to use an external resistor to avoid my ears being turned into mush by the obscene volume. fucking stop it ;_;
I couldn't agree more. I find modern music is tiring to listen to for a prolonged amount of time. 10-15 yrs ago (I'm 31 now) club volumes were louder...You could hear night clubs from down the street! These days with all the compression you can't have a conversation inside but can't even tell there is a club once you step out.
You need that compressed dynamic range in your car. Its a shame we can't produce music with an expanded range and put the compressor on the listening device... oh wait, we could:)
There are two benefits of supercompessed music. It has a low peak-to-average ratio and transmits better over AM/FM radio, and it works well as background music in places where most people are not really interested in listening to the music (where it can be played at a moderate volume without parts disappearing in room noise in the "quiet" sections).
It doesn't sound good on radio trust me. Stations already employ some type of multiband and dynamics processing. Feeding these equipment with compresses audio will simply make them completely crazy
Hey all! I know the Loudness War frustrates a lot of people, and I just want to say that I have a band (sorry to advertise) that has recorded and left ALL of our master tracks uncompressed, meaning the range is out of this world. Look us up: we're American Time Machine, and we payed for our own record AND distribution. It's DESIGNED to play well at home!!
there is an art to the loudness though. i love some of the choruses on CLA mixes. there is just this bite to a song when it is compressed and squeezed high like that that makes me rock hard to them..
When the sonic artistic decisions are relegated to a pencil pusher . And taken from a great artist that is the loud war. Its a war on taste. I trust Parsons on the dark or the light side of the moon.
it´s most of the time neither about sonic decisions nor about artistic ones as the art of musical expression suffers most under the ridiculous pressure to make something as loud as possible for the sake of the loudness wars. The war has nothing to do with taste actually. It´s a war about sense and nonsense and knowledge and understanding and being uneducated.
Even if it is pencil pusher or some music aficionado ... As for taste, Parson is a passe and so is Pink Floyd as recording standards and quality ... The game has changed ... its different and loud world. Your listening to music or loudness ...
Samrat Bee Bull shit Simply put Great recording is an art never out of fashion. And the game will always be about perfection not elevator music. Passe to what hip hop? LOL
K Muller Bullshit is the hegemony one suffers from hanging unto old recordings and sounds. The way music is made and mixed has changed from the geriatric methods of Pink Floyd or some golden age of amplifiers ... Elevator music or Hip Hop or Electronica or Jazz or even Pop ... it does sound better than the 70s or 60s ...
This shit occured 20 years ago BECAUSE producers wanted the "music" to compete with and blast through radio stations in shit vehicles with shit road noise and shit coversations with all the other shit on said radio.
I believe the loudness war is on two folds. Less people are plugging their headphones into amplifiers, so the only way for people to hear their music is to make the recording louder with post production. The second reason is that listeners like to listen to loud music
I think the problem is in the 1990s people were playing music mostly through speakers so music had to be as "loud" as possible. Today, people more than likely listen through headphones and with the likes of ReplayGain and Apple SoundCheck now being applied to consumer tracks, the "loud" tracks are turned down to match the dynamic tracks and sound weak as a result.
+GeoNeilUK We all still play music through speakers and most of us had Walkmans in the 80;s. Headphones aren't new. The loudness wars started because of radio airplay, in particular FM, and had nothing to do with headphones.
Paul Evans I think the loudness wars has everything to do with volume normalisation. Back in the 1990s we didn't have it, now we do. iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, RUclips, they all do it when they didn't before and tracks that were whacked up to max get reduced massively, with tune "mastered for iTunes" and "HDTracks" different instruments are adjusted to different levels, so it sounds punchier.
Our ideas and thinking about how and what caused the loudness is just different is all. To be honest most knowledge I have about the history of it came from a single book about the subject I read so I'm no professor.
I actually chose to NOT buy Metallica's Death Magnetic album as it sounded like utter garbage due to clipping - They are my favourite band of all time and to this day I refuse to buy that album as it is hard to even listen all the way through one single song on it. I do have a much less clipped version that was released for the game Guitar Hero 3 and the reason it is not as clipped is the game makers required the different layers of the songs from the album before final mixing and mastering was done. So the songs from the GH3 version of Death Magnetic sounds a whole lot better than the official retail CD. They are still a little bit clipped and the overall volume is reduced by about 15db (so you have to turn your volume up about a third more than usual to hear it well enough) it is significantly better sounding. Until they re-release that CD remastered PROPERLY unclipped to hell I will never purchase the official retail release. If their next album is the same I can only hope that some other alternate version of it gets leaked as the GH3 version was for DM. :/
Jase Anthony I've heard tons of people say this, actually, and that people have been illegally downloading the Guitar Hero version because, even pirated, it sounded infinitely better than the actual album version.
Jared Arbizu I for one did buy the GH3 game and ripped the music then mixed it into an album then found out that others did the same thing and had uploaded better mixed versions than mine was! lol Facts are this: That version is what the retail CD version should have been - I paid for my GH3 game so the music on it is the retail CD in my eyes and I made the proper album by mixing the music from it. I think the songs might have been from DLC - I can not remember... Either way, I paid for the album from the game disc or the DLC so I wish to be able to enjoy it as it is not as the shitty retail CD is. Have you heard the difference between the two versions at all? it is night and day! :D Please bring back Bob Rock as producer, at least he did not clip to hell the end songs... That said, even the GH3 versions had moments of clipping (no where NEAR as bad as the retail CD was though!) but still, it had moments of flat clipping sounds - that is saying something!!! It was heavily compressed all the way through every check and pass from everyone concerned and they all allowed it to go to the next step. I remember hearing the first single on the radio and heard how bad it sounded ala the clipping and thought at the time 'It is bad due to being just a pre-release demo for radio...' then the retail CD was released and heard more from it and realised it was all garbage clipped shite. :( Worst to date - - I honestly hope that sanity will prevail with their next album release and do not repeat this HUGE error of judgement. They know how bad it is and at the Metallica concert I went to in late 2010 they played the intro to a few songs before the band kicks in - they sounded not-clipped so they must have used the GH3 version or an earlier mastered version rather than the retail CD version as it was not clipped. Or, they did a lame declipping trick which in such an arena would sound decent but at home would sound flat.
Completely agree. I had to download it twice to make sure I didn't get a shitty file. It literally sounds like 240p on youtube due to Rick FUCKING Rubin - the master of shitty audio
Defensive Wounds The GH3 isn't what the retail one should have been because it still exhibits a lot of clipping, only far less than the retail version. Neither version is ideal. But the lesser of two evils wins in this case if you want to listen to the album.
The problem with making mixes as loud as possible is DA converters, and AD converters for that matter, sound better when they are not pushed to their max.
I find that by giving a recording a sense of width and a sense of air, the perceived volume increases. If a mix is narrow and there's too much middle / middle-low, you can expect a final product that is flat and uninteresting, no matter how much actual volume you squeeze out of it. Obviously, you want to avoid making it sound brittle, but just adding some high-frequency air adds so much, without squeezing any of the dynamics out of the recording.
Yeah, over compression has been an ongoing problem in hit music charts for quite some time. If you are interested in audio production/recording and watching this pay close attention.... DO NOT OVER COMPRESS!!! Sure some moderate compression on some individual tracks helps to bring everything together and extend the overall dynamic range. However, adding heavy compression on the final mix down is like an apprentice mark on a fine handmade trinket. In other words it's a rookie mistake. If the end listener wants to hear it louder they will turn it up, in fact they are going to anyway. Regardless of how much you try to make it loud the listener will always want to hear it louder. Let them turn their amp up. Your job is to be sure that when they do it still sounds crystal clear and as close to the studio reproduction as possible.
Sound frequencies that are technically not audible... are still felt via their vibration and interaction with audible tones. Removing something doesn't enhance the music.
Sound frequencies that are inaudible on their own still add to those within the audible range; they are called *harmonics.* If you subtract them from the overall waveform, what you get in the end is a recording that sounds _flat._ Any recording engineer who is worthy of his salt knows this.
Graham Rathbone, from your response it is evident that you're a recording engineer. I'm not one myself, but I have studied Fourier Analysis back in college. As such, I understand that any sound recording can be broken down into an infinite series of waveforms composed of the fundamental frequency and its harmonics. Digital signal processors use the Fast Fourier Transform to accomplish this in real time in modern digital playback equipment; for example, digital graphic equalizers. Given your knowledge on the subject, what's the optimum range of audio frequencies that should be include within a recording in order to deliver high fidelity without introducing harmonic distortion?
Graham Rathbone "20-20k seems pretty prudent" So, in order to effectively capture the upper end of the audible band, it would need to be sampled at twice the upper cut-off frequency (i.e., only 40 kHz). I have yet to see any predefined sampling-rate (e.g., in LAME) lower than 48 kHz; so, even at this minimum sampling-rate, there is oversampling occurring.
Graham Rathbone "You cannot hear the octave harmonic of a square wave at 10K, nor any of the harmonics that define that wave's shape." Of course not, because there *isn't* one in a square wave. Square waves only have *odd* harmonics (if my memory serves me correctly). Since the term "octave" implies a doubling of the fundamental frequency, it means that this type of harmonic doesn't exist for a square wave. Nice curve-ball, but I was able to hit it anyway. ;)
Graham Rathbone Really? Perhaps I don't have as firm a grasp of the concept of oversampling as I thought I did. Unless you're willing and able to enlighten me, I guess I shall have to do some further research in this area.
I've been thinking the same thing. Release one mastered using K14 and one that's standard. (no dynamics) The majority of people will choose the louder of the two but I agree, it's a good idea.
I have a specific artist that I have sorted songs by when they were recorded. I have two releases that cover the span between 1955 and 1958 from the same company, one from 1990 and the other from 2007. They are both intermixed in my folder as they contain different songs. The one from 1990 I always put a normal listening volume as it's what starts the set. The one from 2007 I can instantly identify as being from such as it is mastered far louder than the 1990 songs. Absolutely atrocious decision but it's what I have to live with as it's the only version ever released of those songs. Loudness adds nothing to the song, it only makes me turn down my already normal listening level of volume.
The paradox is that music that is mastered with tons of compression to sound louder than dynamic music if the volume control is set the same, is that I always turn the volume DOWN when it's too compressed because it sounds bad. I also DJ ecstatic dance events and avoid an entire swath of over-compressed music because it just sounds like ass especially if being played loud for dancing. Very dynamic music played super loud has a special kind of WOW!!!
It has got to such a ridiculous point. My favourite book for ages has been Greg Milners 'Perfecting sound forever'. It is without doubt THE best book on recording and explains 'The loudness wars' in such a brilliant way. I really recommend it for anyone interested in music and recording. It made me re-evaluate everything I thought I knew and I got my vinyl collection out of storage.
Yes. High fidelity speakers with a flat-like frequency response are called studio monitors. In essence, speakers are used to monitor sound, that's where the term comes from.
With digital, it's so tempting to mix according to the meters. I wonder if engineers trained on analog gear ever subconsciously treat digital peak meters as if they were VU meters. I also wonder if mixes would improve if instead of level meters, DAWs had a big crest factor meter on the main buss! Speaking of crest factor, one of the highest I've seen in popular music is from "Stuck with You" by Huey Lewis and the News. IMO, a great sounding track: very lively and punchy - and a big commercial success too.
We have worked hard to develop the DRMeter MkII which just had been released by www.MAAT.digital, It really helps engineers in all working situations to get a great intuitive sense of what is going on in regards of the peak structure, dynamics and target loudness so that the potential of loudness normalized platforms like Spotify, iTunes Music, MfiT, TIDAL, and TubeTube are used and no "Dynamic Potential" is wasted.
Looks like just what I was imagining - excellent! :) I became convinced of the virtue of sensible digital metering after reading Bob Katz. Not that one should mix with one's eyes, of course, but when finishing a product you need to know where you sit - "If you can not measure it, you can not improve it." Thanks!
have you researched whats bit resolution in audio? I did...and this is what it says; variations in bit depth PRIMARILY affect the noise level from quantization error-thus the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and DYNAMIC RANGE.
I like what DJ Sprinkles did on the album "Midtown 120 Blues". It's a deep house album. There was no effort to reach 0db, the dynamic range was preserved completely. And it's great, because all you do is turn up your volume when you listen to it, and it sounds better than most other records. Also, many devices just automatically adjust volume - I think Spotify does this. In my opinion, there is obviously a place for compression, especially in genres like hip hop and dance music, but as long as each track on your album has a consistent volume, you don't need to squish it up to 0db. In the future, sound systems will improve - it won't be as hard to produce tracks that are audible and on all systems. And devices will improve - output levels will be adjusted according to the volume of the track. I'm not a very experienced producer but I think the loudness war will end.
The problem what loudness war was trying to fix was that the end-user were not and still aren't, trained to use compression or even knowing what is dynamics. There are TONS of situations where you need to compress the sound to fit the use. I use fast compressor-slow limiter (with automatic gain, ie, they work as a normalizer...) chain at the end of my living room audio chain. That environment produces lots of noise and still you are suppose to receive the message: if it's news, you want to hear what are being said. If it's music on the background, you want it nice and level, no silence but you can't have loud booms either. With my very simple setup and few well thought out presets, anyone can use it and the sounds is ALWAYS at proper level. It is as simple as switching between presets (i do it with software in the media center, a simple VST chain). End-user is much better at tweaking the tone, a what EQ does is learned in few minutes and the user can make the sound more pleasing to them very fast (yeah, i know, don't get hung on that they don't know what they are doing, this is not about "smilies" just that frequency is easy to understand). Put the same person in front of a compressor; they can sit for an hour and not understand what it does. It takes training to hear attack/hold, threshold, compression amount, it takes years to be good at it. It doesn't have to be that way. You can have "industrial standards", 5 (or more) presets that can cover the most needs for dynamic control, basically just ever increasing compression with different time domain/compression settings: yes, i'm am talking about "pop", "spoken" "max", etc very broad definitions that cover most needs, it needs to be simple and clear, "dumbed down". Circuit design and presets that are studied and configured by the very best in the business to hold for a decade with out revisions.. Stable standards that span years and consistent education thru user manuals, help menu etc. Manufatcturers can provide their own alternatives as long as the basic standard is always there, unchanged and checked by a institution, a certification (no fees! it has to be free). The check itself is easy to configure, we are talking about in/out comparison after all ;) But that would mean either external units (bad) or industry wide standard DSP built in to every amplifier (almost impossible). It is totally possible in technical sense, such a DSP these days don't cost an arm and leg, most amplifiers already have a chip capable of doing this.. But in corporate world, it is impossible as it only takes ONE manufacturer to cheat on the specs and make theirs "louder", "sweeter" etc. to the point of distorting the sound so that it sounds better than the competitor in the shops.. But that is where this competition should've been in the first place, not at mix/master stage. It was done in the wrong end as every loudness war affected record is ruined forever where as at the user -end, you can always switch the DSP off and enjoy the recording.. And even then you might've ended with the same result, all it takes is one engineer to peak limit a bit and the spiral start to spin again. One interesting thing that 128EBU does bring, it is a sort of compromise that allow exactly this sort of user-end compression standard to be implemented.
I for one, like anyone else, like to listen to a powerful record. And there are certainly some records from the 70s and 80s that could seriously benefit some remastering and increased volume and slightly more compression. Having said that, it seems like EVERY single record I get these days shatters my ears the second I put it in my car stereo. Even if I turn the volume down on my stereo, it seems like there's zero room for it to breathe.I actually think the softer bands sound better with a bit more boost in the mastering, and the loud records sound way better with more mild mastering.
I prefer high compression when I'm listening to something late at night. Particularly in the case of a movie. People talk softly, you need to turn it up to hear what they are saying, but then a music passage comes in to accentuate something in the plot and it blares 5 times louder. The volume is constantly going up and down to compensate.
As a mobile DJ for decades, I've known that dynamic range is extremely important because over time, let's say after an evening of dancing to music played at the right volume, if every song is LOUD, the ears begin to complain & one result is ear fatigue and we just want to turn it off. I've even written an article about this topic & it was published in Mobile Beat a few years back, & posted the article on my DJ Blog: www.goodmusicdj.com/new-music-clipping-dynamic-range/
The complete absence of a noise floor today leaves this hole, which is then wrongly countered by hotter levels in an attempt to compensate. Its this noise, predominantly in the lower bass octaves, that people associate with thickness/presence/warmth this is in conjunction with the other, separate phenomenon whereby the majority of modern pop music lacks any real stereo 'width', not because of incompetence, but because when everything was mixed on physical tape, that medium offered an element of cross-talk between signals recorded parallel on magnetic tape, which translated directly into the effect known as 'shuffling' , as if by accident, this property so happens to comply quite nicely with the way humans hear. Tape is literally psycho-acoustic theory reverse engineered as crazy as that sounds. Tape was autopilot up to the point computers took over and now this prerequisite must be added manually. Stereo separation, a specification which digital systems excel at, is actually the bane, contrary to popular belief (up to a point). To improve width, or depth, actually requires the reduction of separation in the treble range,
I thought this was going to be about the stereo receiver wars from the 1970's. Someone could do a whole hour long documentary about that topic. I have one of the champions from that era myself, the Pioneer SX-1250.
I can tell you something specific about what causes listening fatigue in overcompressed recordings. I started 'remastering' a lot of my CDs in my computer, on ancient Adobe Audition software, because many '70s album master tapes lacked low end due to vinyl's tech limitations ("can't make the needle jump out of the groove!"). Well, turns out a lot of CD reissues (especially from European labels) of '70s American funk and R&B) are brickwalled, and a side effect of it is a SCREECHY edge to the sound. We non-pros might call it a serious excess of 'the high end of midrange' & 'the low end of treble'. It corresponds to the range of about 4000 to 7000 Hz. Think of a piercing whistle. When I use the software to pull down that part of the frequency range... OMG, WHAT A RELIEF! And the stupid irony is, when we listen on our players or car systems, if we realize we're being irritated by that SCREECHING, about all we can do for quick relief is turn the volume down-- which kills the supposed 'advantage' of the high compression that's causing this problem! (And no, a lot of times turning the treble control down DOESN'T really kill the screech, and even if it did, we shouldn't have to do that to make the sound tolerable!)
Ironic that while digital formats have the technical possibility to have way more dynamics than vinyl, the compression completely defeats the purpose... you end up with better DR on vinyl than digital
It is entirely possible to press vinyl from the same harsh over-compressed digital master that made the CD (or now, streamed file), which means that the vinyl would also sound like crap, but with surface noise, clicks and pops.
A case in point, Rhino's 'Remastered' Chicago The Studio Albums 1969-1978. Listen to the Chicago Records CD's as a frame of reference, then listen to a Rhino CD. The dynamics are lost. Loudness is fatiguing, but not ear fatiguing, plain old fatigue. If one views the audio file from a 'remastered' CD, it looks like a rectangular blob and sounds like it.
Quite likely a new standard will come in. Rather than 'as close to 0 as possible'. That EBU loudness will mean stuff is normalised to -16LUFS anyway. Which if a song is like that, that is a healthy amount of DR if it peaks near to 0. Artistic compression is fine, but that lets attack through. I don't see how brickwall could be artistic, unless you are trying to soften and quieten the sound, which is what it does, if you compare at the same level, it might be a way to take out all the attack if you want a really soft record.
I have been saying this for years,and it really winds me up.It's the case of the tail wagging the dog,.All producers could just stop it tomorrow but they're all waiting for the other guy to bring the levels down.
16-bit is 'only' 96dB and the very best analogue signal chains could achieve a little over 120dB SNR. So, there is some marginal benefit to 24-bit, but you wouldn't get to the theoretical 144dB in practice. Most DAWs operate as 32-bit float, but this is really for computational reasons. For final playback, the 96dB range of 16-bit formats is excellent, by any practical standpoint this is an enormous dynamic range for music playback.
What a blessing the internet is that musicians can now publish their music exactly as intended, and for free, to the whole planet, instantly! Music can breathe again! 🌴
i'm not disputing that, i know over-compressing and limiting damages the overall sound. but good producers know how to enhance the track levels and keep it loud and clear so it stands out!!!
Perhaps part of the problem is calling it "loudness". Many laypeople just assume you're talking about only making it louder as opposed to the compression llimiting/distortion] that's happening to give that impression. There are even mix decisions made to place more piercing elements in the audio to have it occupy more sonic space, especially in the midrange where most low quality playback systems project easily enough. And in the mixing/mastering studio, when comparing less to more compression/limiting it's important that the overall volume level doesn't change. It's the problem, say, with most limiting algorithms that have gain compensation that when the compression factor is turned up, the overall volume also gets louder giving the reptile-brain a kind of excitement and "oh, this is better!" immediate response. In all cases where I've done mastering, when the client hears a volume-compensated comparison, extreme limiting is never preferred. But in experiments I've done, when I don't compensate for volume (and more compression means also louder), they get excited and prefer that. Digital audio has meant that it's more of an exact science to compress the hell out of everything. In the days of tape/vinyl, one could never assume that one pressing or tape run would be identical to another in terms of overall volume, so of course you would never rely on putting two or more completely different records/tapes on and expect to not touch your volume control. So the idea of ultra compression to the detriment of sound quality just so that somebody might prefer your record because it happens to be louder wasn't a huge problem back then, because the analog domain didn't have such consistency anyway.
what is very sad is seen new artists wanting to get their productions on vinyl when they borned in the era of cd`s. They dont have any fucking idea whats vinyl and I don`t even think they ever grab a cassette either.
love it when i have my 11-13 year old grandkids listening to good produced vinyl songs and they still say" oh this is sooo old music.. then i tell them close your eyes and really listen to the instruments playing. ... what does kill me is you have bands that go from one recording studio to the next to spread the money and what comes out of this hodge podge is an album of good recording /bad recording/ song to song. when someone will wake up and say this is a good recording or crap ,start over and listen to the clarity and musical dynamics of instruments/ vocals and enjoy .. i do not want washed out music just for the darn volumn. not all of us out there have bad cheap equipment to listen on. we want to immerse in music at home not volumn and ear fatigue in concerts. But give me my monies worth and give me a decent amount of good engineered tracks on a record or cd. this crud changes tooo much to feel worth it...at least you can buy track to track. albums ,you still get 90% crappy songs for your money. i believe this is what also killed vinyl. besides kids still do not make the money to warrant spending it on expensive audio to enjoy. 99 cent$ track them to death is the way to stick the iv to their wallet. forget about the long term benifits. long live the ear bud zombies who are going deaf ....
in 10 years we will lough? i dont think i can lough about something what destroyed music 4 me... it made me start to hate music. Something i love so much started to discuss me.
We, of the analog, vinyl revolution had OUR share of loudness wars. This is nothing new. The ones who are complaining are complaining because THEY couldn't make their analog recordings, with all their electronic gizmos, as loud as digital! Find me some real engineers! :)
***** The people birtching about loudness, birtch because their audio work is below average!! Hey, Alan Parsons, how many times are your albums going to be remastered, last date 2013!!
overcompression isn't the only "problem", some mixing/mastering engineers are using a lot of distortion and clipping (analog and digital) to make their tracks sounds louder...
From the video: "Volume wins any contest." Richard Dodd. The most popular mix engineer today is Chris Lord Alge. I bet he subscribes to very few of these ideas. It's nice sentiment, but ultimately not completely applicable in the staggeringly competitive music industry.
for some reason, ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC sound great in the loudness wars, but sometimes, it is too much. the LOUDNESS WARS, has influenced the BIG ROOM (talentless SUBGENRE) to gain success
Yes, mixing and mastering loud is actually easier and faster to do than creating a well balanced mix. For the latter higher audio engineering skills are required. Making everything loud is kind of like smashing everything against a wall - it´s simple and opens the door for the average Joe.
Friedemann Tischmeyer As I tell many, few (maybe 15%) actually care about sound quality. It's about the same 15% as those who demand stereo mixes, rather than monophonic. That makes sense - A GREAT AMOUNT OF SENSE. Anyway, most of the time, you step into someone's car after they listened to music they enjoy, and they'll have it playing loud. There ARE advantages to mastering loud, if you know something about audio, but I never see it mentioned anywhere.
genuineuni When you follow the discussions within the Ploud group of the EBU and the official papers including the BS.1770 ones there is NO discussion about loudness WITHOUT considering the context where music is consumed. The aim of meaningful loudness normalization or loudness management is controling the loudness according to the listening environment. In this sense you are right. Automotive music consumtion requires less dynamic than home entertainment, etc. Therefore it makes sense to supply music in a meaningful loudness which will be dynamic reduced according to the particular listening environment. I wouldn´t make sense to design music for people who want to hear the music while they are operating a buzz saw as this would require DR2 or DR3 and it is hard to undo loudness treatment while it is simple to reduce dynamic content.
Friedemann Tischmeyer First, nice video, thanks fore taking the time to post it. However, I always hear of the "bad" remastering, seldom the good. You can find one or more right here on RUclips. But, let's be fair, people can NOW "see" (waveform) what they are listening to. Would they complain otherwise? Probably not. Great sound quality (alone) never sold music. A fine example is a US #10 1965 Hit, by The Silkie, You've Got To Hide Your Love Away, issue (US) on Fontana record label. Sound like a live, cheaply done recording, loads of distortion, but, still, it reached US #10. I remember a fair number of vinyl 45s, as the song faded, the audio became less distorted, but, again, it didn't stop the song from charting. Actually, if you listen to the remixing of Lighthouse('s) - One Fine Morning ('70's song), it now sounds bland, unlike the 45 and vinyl album versions were pushed to their audio limits. So, loudness has always been and probably will always be part of man's history! :) And if you happen to see Bob Ludwig around, tell him I wasn't thrilled with his Extreme remastering of John Cougar Mellencamp.
Friedemann Tischmeyer Furthermore, let's take Alan Parsons. He had a key advantage over past engineers due to tape recording technology. I highly doubt he would have been able to pull-off a Pink Floyd, sounding as good if done in the early-mid '60.s. Overdubbing, that harmed (audio) a lot of fine music was now welcome, due to manufacturers like tape recording equipment, such a Ampex. Lots think of loudness as in amplitude, but I (also) think of it on density of sound, such as adding echo or reverb to vocals and/or musical instruments [w/o changing amplitude]. Anyway, thanks for the Ploud group mentioning, it sounds like something I'd like to participate.
I don't like turning volume up and down with the wide catalog I listen to on spotify. Tried it with volume equalization off and dynamics are nice. It's an interesting experience. I appreciate it. But most of the time I just want the convenience of an even volume across artists and producers. So produce your music with high dynamic range if you like but don't fool yourself thinking it's superior. It's just allowing more ways for people to experience your music. Pros and cons, plenty of interesting things happening in loud music too. ❤️
"I don't like turning volume up and down with the wide catalog I listen to on spotify. " - But you should. The louder parts SHOULD make you push deeper back into your chair/couch as applicable and the quieter parts should make you lean forward to listen carefully. The surges and ebbs lend unquantifiable emotion to the music. Without that, it's just a flat procession of everything sounding the same even when tempos or time sigs change or when the intensity goes up or down. "But most of the time I just want the convenience of an even volume across artists and producers." - How can you even begin to listen to metal and jazz at the same volume? Such needs cannot be fulfilled. I am not being finicky here. Tell me something, would you drive a Camry and a Ferrari both the exact same way? Yeah, didn't think so. It's horses for courses. So, no, making music with high dynamic range IS superior. But music is so utterly commodified now that people won't pay the price for a superior product. You can't fight sloth. I hope YOU weren't there in the 80s and 90s operating cassettes; boy, if you complain about moving the volume up or down on a phone or a computer, changing sides or pressing rewind/FF would have driven you crazy.
If you listen to classical music, recorded nowadays with modern equipment, it really makes you sad. Because it sounds so awesome and they could have done that with pop music as well (not as a genre but rather anything not classic basically). It would be great
hello mr Friedemann i have your dvds some years now im not into mastering really but hopefully they had a lot all around technical audio information that is very useful so it was not wasted money.You did a good job.
Ironically the really "loud" albums doesn't sound loud at all, because the constant high level causes me to turn the volume down, and eventually turn it off/leave...
No, it doesn't sound loud because it makes you turn it off. Silence.
It irritates me even with hip hop, I want dynamics and separation I don't want the vocal to merge with the beat and become one ear-tiring blur. I'm talking specifically about compressing the mix as a whole, using it on separate elements to make them punchier in moderation can work really well.
Yeah, try to listen to Death Magnetic by Metallica through headphones.
Can't do it. I love the Songs, they're great, but the terrible overcompression kills them. Literally makes it a pain to listen to.
Yeah, same here. Whenever i hear any overcompressed audio i turn it down coz it sounds too loud but then my ears try and adjust again and then it feels like I need to turn it down again but at that points its obviously just the way they compressed it.
Old comment, but sadly this is true. It causes ear fatigue. I used to think that I was just out of touch and not liking modern music. Turns out its just the loss of the dynamics in the audio that has turned me off.
I am a sound engineer myself and i have one golden rule: "the art of leaving things out" and that includes loudnes.....every instrument deserves a spot in depth!!!
It's ironic that 24 bit audio is now available to allow more dynamic range than 16 bit CD but most new music released have very compressed dynamic range that 24 bit audio has no meaning.
But there could exist band/artists that do not participate in the loudness wars? those could see the advantage of 24 bit audio.
there is absolutely no need to use even the whole 16 bit dynamic range unless you're recording classical music with extreme loudness differences. If it were let's say rock music that sort of dynamic range is NOT something people would want from music. It would be just as fatigueing as overly compressed and brickwalled post-loudness war albums.
Also the vast majority of microphones, even the most expensive ones have the dynamic range that is lower than 16 bit. For example, the $3500 Neumann U87 has a dynamic range of 69-82 dB (depending on how you measure it), which is way below the dynamic range provided by 16 bit (96 dB).
@@comrademartinofrappuccino Black Sabbath 2009, Pink Floyd 2011 and Frank Zappa 2012 remasters are very charm and dinamic
@@comrademartinofrappuccino Yes but you won't hear it commercially. Any commerical music will be slammed and as loud as possible and over time things are getting louder which is scary
That is why I always try to find first pressings of both vinyl records and CDs, they've most likely been mastered the right way. Reissues often mean that the music has been remastered which seems a positive thing but in most cases it simply mean they've increased the loudness of the track thus compressed it and crushed its dynamic range as a result.
That's why I kept my original releases or bought them right away
Bought a nice audio system, and now have to deal with half my songs sounding like shit just because it was mastered incorrectly... FML.
I feel your pain, I really do. :(
+mrensayne uggghhh I also feel your pain - I thought something was wrong with my gear :(
Go for Vinyl at least you have to deal with this loud shit.
What do you mean?
vinyl won't solve the issue. vinyl records are still mastered like crap.
I used to peak limit/compress my mixes. I always used to hate the fact that the dynamics would disappear. Now, i use ZERO limiting. The dynamics in my mixes remain, and with zero distortion. Want it louder?? Use your volume knob.
That's the way.
Lol tell that to any electronic record coming out rn.
chino torrez i produce electronic music, and i want dynamics.
SomeGuy not in my experience.
If you have a super fast transient poking out then just use a transient shaper on that sound or turn that one channel down. Stop using limiters to just chop it off so you don't have to actually control the dynamics of your instruments per track if you don't want to be called lazy.
There's a movie called "The Sound of Silence" that came out 2019 with Peter Sarsgaard and Rasheda Jones that I'd highly recommend and make you think about the affects of sound and frequency, vibration affect the mind, body and soul and how those in power use it to work against you since the early 1900's. This changed the way I live my life.
I once had a client who challenged my abilities because the meters weren't pinned into the red.
Best option ideally is to make 2 masterings with one being compressed to make the label happy and the other for Hi-Res/Vinyl with more dynamic range.
Hey! What do the record companies have to lose?
Bad sound? Here's a re-remaster! And then... a re-re-remaster! Buy it! Buy it!
After the Loudness War, they can sell re-re-re-mastered music! Labeled as being a "full dynamic range edition" or whatever.
now that I would buy....if they guaranteed a SUPER HIGH dynamic range.
No we won't look back and laugh... we will cry. So much great music destroyed to un listenable crap because of loudness.
Now that i'm aware of this every other song I hear on the radio from only a decade ago sounds like pure sht
Fuckin drama queen
Yes, dynamics please!
Overcompressed audio is like an overexposed picture. In 1 second you see it is crap.
+fredontube But i'm too lazy to turn up the brightness and contrast on my screen---oh god how else will i even see the image? (pretty much the loudness war situation.....)
+jorgepeterbarton Except the reason is not laziness but "it's what the audience wants" or "what the market demands" -talk. Independence and taste, where are you?
fredontube yeh, no one actually is that lazy... its rather patronising.
Good point!
More like oversaturated pictures , but yes you are right.
Its like watching a movie, Wonder if you take the loudest part of the movie and make the whole movie like that, you would probably walk out after about 20 min. going from quite to loud real quick will have more impact on a scary scene.
Dynamics are an important part of speech, singing, and music. With all the super-compression and increased loudness, what the producers have basically done is to make every recording sound like a commercial. And more and more, people are ignoring music now for the same reason they ignore commercials. They're mind-numbing, tedious and difficult to listen to for more that a minute or two.
So it wasn't just my ears in the late 90's, the music did start to sound like crap.
If everybody makes everything stand out, then in the end nothing stands out, you just get the same mindless output.
The most important thing is artistic integrity - imagine applying Technicolor to the Mona Lisa? Do it to copies, but NEVER the original. So radio stations will often compress when broadcasting, but when I go out and pay hard cash buying the album, I want what the artist intended in concert with his recording engineer, or else I am cheated. We are all cheated and worse, the choice has been taken away from us and the artist. It is disrespectful and smacks of Big Brother.
Yeah um, what does big state oppression have to do with big money oppression?
How is ripping you off Big Brother? 1984 was about being spied on and beaten.
It seems that dynamics in music have gone out the window! Modern recordings are hard to listen to as compression squashes everything and takes the life out of it.
fuck them all, when these managers will die in agony from brain cancers, WE GONNA ENJOY dynamics again. Fuck you, dirty fucking labels, who ruined lots of great music. Fuck you, modern artist for being so stupid and not ordering engineers to produce more dynamic mixes. Lord GOD Jesus Christ will cut off you balls and make you eat them. Die die die die die you fuckers. Burn in fire, cocksucking modern record prouction. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Every record producer who does compressed record = cocksucking little dirty cunt. Fuck you all - facebook geration fucking silly dickheads
Why dont people just turn up the damn volume knob when they want it louder??? (...like I do!)
not every song is mastered for this
Simple. They don't have hi-fi gear.
Phones and MP3 players can only go so loud, plus risking hearing damage if you wear headphones.
@@Clay3613 bruh... it doesn’t matter if it’s the volume on your device or the levels of the recorded audio. Hearing damage just has to do with volume in decibels at your ear. The loudness here is because of being compressed so there’s no loud or quiet it’s just a wall.
When I'm mixing and mastering, I do not crush it on the mastering phase. I really would rather have to turn up my volume knob than have my music come out sounding like one big wall of sound rather than something that moves the soul.
The number one reason I don't buy much music nowadays is the dynamically compressed 'loud' music. It sounds awful on any quality audio system, be it a Hifi or even phone with reasonable earphones/headphones. I have even written letter of complaint to production company after listening to artist live on TV (BBC) and loving it, then buying her album and hating it - the same song compressed, clipped and horrid. That artist I thought had a great career ahead of her - now? Don't hear a thing and I for one would never buy her album again. Sad how the decision makers on song mixes are killing enjoyment and sales of the music that is their business.
i couldn't say it better!
You are absolutely right! For some music like club music a relatively lower amount of dynamics is completely OK, but the argument of artistically freedom is often abused to hyper-compress beyond good taste just for the sake to be the loudest. That´s what we´re talking about
The subject is very serious. As a group, we try things out during the recording sessions. It happened that the sounds were incredibly too compressed and we thought, "Well, that sounds good!" .. After that, we tried to clarify it and we made fun of ourselves .. Crazy and silly ideas we had. When we listen to other bands, we think they could make a big effort on this compression. A lot of work on the dynamics. It may be strange to say, but the best results we got were, mainly, by live recordings! With a long experience of recordings, after errors & huge mistakes, we returned to the essential: The sound and not the volume! Thank you for this excellent video..
Considering 98% people listen via headphones, having sound so loud just fatigues the ears & brain...
I Hate It, It ruins the music...
I make a decision that all my music gets redone / turned down 1-2-3 notches using Adobe Audition.
The difference in dynamics is amazing.. Cheers from Electronic80s, Sydney, Australia..
The record company executives are in the money making business. A record company would rather put out crappy cliched music that would make millions as opposed to truly original music that would make half as much.
The issue w/loudness is the lack of training and education in the Music industry for most artists and producers and therefore artistic audio ignorance.
The loudness war started in the 1980s in the broadcast industry. Many radio stations tried to be the loudest station in town. Every program director "knew" that more listeners would listen to the loudest station.
In fact, this is caused by a physiological effect that, DURING A COMPARISON, a louder signal will tend to sound better. Dishonest speaker salesmen use this tactic all the time. And radio program directors tend to sit in their cars, punching buttons and comparing their station with the competition. Up to the early 1980s, the broadcast industry did not reall have the tools to "declare war". They were working with audio processors like CBS Audimax/Volumax, Gates StaLevel and SolidStatesman, which while they screwed up the dynamics, they did not apply a lot of raw clipping.
In the late 1970s a guy named Bob Orban brought out a revolutionary audio processor called the Optimod. It was revolutionary because its waveform clipping was integrated into a multistep equaliztion circuit which provided the required pre-emphasis, low-pass filtering, and waveform clipping in an integrated fashion. This reduced overshoot, which allowed a louder overall sound without much loss of quality. There is no doubt about it, the Optimod could be adjusted to sound very good; I've set up both the original Optimod 8000 system and the Optimod 8100 system, and in both cases, I was able to make the respective stations by far the best audio quality in town, although not the loudest.
However the Optimod could also be adjusted to sound loud and clipped, if the program director so desired. Driven by their button punching comparisons in their cars, they demanded more and more loudness. Orban obliged them, developing accessories like the XT multi-band processor chassis, and, with the introduction of these tools-of-warfare, the loudness war took off. Orban was by no means the only company. CRL (Circuit Research Labs, or as I call them Crude Rude Loudness) made many of the tools of the early loudness war. I removed all the CRL gear from one station because it generated too much distortion even when in "proof" mode, when all the clipping was supposedly disabled, and replaced it with much better sounding Orban gear. I built one cable FM station where I modified an Orban 8000A to modulate to 200% (150 KHz deviation), not so that it could be louder, but to allow 6 dB more peak level before clipping. Needless to say, it sounded very good.
I curtailed my broadcast activities when program directors started ordering me to make our station(s) the loudest in town, because I just couldn't deal with crapping up the good audio I worked so hard to achieve at the studio before it went to the transmitter.
In the 1990s and beyond, the same loudness war moved to the recording industry.
Parsons, Dodd, Bolas and the others are masters of the craft. Their job is to make the music sound as great as possible, through capturing the natural dynamics of the musician's performances - from the "in your face" kind of impact, to the quietest nuances. Music that is too loud for too long becomes fatiguing, and when the dynamics are lost, so is the art as it was intended to be heard. Many broadcasters are now following certain guidelines and standards ( LUFS, R128, etc) where if the final product is too loud in perceived volume, it will either get turned down, or in some cases, they might even refuse to play it. Dynamics needs to come back. Loud doesn't always equal "Good". Preserving the dynamic range in music makes it more enjoyable to listen to. If everything is always equally loud, then you lose the affect of parts that are supposed to be loud. You can't have black without having white, or left if there's no right. Accordingly, a loud passage won't be as effective as it is intended, if you don't also have quiet parts as a contrast, too. FWIW, - d.
The irony of this loud records is that you cannot even listen to them LOUD, as you usually do when you really like the piece. It`s a pain to listen.
Someone once asked me why I buy cd’s either out of the cheap bin or look for 20 year old cd’s.
Out of the cheap bin I find a lot of time these cd’s haven’t been remastered.
Second point more or less speaks for itself (before they turned up volume to screeching levels).
I'd like to know what Rick Rubin thinks about this ahah
Oasis is worse than Rick Rubin, even me as a oasis fan, it is sad.
@@JnL_SSBM _What's The Story_ started it all...a criminal record
The worst thing about this is that I have bumped into quite a few “remasters” of old albums that had obviously been butchered by compressing them, and even brick-wall clipping them just to make them somewhat competitive with the latest pop hits.
Luckily this guy seems to be somewhat right with his 10 year prediction, because we're 10 years later now, and I seem to be noticing more dynamic range in recent music.
Most everything remastered is, from artists as disparate as Amy Grant and Gordon Lightfoot, the waveforms look like a child's coloring book where everything is filled in, 😥
always had a tremendous respect for producers and engineers. It is something that must take an enormous amount of sonic knowledge and I wouldn't even know how to begin a career as one (I wouldn't want to as I think I would suck at it)
Budding audio engineer here. I'm going to take the advice from this video and master songs with amole dynamic range. If the recordings are properly gain staged at lower levels in the first place, we should be able to preserve DR while mastering. Provided all mixing engineers follow suit with this workflow and then hand it over to the mastering engineer to get the preserve the large crest factor in the signal.
right on. let me turn it up to 11 if i want it to be louder, don't ram it down my throat. i use canalphones and i now have to use an external resistor to avoid my ears being turned into mush by the obscene volume. fucking stop it ;_;
"Fucking stop it". Loool. I like that.
I couldn't agree more. I find modern music is tiring to listen to for a prolonged amount of time.
10-15 yrs ago (I'm 31 now) club volumes were louder...You could hear night clubs from down the street! These days with all the compression you can't have a conversation inside but can't even tell there is a club once you step out.
You need that compressed dynamic range in your car. Its a shame we can't produce music with an expanded range and put the compressor on the listening device... oh wait, we could:)
There is a button on my amp, called, guess what LOUDNESS. What stopping having this button in car amps ?
I prefer music that achieve great separation of sound through proper EQ which reduces the mud and noise.
There are two benefits of supercompessed music. It has a low peak-to-average ratio and transmits better over AM/FM radio, and it works well as background music in places where most people are not really interested in listening to the music (where it can be played at a moderate volume without parts disappearing in room noise in the "quiet" sections).
It doesn't sound good on radio trust me. Stations already employ some type of multiband and dynamics processing. Feeding these equipment with compresses audio will simply make them completely crazy
@@juniorsilvabroadcastexactly
@@RWL2012 i work with radio audio processing. Loud masters will sound like complete garbage when processed by almost every audio processor
Hey all! I know the Loudness War frustrates a lot of people, and I just want to say that I have a band (sorry to advertise) that has recorded and left ALL of our master tracks uncompressed, meaning the range is out of this world. Look us up: we're American Time Machine, and we payed for our own record AND distribution. It's DESIGNED to play well at home!!
there is an art to the loudness though. i love some of the choruses on CLA mixes. there is just this bite to a song when it is compressed and squeezed high like that that makes me rock hard to them..
HellaHipHop ??????????
When the sonic artistic decisions are relegated to a pencil pusher . And taken from a great artist that is the loud war. Its a war on taste. I trust Parsons on the dark or the light side of the moon.
it´s most of the time neither about sonic decisions nor about artistic ones as the art of musical expression suffers most under the ridiculous pressure to make something as loud as possible for the sake of the loudness wars. The war has nothing to do with taste actually. It´s a war about sense and nonsense and knowledge and understanding and being uneducated.
Friedemann Tischmeyer
Sounds good I buy it. I still want to hire Parsons for my next set of tunes. I bet he is busy LOL
Even if it is pencil pusher or some music aficionado ... As for taste, Parson is a passe and so is Pink Floyd as recording standards and quality ... The game has changed ... its different and loud world. Your listening to music or loudness ...
Samrat Bee
Bull shit
Simply put Great recording is an art never out of fashion. And the game will always be about perfection not elevator music. Passe to what hip hop? LOL
K Muller Bullshit is the hegemony one suffers from hanging unto old recordings and sounds. The way music is made and mixed has changed from the geriatric methods of Pink Floyd or some golden age of amplifiers ... Elevator music or Hip Hop or Electronica or Jazz or even Pop ... it does sound better than the 70s or 60s ...
Rick Rubin's thoughts: "Compress all the things!"
This shit occured 20 years ago BECAUSE producers wanted the "music" to compete with and blast through radio stations in shit vehicles with shit road noise and shit coversations with all the other shit on said radio.
I believe the loudness war is on two folds. Less people are plugging their headphones into amplifiers, so the only way for people to hear their music is to make the recording louder with post production. The second reason is that listeners like to listen to loud music
I think the problem is in the 1990s people were playing music mostly through speakers so music had to be as "loud" as possible.
Today, people more than likely listen through headphones and with the likes of ReplayGain and Apple SoundCheck now being applied to consumer tracks, the "loud" tracks are turned down to match the dynamic tracks and sound weak as a result.
+GeoNeilUK We all still play music through speakers and most of us had Walkmans in the 80;s. Headphones aren't new. The loudness wars started because of radio airplay, in particular FM, and had nothing to do with headphones.
Paul Evans I think the loudness wars has everything to do with volume normalisation. Back in the 1990s we didn't have it, now we do.
iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, RUclips, they all do it when they didn't before and tracks that were whacked up to max get reduced massively, with tune "mastered for iTunes" and "HDTracks" different instruments are adjusted to different levels, so it sounds punchier.
Our ideas and thinking about how and what caused the loudness is just different is all. To be honest most knowledge I have about the history of it came from a single book about the subject I read so I'm no professor.
I actually chose to NOT buy Metallica's Death Magnetic album as it sounded like utter garbage due to clipping - They are my favourite band of all time and to this day I refuse to buy that album as it is hard to even listen all the way through one single song on it. I do have a much less clipped version that was released for the game Guitar Hero 3 and the reason it is not as clipped is the game makers required the different layers of the songs from the album before final mixing and mastering was done. So the songs from the GH3 version of Death Magnetic sounds a whole lot better than the official retail CD. They are still a little bit clipped and the overall volume is reduced by about 15db (so you have to turn your volume up about a third more than usual to hear it well enough) it is significantly better sounding.
Until they re-release that CD remastered PROPERLY unclipped to hell I will never purchase the official retail release. If their next album is the same I can only hope that some other alternate version of it gets leaked as the GH3 version was for DM. :/
You are the only other person besides myself that said this. It was unreal how the clipping destroyed the album
Jase Anthony
I've heard tons of people say this, actually, and that people have been illegally downloading the Guitar Hero version because, even pirated, it sounded infinitely better than the actual album version.
Jared Arbizu I for one did buy the GH3 game and ripped the music then mixed it into an album then found out that others did the same thing and had uploaded better mixed versions than mine was! lol Facts are this: That version is what the retail CD version should have been - I paid for my GH3 game so the music on it is the retail CD in my eyes and I made the proper album by mixing the music from it. I think the songs might have been from DLC - I can not remember... Either way, I paid for the album from the game disc or the DLC so I wish to be able to enjoy it as it is not as the shitty retail CD is.
Have you heard the difference between the two versions at all? it is night and day! :D Please bring back Bob Rock as producer, at least he did not clip to hell the end songs... That said, even the GH3 versions had moments of clipping (no where NEAR as bad as the retail CD was though!) but still, it had moments of flat clipping sounds - that is saying something!!! It was heavily compressed all the way through every check and pass from everyone concerned and they all allowed it to go to the next step. I remember hearing the first single on the radio and heard how bad it sounded ala the clipping and thought at the time 'It is bad due to being just a pre-release demo for radio...' then the retail CD was released and heard more from it and realised it was all garbage clipped shite. :( Worst to date - - I honestly hope that sanity will prevail with their next album release and do not repeat this HUGE error of judgement. They know how bad it is and at the Metallica concert I went to in late 2010 they played the intro to a few songs before the band kicks in - they sounded not-clipped so they must have used the GH3 version or an earlier mastered version rather than the retail CD version as it was not clipped. Or, they did a lame declipping trick which in such an arena would sound decent but at home would sound flat.
Completely agree. I had to download it twice to make sure I didn't get a shitty file. It literally sounds like 240p on youtube due to Rick FUCKING Rubin - the master of shitty audio
Defensive Wounds The GH3 isn't what the retail one should have been because it still exhibits a lot of clipping, only far less than the retail version. Neither version is ideal. But the lesser of two evils wins in this case if you want to listen to the album.
My musician side dislikes heavy limiting and outright clipping even more than my audiophile side. It destroys the actual sound we make.
Pop music has been so awful for so long that you can't do anything to it to make it worse than it already is so it doesn't matter.
The problem with making mixes as loud as possible is DA converters, and AD converters for that matter, sound better when they are not pushed to their max.
I find that by giving a recording a sense of width and a sense of air, the perceived volume increases. If a mix is narrow and there's too much middle / middle-low, you can expect a final product that is flat and uninteresting, no matter how much actual volume you squeeze out of it. Obviously, you want to avoid making it sound brittle, but just adding some high-frequency air adds so much, without squeezing any of the dynamics out of the recording.
I love the Neumann on the 360P video.
Yeah, over compression has been an ongoing problem in hit music charts for quite some time. If you are interested in audio production/recording and watching this pay close attention....
DO NOT OVER COMPRESS!!!
Sure some moderate compression on some individual tracks helps to bring everything together and extend the overall dynamic range. However, adding heavy compression on the final mix down is like an apprentice mark on a fine handmade trinket. In other words it's a rookie mistake. If the end listener wants to hear it louder they will turn it up, in fact they are going to anyway. Regardless of how much you try to make it loud the listener will always want to hear it louder. Let them turn their amp up. Your job is to be sure that when they do it still sounds crystal clear and as close to the studio reproduction as possible.
Now I know why when I first played "What's the Story Morning Glory" by Oasis with headphones on i had migraines after lol
Sound frequencies that are technically not audible... are still felt via their vibration and interaction with audible tones.
Removing something doesn't enhance the music.
Sound frequencies that are inaudible on their own still add to those within the audible range; they are called *harmonics.* If you subtract them from the overall waveform, what you get in the end is a recording that sounds _flat._ Any recording engineer who is worthy of his salt knows this.
Graham Rathbone, from your response it is evident that you're a recording engineer. I'm not one myself, but I have studied Fourier Analysis back in college. As such, I understand that any sound recording can be broken down into an infinite series of waveforms composed of the fundamental frequency and its harmonics. Digital signal processors use the Fast Fourier Transform to accomplish this in real time in modern digital playback equipment; for example, digital graphic equalizers. Given your knowledge on the subject, what's the optimum range of audio frequencies that should be include within a recording in order to deliver high fidelity without introducing harmonic distortion?
Graham Rathbone
"20-20k seems pretty prudent"
So, in order to effectively capture the upper end of the audible band, it would need to be sampled at twice the upper cut-off frequency (i.e., only 40 kHz). I have yet to see any predefined sampling-rate (e.g., in LAME) lower than 48 kHz; so, even at this minimum sampling-rate, there is oversampling occurring.
Graham Rathbone
"You cannot hear the octave harmonic of a square wave at 10K, nor any of the harmonics that define that wave's shape."
Of course not, because there *isn't* one in a square wave. Square waves only have *odd* harmonics (if my memory serves me correctly). Since the term "octave" implies a doubling of the fundamental frequency, it means that this type of harmonic doesn't exist for a square wave.
Nice curve-ball, but I was able to hit it anyway. ;)
Graham Rathbone Really? Perhaps I don't have as firm a grasp of the concept of oversampling as I thought I did. Unless you're willing and able to enlighten me, I guess I shall have to do some further research in this area.
I've been thinking the same thing. Release one mastered using K14 and one that's standard. (no dynamics) The majority of people will choose the louder of the two but I agree, it's a good idea.
I have a specific artist that I have sorted songs by when they were recorded. I have two releases that cover the span between 1955 and 1958 from the same company, one from 1990 and the other from 2007. They are both intermixed in my folder as they contain different songs. The one from 1990 I always put a normal listening volume as it's what starts the set. The one from 2007 I can instantly identify as being from such as it is mastered far louder than the 1990 songs. Absolutely atrocious decision but it's what I have to live with as it's the only version ever released of those songs. Loudness adds nothing to the song, it only makes me turn down my already normal listening level of volume.
The paradox is that music that is mastered with tons of compression to sound louder than dynamic music if the volume control is set the same, is that I always turn the volume DOWN when it's too compressed because it sounds bad. I also DJ ecstatic dance events and avoid an entire swath of over-compressed music because it just sounds like ass especially if being played loud for dancing. Very dynamic music played super loud has a special kind of WOW!!!
It has got to such a ridiculous point. My favourite book for ages has been Greg Milners 'Perfecting sound forever'. It is without doubt THE best book on recording and explains 'The loudness wars' in such a brilliant way. I really recommend it for anyone interested in music and recording. It made me re-evaluate everything I thought I knew and I got my vinyl collection out of storage.
Yes. High fidelity speakers with a flat-like frequency response are called studio monitors. In essence, speakers are used to monitor sound, that's where the term comes from.
With digital, it's so tempting to mix according to the meters. I wonder if engineers trained on analog gear ever subconsciously treat digital peak meters as if they were VU meters. I also wonder if mixes would improve if instead of level meters, DAWs had a big crest factor meter on the main buss!
Speaking of crest factor, one of the highest I've seen in popular music is from "Stuck with You" by Huey Lewis and the News. IMO, a great sounding track: very lively and punchy - and a big commercial success too.
We have worked hard to develop the DRMeter MkII which just had been released by www.MAAT.digital, It really helps engineers in all working situations to get a great intuitive sense of what is going on in regards of the peak structure, dynamics and target loudness so that the potential of loudness normalized platforms like Spotify, iTunes Music, MfiT, TIDAL, and TubeTube are used and no "Dynamic Potential" is wasted.
Looks like just what I was imagining - excellent! :) I became convinced of the virtue of sensible digital metering after reading Bob Katz. Not that one should mix with one's eyes, of course, but when finishing a product you need to know where you sit - "If you can not measure it, you can not improve it." Thanks!
4:47 Oh my... 96k and 192k has nothing to do with dynamics! It is the bit resolution that does it!
have you researched whats bit resolution in audio? I did...and this is what it says; variations in bit depth PRIMARILY affect the noise level from quantization error-thus the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and DYNAMIC RANGE.
Of course I have. I'm an audio engineer. I know what I say!
@@alpyre Simmer down, cupcake.
IM FOR CLEARNESS AND QUALITY FIRST!!! I MASTER AND COMPRESS UNTIL IT SOUNDS LIKE NOTHING IS BEING COMPROMISED. THATS THE BEST WAY!!!!
I like what DJ Sprinkles did on the album "Midtown 120 Blues". It's a deep house album. There was no effort to reach 0db, the dynamic range was preserved completely. And it's great, because all you do is turn up your volume when you listen to it, and it sounds better than most other records. Also, many devices just automatically adjust volume - I think Spotify does this. In my opinion, there is obviously a place for compression, especially in genres like hip hop and dance music, but as long as each track on your album has a consistent volume, you don't need to squish it up to 0db. In the future, sound systems will improve - it won't be as hard to produce tracks that are audible and on all systems. And devices will improve - output levels will be adjusted according to the volume of the track. I'm not a very experienced producer but I think the loudness war will end.
The problem what loudness war was trying to fix was that the end-user were not and still aren't, trained to use compression or even knowing what is dynamics. There are TONS of situations where you need to compress the sound to fit the use. I use fast compressor-slow limiter (with automatic gain, ie, they work as a normalizer...) chain at the end of my living room audio chain. That environment produces lots of noise and still you are suppose to receive the message: if it's news, you want to hear what are being said. If it's music on the background, you want it nice and level, no silence but you can't have loud booms either. With my very simple setup and few well thought out presets, anyone can use it and the sounds is ALWAYS at proper level. It is as simple as switching between presets (i do it with software in the media center, a simple VST chain).
End-user is much better at tweaking the tone, a what EQ does is learned in few minutes and the user can make the sound more pleasing to them very fast (yeah, i know, don't get hung on that they don't know what they are doing, this is not about "smilies" just that frequency is easy to understand).
Put the same person in front of a compressor; they can sit for an hour and not understand what it does. It takes training to hear attack/hold, threshold, compression amount, it takes years to be good at it. It doesn't have to be that way.
You can have "industrial standards", 5 (or more) presets that can cover the most needs for dynamic control, basically just ever increasing compression with different time domain/compression settings: yes, i'm am talking about "pop", "spoken" "max", etc very broad definitions that cover most needs, it needs to be simple and clear, "dumbed down". Circuit design and presets that are studied and configured by the very best in the business to hold for a decade with out revisions.. Stable standards that span years and consistent education thru user manuals, help menu etc. Manufatcturers can provide their own alternatives as long as the basic standard is always there, unchanged and checked by a institution, a certification (no fees! it has to be free). The check itself is easy to configure, we are talking about in/out comparison after all ;)
But that would mean either external units (bad) or industry wide standard DSP built in to every amplifier (almost impossible). It is totally possible in technical sense, such a DSP these days don't cost an arm and leg, most amplifiers already have a chip capable of doing this.. But in corporate world, it is impossible as it only takes ONE manufacturer to cheat on the specs and make theirs "louder", "sweeter" etc. to the point of distorting the sound so that it sounds better than the competitor in the shops..
But that is where this competition should've been in the first place, not at mix/master stage. It was done in the wrong end as every loudness war affected record is ruined forever where as at the user -end, you can always switch the DSP off and enjoy the recording.. And even then you might've ended with the same result, all it takes is one engineer to peak limit a bit and the spiral start to spin again.
One interesting thing that 128EBU does bring, it is a sort of compromise that allow exactly this sort of user-end compression standard to be implemented.
I for one, like anyone else, like to listen to a powerful record. And there are certainly some records from the 70s and 80s that could seriously benefit some remastering and increased volume and slightly more compression.
Having said that, it seems like EVERY single record I get these days shatters my ears the second I put it in my car stereo. Even if I turn the volume down on my stereo, it seems like there's zero room for it to breathe.I actually think the softer bands sound better with a bit more boost in the mastering, and the loud records sound way better with more mild mastering.
David R i agree with your 2nd paragraph.
I prefer high compression when I'm listening to something late at night. Particularly in the case of a movie. People talk softly, you need to turn it up to hear what they are saying, but then a music passage comes in to accentuate something in the plot and it blares 5 times louder. The volume is constantly going up and down to compensate.
They use the comping/limiting and lack of dynamics so that they can boost the loudness on the CD's. So it IS about loudness as well as the dynamics
On iTunes older versions of songs routinely outsell more recent louder remasters.
As a mobile DJ for decades, I've known that dynamic range is extremely important because over time, let's say after an evening of dancing to music played at the right volume, if every song is LOUD, the ears begin to complain & one result is ear fatigue and we just want to turn it off. I've even written an article about this topic & it was published in Mobile Beat a few years back, & posted the article on my DJ Blog: www.goodmusicdj.com/new-music-clipping-dynamic-range/
The complete absence of a noise floor today leaves this hole, which is then wrongly countered by hotter levels in an attempt to compensate. Its this noise, predominantly in the lower bass octaves, that people associate with thickness/presence/warmth this is in conjunction with the other, separate phenomenon whereby the majority of modern pop music lacks any real stereo 'width', not because of incompetence, but because when everything was mixed on physical tape, that medium offered an element of cross-talk between signals recorded parallel on magnetic tape, which translated directly into the effect known as 'shuffling' , as if by accident, this property so happens to comply quite nicely with the way humans hear. Tape is literally psycho-acoustic theory reverse engineered as crazy as that sounds. Tape was autopilot up to the point computers took over and now this prerequisite must be added manually. Stereo separation, a specification which digital systems excel at, is actually the bane, contrary to popular belief (up to a point). To improve width, or depth, actually requires the reduction of separation in the treble range,
I thought this was going to be about the stereo receiver wars from the 1970's. Someone could do a whole hour long documentary about that topic. I have one of the champions from that era myself, the Pioneer SX-1250.
Waiting and trying to end the loudness war.😶😶
Thank god for audiophiles.
@ Let's not totally demonise compression, becasue it has its uses in both mixing and mastering. Like all tools, it's the OVERUSE which is the problem.
I can tell you something specific about what causes listening fatigue in overcompressed recordings.
I started 'remastering' a lot of my CDs in my computer, on ancient Adobe Audition software, because many '70s album master tapes lacked low end due to vinyl's tech limitations ("can't make the needle jump out of the groove!"). Well, turns out a lot of CD reissues (especially from European labels) of '70s American funk and R&B) are brickwalled, and a side effect of it is a SCREECHY edge to the sound. We non-pros might call it a serious excess of 'the high end of midrange' & 'the low end of treble'. It corresponds to the range of about 4000 to 7000 Hz. Think of a piercing whistle. When I use the software to pull down that part of the frequency range... OMG, WHAT A RELIEF! And the stupid irony is, when we listen on our players or car systems, if we realize we're being irritated by that SCREECHING, about all we can do for quick relief is turn the volume down-- which kills the supposed 'advantage' of the high compression that's causing this problem!
(And no, a lot of times turning the treble control down DOESN'T really kill the screech, and even if it did, we shouldn't have to do that to make the sound tolerable!)
People are lazy with compression. Automate those knobs.
Ironic that while digital formats have the technical possibility to have way more dynamics than vinyl, the compression completely defeats the purpose... you end up with better DR on vinyl than digital
It is entirely possible to press vinyl from the same harsh over-compressed digital master that made the CD (or now, streamed file), which means that the vinyl would also sound like crap, but with surface noise, clicks and pops.
A case in point, Rhino's 'Remastered' Chicago The Studio Albums 1969-1978. Listen to the Chicago Records CD's as a frame of reference, then listen to a Rhino CD. The dynamics are lost. Loudness is fatiguing, but not ear fatiguing, plain old fatigue. If one views the audio file from a 'remastered' CD, it looks like a rectangular blob and sounds like it.
just leave the fucking music alone the way it should be heard, simple.
You wouldn't like it if they didn't use a bunch of signal processing.
Oneness100
Signal processing isn't only dynamic range compression.
Asbjørn Grandt I'm very aware of that.
Please re-read the comment I made.
Live?
Quite likely a new standard will come in. Rather than 'as close to 0 as possible'.
That EBU loudness will mean stuff is normalised to -16LUFS anyway.
Which if a song is like that, that is a healthy amount of DR if it peaks near to 0.
Artistic compression is fine, but that lets attack through. I don't see how brickwall could be artistic, unless you are trying to soften and quieten the sound, which is what it does, if you compare at the same level, it might be a way to take out all the attack if you want a really soft record.
I have been saying this for years,and it really winds me up.It's the case of the tail wagging the dog,.All producers could just stop it tomorrow but they're all waiting for the other guy to bring the levels down.
16-bit is 'only' 96dB and the very best analogue signal chains could achieve a little over 120dB SNR. So, there is some marginal benefit to 24-bit, but you wouldn't get to the theoretical 144dB in practice. Most DAWs operate as 32-bit float, but this is really for computational reasons. For final playback, the 96dB range of 16-bit formats is excellent, by any practical standpoint this is an enormous dynamic range for music playback.
What a blessing the internet is that musicians can now publish their music exactly as intended, and for free, to the whole planet, instantly! Music can breathe again! 🌴
Totally agree with "Everyone Is Too Lazy to Turn It UP" Well Said!!👍👍
i'm not disputing that, i know over-compressing and limiting damages the overall sound. but good producers know how to enhance the track levels and keep it loud and clear so it stands out!!!
You know i've seen releases that actually note they "may be quieter than your used to, We've made an effort to preserve dynamics"
can you imagine having to listen to chan chan that has been compressed like music today
i would probably cry
Perhaps part of the problem is calling it "loudness". Many laypeople just assume you're talking about only making it louder as opposed to the compression llimiting/distortion] that's happening to give that impression. There are even mix decisions made to place more piercing elements in the audio to have it occupy more sonic space, especially in the midrange where most low quality playback systems project easily enough.
And in the mixing/mastering studio, when comparing less to more compression/limiting it's important that the overall volume level doesn't change. It's the problem, say, with most limiting algorithms that have gain compensation that when the compression factor is turned up, the overall volume also gets louder giving the reptile-brain a kind of excitement and "oh, this is better!" immediate response. In all cases where I've done mastering, when the client hears a volume-compensated comparison, extreme limiting is never preferred. But in experiments I've done, when I don't compensate for volume (and more compression means also louder), they get excited and prefer that.
Digital audio has meant that it's more of an exact science to compress the hell out of everything. In the days of tape/vinyl, one could never assume that one pressing or tape run would be identical to another in terms of overall volume, so of course you would never rely on putting two or more completely different records/tapes on and expect to not touch your volume control. So the idea of ultra compression to the detriment of sound quality just so that somebody might prefer your record because it happens to be louder wasn't a huge problem back then, because the analog domain didn't have such consistency anyway.
I just wish the producers were allowed to create and label two mixes. One with full dynamic range and the other compressed for cars and bars.
Also, lables send these harsh, over compressed singles to radio, and when broadcast run through more compression at the transmitter
what is very sad is seen new artists wanting to get their productions on vinyl when they borned in the era of cd`s. They dont have any fucking idea whats vinyl and I don`t even think they ever grab a cassette either.
7:07 is an essential point. Only THOSE things will last, that are made to last, that have a heart, strong enough to beat longer than 4 weeks ;-)
love it when i have my 11-13 year old grandkids listening to good produced vinyl songs and they still say" oh this is sooo old music.. then i tell them close your eyes and really listen to the instruments playing. ... what does kill me is you have bands that go from one recording studio to the next to spread the money and what comes out of this hodge podge is an album of good recording /bad recording/ song to song. when someone will wake up and say this is a good recording or crap ,start over and listen to the clarity and musical dynamics of instruments/ vocals and enjoy .. i do not want washed out music just for the darn volumn. not all of us out there have bad cheap equipment to listen on. we want to immerse in music at home not volumn and ear fatigue in concerts. But give me my monies worth and give me a decent amount of good engineered tracks on a record or cd. this crud changes tooo much to feel worth it...at least you can buy track to track. albums ,you still get 90% crappy songs for your money. i believe this is what also killed vinyl. besides kids still do not make the money to warrant spending it on expensive audio to enjoy. 99 cent$ track them to death is the way to stick the iv to their wallet. forget about the long term benifits. long live the ear bud zombies who are going deaf ....
in 10 years we will lough? i dont think i can lough about something what destroyed music 4 me... it made me start to hate music. Something i love so much started to discuss me.
im really no expert, but maybe for edm music this loudness is not as bad as for other genres, right?
We, of the analog, vinyl revolution had OUR share of loudness wars. This is nothing new. The ones who are complaining are complaining because THEY couldn't make their analog recordings, with all their electronic gizmos, as loud as digital! Find me some real engineers! :)
The Loudness War is a problem for every single genre of music. No exceptions. If you want it louder, just turn the volume up in your playback system.
***** The people birtching about loudness, birtch because their audio work is below average!! Hey, Alan Parsons, how many times are your albums going to be remastered, last date 2013!!
overcompression isn't the only "problem", some mixing/mastering engineers are using a lot of distortion and clipping (analog and digital) to make their tracks sounds louder...
Jean Bernal I believe man has always aimed for that goal, louder sound. It shouldn't be isolated to audio CDs.
From the video:
"Volume wins any contest." Richard Dodd.
The most popular mix engineer today is Chris Lord Alge. I bet he subscribes to very few of these ideas.
It's nice sentiment, but ultimately not completely applicable in the staggeringly competitive music industry.
for some reason, ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC sound great in the loudness wars, but sometimes, it is too much. the LOUDNESS WARS, has influenced the BIG ROOM (talentless SUBGENRE) to gain success
Yes, mixing and mastering loud is actually easier and faster to do than creating a well balanced mix. For the latter higher audio engineering skills are required.
Making everything loud is kind of like smashing everything against a wall - it´s simple and opens the door for the average Joe.
Friedemann Tischmeyer As I tell many, few (maybe 15%) actually care about sound quality. It's about the same 15% as those who demand stereo mixes, rather than monophonic. That makes sense - A GREAT AMOUNT OF SENSE. Anyway, most of the time, you step into someone's car after they listened to music they enjoy, and they'll have it playing loud. There ARE advantages to mastering loud, if you know something about audio, but I never see it mentioned anywhere.
genuineuni When you follow the discussions within the Ploud group of the EBU and the official papers including the BS.1770 ones there is NO discussion about loudness WITHOUT considering the context where music is consumed. The aim of meaningful loudness normalization or loudness management is controling the loudness according to the listening environment. In this sense you are right. Automotive music consumtion requires less dynamic than home entertainment, etc. Therefore it makes sense to supply music in a meaningful loudness which will be dynamic reduced according to the particular listening environment. I wouldn´t make sense to design music for people who want to hear the music while they are operating a buzz saw as this would require DR2 or DR3 and it is hard to undo loudness treatment while it is simple to reduce dynamic content.
Friedemann Tischmeyer First, nice video, thanks fore taking the time to post it. However, I always hear of the "bad" remastering, seldom the good. You can find one or more right here on RUclips. But, let's be fair, people can NOW "see" (waveform) what they are listening to. Would they complain otherwise? Probably not. Great sound quality (alone) never sold music. A fine example is a US #10 1965 Hit, by The Silkie, You've Got To Hide Your Love Away, issue (US) on Fontana record label. Sound like a live, cheaply done recording, loads of distortion, but, still, it reached US #10. I remember a fair number of vinyl 45s, as the song faded, the audio became less distorted, but, again, it didn't stop the song from charting. Actually, if you listen to the remixing of Lighthouse('s) - One Fine Morning ('70's song), it now sounds bland, unlike the 45 and vinyl album versions were pushed to their audio limits. So, loudness has always been and probably will always be part of man's history! :) And if you happen to see Bob Ludwig around, tell him I wasn't thrilled with his Extreme remastering of John Cougar Mellencamp.
Friedemann Tischmeyer Furthermore, let's take Alan Parsons. He had a key advantage over past engineers due to tape recording technology. I highly doubt he would have been able to pull-off a Pink Floyd, sounding as good if done in the early-mid '60.s. Overdubbing, that harmed (audio) a lot of fine music was now welcome, due to manufacturers like tape recording equipment, such a Ampex. Lots think of loudness as in amplitude, but I (also) think of it on density of sound, such as adding echo or reverb to vocals and/or musical instruments [w/o changing amplitude]. Anyway, thanks for the Ploud group mentioning, it sounds like something I'd like to participate.
I don't like turning volume up and down with the wide catalog I listen to on spotify. Tried it with volume equalization off and dynamics are nice. It's an interesting experience. I appreciate it. But most of the time I just want the convenience of an even volume across artists and producers. So produce your music with high dynamic range if you like but don't fool yourself thinking it's superior. It's just allowing more ways for people to experience your music. Pros and cons, plenty of interesting things happening in loud music too. ❤️
"I don't like turning volume up and down with the wide catalog I listen to on spotify. " - But you should. The louder parts SHOULD make you push deeper back into your chair/couch as applicable and the quieter parts should make you lean forward to listen carefully. The surges and ebbs lend unquantifiable emotion to the music. Without that, it's just a flat procession of everything sounding the same even when tempos or time sigs change or when the intensity goes up or down.
"But most of the time I just want the convenience of an even volume across artists and producers." - How can you even begin to listen to metal and jazz at the same volume? Such needs cannot be fulfilled. I am not being finicky here. Tell me something, would you drive a Camry and a Ferrari both the exact same way? Yeah, didn't think so. It's horses for courses.
So, no, making music with high dynamic range IS superior. But music is so utterly commodified now that people won't pay the price for a superior product. You can't fight sloth. I hope YOU weren't there in the 80s and 90s operating cassettes; boy, if you complain about moving the volume up or down on a phone or a computer, changing sides or pressing rewind/FF would have driven you crazy.
If you listen to classical music, recorded nowadays with modern equipment, it really makes you sad. Because it sounds so awesome and they could have done that with pop music as well (not as a genre but rather anything not classic basically). It would be great
hello mr Friedemann i have your dvds some years now im not into mastering really but hopefully they had a lot all around technical audio information that is very useful so it was not wasted money.You did a good job.
Great video! Dr.luke does this with almost every katy perry song. He cranks the db up during the chorus and people love it.
Many amps have a 'night mode' that is basically a 'super loudness' button for that very reason. I say do it in post, playback, not in the source.