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loudness wars 2019


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Whilst I agreee with what is said above about loudness “pushed to 11” on many new pop songs, and that it destroys music

 

for non critical listening and streamed music in day an office many people I work with are accustomed to a constant sound level. They often have the opposite issue of too quite and too loud with well recorded music

 

But to be far there exists a number of equalisation techniques within hardware and software such as Sonos to overcome some of this via equalisation at least between songs if not within songs.

 

also I believe radio stations have always had the ability to reprocess audio to reduce the dynamic range (I think I am correct here?)

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3 hours ago, Demondes said:

also I believe radio stations have always had the ability to reprocess audio to reduce the dynamic range (I think I am correct here?)

yes. Don't listen to radio music anymore but they use to use DSP.

Edited by Wimbo
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My view is that we are somewhat blaming the wrong people for this problem.... now that the tools exist to "take the power back".    

  • Loudness as an artistic tool .... will never go away.
  • Loudness as a tool to "make it sound acceptable on an iPad speaker" .... needs to be moved from the producer to the playback system (ie. playback systems should boost their loudness when needed)
  • Loudness as a tool to "make it sound loud" .... can be overridden in the playback system by automated "volume levelling" eg. R128  (ie. playback systems should automatically level loudness)

.... but until loudness correction features are ubiquitous, then producers will feel compelled to solve the problem themselves.    Right now criticisms of "why did you butcher the dynamic range?!?!" .... are met with the response of "to make it sound good on typical (not audiophile) devices, and to make it stand out".   Neither of those should be a thing.

 

Of course, "I just wanted it to sound that way".   Will always be a thing.

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4 hours ago, Demondes said:

For non critical listening and streamed music in day an office many people I work with are accustomed to a constant sound level. They often have the opposite issue of too quiet and too loud with well recorded music.

Well if you think about it, it's sad if the target audience for said music then is "background music in an office."

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33 minutes ago, Ittaku said:

Well if you think about it, it's sad if the target audience for said music then is "background music in an office."

But that's how a great deal of music is listened to ..... or in a car, or on a laptop speaker, or on a little bluetooth speaker near a pool, or...   and so it is in their interest to make the music sound "good" on these.

 

 

Producers are (rightly or wrongly) trying to solve a "problem" that is in their interest to solve ...... just telling them to "stop solving the problem", is not going to change anything.

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Who decided for us that music played in a car has to be 'loud'? I drove home today with music playing at a soft level, no one outside of my car can hear. Sure, some quiet parts were drowned out by traffic and car noise, but I still heard enough to enjoy my ride. For pop and rock music, especially those that are familiar, there is no need to be loud. Seriously, even back in the days of cassettes in car, no one really called for loud recordings.

 

This Stereophile article ( https://www.stereophile.com/content/moby-sound-mind) look at the pressure to record loud from a musician's perspective. I quote:

"I understand why they do it, because every musician has had that experience where you make a record, you mix it, you master it—and then you play it up against someone else's record, and their record just sounds so much louder and more dynamic, and you become sort of envious. And so then it's this escalating process where the next time you make a record, maybe you, like, put a few more things on the master bus in Pro Tools—some more limiting, so you get some more gain. Then, when you master, you have the conversation with the mastering engineer, where you say to them, 'Okay, I don't want to have an overly compressed, overly loud record.' But then, when they master it in a way that's not overly compressed or overly loud, you get scared and go back to them and see if you can find a happy medium—which escalates this process of louder and louder and louder."

 

So what we have is similar to why TVs are tuned from factory to be really bright: so that they can stand-out from their competitors in the show room. It is a peer pressure thing. 

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46 minutes ago, LHC said:

Who decided for us that music played in a car has to be 'loud'?

It's common consensus.    Typical 'high dynamic range' audio, doesn't sound good in typical environments where there is noise, or where the speakers are otherwise incapable of reproducing the range.

 

The people creating the audio, "decided" to make it "compatible" with the "real world".

46 minutes ago, LHC said:

no one really called for loud recordings

... but in those situations, they sound better.... so you got them.

 

It's "our fault" for making the problem (flawed playback systems) .... not "their fault" for trying to solve it.

 

 

Note  (and it's a big/important note) .... that I am ignoring the "I made it sound loud 'cos that how I think it sounds best" type of motivation for loudness.....   and am just focussing on the "I made it sound loud so it sounds acceptable on a clock radio" .... and then "I made it loud so it stands out on the radio" .... justifications.

46 minutes ago, LHC said:

It is a peer pressure thing. 

Pressure not to end up on the wrong side of a "problem".

 

.... but who created the problem?!  ;);) .... Who has the solution for the problem?!  ;);) 

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I’m not persuaded by the argument that most listening is done on systems incapable of producing a reasonable dynamic range.  As far as I can see, by far the largest amount of music listening by volume (pun not intended) is using headphones with a mobile device.  Sure, the headphone quality is often rubbish, but all that really happens is people turn it down to compensate for the ‘loudness’, or turn it up on properly mastered content.

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1 hour ago, davewantsmoore said:

It's common consensus.    Typical 'high dynamic range' audio, doesn't sound good in typical environments where there is noise, or where the speakers are otherwise incapable of reproducing the range.

Yes, but where and when was it determined that this is not acceptable in a car environment? 

 

1 hour ago, davewantsmoore said:

The people creating the audio, "decided" to make it "compatible" with the "real world".

So there was no consensus (between producers and consumers); it probably started as an industry trend that became ubiquitous driven by peer pressure - don't want to be the odd one out. 

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There’s still hope, I just bought a live album by a guy called Hiall Horan, one of those muppets from that group called One Direction, absolutely lovely live recording. 

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9 hours ago, LHC said:

Yes, but where and when was it determined that this is not acceptable in a car environment? 

Well, I do a lot of driving as a sales rep. My car has a bi-modal exhaust, I turn it to quiet mode for long trips so the exhaust or engine isn't heard and still find the need to turn up my volume to overcome wind and tyre roar. Unless you are driving a uber luxury vehicle with double glazing and heaps of sound isolation, they are VERY noisy places to be, much louder than your average shop or office environment.

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13 hours ago, LHC said:

Yes, but where and when was it determined that this is not acceptable in a car environment? ...

I used to believe that a greater degree of compression would be appropriate in a car environment to overcome vehicle and road noise.  I don't have an outstanding audio system in my car - it's better than the stock audio systems though.  As the CD player doesn't work, I have to rip and play mp3 via the usb input (yes, another degradation).  And I have a very old car, so it has a reasonably higher noise floor than more modern cars. 

 

The changing point came one day when I was listening to a CD in the car (ripped to mp3), and I thought "this sounds fantastic - much better than normal - why?" .  I realised that I was listening to a DCC (label) CD, mastered without added compression by Steve Hoffman. 

 

My conclusion, reinforced by subsequent comparisons is:  Even in the poor acoustic and noisy car environment, listening to music degraded by mp3 encoding, quality mastering without excess compression still allows the music to "live" and be enjoyed in comparison to music mastered with greater compression. 

 

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I agree that in 2019 compression is still a concerning compromise to music quality.

 

However, I also think it holds equal place to that other production "evil" - excessive use of auto-tune.  On breakfast TV the other morning a young successful British pop star was introduced, when they played her hit all I could hear was that dreadful auto-tune sound. 

 

I really struggle to know which I find harder to listen to - excess compression or excess auto-tune.  The two together = unlistenable. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I recently looked at Daft Punk's Random Access Memories which is a very popular sample album and was very disappointed to see despite its fame, it is quite compressed on digital and vinyl has substantially more dynamic range, and even cleaner spectra.

 

Highres(!) digital:

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Versus vinyl rip:

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