7 ms·

Loudness (2007)

144 points by mjgoins 9y ago

haterswillhate 9y ago
It's amazing how audio professionals talk about this.. but take a look on EDM industry.. everyone mastering they records max as possible. Then comes mr. Righteous "youtube" who as usual "punish" producers.. Dog eats dog out there, let me ask ? Why we have so many audio standards for 2 channel audio ? It's amazing jungle there.
__x0x__ 9y ago
I'm a self-described audioweenie who has a dedicated listening room with a decent setup. It does make me sad that much new music is mastered so loud because information is lost when you "brickwall master". For older music, a lot of audiophiles will seek out original non-remastered releases of music made before the "Loudness Wars" (early 90s and before) where, as I understand it, it was generally considered taboo to have a "digital over" in a mastering. However some "Loud" masterings still sound quite good. It depends a lot on the type of music and how the compression was applied. I mean, someone overdriving a tube guitar amp into soft clipping is essentially compressing the sound in the analogue domain - that's what makes guitars sound so awesome. I wish to make one main observation about the vinyl resurgence. Vinyl (which I enjoy, mostly for nostalgia because I'm old enough to remember when it was the main format) is on the rise for the wrong reasons. One reason is that it has become trendy - and I have no problem with this, but it's a real thing. Another more frustrating reason is the perception that vinyl masters cannot have the same amount of compression as digital masters, hence the perception is that vinyl version of a modern master will less compressed. Many, many audiophiles believe this. However I can tell you that the vast majority of modern vinyl releases are the same exact mastering as the digital version. The digital tracks have already been "squashed" and that mastering is fed to the cutting head after applying the RIAA curve. However, the "dynamic range database" (results from a piece of free software that applies an algorithm to digital music and assigns a number related to the ratio between peak and RMS energy in the music) will regularly indicate vinyl versions of music (recorded and digitized by someone on their home setup) with more dynamic range. The problem is that this "extra" dynamic range arises from the inability to reproduce square waves (those flat-topped 0 dBFS regions in the article) in the analogue domain... there are overshoots that "add" peak energy that didn't exist on the squashed digital master. So you have people who think squashed music that has gone through all of the processing that is required to make a vinyl record magically comes out on the other end with more dynamic range, sounding better, when it's added a bunch of additional distortion. It's part of what makes the audio hobby so much.... fun.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
amelius 9y ago
Was there any way we could have prevented the "loudness war"?
- santoshalper 9y ago
  There is research that shows that on a casual listen, people believe louder music sounds better. Similarly, people tend to find brighter pictures more appealing at a glance, even though both of these can be fatiguing and cause discomfort. That's why stereo stores (in so much as they still exist) crank up the music to very loud volumes and all the TVs at Best Buy are grossly mis-calibrated. Unfortunately, most musicians are just hoping you will notice their song when it comes up on the radio, pandora, a friends iPhone and so everyone is incentivized to crank their song to the max. The thing that bums me out is that there were really good records released in the 2000's that are mastered terribly, and we may never hear a better version. It's one thing when a stooges album is fucked up on re-release, I can always grab the original, there may never be another version of "Is This It".
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    I found myself pondering this in relation to the resurgence of LPs. I wonder if the lower dynamic range of LPs restricts music released on them from being overly loud, and thus not as fatiguing to listen to as more modern formats.
    - microcolonel 9y ago
      Not exactly. It is technically the case that vinyls have less frequency response (basically a low pass filter) than good (really effectively perfect) reproduction formats like CD. That certainly means that the maximum loudness value is lower, but dynamic range is not required for loudness, gain and frequency response are. If anything, having less dynamic range would encourage people to make louder records.
      - cromon 9y ago
        A CD is limited to 22khz, whereas vinyl is analogue and doesn't have this limit, digital files obviously can go up to ~96khz due to the 192khz sample rate achievable by some sound cards.
morecoffee 9y ago
Tangential, but for the longest time I couldn't figure out why VLC always played music / DVDs at such low volume. Setting the system volume to max and overdriving VLC's volume slider was the only way I could actually hear the soft parts. Recently I found out about the volume compressor, which with a single check box does exactly the right thing. I asked myself "why the heck isn't this box checked by default?" I think the answer is with audio purists wanting to stem the loudness war. When reading about CD mastering maxing out the volume, It seems like it is the right decision. Most people do want the loudest setting, no mess with the EQ, compressors, etc. Only a tiny population wants to preserve the fidelity of the amplitude.
- mrspeaker 9y ago
  I think the reason it's not on by default is that so much music is already compressed to insane levels that sounds terrible - double-y compressing things doubles the terribleness. I love music, but I wouldn't call myself an audiophile (heck, I'm listening out of my lappy's default sound card with cheap headphones) but in this case I totally agree with the audiophile's term "fatigue". Music that is over-compressed doesn't sound bad to my untrained ear, but it's just fatiguing after a while. The silence that finally comes is a pleasure! But having it double-compress by default is like hearing those people who want to play there car stereo louder than their system can handle and it distorts like crazy: they are obviously still enjoying it - but it's not the song the artists recorded. (Ok, maybe an exaggeration... but I still don't think we should encourage it!)
  - hammock 9y ago
    Actually if the music those crazy people were listening to was overcompressed, they'd be able to turn it up louder without distortion :)
- trevyn 9y ago
  Movies generally have a wide dynamic range so that loud action scenes are very loud. You don't want your normal dialogue to be at the same volume as your explosions, unless you're watching at home with the volume down.
mortenjorck 9y ago
For practical listening, I actually prefer modern brickwall mastering techniques to more traditional mastering with a high dynamic range, for one reason: what the author sees as "hijacking the volume control from the listener" I would consider the opposite. With a high dynamic range, a headphones listener may feel the need to adjust the volume several times in a song to boost the clarity of softer sections or to make louder sections more comfortable to the ears, depending on the listening environment. With a "loud," low dynamic range, however, the listener need only adjust the volume once, as the whole track is roughly the same volume. In other words, the listener is in control of the volume, rather than the engineer.
- moolcool 9y ago
  Do you also want explosions in movies to sound just as loud as whispers? Quiet parts of songs are meant to sound quieter, there's even special notation in sheet music for this.
- nathanasmith 9y ago
  Just give me the option. When I'm in the car, I like the "wall of sound" since it's a noisy environment, so I have a head unit with a built-in compressor I can control. When I'm at home, I prefer the dynamic range. The problem comes when the engineer takes that option away from me (quite often) clipping and distorting everything to the nth degree. Like the article mentions, this creates ear fatigue and I end up, eventually, just not wanting to listen to the CD at all which colors my perception of the band. So I'm less likely to go to their concerts and give them money. That's just me though.
- Qantourisc 9y ago
  In my opinion this is a software problem, you just need some automatic gain control (automatic volume adjust).
- xkcd-sucks 9y ago
  It's easier to remove dynamic range on playback than to add it back in... don't many stereos have a "loudness" function which brickwalls the audio?
golergka 9y ago
Since Youtube and most streaming services started to automatically balance tracks based on their average perceived loudness (not all of them use the same metric, but the purpose is the same), loudness war is almost dead. If you brickwall your song, it will not be played louder than competition anymore.
- copperx 9y ago
  The algorithms that determine perceptual loudness are very inaccurate, so it's still possible to game them.
ttoinou 9y ago
Theses mastering techniques have their legitimate use ! Some notes : * it's a step in musical production where having experience, skills and contact with the artist matters. Not all compressor and limiter are created equal and the default value you use in your media player may not sound as good as what an audio engineer might have done.. * Not everyone have good hardware and a good environment to listen to high dynamic range music like thoses listening to classical music / jazz / Philip Glass, so theses business decision to increase volume for the market made sense at that time I think. Audio engineer simply took profit of having a technically better medium (CD) to make audio sound better (from what I've read theses techniques did not work well on vinyl) * Loudness wars didn't have an effect on old records since as one can see in this article, we could find the old dynamic ones (and so we actually have the choice of listening to the old untouched record, or the new compressed-for-the-market record, and that is a good thing !) * Theses music stats (mean RMS, peak RMS, max mean RMS) look at instantaneous dynamic, but a look at the overall dynamic of a song is also very important ! A good article on this topic stating that songs did not lose overall dynamic range that much : ['Dynamic Range' & The Loudness War, 2011] http://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/dynamic-range-loudness-war http://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/dynamic-range-loudn...
- bhj 9y ago
  Also see SoS's "follow-up" article from 2014: http://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/end-loudness-war http://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/end-loudness-war
cromon 9y ago
This is something I have battled with for a long time, personally I master to make the music sound good, sometimes that is loud (new dance music) sometimes not so much (old African recordings remasters). Coupled with the data from this page [1] there is no point in going too loud anyways, that's why you have gain / volume control. I'm not sure how I feel about streaming services implementing extra processing tbh. Spotify is the worst culprit adding limiting which can significantly change the sound of a recording. I just wish other engineers would have more pragmatism in this industry, way too much overcooked and distorted music around. [1] http://productionadvice.co.uk/online-loudness/ http://productionadvice.co.uk/online-loudness/
thatswrong0 9y ago
This is pretty funny to me because I mostly listen to (and produce) electronic music.. and there are pretty much no rules when it comes to electronic music and loudness. Stupidly loud music can actually sound pretty dang good [0][1]. The momentary RMS in some Moody Good tracks can actually hit _above_ 0dBFS. If you have the right source material, you can brickwall the hell out of tracks and not notice the distortion.. or perhaps the distortion will even add pleasant artifacts. One of the more prominent issues with making things stupid loud is intermodulation distortion, but that really only becomes noticeable when you have pure tones or vocals being mashed into the limiter. If the source material is already distorted (think screechy dubstep synths), then it probably don't matter. But yeah, when you're dealing with more traditional kinds of music, which often times involves vocals or a lot more subtlety to the timbre of the instruments, brickwalling is probably not the best call. It seems that the Search and Destroy "remaster" sounding terribly distorted was intentional.. but IMO it's not very listenable nor does the distortion really bring the grungy character than I think they were going for. It just sounds bad. [0] https://soundcloud.com/moodygood/mtgfyt-vol1 https://soundcloud.com/moodygood/mtgfyt-vol1 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lsX8pUaloY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lsX8pUaloY
- coldtea 9y ago
  >The momentary RMS in some Moody Good tracks can actually hit _above_ 0dBFS. It's about the dynamics (or lack thereof), not just about the distortion (if it's not clipping to just white noise 0dBFS is not the DAW limit anyways).
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  I (only half jokingly) think (music like) that Bassnectar track Into The Sun is Lorin Ashton's attempt at hitting The Brown Note when played on a big rig sound system. It's just constant rolling thunder, break down around 2 mins in, followed by more rolling thunder. Sounds like the melody is playing on a different sound system half a kilometer away at the same festival. Ah, music is weird because even the stuff I like is fun to criticise. On that note, have you come across Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music?[1] It hasn't been updated in a long time, but still highly amusing. 1. http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/ http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/
krallja 9y ago
2007, if Internet Archive is to be believed https://web.archive.org/web/20070808082932/http://www.chicagomasteringservice.com/loudness.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070808082932/http://www.chicag...
- dang 9y ago
  Thanks, added.
quakenul 9y ago
Mastering is in a way comparable to capitalism. You can certainly try and be nice about it but pushing harder will usually get you further, because most people care more about one aspect than all the others aspects combined. In capitalism it is getting a great product for a great price. In mastering, it is loudness. Loudness is a bastard. There is a reason, why all the pros are usually very, very careful about level matching when doing any sort of audio comparisons. Even when you know that louder can easily fool you into thinking something is better (which most listeners don't), you're still susceptible, if you don't counter act it. Wanna convince a recording artist in the studio it's great? Turn up those big speakers. Instant gratification. When it comes to music consumption I like to think this is not really a problem: The sound of compression and distortion is the sound of current music and there is nothing inherently bad about it. Older generations will tend to oppose any new musical trend for various reasons, which all end up being subjective. The younger generations that grow up on this new sound do not care about brickwall limiting, because there is nothing to fucking care about. Music production has been and forever will a mix of mostly people copying other people and flowing with the stylistic currents while adding a little something themselves. Sometimes something radical will happen. Mostly not. If you wanna stay relevant you go with the former and keep reaching for the later. Pretty much the same, as with coding or design.
chrismealy 9y ago
It's not just about volume. Tracks mastered with a ton of compression trick your brain into sounding louder than they really are, which is great for a song or two (or if you want pay people to pay attention to your tv commercial), but for listening to a whole album it wears you out. If you have an album you love but somehow never make it all the way through this is probably why. The perception of full volume gets your lizard brain aroused, which is great if you're in the club, but not if you're in the mood to listen to the first three Led Zeppelin records in a row. On the other hand, older recordings with more dynamic range might sound thin at low volume, but are much richer at higher volumes (you can hear the individual instruments better and feel the space in the sound). If you try comparing older and newer masterings at a good volume the newer mastering usually sounds kinda mushy.
- hashmal 9y ago
  Not only it wears you out, but it can be dangerous, especially in clubs. The longer you listen to loud music (can be just a few minutes!), the more damage is done. Having music with a wide dynamic range helps to have an overall lower volume and preserve ears.
  - lflux 9y ago
    In Sweden, night clubs have a different time period for sound pressure exposure limits than concerts[0] (15 minutes instead of 60), partially due to the difference in dynamic range. [0] https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/globalassets/livsvillkor-levnadsvanor/halsoskydd-miljohalsa/inomhusmiljo/buller/sp-info-2004-45-egenkontroll.pdf https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/globalassets/livsvillkor... §5.1.2 vs §5.2.3
- elmar 9y ago
  Today if you want dynamic range you have to buy Vinyl or lossless downloads. http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Roger+Waters&album=is+this+the http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Roger+Waters&a... http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Roger%20Waters http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Roger%20Waters
mrlucax 9y ago
>but for listening to a whole album it wears you out. Looking at you, Death Magnetic.....
em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
Fortunately many audio providers now have been fighting back against this. For instance YouTube will punish video uploads that are louder than -13 LUFS by attenuating the level. This will provide a somewhat level playing field and encourage people to upload with a reasonable dynamic range.
- hashmal 9y ago
  And some others are going full retard. Some streaming services actually add compression to everything…
  - rocqua 9y ago
    Which ones?
    - ubercow13 9y ago
      Spotify: http://productionadvice.co.uk/online-loudness/ http://productionadvice.co.uk/online-loudness/
      - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
        I got 403 Error. Could you post a public link?
        ubercow13 9y ago
        Sorry, try again!
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    Ideally compression could be left for the end device. CyanogenMod has for a long time had compression control in settings. I can understand why some compression is useful, but it is a shame for the streaming provider to do this since information gets lost in compression.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

Loudness (2007)

144 points by mjgoins 9y ago

It's amazing how audio professionals talk about this.. but take a look on EDM industry.. everyone mastering they records max as possible. Then comes mr. Righteous "youtube" who as usual "punish" producers.. Dog eats dog out there, let me ask ? Why we have so many audio standards for 2 channel audio ? It's amazing jungle there.

__x0x__ 9y ago

I'm a self-described audioweenie who has a dedicated listening room with a decent setup. It does make me sad that much new music is mastered so loud because information is lost when you "brickwall master". For older music, a lot of audiophiles will seek out original non-remastered releases of music made before the "Loudness Wars" (early 90s and before) where, as I understand it, it was generally considered taboo to have a "digital over" in a mastering. However some "Loud" masterings still sound quite good. It depends a lot on the type of music and how the compression was applied. I mean, someone overdriving a tube guitar amp into soft clipping is essentially compressing the sound in the analogue domain - that's what makes guitars sound so awesome. I wish to make one main observation about the vinyl resurgence. Vinyl (which I enjoy, mostly for nostalgia because I'm old enough to remember when it was the main format) is on the rise for the wrong reasons. One reason is that it has become trendy - and I have no problem with this, but it's a real thing. Another more frustrating reason is the perception that vinyl masters cannot have the same amount of compression as digital masters, hence the perception is that vinyl version of a modern master will less compressed. Many, many audiophiles believe this. However I can tell you that the vast majority of modern vinyl releases are the same exact mastering as the digital version. The digital tracks have already been "squashed" and that mastering is fed to the cutting head after applying the RIAA curve. However, the "dynamic range database" (results from a piece of free software that applies an algorithm to digital music and assigns a number related to the ratio between peak and RMS energy in the music) will regularly indicate vinyl versions of music (recorded and digitized by someone on their home setup) with more dynamic range. The problem is that this "extra" dynamic range arises from the inability to reproduce square waves (those flat-topped 0 dBFS regions in the article) in the analogue domain... there are overshoots that "add" peak energy that didn't exist on the squashed digital master. So you have people who think squashed music that has gone through all of the processing that is required to make a vinyl record magically comes out on the other end with more dynamic range, sounding better, when it's added a bunch of additional distortion. It's part of what makes the audio hobby so much.... fun.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

amelius 9y ago

Was there any way we could have prevented the "loudness war"?

santoshalper 9y ago
There is research that shows that on a casual listen, people believe louder music sounds better. Similarly, people tend to find brighter pictures more appealing at a glance, even though both of these can be fatiguing and cause discomfort. That's why stereo stores (in so much as they still exist) crank up the music to very loud volumes and all the TVs at Best Buy are grossly mis-calibrated. Unfortunately, most musicians are just hoping you will notice their song when it comes up on the radio, pandora, a friends iPhone and so everyone is incentivized to crank their song to the max. The thing that bums me out is that there were really good records released in the 2000's that are mastered terribly, and we may never hear a better version. It's one thing when a stooges album is fucked up on re-release, I can always grab the original, there may never be another version of "Is This It".
- digi_owl 9y ago
  I found myself pondering this in relation to the resurgence of LPs. I wonder if the lower dynamic range of LPs restricts music released on them from being overly loud, and thus not as fatiguing to listen to as more modern formats.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    Not exactly. It is technically the case that vinyls have less frequency response (basically a low pass filter) than good (really effectively perfect) reproduction formats like CD. That certainly means that the maximum loudness value is lower, but dynamic range is not required for loudness, gain and frequency response are. If anything, having less dynamic range would encourage people to make louder records.
    - cromon 9y ago
      A CD is limited to 22khz, whereas vinyl is analogue and doesn't have this limit, digital files obviously can go up to ~96khz due to the 192khz sample rate achievable by some sound cards.

morecoffee 9y ago

Tangential, but for the longest time I couldn't figure out why VLC always played music / DVDs at such low volume. Setting the system volume to max and overdriving VLC's volume slider was the only way I could actually hear the soft parts. Recently I found out about the volume compressor, which with a single check box does exactly the right thing. I asked myself "why the heck isn't this box checked by default?" I think the answer is with audio purists wanting to stem the loudness war. When reading about CD mastering maxing out the volume, It seems like it is the right decision. Most people do want the loudest setting, no mess with the EQ, compressors, etc. Only a tiny population wants to preserve the fidelity of the amplitude.

mrspeaker 9y ago
I think the reason it's not on by default is that so much music is already compressed to insane levels that sounds terrible - double-y compressing things doubles the terribleness. I love music, but I wouldn't call myself an audiophile (heck, I'm listening out of my lappy's default sound card with cheap headphones) but in this case I totally agree with the audiophile's term "fatigue". Music that is over-compressed doesn't sound bad to my untrained ear, but it's just fatiguing after a while. The silence that finally comes is a pleasure! But having it double-compress by default is like hearing those people who want to play there car stereo louder than their system can handle and it distorts like crazy: they are obviously still enjoying it - but it's not the song the artists recorded. (Ok, maybe an exaggeration... but I still don't think we should encourage it!)
- hammock 9y ago
  Actually if the music those crazy people were listening to was overcompressed, they'd be able to turn it up louder without distortion :)
trevyn 9y ago
Movies generally have a wide dynamic range so that loud action scenes are very loud. You don't want your normal dialogue to be at the same volume as your explosions, unless you're watching at home with the volume down.

mortenjorck 9y ago

For practical listening, I actually prefer modern brickwall mastering techniques to more traditional mastering with a high dynamic range, for one reason: what the author sees as "hijacking the volume control from the listener" I would consider the opposite. With a high dynamic range, a headphones listener may feel the need to adjust the volume several times in a song to boost the clarity of softer sections or to make louder sections more comfortable to the ears, depending on the listening environment. With a "loud," low dynamic range, however, the listener need only adjust the volume once, as the whole track is roughly the same volume. In other words, the listener is in control of the volume, rather than the engineer.

moolcool 9y ago
Do you also want explosions in movies to sound just as loud as whispers? Quiet parts of songs are meant to sound quieter, there's even special notation in sheet music for this.
nathanasmith 9y ago
Just give me the option. When I'm in the car, I like the "wall of sound" since it's a noisy environment, so I have a head unit with a built-in compressor I can control. When I'm at home, I prefer the dynamic range. The problem comes when the engineer takes that option away from me (quite often) clipping and distorting everything to the nth degree. Like the article mentions, this creates ear fatigue and I end up, eventually, just not wanting to listen to the CD at all which colors my perception of the band. So I'm less likely to go to their concerts and give them money. That's just me though.
Qantourisc 9y ago
In my opinion this is a software problem, you just need some automatic gain control (automatic volume adjust).
xkcd-sucks 9y ago
It's easier to remove dynamic range on playback than to add it back in... don't many stereos have a "loudness" function which brickwalls the audio?

golergka 9y ago

Since Youtube and most streaming services started to automatically balance tracks based on their average perceived loudness (not all of them use the same metric, but the purpose is the same), loudness war is almost dead. If you brickwall your song, it will not be played louder than competition anymore.

copperx 9y ago
The algorithms that determine perceptual loudness are very inaccurate, so it's still possible to game them.

ttoinou 9y ago

Theses mastering techniques have their legitimate use ! Some notes : * it's a step in musical production where having experience, skills and contact with the artist matters. Not all compressor and limiter are created equal and the default value you use in your media player may not sound as good as what an audio engineer might have done.. * Not everyone have good hardware and a good environment to listen to high dynamic range music like thoses listening to classical music / jazz / Philip Glass, so theses business decision to increase volume for the market made sense at that time I think. Audio engineer simply took profit of having a technically better medium (CD) to make audio sound better (from what I've read theses techniques did not work well on vinyl) * Loudness wars didn't have an effect on old records since as one can see in this article, we could find the old dynamic ones (and so we actually have the choice of listening to the old untouched record, or the new compressed-for-the-market record, and that is a good thing !) * Theses music stats (mean RMS, peak RMS, max mean RMS) look at instantaneous dynamic, but a look at the overall dynamic of a song is also very important ! A good article on this topic stating that songs did not lose overall dynamic range that much : ['Dynamic Range' & The Loudness War, 2011] http://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/dynamic-range-loudness-war http://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/dynamic-range-loudn...

bhj 9y ago
Also see SoS's "follow-up" article from 2014: http://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/end-loudness-war http://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/end-loudness-war

cromon 9y ago

This is something I have battled with for a long time, personally I master to make the music sound good, sometimes that is loud (new dance music) sometimes not so much (old African recordings remasters). Coupled with the data from this page [1] there is no point in going too loud anyways, that's why you have gain / volume control. I'm not sure how I feel about streaming services implementing extra processing tbh. Spotify is the worst culprit adding limiting which can significantly change the sound of a recording. I just wish other engineers would have more pragmatism in this industry, way too much overcooked and distorted music around. [1] http://productionadvice.co.uk/online-loudness/ http://productionadvice.co.uk/online-loudness/

thatswrong0 9y ago

This is pretty funny to me because I mostly listen to (and produce) electronic music.. and there are pretty much no rules when it comes to electronic music and loudness. Stupidly loud music can actually sound pretty dang good [0][1]. The momentary RMS in some Moody Good tracks can actually hit _above_ 0dBFS. If you have the right source material, you can brickwall the hell out of tracks and not notice the distortion.. or perhaps the distortion will even add pleasant artifacts. One of the more prominent issues with making things stupid loud is intermodulation distortion, but that really only becomes noticeable when you have pure tones or vocals being mashed into the limiter. If the source material is already distorted (think screechy dubstep synths), then it probably don't matter. But yeah, when you're dealing with more traditional kinds of music, which often times involves vocals or a lot more subtlety to the timbre of the instruments, brickwalling is probably not the best call. It seems that the Search and Destroy "remaster" sounding terribly distorted was intentional.. but IMO it's not very listenable nor does the distortion really bring the grungy character than I think they were going for. It just sounds bad. [0] https://soundcloud.com/moodygood/mtgfyt-vol1 https://soundcloud.com/moodygood/mtgfyt-vol1 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lsX8pUaloY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lsX8pUaloY

coldtea 9y ago
>The momentary RMS in some Moody Good tracks can actually hit _above_ 0dBFS. It's about the dynamics (or lack thereof), not just about the distortion (if it's not clipping to just white noise 0dBFS is not the DAW limit anyways).
TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
I (only half jokingly) think (music like) that Bassnectar track Into The Sun is Lorin Ashton's attempt at hitting The Brown Note when played on a big rig sound system. It's just constant rolling thunder, break down around 2 mins in, followed by more rolling thunder. Sounds like the melody is playing on a different sound system half a kilometer away at the same festival. Ah, music is weird because even the stuff I like is fun to criticise. On that note, have you come across Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music?[1] It hasn't been updated in a long time, but still highly amusing. 1. http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/ http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/

krallja 9y ago

2007, if Internet Archive is to be believed https://web.archive.org/web/20070808082932/http://www.chicagomasteringservice.com/loudness.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070808082932/http://www.chicag...

dang 9y ago
Thanks, added.

quakenul 9y ago

Mastering is in a way comparable to capitalism. You can certainly try and be nice about it but pushing harder will usually get you further, because most people care more about one aspect than all the others aspects combined. In capitalism it is getting a great product for a great price. In mastering, it is loudness. Loudness is a bastard. There is a reason, why all the pros are usually very, very careful about level matching when doing any sort of audio comparisons. Even when you know that louder can easily fool you into thinking something is better (which most listeners don't), you're still susceptible, if you don't counter act it. Wanna convince a recording artist in the studio it's great? Turn up those big speakers. Instant gratification. When it comes to music consumption I like to think this is not really a problem: The sound of compression and distortion is the sound of current music and there is nothing inherently bad about it. Older generations will tend to oppose any new musical trend for various reasons, which all end up being subjective. The younger generations that grow up on this new sound do not care about brickwall limiting, because there is nothing to fucking care about. Music production has been and forever will a mix of mostly people copying other people and flowing with the stylistic currents while adding a little something themselves. Sometimes something radical will happen. Mostly not. If you wanna stay relevant you go with the former and keep reaching for the later. Pretty much the same, as with coding or design.

chrismealy 9y ago

It's not just about volume. Tracks mastered with a ton of compression trick your brain into sounding louder than they really are, which is great for a song or two (or if you want pay people to pay attention to your tv commercial), but for listening to a whole album it wears you out. If you have an album you love but somehow never make it all the way through this is probably why. The perception of full volume gets your lizard brain aroused, which is great if you're in the club, but not if you're in the mood to listen to the first three Led Zeppelin records in a row. On the other hand, older recordings with more dynamic range might sound thin at low volume, but are much richer at higher volumes (you can hear the individual instruments better and feel the space in the sound). If you try comparing older and newer masterings at a good volume the newer mastering usually sounds kinda mushy.

hashmal 9y ago
Not only it wears you out, but it can be dangerous, especially in clubs. The longer you listen to loud music (can be just a few minutes!), the more damage is done. Having music with a wide dynamic range helps to have an overall lower volume and preserve ears.
- lflux 9y ago
  In Sweden, night clubs have a different time period for sound pressure exposure limits than concerts[0] (15 minutes instead of 60), partially due to the difference in dynamic range. [0] https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/globalassets/livsvillkor-levnadsvanor/halsoskydd-miljohalsa/inomhusmiljo/buller/sp-info-2004-45-egenkontroll.pdf https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/globalassets/livsvillkor... §5.1.2 vs §5.2.3
elmar 9y ago
Today if you want dynamic range you have to buy Vinyl or lossless downloads. http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Roger+Waters&album=is+this+the http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Roger+Waters&a... http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Roger%20Waters http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Roger%20Waters

mrlucax 9y ago

>but for listening to a whole album it wears you out. Looking at you, Death Magnetic.....

em3rgent0rdr 9y ago

Fortunately many audio providers now have been fighting back against this. For instance YouTube will punish video uploads that are louder than -13 LUFS by attenuating the level. This will provide a somewhat level playing field and encourage people to upload with a reasonable dynamic range.

hashmal 9y ago
And some others are going full retard. Some streaming services actually add compression to everything…
- rocqua 9y ago
  Which ones?
  - ubercow13 9y ago
    Spotify: http://productionadvice.co.uk/online-loudness/ http://productionadvice.co.uk/online-loudness/
    - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
      I got 403 Error. Could you post a public link?
      - ubercow13 9y ago
        Sorry, try again!
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  Ideally compression could be left for the end device. CyanogenMod has for a long time had compression control in settings. I can understand why some compression is useful, but it is a shame for the streaming provider to do this since information gets lost in compression.

deleted 9y ago

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