Loudness War

I figure most people on here already know about this but I thought this was a great video.

 

Though it doesn't tell the whole story, this is still one of my favorite references:

http://dr.loudness-war.info/

 

I use this everytime I need to find a new album. Great website.

 

I used to love dr.loudness-war.info. But then I stopped buying new CDs because I was so mad at the state of things. This meant I wasn't listening to new music. Then I stopped listening to most of what I have because I was so mad. This meant I stopped listening entirely, which was unacceptable. I can't afford to convert to all vinyl, and am chickenshit about obtaining vinyl rips [please no commentary on this point]. So, I perpetuate the problem by purchasing dynamically compromised music. Damn it. When I write it all out, it makes me all sad. TL;DR: dr.loudness-war.info is awesome, but I can only love it from afar.

 

In the very early days of my audiophilia, I used to buy “good recordings” just because they were good. I quickly learned by this mistake and stopped doing that after about half a dozen albums. Those gold MFSL discs can drain your wallet pretty quick! I totally understand the frustration behind this war. But I also completely agree that you can’t live your life like this. To use the phrase, “If it sounds good, it is good”, I’ll buy something compressed as long as I enjoy listening to it. And if I don’t like the sound, either because it’s too loud or I just don’t like the artistic qualities, then I won’t buy it. What I would use that site for is to compare releases and remasters and make my buying decision based on that info for an album that I’m already committed to buying. As a side note, I often find it interesting how albums that I thought were compressed really weren’t (according to their numbers and measuring methodology) and visa versa.

 

The DR numbers only tell a part of the story. While I doubt I could ever listen to anything with a DR below 6 for any extended period of time, there's a lot of wiggle room within the numbers. For example, the new Elvis Costello hi-res reissues have lower DR values than some of the previous CDs, but they sound excellent.

 

I have the Foobar2k plugin that can measure DR (can also use Replaygain to adjust loudness of album tracks to equal).

What I found interesting is that while comparing the same song from two releases with identical DR, one sounds louder than the other.

 

you know what's funny? When I mix and master music, and my clients want it on vinyl, I actually have to reduce the deep lows, the amount of kick, and I have to compress and limit/clip/saturate the peaks. Because Vinyl just doesn't do that too well. Too much low end = needle will jump right out of the tracks.

I'm not super knowledgable with the whole vinyl thing, so I don't know EXACTLY where it needs to be, but the truest high quality dynamic mediums are digital. Which I'm sure most people here will agree with, but still. Audiophilia brings with it odd beliefs.

The loudness war is something I've had to participate in when mastering, because bands have asked me for it. But for the latest band I'm mixing, they agreed to try a proper non-limited master! It'll probably feature parallell compression (compress the signal and blend it into the non-compressed signal), but no removal of peaks.

People talk about "compression" as being the big bad wolf, but that's not actually true. The true evil is in the whole methodology and idea behind how things are mixed from the ground up. Individual drum mics? Use clipping to remove the peaks of the transients, so that while it basically sounds the same (it really does sound 80% the same before you compensate for it), the compressors and limiters further down the mixing chain don't see the big transient peaks, and so the signal can be louder!

You can use the fletcher-munson curve to make your music SOUND slightly louder than it actually is! You can use ducking to make some tracks turn down when other sounds get louder!

You can generally do a ton of trickery to make more space for "everything", and so you can push things louder. Where the final little bit of juice is eaten up is with the limiter. Basically it eats up transients and peaks, and then turns the sound up so the max level is the same. So everything gets louder, but you don't exceed the set volume limits. This eats up what's left of the peaks.

Compression is amazing, however. A compressor will make things sound sexy as hell, and contrary to popular belief, is why so many things sound punchy! It actually ADDS transients and peaks most of the time. It's the kind of thing that can make a mix sounds REALLY GOOD.

Sorry for the random ramblings, I'm just kinda interested in this topic. The thing is, so many things just sound awesome when pushed really hard to the absolute limits. But that's the thing: So many thigns are pushed to the edge that do not belong there!

 

the DR database is a good reference for weeding out bad releases. You can take it too far as has been mentioned ITT. This single stat can only tell you so much about how the music was produced and I don't view it as the alphamega of good or bad sounding music. And sometimes you gotta just listen to the music even if it's squashed because it sounds good in the car with the windows rolled down and the U shaped EQ and the whole works.

 

I think this is a very good video. I like that he goes into how heavily compressed/limited music can *feel* rather than just what it does to the sound.

It is the uncomfortable feeling that gets to me, and I rarely read any discussion of that.

 

Maybe I'm being a bit thick, but surely the DR measure of a release is relatively meaningless on its own? Yes, I get the fatigue aspect, but if that's what the artist intended then it is what it is, you're hearing what you 'should' hear. Now if the artists' intent is being subverted and the music is being compressed such that it is actually losing intended dynamic range, then we have a problem. But I'm not sure how simply looking at a DR measure would tell you that. Is there something I'm missing?

 

I don't think you're missing anything - a lot of Heavy Metal recordings have bollocks all dynamic range - it is, for the most part, how they're meant to sound. Also something like Window Licker by Aphex Twin is just horribly/delightfully loud all the way through. I think it's fair to say it's an aesthetic decision for some artists - Sometimes the mastering is fucked, sometimes it's a choice. That's kinda of a distraction though from the Loudness War - it's a real problem for sure.

 

So the problem has two elements, one an element of choice by the creator for loudness and one an override by the producer/mastering engineer for compression to create uniformity/loudness.

Well, I guess popular taste is the underlying issue, and popular taste isn't necessarily tasteful.

 

Has it become that way? I guess everybody knows the history, that this compression started way back, decades ago, when competing radio stations did not want a nob twiddler to miss them because they were playing a quiet passage as said tiddler passed their frequency on the scale --- has it really become that music consumers are now philistines that don't even appreciate the basic dynamics of music?

I hear of re-issues of intelligent music, even rock, that, reportedly, has had all the dynamic range knocked out of it. If that is because it is what the consumers wanted, rather than because the musicians have gone deaf or the mastering engineers are still working with radio in mind, then never mind the end of the world being nigh, the end of the world is now.

Thank god most of my music collection comes from three or four decades ago.

 

FTFY

 

Well let's not paint the world as a group of mindless philistines too quickly . The video makes a good point that listening is less and less a concerted activity, and that affects the situation for the worse. The mass popularity of crappy headphones and crappy bitrate compressed music also doesn't help - it's hard to know what you just don't know because you've never experienced it. Hell, as a kid I'd rig up any shit speaker to my equally shit home-built radio and be awesomely happy listening to tunes on AM, later I'd have nth generation tapes (remember the TDK D90 anyone?) that were precious as gold. Today you can get better quality at very low price points, so it really comes down to a question of education. For all people may have issues with the finer points of the Pono movement, it has done a lot for bringing awareness simply that there is 'better' available out there. No-one will ever discover the 'real' better if no-one's looking for any better.

 

Doesn't Spotify and YouTube have in-built smart normalisation algorithms? Shouldn't they make the loudness pursuit useless?

 

Wow, with dr loudness, when I sort by year, i can see the dynamic range decrease as it gets newer. Quality is just decreasing...
http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list/year?artist=Boston
http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list/year?artist=Billy+Joel
http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list/year?artist=styx
http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list/year?artist=chicago

 

Not everyone uses those platforms exclusively. Furthermore, it's not just about consistency in volume. Overcompressed music is more likely to attract listeners' attention, something philistines can't be bothered to give to most music. Modern music has shown a distinct pattern of making music louder and louder, kinda like the Indominus Rex in Jurassic World. Like that movie pointed out, most people a.k.a philistines care more about following the norm (selfie sticks, putting earbuds on the ear without playing music/ beats around the neck,.....) than experiencing the subtle dynamics of everything.

EDIT: Added entire quote, cuz why not:

"Our shareholders have been patient, but let's be honest: no one is impressed by a dinosaur anymore. Twenty years ago, de-extinction was right up there with magic. These days, kids look at a Stegosaurus like an elephant from the city zoo. That doesn't mean asset development is falling behind. Our DNA excavators discover new species every year. But consumers want them bigger, louder - "more teeth". The good news? Our advances in gene splicing have opened up a whole new frontier. We've learned more from genetics in the past decade than a century of digging up bones."​

 

My impression was that 24 bit versions tended to be closer to the vinyl version. Not because of anything inherent with the 24 bit format but because it's mixed to sound better because that's what the audiophiles expect. In fact when I read articles on how 24/192 is no different than 16/44 they say that in the cases that the 24 bit measures better is because it's mixed differently and can't truly be used as a way to compare CD vs Hi-Res. My takeaway on this is that most hi-res versions are at least as good as a vinyl rip.