1. Compressed sound can be an integral (wanted) part of different genre aesthetics. I personally love dynamic mixes, but if you let your customers A/B mixes they will often chose the more compressed/louder one. If your song sounds weak after another bands song, that is an issue.
2. For reasons of health/liability there are maximum levels on headphones and mobile playback devices. That means if my mix has a high dynamic range the bulk of it may really just be too low when played back on the majority of headphones. If I mix my own music this is a bargain I can make if I mix other peoples music I would try to be a little more on the cautious side if the musicians didn't demand a highly dynamic mix.
3. Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music. 90% of people who listen to music do not listen to it actively, they just let it run in the background or are passively exposed to it. Try listening to a good dynamic recording of Beethovens fith in your car with the window rolled down. You will hear some strong phrases then inbetween nothing as it is below the ambient noise floor.
Vinyl has the benefit, that I as the mixing engineer can assume that the listener will be much more likely actively involved with the music than say in a radio mix.
I’ve always been curious - but presumably that’s true even after volume matching?
> 3 Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music
I’ve heard this is also why film and video game soundtracks are often very compressed, even when orchestral, because they have to fit in the background with dialog/sfx
Anyhow that's my theory
Most people aren't in a quiet environment when they listen to music these days. Compression helps significantly with this.
What would be neat would be to have a compression metadata 'guide' that would allow a compressor on-device to perform the compression, rather than baked into the audio track.
This would allow the user to tune 'severity' of compression. In a car / fancy headphones, you could sample the ambient noise level and adjust accordingly.
Most people don't have cars
They overly compress the master channel specifically to make it very loud, and there's dozens of interviews with engineers that are frustrated with it.
Speaking of, I think the sound quality of modern-day bluetooth speakers is really good.
The sound quality out of the speakers of some Apple products seems borderline impossible to me. The MacBook in particular makes me feel like I missed an important DSP lecture at university.
Am I meant to then override that by increasing the center channel volume so it's louder than the other speakers?
Or raise the system volume?
That and having an industry standard way to crank the center channel (user setting) when downmixing to 2.1
1: Powered by a Denon AVR, not separates if you want to "No true cinephile" me.
hint - the industry is doing EXACTLY what (most) consumers want. there is a big difference between what a consumer tells you they want, and what actually they pay for
As far as revealed preference goes, those who complimented me on it all had the smallest iPhone available when purchased.
The change in mixing and mastering can be largely explained by people changing the way they consume it. Eg. people watch more movies on netflix than in a cinema. People used to sit in a room with a record player, now they listen in their car or headphones while doing other stuff.
This is anecdotal at best; "those guys" will be using hard data just like tech bros with ecommerce sites do, and the data does not lie.
Compression sells better than high dynamic range else they would have stopped. This is true for every "nobody likes this" statement people make on the internet about things that are commercially successful nevertheless. Big phones (as someone else mentioned), mobile games, video game movie adaptations, AI music, Marvel franchise entries, funko pops, they're all running circles around people that don't personally like it and who are in circles of like-minded people.
When people listen to two pieces of audio they generally prefer the louder of the two. That doesn't mean they want you to turn up the volume dial for them. They can adjust the volume dial themselves, and if everything gets louder they'll turn down the volume dial to compensate.
I’m willing to help fix this, but the source code is not public, and when I emailed the author I got no response.
foo_dr_meter: A simple Dynamic Range meter based on DR estimation formula published by https://dr.loudness-war.info/
foo_truepeak: ITU-R BS.1770-5 compliant True Peak scanner.
ReplayGain is part of the core components of foobar2000, so automatically adjusting the volume depending on the loudness of the trakc or entire album is pretty much a default feature of this player. The latter two components, especially the latter one give valuable insights into the loudness and mastering quality of a recording. True Peak can calculate the Peak-to-Integrated Loudness of a recording for example the headroom between loudest part and the maximum possible loudness of the format, or it tells you the loudness range in LUFS meaning how squished or wide the dynamic range of a track is. Really nifty if you have a huge music collection and need numbers to quickly compare releases.
This is already way beyond what vinyl is able to reproduce. The best case is roughly 12-bits PCM equivalent. Literally not an issue in the slightest.
The issue is that vinyl mastering is a special case and different from digital mastering. You have to consider extra things like the width of the grooves, they can vary depending on the runtime of a side, this affects low frequencies as grooves might cut into each other and you'll get skips. And high frequencies degrade the closer you get towards the center of the record. I just think the people who can do this craft are simply retiring or dying out. This affects major label and indie artists alike.
If you just amplify the whole track until its max amplitude reaches the medium's maximum, yes you could undo that.
But the loudness war aims to make the whole track even louder than that, by quietening those max peaks so they don't clip, then that gives you room to amplify the rest of the track even further. The dynamic range of the recording is permanently reduced.
same here, but there is no real market for somebody to bother yet
In the open metadata world there is ReplayGain which analyzes music peaks and tries to create a negative gain to equalize the dynamic range to a standard volume at both the individual track and full album level.
Apple Music, Spotify, and others have proprietary but similar systems.
(As someone who deeply loves to shuffle an entire library, having a music player that supports ReplayGain has long been a personal requirement.)
These tools are most useful when used earlier in the process. Like when you just tracked an amazing vocal take, but the gain was too hot on one or two notes. The tools can mitigate some of the distortion artifacts to make it more usable. Applying these tools to complex material like a full mix will have some improvements, but at that stage there's less guarantee for convincing restoration of the record.
What I think non-professionals don't understand is that a record that is characterized by heavy compression is not something that happened at the very end with the mastering stage. It is an aesthetic choice that was made dozens of times along the way while recording, arranging, and mixing. Heavy compression is not necessarily a bad thing. Lots of amazing-sounding records harness it well. It's an art AND a craft. It takes audio engineers and producers years to do it well and with taste.
For analog there are similar limitations, but it's limited by other factors like noise.
Hard limiting is a (stupid) choice, but some limiting has always been necessary.
The "warm vinyl sound" is basically analog compression with added low-end distortion from the RIAA compensation and some wrinkles at the high end caused by stylus resonance.
CDs are able to store much louder tracks than can be cut on a record. The technical reason things on CD got louder is because they could.
A lot less than half.
It's around 20-30db and every 10db is a factor of 10. The CD has between 100-1000x more dynamic range.
For who wants to know: sound perception doubles every 10dB so. 30db of dynamic range is about 8 times as much dynamic range from the perceptual perspective.
It was the move to digital that facilitated the loudness war.
In modern years it’s been fairly common for masters to vinyl to be less compressed than the CD release, for the simple reason vinyl has more limitations.
In theory, yes. In practice it depends on the "loudness".
I never bought into the recent vinyl hype. Though I really like the beautiful design of many new vinyl releases, I don't think they are for being played. But I used to buy new and used vinyl as a teenager to actually listen to them, and occasionally I still buy used vinyl. Vinyl records from the flea market were as cheap as 1€, so that was an efficient way to grow my music collection before file sharing was a thing.
But now I prefer CDs because what really interests me is the music itself and I simply prefer the version with the best mastering. That's often CD releases from the early 1980s to mid 1990s.
And yes, I still buy music because I don't trust music streaming to be around forever. At least I think there is a real chance CDs will outlast individual services for sure. And in case the internet gets shut down because of war, at least I still have music as long as I have power.
This. I'm 55. My teenage years were in the 1980s, where CDs started to appear but vinyl was still mainstream. I remember Dad having a significant vinyl library and I also got my own collection.
But I hated caring for that thing. The medium is finicky, prone to scratches and whatnot, and CDs had more length and also more range and better sound. So as soon as I was able to get CDs, I got rid of my vinyl collection faster than one does it with a hot potato in their hands. I used vinyl daily, hated the whole burden of caring for it; and against CDs, I really found them wanting.
Too bad the medium got degraded with idiots who used dynamic compression, but inherently CDs and lossless digital audio in general is way much better. I never understood the vinyl resurgence, until some people explained it as being something more performative and also a way to get better artwork and physical mementos of the music. Understandable, but I still feel it's weird.
For me, it's the expense and the inconvenience... as the meme goes. But anyway - I just like it; when I put on a record it's like "I'm doing this now and nothing else". Sitting on the couch and listening to Dark Side with a glass of wine. Remembering when my dad used to play records and I wasn't allowed to touch it because the stylus was expensive and fragile. It's a vibe, as the kids say.
https://www.therevolverclub.com/blogs/the-revolver-club/the-...
I had to record the vinyl to get usable digital files.
inability to encode very low tones.
I suspect you’re not involved in contemporary record making. Like it or not, clipping is a technique and a color that producers, mixers, and mastering engineers all choose to impart for aesthetic and technical reasons. It has it’s uses.
If your proposal were passed all that would be left for consideration would be a handful lame DSD jazz records from those hi-fi enthusiasts who are disconnected from the reality around how most records are made these days.
https://www.statista.com/chart/32863/genres-with-the-highest...
What RIAA should do is promote universal use of ReplayGain across digital distribution platforms. That way people can manage relative volume as desired without the need to corrupt the audio. They could make money with a signed tag certifying the mix meets quality standards.
Even without proper dithering, listeners could not tell the difference between that and the SACD[1], but could tell the difference between that and the CD version of the same album.
The format is only relevant in that it requires audiophile level dedication and money to use the format in the first place. Not dissimilar to vinyl before its recent boom.
I have an SACD setup, but for what I want to listen to, everything is out of print and secondary market is insane. Players can be found relatively cheaply at thrift stores (many don’t bluray and multi-CD carousels support it with digital output).
If I am using an analog device (in my case tube amplifier) I want to listen to something that was mastered on analog equipment. If it's square wave pressed on to vinyl you might as well stream.
I've now got a pretty mixed collection of records, tapes, CDs, digital music, and even a rockbox modded ipod. An added facet of fun for me when I find new music is to decide what the most thematically appropriate format to own it is.
For example I own the CD for Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay because there's a CD in the art, and it feels like a very 00s album, but for vaporwave I almost exclusively buy cassettes.
It's crazy watching some of the producer YT videos now and they open up these projects with 105 tracks, multi-layered/multi-voice drums, etc.
Queen's music is a massive pile of overdubs, especially for vocals and guitar. The Beatles also, and they were heavily into looping (physically cutting audio tape and gluing it in a loop, then re-recording it). Vocal and guitar double-tracking has also been the norm since the 50s, at least.
80s pop was also generally full of synthesizer stacks, where MIDI from one keyboard was simultaneously triggering several synths to create layers.
The loudness war was never exclusive to digital audio formats though, it just reached saturation point [heh] with CDs. This didn't happen earlier because clipping isn't a thing on records -- saturation (practically some margin below that) is a hard limit.
Hard article to follow unfortunately. Also the only example it gives just shows a compressed waveform. I understand disliking that compared to the more dynamic older record, but a perfectly reasonable explanation for this would be: it sounds more like what buyers today expect.
Is that really true? Anybody buying music today instead of streaming is somebody who takes music more seriously than most. It seems likely they're going to care more about sound quality than the streaming audience.
I don't know why you've introduced this 'serious' vs. streaming thing.
What does taking music more seriously even mean here? If you seriously like listening to normalised Purple Rain on 128 kbps mp3 and also like collecting physical media, you might seriously like to buy and listen to normalised Purple Rain on your preferred (lossless, or less-lossy) format.
That is, they're more collectible than CDs in my opinion. Bigger packaging for better artwork, something physical and relatively sturdy, etc.
> Especially since the answer to any loudness problem is to simply for the user to turn up the volume.
This isn't quite true as compression addresses differences in volume. Unless you expect the listener to actively turn up the volume during the quiet parts and down during the loud parts of your song, or be listening in a completely quiet environment with nothing but the music so they can appreciate the dynamics--which is the way a lot of vinyl aficionados do listen to music.
Where? The critical bit is missing!
https://web.archive.org/web/20260208100527/https://magicviny...
From the perspective of an amateur DJ and dedicated dancer, vinyl never really died in the underground dance scene, whether talking about the UK dubscene or German techno.
And as much as I love and respect vinyl DJs, the medium itself is often used to make vinyl exclusive releases (looking at you UK), gatekeeping the music literally, make the runs limited and super exclusive, and obviously super expensive.
Not to mention it makes little sense, musically, to put a digitally produced track on an analog medium. Collecting old music on vinyl is one thing, getting all your new music (produced on Abelton) as vinyl is just silly to me. Again, completely understand why vinyl only DJs do it.
To me vinyl is totally contrary to the DIY culture of underground dance music, and I simply won't buy any new vinyl (not to say DJ culture is DIY, but techno culture for example really is at its core punk DIY).
I would much rather the producer just made a shirt instead of a special deluxe vinyl edition for the super fans with too much money (and the couple of vinyl only DJs that will buy it). I'd rather spend that money on more new music, that I can own as FLAC forever.
And I would REALLY like if all the old vinyls were professionally ripped and sold by their labels. Because sooner or later they WILL all disappear, which I guess if you're a collector/secretive DJ is a good thing... Really shocking that a lot of this old music can only be found in good quality on Youtube rips. Yes, better than if you were able to dig out a 30 year old record in a store.
