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The "Loudness War" and the Future of Music
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Aug 23, 2007 07:43 AM
from the turn-that-thing-down dept.
from the turn-that-thing-down dept.
An anonymous reader notes an article up at IEEE Spectrum outlining the history and dangers of the accelerating tendency of music producers to increase the loudness and reduce the dynamic range of CDs. "The loudness war, what many audiophiles refer to as an assault on music (and ears), has been an open secret of the recording industry for nearly the past two decades and has garnered more attention in recent years as CDs have pushed the limits of loudness thanks to advances in digital technology. The 'war' refers to the competition among record companies to make louder and louder albums by compressing the dynamic range. But the loudness war could be doing more than simply pumping up the volume and angering aficionados — it could be responsible for halting technological advances in sound quality for years to come... From the mid 1980s to now, the average loudness of CDs increased by a factor of 10, and the peaks of songs are now one-tenth of what they used to be."
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Submission: The Future of Music by Anonymous Coward
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Vinyl To Signal the End for CDs? 883 comments
PJ1216 writes to mention that vinyl seems poised to make a comeback in the music industry. Some are even predicting that this comeback coupled with the surge in digital music sales could possibly close the door on CDs. "Portability is no longer any reason to stick with CDs, and neither is audio quality. Although vinyl purists are ripe for parody, they're right about one thing: Records can sound better than CDs. Although CDs have a wider dynamic range, mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible: It's the so-called loudness war. Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound. Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove, Nyquist's theorem to the contrary."
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I have the solution (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I have the solution (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I have the solution (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I have the solution (Score:4, Interesting)
gear, or a 6x9 speaker and see how it sounded, since 90% of everyone would be hearing it on similar
gear.
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Re:I have the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
You know...I've often wondered why kids of today, aren't as into getting good sound reproduction, as they were when I grew up.
My friends and I would drool at the gear in the higher end audio shops. I knew at age 12 when I heard my first McIntosh tube amp running through a pair of Klipschorns, that that was what I wanted someday. I don't have the Mc yet, but, using a decware SET amp, but I do have the 50th anniversary K-horns.
I mean, none of us were wealthy back growing up, we all worked jobs we could get as we grew up, buying a piece at a time...upgrading over the years...etc.
But, if the music being put out the past few years....doesn't sound good due to over compression, etc....well, why get anything good to play it on....and I guess, over the past few years with this, youths of today don't even KNOW what good sound reproduction is supposed to be.
I guess that kind of explains the reactions I see here when I comment I'd not be interested in buying music online until it is available in at least CD quality....much of what I like is older, and with greater dynamic range, does sound better on good gear?
I dunno...but, I think it is sad that so many people don't care about really good sound repro...and maybe it is that music put out today (regarless of content, that's another argument) just doesn't sound as good....and all they know is to drive in a car with all subs vibrating the neighborhood, and no tweeter at all in the car.
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Short answer. (Score:4, Interesting)
Short answer:
Because unless you had especially well connected friends or super hip parents you had much less of a sampling pool. It was important for each song to sound as well as possible since you would be hearing it, much, more often. Today's kids/teens have a huge wealth of music, even in the pop arena.
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Re:I have the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
1) The kids with their overpriced and overpowered subs are the behavioral equivalent of you in your youth. The goal is different but the mindset of lusting over ever better and more unattainable with your friends is the same. Sadly the technology is far too affordable and effective at producing nothing but bass and that's why I have less distraction living next to the airport than living across from the high school. 2) Low end sound quality has also improved. The gap between absolute crap and super high end still exists, but most people aren't working with the lower extreme. Mid-range systems that are just fine for casual listening are cheap and readily available.
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Is MP3 louder than uncompressed? (Score:5, Informative)
From your ear's point of view, then the folicles and cells that are tuned to the reatined frequencies, experience more accoustic energy at a given sound level.
On top of that, I suspect there are other effects as well. I suspect that MP3s may compand and decompand the music. Any mismatch between the compander and decompading codecs, or roundoff errors, might increase or decrease the dynamic range. Likewise the pyscho accoustic model might tinker with this as well.
The reason I think this is the case is that I always notice that when I play highly clipped music (e.g. Green day) through my ipod that the symbols and snare drums are actually slightly painful to the ears even when the overall volume is at low listening level.
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Re:Is MP3 louder than uncompressed? (Score:5, Funny)
I find playing Green day to be painful to my ears no matter what I play it through.
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Re:Is MP3 louder than uncompressed? (Score:5, Insightful)
The real layman's description of how mp3s work is the black box model: CD goes in here, mp3 comes out there. It's smaller now.
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Re:Is MP3 louder than uncompressed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Clipped music means that the system can't reproduce the transition from wavefront to wave decay over time, so the top of the wave is clipped, or flattened - so, at that point, the system is putting out a biased DC voltage during that time, rather than AC. This causes nasty things in the amplifiers, nastier things in speakers and even nastier things in your ears.
Something like that, anyway.
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Re:I have the solution (Score:5, Informative)
You don't seem to understand it, but that is the crux of the loudness war. The local stations do not in fact crank the volume on commercials. That would be illegal. In fact what they do is compress the dynamic range of the audio, so the "apparent loudness" is increased. The peaks (which is how the FCC defines volume) are the same, but the RMS volume (essentially the average sound level and what our ear perceives as volume) is increased. Think about it, a CD is 16 bit, so the max volume is obviously 2^16=65536 for any particular data sample. So, they can't make the volume 2^17. What they can do, however, is compress the dynamic range, so instead of the average volume level to be at 4096, say, it is now 16483.
Commercials on TV suck, don't they. The audio is compressed to hell and back.
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Re:I have the solution (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:I have the solution (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I have the solution (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, many people and many systems can't tell the difference. A casual listener listening to terrestrial radio in a car hasn't a chance in h*** of noticing; the degradation of the signal from other means makes this just noise. If you have a nice home system and actually enjoy LISTENING to the music then you probably can tell the difference.
This irks me almost as much as the whole "sell music in MP3 format" talk. MP3 is a lossy format, by definition, and is NOT the same music as recorded and particularly at 128k is very noticeable in any halfway decent environment. 256k is better, but I do NOT want a lossy format as my only choice for digital audio!
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What pisses me off (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What pisses me off (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:What pisses me off (Score:4, Interesting)
The time of the commercial breaks, though, can be annoyingly consistent across networks, so channel flipping doesn't help much.
My current solution is dual tuner Tivo. They are surprisingly inexpensive for the non-HD ones, now. So when you watch live TV, and a commercial comes on, you can pause it and switch tuners. It's true there might be a commercial on the other station you want to watch, but you can pause that, too.
After one segment of the show, you'll never have to watch commercials.
I guess I'm just a thief.
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Example... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wow, very informative... (Score:4, Informative)
Of course that is a lower fidelity signal because high fidelity means reconstructing also the dynamics of the original sound, so to audiophiles a compressed signal sounds crappy.
I think the war started with sound engineers overcompressing stuff out of experimentation (in dance music compression is an important aspect, for instance). That made louder records stand out better in radio programming (even if radio stations have good compressors themselves nowadays) and casual listening, especially on crappy audio equipment.
Once the ear has adjusted itself to the loud recording, the less loud one sounds a little worse.
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More info (Score:5, Informative)
Re:More info (Score:5, Informative)
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Try it for yourself! (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow! I'd forgotten music could sound this good! And I'm not even a huge fan of grunge these days. The lack of compression in the music seems to make it less tiring to listen to. The soundstage is bigger, the music seems to breathe a little more, and it generally ebbs and flows more. I'm listening on a pair of $30 Sennheiser headphones, not audiophile-grade equipment by any means.
Once again, we see the danger of pandering to the lowest common denonimator: you end up pissing everyone off eventually. It is a shame that we persist in thinking this is necessary. Of course, it is difficult to be surprised by it, given that the music industry is about selling the performer as a product instead of producing art.
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Re:Try it for yourself! (Score:5, Insightful)
Many people experienced improved sound quality from using a special pen to draw round the outside of their CDs. They expected it to sound better and so it did.
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It's a serious problem (Score:4, Insightful)
If I want it to sound loud, I'll turn the volume up.
Re:It's a serious problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Velvia used to be a moderately popular film that was used my photographers to make some kind of artistic statement through oversaturation. You usually saw it used when someone wanted to emphasize some garish contrast in colors. These days oversaturation is standard practice for some people, for every photo they make. Every photo looks like a Nickelodeon commercial.
To flip the analogy around, the visual noise in the photos blares out at you the entire time, and you leave the gallery with your eyes ringing, desensitized to stuff like stoplights. Subtle contrast is overpowered and lost.
I think people in general are just getting more used to noise, all the time, and to get their attention you have to keep stepping it up.
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Only solution? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just releasing tracks that are much quieter than the current standard is going to be annoying for a lot of listeners.
"It's Good Enough" (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong - I'm not a Luddite, and I love the Digital revolution of music. I am just sickened by it's apparent side-effects, and AMAZED at the tolerance we the "consuming public" have for getting fed shit. As long as we accept this as the standard of quality we find acceptable, the various producers and manufacturers will keep feeding us more and crappier garbage.
Re:"It's Good Enough" (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was in high school I spent an afternoon once in a recording studio and these guys did this one part of a song over and over and over. It was driving me nuts because it sounded exactly the same every single time (to me).
Earlier this week I downloaded an album that is being marketed in a kind of shareware method (saw a link for it in a sig here at the dot) and so what you download is a lower bitrate (or whatever it is called) and the artist hopes you will like it enough to buy the higher quality files. The thing is, what he is giving away sounds just fine to me. Maybe someone with a better ear for this stuff would care, but I don't. And I struggle to see how this is a problem. If I am enjoying a song - I am enjoying it.
In other areas of my life I consciously choose to be satisfied with lower quality because I can't afford the best stuff. (optics come to mind as a great example) I have friends who can afford Swarovski and give me grief about the 'junk' I use. I feel the same way about this music stuff. For people who can really tell the difference, I can understand why they get passionate about it, but I just can't get that worked up over it as it's an issue that doesn't even really exist for me. I only know about it because someone tells me.
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You've never listened to modern turntables (Score:5, Informative)
I have a set of flac music files of the latest White Stripes Album. The hiss is almost inaudible, there are no clicks, pops or any of the other crap you would hear on a mid 70's turn table.
Yes, the frequency range is nothing like a CD, but the dynamic range is SO much better. Plus on the CD version of the same album above is SO loud it actually clips (click sounds on loud points of the album).
It's a sad state of affairs when the Vinyl version of a record sounds better than the CD.
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Unfortunately, it makes business sense (Score:4, Insightful)
When I say "better", I mean that these devices cannot play the full dynamic range that an expensive HiFi set could, which means you'd miss part of the music if a CD is mastered the "old" way, as compared to a CD that is mastered using dynamic range compression.
Now you may guess how many people these days spend $3000 (or even $1000 for that matter) to buy just an amplifier, a CD player and 2 speakers, as compared to the amount of people who listen several hours a day to MP3 players, cheap (portable) sets etc.
That's why "they" are doing this.
Wall of Sound (Score:5, Funny)
"Aficionados" (Score:5, Interesting)
Coming from someone in the field, paid by the people you all hate, and also holds undergrads in areas of perception and music and currently working on my final thesis beyond that, we are giving the listeners what they want. This has been well documented over the years that the loudness and distortion are only problems upon multiple listenings, and even then, only upon critical review, hence the idiots that want to know how Rikki Rocket blickemed the drum solo in the 1983 line up of Poison.
In other words, it doesn't matter.
What do listeners want? They want wallpaper. They want something even and uneventful that they can drive to. 95% of all music listened to these days is listened to in the car. That is what it is sold for. Drivetime radio, or burning iTunes tracks to listen to between 730 to 845 and then again at 530 to 645. Two hours a day.
Personally, I don't care much for what recorded music sounds like. I've had my share and I've never heard anything even remotely close to what I know it the real thing. I could care less that the RIAA is beating down teens who pass bad music, I think it is a lesson in aesthetics, not economics, because I don't know anyone in the music industry that likes the crap kids are listening to. This is why we all have our secret bands that we get signed for the fuck sakes of getting signed, promote them all we can, knowing none of the tin-eared teens are going to appreciate it, and take time away to personally make certain that the shit is recorded correctly. The rest? Who the fuck cares. I say jail anyone listening to it.
So if things are clipped and enloundened, you only have bad listeners and human psychoacoustic understanding to blame.
That's why you have a volume knob. (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, that darned Beethoven (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:That's why you have a volume knob. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you do not like to turn the knob, stop listening to music. Each album has its own volume, each song too.
The issue is not much about turning the volume knob. The problem is that you cannot *unturn* the dynamic range knob. I can use replaygain to have constant album volume, while I can only cry about bringing back the lost dynamics.
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Optimised for radio, unlistenable on good systems (Score:4, Insightful)
Explains why people listen to awful demos in department stores (those horrible tinny Bose cube things with terrible hissy fizzy treble and booming vague bass) and think they sound good simply because it's turned up loud for the midrange.
And no, I don't have "exotic cables", just quality speakers and a hefty power amp with plenty of headroom to spare.
Sometimes it makes sense all around (Score:4, Interesting)
I often am forced to listen to my music in either a loud environment or in an area where I must keep the music volume as low as possible. A wide dynamic range means that in order to hear the quiet parts, the louder parts are unacceptably loud.
Yes if all I ever did was listen to music inside a quiet, soundproof room all by myself, then I'd want the widest possible dynamic range. But since I am almost never in that situation, I find myself artificially compressing the dynamic range myself because I want to be able to hear the quiet parts without bugging everyone else or blowing out my ears during the loud sections.
Plus I'm not an adolescent gangsta wannabe so overall volume and the ability to irritate others by playing my music at full volume simply isn't an issue. And frankly I couldn't care less about the type of music where that sort of thing is an objective, so if that sort of music is "ruined" by dynamic compression it just doesn't bother me in the least. I'm not going to stand on principle to save from destruction something I find offensive, and it's silly to try to get people concerned about the destruction of an industry that they find offensive. I like classical music and rock, and as far as I can tell neither one is being ruined by dynamic compression. You still need a quiet environment to really experience good classical music, and somehow I don't find myself too concerned with not having to strain to hear the words in Holiday or September.
If you're offended by me listening to me listening to Mozart with my windows up and the system down, let me know and I'll see what I can do to be less irritating (heh).
it's the cars that go bump (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, the reason record companies are doing this, yes, to maximize profits, but that cynical answer doesn't explain how or why really. The real reason is because people in cars with loud stereo systems aren't able to distinguish the dynamic ranges in a loud, noisy, moving environment so they compress the sound to make it sound best in cars. Really. Take say, the latest Front Line Assembly album (crazy loud) and listen to it in your car. It sounds great. It's compressed all to hell. On headphones it sounds like a mess though. Now take any Dire Straits album, particularly Brothers In Arms (Quiet as a mouse) and listen to it in your car. It's quiet, you can't hear it, it sounds like crap. Now listen to it on headphones and it sounds incredible. Why? The dynamic range is there so you can hear the nuances of the music throughout the album, unlike the former album where everything sounds approximately the same level.
THat is the difference between loud and quiet and compression on dynamic range.
Radio (Score:4, Interesting)
What an interesting contradiction (Score:4, Insightful)
- too much dynamic range.
Scenes with explosions, traffic, etc are way too loud while the dialogue is way too soft.I solved the DVD problem by inserting a compressor on the audio out of the DVD player before it reaches my stereo - precisely what the network station did before the era of DVD when everybody watched movies on HBO, Turner Classics, ABC, NBC, etc. I did the same to my parents' TV so they wouldn't get blasted by commercials on cable TV. We are all much happier.
Unfortunately there is no easy solution to "squashed" CDs. Once the dynamic range is compressed to oblivion, you cannot get it back without the source material (IE master multitrack). In the last five years I have bought 10x more DVDs than CDs.
Who needs sound quality? (Score:5, Funny)
Next thing somebody will write an article saying that music should have composition, harmonies, melodies, varity, and subbtle qualities. Or that vocalists should actually be able to sing - not just talk into a mic, or that "musicians" actually read and write music, or that musicians actually play a musical instrument. Or that lyrics should be more than "funk soul brotha" repeated a thousand times.
Come on folks, this is the 21st century. The point of a sound system is prove that you're a real man by being obnoxious, and irritating other people. And besides, the recording industry is a *business* it's all about your crib and your bling. Screw "sound quality."
Food analogy (Score:5, Funny)
Except not by the record companies, obviously.
My own experience of it (Score:4, Interesting)
When it came to mixing the album, I adjusted things as best I could, but I had no background along those lines. I got feedback from my friends that the loud portions were too loud and the quiet portions were too quiet. But I didn't know to what degree the audio should be compressed. I was at square one.
I took a cross-section of tracks from my ripped CD library and measured their peak level and RMS level. Having this information would tell me what people would be used to. Unfortunately, the only consistent pattern that I found was that the higher the RMS level, the later the release date of the CD.
Re:The alternative? (Score:5, Informative)
Oh that's right, you can't. You're right, it's not a tough choice is it?
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Re:The alternative? (Score:4, Funny)
The recording engineer?
Rich
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Re:The alternative? (Score:5, Informative)
Data compression should be clear - the raw audio data are processed in a way that they take less space on a storage medium or less time to push them over the Intertube. This is done either losslessly by purely mathematical means or lossy by using so-called psychoacoustic models that try either to remove those parts from the sound that the human brain won't really recognize (eg. because they're "buried" below some other sound playing at the same time), or simply store those parts with way less precision. Basically lossy compresison throws away some decimal places in the parts of the audio data you won't hear too well anyway.
Dynamic compression on the other hand simply reduces the dynamic range of the sound - it makes loud stuff quieter or, if you simultaneously push up the total volume, makes quiet stuff louder. This hasn't anything to do with digital audio data - it's a purely acoustic modification that's been in use in recording studios for decades now, sometimes reasonably, sometimes not
Interestingly dynamic compression for the sake of getting things louder and data compression are almost mutual exclusive - by increasing the average volume of the song and basically emphasizing every little detail you're making the music noisier and noiser - and white noise is the worst thing that can happen to data compression of any kind. And even psychoacoustic compression schemes are given a hard time when they've got to figure out which of all those things coming screaming at you are important and which aren't.
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Re:It makes you wonder... (Score:4, Funny)
Sir, people have been wondering what Bob Dylan has been talking about for over 40 years.
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Re:It's more than just music (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think that super8 film is astounding, you probably aren't paying attention to the substantial color shifting you are observing, or haven't bothered to check out any of the HD-quality video cameras they have out for shooting news items now.
Your in-laws probably have a REALLY bad digital satellite TV setup, because my HD satellite setup blows anything else I have seen out of the water. And waxing nostalgic about how awesome old VHS tapes look is just foolish.
I see no reason to complain about how a DVD player you buy today (which you can get for around 25 dollars) will not last as long as the 200 dollar one you bought 5 years ago, especially since HD players like Blue Ray are going to be what you really want a few years from now. I rather buy a 25 dollar dvd player and replace it every 4 years or so than buy a 200 dollar one and replace it every 10 years. But that is just me.
The market is in the middle of large changes and shifts in video technology. Video technology is progressing forward with ever greater quality. If you don't believe me watch any sitcom from 20 years ago and compare it with one from last year. You, my friend are either delusional or making things up for effect.
The thing we are complaining about is the fact that audio quality is not progressing forward but going backward even as video and image quality improves. Go back and watch your precious Charles in Charge VHS tapes with their amazing video and audio quality.
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Re:Vinyl (Score:5, Interesting)
Vinyl is NOT better. Good vinyl beats bad CDs. Good CDs beat good vinyl. I've got a pretty large vinyl collection and some modestly high-end playback gear, and I regularly listen to a lot of my records. However, it's simply not as good as CD. Pitch stability, wow/flutter, frequency errors, dynamic range, channel variance, crosstalk, IM and harmonic distortion products, rumble, and so forth are all enormously less on CD than on vinyl, if they exist at all (many disappear entirely in the digital domain).
What about the sound, though? Good sound is good sound. If you're missing that 'airy' sound that good vinyl has, then try this: Get a noise generator, and inject random-phase noise (I _think_ pink noise, 'though I can't remember for sure) at about -80db into the audio stream from your CD player. Suddenly, there's the missing piece.
Records were compressed just as badly as CDs in their heyday. I've got a few albums I've picked up over the years where there's about
10db total dynamic range. However, by compressing the audio and limiting bass response, they could put cut a tighter groove, and put MORE MINUTES onto a record, for greater sales.
Vinyl, CD, even MP3 aren't inherently garbage or great--they're just made that way by cheap record companies who can get away with selling shit-on-a-shingle. Great audio is possible in all of these formats (although MP3 has some caveats)--but it takes care and skill.
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