Why Music Really Is Getting Louder 388
Teksty Piosenek writes "Artists and record bosses believe that the best album is the loudest one. Sound levels are being artificially enhanced so that the music punches through when it competes against background noise in pubs or cars. 'Geoff Emerick, engineer on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, said: "A lot of what is released today is basically a scrunched-up mess. Whole layers of sound are missing. It is because record companies don't trust the listener to decide themselves if they want to turn the volume up." Downloading has exacerbated the effect. Songs are compressed once again into digital files before being sold on iTunes and similar sites. The reduction in quality is so marked that EMI has introduced higher-quality digital tracks, albeit at a premium price, in response to consumer demand.'"
Also, the Loudness War (Score:5, Informative)
A good video explanation (Score:5, Informative)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ [youtube.com]
cheers.
Good audio example (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Terminology confusion? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Terminology confusion? (Score:5, Informative)
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence just as easily.... The whole thing strikes me as an article written by someone who simply doesn't understand the difference between psychoacoustic-based data compression and dynamic compression....
I'd be amazed if any album other than classical music were made without compression. A drum kit or other similar drums without at least some compression sound pretty silly. Basically, you end up burying the entire mix in the mud to keep the drums from clipping... unless you record on analog tape and just let it clip (soft saturation), but in that case, you're really compressing the signal, just without calling it compression. The peak of the sound is just too soft compared to the meat of the sound to give you a usable volume without either adding compression or limiting (which is just a special case of compression).
Re: Good audio example (Score:2, Informative)
Mod article -1, troll (Score:3, Informative)
Dynamics compression vs. digital compression (Score:3, Informative)
Basically, TFA is written by someone without the first clue about the difference between dynamic range compression [wikipedia.org] and lossy audio data compression [wikipedia.org].
The two have absolutely nothing in common and yet they are somehow grouped together by the author.
Re:Peaking (Score:5, Informative)
Compression is a necessary part of recording. Judicious use of compression can make a mix really come together and fit everything into it's right place. Notice that I said judicious. It's unfortunately a very useful tool which can easily be abused. OVER compression starts to result in the degradation of the signal. Sometimes you can hear it "pumping and breathing." Over compression is nasty, plus it destroys dynamics. Forget that crescendo on the second movement. Your violin solo is now exactly as loud as your entire orchestra. Are you excited yet? It's also extremely tiring to listen to. Take a pure square wave and pump it through a speaker. Look at that speaker and notice how fast and constantly the speaker cone is vibrating. Take your newfangled over compressed rock/pop CD and extract audio into some sort of multitracking software like Pro Tools or Ardour even. Expand the view a bit and look at the wave form. Looks a lot like a square wave the way the tops and bottoms of that wave form are chopped off doesn't it? Extract audio from a cd you really like from say, the mid 60s. Look at the wave form. There are peaks and valleys and quiet parts and loud parts, the tops and bottoms of the waveform are not chopped off. Now imagine what that new over compressed pop/rock record is doing to your eardrum even at low volume while keeping in mind the speaker cone. Your ear works a lot like that speaker cone. It's vibrating exactly as fast as that speaker cone. It's a mechanical part. There is fatigue involved. Plus it's just boring to listen to. It sucks out emotion and excitement.
By the time you hear your average top 40 hit on the radio, it has been compressed during recording twice (on individual sound sources and probably again when a stereo mix is produced), during mastering, then again at the radio station. Radio stations want their station to catch your ear, plus it helps in keeping signal strength over long distances. Labels want louder songs to compete with the other loud songs, bands want their record to sound like this other loud record, mastering engineers are asked by either the band or the label to make it as loud as possible. You know who's paying the bill so they do it. Recording engineers can be pressured to over-compress by the band or label or just by wanting to have a job in the next year and they might do it as well. Even if they turn in a good balanced mix for mastering, it's a crap shoot whether their mixes will sound the same when the record actually gets put out.
It's a shite state of affairs all around.
Re:How about a technical fix for MP3/AAC/etc? (Score:2, Informative)
Loudness (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war [wikipedia.org]
It really is true: if you apply too much sound-level compression to a recording, the recording sounds worse. Music is more interesting with some dynamic range. Some of my favorite classic rock songs sound much better from the CD than they do when played on the radio, because the radio station applies sound-level compression.
On the other hand, it's not really wrong for the radio station to apply the sound-level compression; you wouldn't thank them if you set your volume control knob for one song and then the next song was much louder. And the compression helps the music "cut through" the background noise of driving, so you can hear it better. But it is a pity if the CD is mastered with that kind of sound-level compression from the beginning!
Here's another really good web page about this.
http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/dynamics/dyna
Just take a look at the Ricky Martin song. The gain was set far too high, and as a result many waveforms went outside legal bounds; when you try to master a CD with a wave that is simply too extreme to be legal, it is hard-clipped to make it legal. That sort of clipping makes an unpleasant sound, and makes the CD sound even louder. And hard-clipping means discarding audio data; there is no way to reconstruct it later.
The above is one of the reasons why vinyl LPs still have their fans. You simply cannot push an LP so hard that it's playing hard-clipped square waves. But a well-mastered CD will have more dynamic range than even the best-mastered LP, and less distortion. (Some of the distortion you get with an LP can actually improve your music, and that's another of the reasons why LPs still have fans. But you could apply a digital effect that sounded like LP distortion, if you wanted to.)
steveha
Re:The older I get the louder I need it (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, I have to use a PC. Well, my laptop.
I usually copy a DVD or 3 to my laptop before going on a business trip. NetFlix has gotten me so DVD dependent that I can't watch normal TV anymore. So, the hotel TV is out (unless HBO just happens to have something on). (I am always stunned when I watch CNN that that is what network news has devolved into. 2-3 people screaming.)
My wife would never handle the 1.2x speed for things she watches.
My actual DVD player appliance that I bought
I used to hook my laptop up to the TV via the S-Video port, but that is cumbersome.
Re:Sound engineers can bitch all they want, (Score:3, Informative)
The best music to troll to is alternative rock like Laibach since everything they did was a troll to dim witted lefties. Most real punk rockers would appreciate the concept of trolling too - consider Sid Vicious in his Swastika T shirt. Sid probably didn't like the Nazis, he just wanted to trigger a debate on their alleged crimes. Post Dead Kennedies however punks have a simplistic worldview where the US is evil and its opponents are good. If you argue with any part of it, you must be evil.
Not coincidentally, this worldview is identical to the Bush supporters' worldview they pretend to hate but with all the signs reversed, a sort of ideological mirror image. This sort of music is therefore very bad to troll to, since it is just designed to agree with the prejudices of its fans, much like Fox News does for Republicans.
If I were flaming slashdot or driving however I'd go for Neanderthal, irony challenged Rap music. Or Post DK punk, something dumb and angry.
Re:Cranked up to 11 (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA (Score:3, Informative)
"The brain is not geared to accept buzzing. The CDs induce a sense of fatigue in the listeners. It becomes psychologically tiring and almost impossible to listen to. This could be the reason why CD sales are in a slump."
The <b> is added for emphasis. The "buzzing" is clipping - where the audio signal peaks and the wave is squared off. Cloth ears don't make you immune to that.
Re:A good video explanation (Score:3, Informative)
you can do this yourself using Audacity. Rip part of any rock album produced prior to c.1993 (from what I can recall it has been happening for this long) and compare it to any form of rock recorded in a studio since the "Seattle sound" came to the fore.
the older stuff has some dynamic range - the corporate rock produced during the past 15 years can virtually be defined by the shapelessness of the wave.
I beg to differ! (Score:3, Informative)
Nay, nay, and nay. The CD by its architecture has a dynamic headroom of 96 dB. Make it 90, to compensate for poor AD/DA converters. No pop band will ever use this full headroom, no matter what. Maybe classical music does, but not always. It's plenty. As an audio engineer, you can play with it just fine. The artist can express herself by using loudness levels - louder parts, quieter parts, depending on what you want to say. What happens here is audio engineers making the quieter parts louder, and limiting the loud parts so that the average dynamics is less than 30 dB sometimes, hence a millionth of what the transport medium can accomodate. The main reason is to make listening in noisy areas easier - cars, subways, in the street, etc. A song with too quiet parts will hardly get any airplay. This is mass market, not art. Hence the limiters and compressors in the studio.
Compression as such is an absolutely unneccessary part of recording, if the audio engineer knows his job, and the producer keeps his mouth shut.
Re:It is not too loud! (Score:4, Informative)
http://imdb.com/title/tt0388139 [imdb.com]
Watch it if you like.
I don't think you know what "compression" is... (Score:5, Informative)
This is NOT the same thing as compressing sound to save disk space.
Earplugs (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.etymotic.com/ephp/er20.aspx [etymotic.com]
I never go to clubs/raves/live music events without them. It makes it heaps easy to talk to people when wearing them too
Re:Cranked up to 11 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It is not too loud! (Score:3, Informative)
If you don't understand what's wrong with a smiley face EQ, you've probably damaged your hearing pretty badly already.
Re:It is not too loud! (Score:2, Informative)
(BTW, dance music download sites have never resorted to DRM - their customers (mostly DJs) would have no use for DRMed tracks, since they need to burn to CDs, or copy about so they can play them out in clubs. DRM would make downloads useless, and everyone would just go back to vinyl. Guess it's another lesson for the big labels on the pointless nature of DRM).
Re:A good video explanation (Score:5, Informative)
No, they are getting clipped. Have a closer look for flat topped peaks.
The damage is being done by look ahead limiters like Waves L2, which are the last process in the mastering chain.
These limiters work on psychoacoustic principles, employing some of the temporal masking ideas used in lossy audio compression to make the artifacts of very fast peak limiting as inaudible as possible.
It's known that humans cannot hear short periods of clipping distortion (less than 2ms or so), so these limiters allow that to happen, clamp down a millisecond later, and increase the subjective loudness of the signal without losing 'punch'. As this kind of limiter incorporates a delay line in the audio output path, but not the side chain, it's always looking a few milliseconds ahead and so knows how to react to a peak in advance.
The problem is that if you push a limiter of this kind really hard, it cannot keep it's artifacts inaudible, the clipped periods get longer, and the music starts to sound harsh and tiring.
It's a shame as they a beautifully clean limiters if used correctly, you can knock 4-6db of pop material without the kind of artifacts a traditional analog limiter would produce.
Re:Cranked up to 11 (Score:1, Informative)
Completely, absolutely agree. It's simply unnecessary to have the volume up that loud. And I'm not being an old coot. It's more important to have proper sound support dispersed throughout the venue (and at comfortable, non-damaging volumes) instead of blasting it all from one central point. DUH.
Rock's deep, dark secret is that virtually all of its most famous musicians have some form of incurable hearing damage. I find it particularly ridiculous that Elvis Costello is the pitchman for Lexus' Mark Levinson car audio system. I guarantee that all he hears is a dull, ugly whine in his ears, but the commercial would have you believe that he can hear mosquitoes mating at 100 yards.
Re:It is not too loud! (Score:2, Informative)
Not always true - the Fletcher-Munson curve (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It is not too loud! (Score:2, Informative)
http://georgegraham.com/compress.html [georgegraham.com]
http://www.cdmasteringservices.com/dynamicrange.h
and pretty graphs here:
http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/dynamics/dyna
Re:I beg to differ! (Score:3, Informative)
Even public radio is not immune! (Score:3, Informative)
Well, the choir I'm in collaborated with another choir and the local symphony orchestra to put on Carmina Burana. So we did -- great show and such. The recording was broadcast by the local public radio station the next day. I recorded it off the air (with decent equipment that isn't the culprit), since the symphony wasn't going to make their recording available to the singers (something about union rules).
Carmina starts (and ends) with the piece "O Fortuna" -- you've probably heard it. Theme song to Excalibur, used and spoofed in tons of advertisements, etc. There is a short (~15 second) ridiculously loud introduction, about a minute of very quiet music, thirty seconds of loud, and then forty seconds of extreme loud -- if you know the piece you know what I mean. All the dynamic changes are sudden. It's the poster child for dynamic range, and the effect is wonderful.
I get the recording, and the quiet bit is just as loud as the rest. WTF? I pull the waveform on Audacity -- flat.
Aargh!
Then I started listening, and you can hear it all over the place in much of their music. Peak limiters and such kick in to reduce the level whenever there is a high-amplitude sound... so you can actually hear the rest of the orchestra suddenly get softer when the bass drum goes off. The bass drum isn't that *loud*, thanks to the response curves of human ears and the frequency-power connection, but it is high-amplitude and triggers the peak limiter like nobody's business. (Orchestral bass drums have a very, very deep sound.)
It's ridiculous.
Re:The older I get the louder I need it (Score:4, Informative)
If you are experiencing significant hearing loss at 35... one of three conditions exist; a) you work in a job that has damaged your hearing (unlikely with OSHA etc...), b) you have a medical condition (unlikely, but possible), or c) you've been listening to loud music/tv/whatever for so long you've damaged your own hearing.
Re:Not always true - the Fletcher-Munson curve (Score:5, Informative)
The parent poster is completely right, hearing damage is a function of Sound Pressure Level and time, and sound pressure level is a measurement of energy in the air, and not a measure of your perception. Something people don't recognize along these lines, is that a lot of people do terrible damage to themselves by simply driving with the car window down on the freeway, as (in our modern aerodynamic cars) the turbulent airflow can pummel your ears with LF, though it doesn't bother you because it's below 20 Hz. And the wind noise makes you turn up the radio louder.
With regard to graphic EQ, the things were invented, partly, to help engineers correct the acoustic characteristics of rooms -- if your room has a mode at 400 Hz, turn down 400 Hz, if it has some high ringiness due to some resonance, turn down the high end. A 30 band graphic EQ is ideal for this sort of work because some rooms have a bunch of little peaks and troughs on an RTA and you'd need a ton of parametric EQs to do the same goofiness. A 5 band graphic EQ is just for show, you need at least 10 before you can do anything particularly fun, and even then in a car I can't imagine where it'd get you. Maybe you could shape the music over the engine noise or something
It should go without saying, if you want to hear the song the way the band mixed it, they listened to it with a flat EQ, and if you want to enjoy the nuances of a piece of music, don't listen to it in a car. Also, the standard practice in music mixing since forever is to record the song as loud as possible without distorting on the medium. Compression (the audio kind) is a style thing, and bands have been using since the beginning of rock and roll, and particularly with CDs, the music is physically incapable of getting any louder on the medium. You kids have just been cranking up your damn volume knobs.
Some solutions for Speedwatching / Time stretching (Score:2, Informative)
(ie. Time stretching, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_timescale-pitc
with winamp plugins such as Chronotron from 25% to 400% in 0.1% intervals with very good sound quality but brings a 2.4GHz P4 down to it's knees at >200% speeds.
With Adapt-x + Studiotime (http://www.acondigital.com/us_StudioTime.html ) not quite as great a quality, 0.1% between 33% and 200% with far lower CPU usage.
With The KMPlayer (http://www.kmplayer.com/forums/index.php , portable software
Hardware solution: Creative Audigy series sound cards
GOMPlayer : very similar to KMPlayer except not portable, 10% to 400% in 10% intervals.
Without subtitles , usually watch at speeds between 200% and 250% , except for Gilmore Girls.
With subtitle , between 270% and 300%.
All that comes via Television watched as described in this post:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=80789
Mixing up the 3 kinds of audio-related compression (Score:3, Informative)
DYNAMICS COMPRESSION (compress the audible dynamic range)
During mixing and mastering, the dynamic range of the audio content is compressed. The softest sounds are made louder and the loudest sounds are made softer. This is what music and audio people think of first if you talk about compression.
Dynamics compression has nothing at all to do with bits, this can be done acoustically, electrically, or digitally, it is about audio. The human ear does outrageous dynamics compression. Analog tape machines have a built-in dynamics compression that is considered to be musically useful and that is imitated today by digital. If you don't do that, you don't have "rock" music. Take away a rock band's dynamics compression and you have a really lame jazz combo, it is all the same instruments, the difference between the sound of jazz and rock drums is 98% dynamics compression. For rock vocals the compressor/limiter is more important then the microphone. Whether the singer whispers or screams it should all be the same volume. If it is not, you can't believe the complaining you will hear about it from everybody because that is not what rock singing sounds like. It is all the same volume. Go and listen to your records, the singer is right there in the front of your skull the whole time.
If you want music with a broad dynamic range there is plenty of it around, it just doesn't sell very well. With a broad dynamic range you have to turn up the volume high to catch the low sounds, and you have to shut the fuck up so you can actually listen to the musical presentation like you would a concert performer. This covers at most 10% of music listeners who are going to do that. Most people listen to music as an accompaniment to their lives like a movie soundtrack. They are running or partying or dancing or reading or whatever while they listen. For that purpose you want the dynamic range to be tight or you will miss a lot of music.
DATA COMPRESSION (compress the amount of disk storage used)
After mixing and mastering, you can make a mix that takes up about half the file size by compressing the data in the file, same as making a Zip archive. This is what computer people think of when you say compression. The bit stream that the player sees is the same as raw audio, but on disk it is compressed data.
LOSSY COMPRESSION (compress the amount of playback bandwidth required)
Finally, you can encode a mix into a lossy format, and the encoder will throw data away in order to compress the bandwidth the file requires to play in real-time. This is how MP3 and MP4 do it. This is what video people think of when you talk about compression, because this is also how DV and many other video-related formats keep their file sizes low enough to be practical.
Re:The older I get the louder I need it (Score:3, Informative)
You can pretty clearly hear the difference between the original and the 'remastered' CD. It's louder, and the signal compression type the studios use almost always pushes a lot of mid-volume detail to the nigh-inaudible level. MP3 compressing it just removes that nigh-inaudible level.
But DCT compression at a good bitrate from a good source is indistinguishable from that source except by audiophiles that have fooled themselves into believing that their $40 centimeter-thick cables get crisper sound.
I'm all for superior equpiment, honestly: A nice sound card, preferably one that resides outside the box; a pair of high-quality headphones; a good set of speakers with a quality subwoofer (and shut off the stupid signal tweak they have built in); perhaps a standalone EQ are all you need.