The "Loudness War" and the Future of Music 687
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."
What pisses me off (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"It's Good Enough" (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
"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.
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).
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.
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.
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)
Re:[raises hand] (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What pisses me off (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:That's why you have a volume knob. (Score:3, Interesting)
Volume is the average 'loudness' of a work - IE volume setting of 5 on the stereo will generate a 50dB tone when input with a 50dB tone. a 4 will generate a 45dB tone & a 6 will generate a 60Db tone.
Dynamic range is the difference between the intensities of the midline & peak sounds of the track. IE the midline vs the crash of a cymbal or the midline vs 1/2 second of absolute silence. On a CD, the peak level is pre-defined & not changeable - anything that rises above this is set to the maximum; an effect known as clipping. What the CD companies have been doing is raising the midline intensity. Since the sound of a voice in comparison to a cymbal crash hasn't changed, they either have to muffle the cymbal for the crash or let it clipp. Both generate distortion in the music.
Classical music is actually one of the places where this type of effect is absolutely unacceptable, the 1812 overature would be a mockery of itself if the cannon shots were barely louder than the brass section. The same with shifts between strings & brass - the instruments were chosen for the specific tonal qualities & the music writen to embrace the differences.
Re:The alternative? (Score:3, Interesting)
I see most of the comments here decrying compression, but a few reasonable arguments why it may sometimes be good/necessary (e.g. it's what consumers want, sounds better on low-quality sound systems, sounds better if you're forced to turn the volume very low, etc.). What I'm wondering is why we don't develop a digital audio standard that includes a "nicely mastered" track without compression. Thus the track has a wide dynamic range. Then, the meta-data for the file includes a few different "profiles" for dynamic range compression. The default profile could even be the "really loud" one appropriate for low-quality sound equipment. Most people would just hear the usual "loud version."
However, people who care about audio quality could set their equipment to automatically use the "higher dynamic range" profile. High-quality audio equipment could automatically select the most appropriate profile. In a more general sense, you could indeed have a "knob" (or software setting) that lets you adjust the compression to suit your tastes (even on a track-by-track basis).
I know to some extent this exists, because various music software have settings for "undoing" (as much as possible) the large audio compression that is routinely applied to modern music. Obviously it would be better to store the version with the higher dynamic range, however. So, unless it's too computationally expensive for something like an iPod to perform, it would seem that this would satisfy everyone's needs: Encode the songs with full dynamic range, and give people a knob (alongside treble and bass, etc.) to adjust the compression level to their needs.
(Again, not being an expert in such things, I welcome anyone who wants to point out by misunderstandings.)
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.
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.
Do it yourself (Score:3, 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.
So process it yourself - there are plenty of dynamic compression filters out there that you can run your music through. If the source material has not been messed around with and is an accurate representation of the original, you can mess it up however you like. However, if the mastering process has done this for you, you can't reverse the process.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
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.
Re:The alternative? (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's a good explanation... (Score:3, Interesting)
Brick Wall Limiting [prorec.com]
I found the latest Oasis album to be particularly offensive in this regard. The audio literally sounds like it was smashed against a brick wall and my ears are fatigued after a few minutes of listening. I honestly don't know if I like the album or not because I can't listen to it long enough to tell.
Re:Sometimes it makes sense all around (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, that's great. Go muck around with *your* player and leave the dynamic range alone for those of us who want it. Either that, or stop worrying about missing the quiet parts so much.
Re:I have the solution (Score:3, Interesting)
I have to agree, it is hard to tell the difference these days. I've been a long-time proponent of VBR: r3mix was the first encoder setting besides 256 or 320k CBR where I couldn't tell the difference between the CD and the compressed file, even on my Allesandros. Today's VBR settings are far more impressive, with alt preset standard pushing the limits of audio quality with mp3.
True story: recently, for about 6 months I was accidentally encoding my alt preset standard mp3s with a peak bitrate locked at 224k. I encoded DOZENS of CDs without noticing. When I finally noticed, I re-encoded for consistency's sake, but I couldn't tell the difference. That's how good LAME is today: ABR of 160-192k is transparent, even without 320k peaks.
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.
The appeal of old records (Score:4, Interesting)
No wonder the new audio format discs haven't taken off.
As for me, my ears have deteriorated from going to too many rock concerts over the years. It all sounds the same to me now.
Re:I have the solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, unlike data compression (such as mp3) dynamic range compression isn't hard to hear or notice; it isn't even supposed to be. All it means is everything is about the same volume. So you *can't* have a brooding quiet passage suddenly shattered by a loud crash of cymbals. You can't have a discussion at audible volume interrupted by a gunshot so lound it makes your ears ring. You can't because the processing makes everything about the same volume. Live music seems to have a lot more dynamic range - drums especially.
To my thinking, dynamic range compression is a good idea for background sounds that aren't supposed to be too noticeable (like radio music for the most part), but bad for sounds that are supposed to be the center of attention (say, in a movie). Think about images; for stunning images (say, in a gallery) you want lots of dynamic range, but for your desktop wallpaper, not so much.
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.
Re:Only solution? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, IAABE. (I am a Broadcast engineer)
Those of us in the radio business DON'T WANT loud over compressed CDs. We do our own compression and limiting, so a "clean" CD, and an overly compressed one will be the exact same volume level over the air. The overly compressed one will sound more grungy and distorted, but it won't be a damn bit louder on the radio.
The Alt-Rock station I currently work for uses 5 different AGC/compressor/limiter/clipper boxes to crunch down the audio signal so that it is LOUD on the air, and never goes over the 100% FCC maximum modulation level. Our peak modulation is held right at 100%, and our average modulation bounces around 80%. This represents about 1.5 to 2 dB of dynamic range, regardless of what the source material is. This is very typical for most FMs. Some are worse.
I sometimes think the recording industry is in this loudness war so that their CDs will sound just as loud as the radio on most portable players.
Re:What pisses me off (Score:3, Interesting)
And if you're thinking "TIVO disabled that years ago," then you need to go buy a cheap laptop or a Mac Mini, a 500GB firewire 800 drive, a nice big LCD display, and a CATV tuner, then install EyeTV or MythTV. You won't be sorry.
I haven't watched a TV commercial for months!
(At least not one without boobies.) As for the "Loudness War," I've solved that by NOT BUYING CDs. Except from independant labels. There's enough free-as-in-beer music out there that's well-engineered and not overly compressed or poorly encoded to satisfy most fans of modern genres...
Unfortunately, if you like classic rock or older popular music, it will cost you real money to go buy collectors-item vinyl and 80's-published CDs. I suggest you find or form a club with people of similar interests and share the expenses.
Re:That's why you have a volume knob. (Score:3, Interesting)
(Actually, that's why I like both.)
Re:What pisses me off (Score:1, Interesting)
On another note to stay more on topic.
During blind tests in the mid 80's, a popular Stereo mag determined that really high percentage of of the general population (like 85% but I forget the actual number) picked a louder source as one that sounded "better". The test was actually described as a test to determine which speakers were better, brand A or brand B. They were actually the same exact speakers and source equipment, just one was played 1db louder then the other one. The purpose was to educate the readers about the difference efficiency of speakers (spl @ 1W and 1M) and of the crooked salesmen trying to fool you into buying something that was not better by playing with the volume.
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.
Re:I have the solution (Score:2, Interesting)
The next day, after he had had a chance to listen to the master on a few different decks (we mixed through my crappy Edirol monitors and referenced through my JBL PA mains occasionally) he called me up and said he wanted it "louder". Of course I had normalized, so the only thing to do now is to compress it. I was having a bitch of a time getting my Mackie Onyx 1640 to play nice with 64Studio [64studio.com] (since jack and the board have wildly different ideas of where zero is :P) so I skipped my normal 1.5:1 main mix compression during mixdown.
As for good EQ'ing, I've always preferred good mic placement to EQ, never have met a digital EQ I liked... And I haven't made enough money to buy a good outboard EQ yet ;)
Couldn't agree more!
Re:It's more than just music (Score:2, Interesting)
Mostly true, except it's still widely acknowledged that the dynamic range on digital camera sensors (yes, even the really expensive ones on the 1d series) is lacking compared to that of film.
From the article:
Conclusions
Digital cameras, like the Canon 1D Mark II, show a huge dynamic range compared to either print or slide film, at least for the films compared.
Re:I have the solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, the focus on the ha-ha-aren't-they-stupid tends to make people dismissive of anything more expensive than lamp wire for cabling, which is equally silly. We're not talking about woo-woo stuff like silver strands versus copper -- we're talking about basic electrical principles like impedance, capacitance and resistance. They matter, and they really are different between different kinds of cable.
And incidentally, gold connectors? They don't corrode. Nothing voodoo-ish about the idea, just common sense. And for goodness' sake, you can get audio cables with gold connectors at Radio Shack for $10 -- I do not understand why I keep seeing them being talked about in the same breath as $2000/meter Transparent Reference cables.
Re:I have the solution (Score:3, Interesting)
And cassette had *awful* sound quality, compared to other formats available at the time. No two ways about it.
So I dunno if we can really generalize about kids "back in the day" having great ears and lust for quality sound reproduction.