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Not testing your patience ;) Modern tunes and bad sounds.

A800

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The noise (some call it music but I don't know why) quoted in the opening post.
 

xr100

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The noise (some call it music but I don't know why) quoted in the opening post.

Oh, I didn't even bother listening to the "suggested" material in anticipation of it being dire.

That Kanye West track is abominable. :eek:

"Don't Start Now" by Dua Lipa is OK. Funky bass and some 80's feel. Mix could be a bit better, and also sounds like it's gone through too much global multiband limiting; I smell aggressive use of Waves L3. There's the odd annoying drum loop of dubious quality and timing. Musically, it doesn't quite hang together. (Can't be bothered to work out the parts to explain why.) Nice try but...

I wouldn't put it in the same box as 4'33" (John Cage), although IMO that Kanye West track is less musical than 4'33". :)
 
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KozmoNaut

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Expensive housing is a product of (the absence of) land availability. Increasingly land has various "protection" statuses attached to it, which is why (of all places) residential property has become very expensive in parts of Australia. Ditto California.

There is plenty of land to build on in Australia or the US, protected lands cover a very small area in comparison to the overall landmass. Protecting land with natural ecosystems of flora and fauna is exceedingly important for biodiversity and the overall health of the natural world. People also need to learn that insisting on everyone having a huge useless wasteland of a lawn is a bad idea.

In the US at least, there is absolutely no shortage of housing, and you cannot solve the problem by simply building more houses. The inflated prices are completely artificial.

Whilst overall "overcompression" is regrettable, "dynamic range" alone won't tell you if something sounds "good" or not, i.e. whether the instruments sound good and the overall mix "gels." And, it is in this respect that too much of the current crop of music just isn't of a professional standard.

Compression is a tool, it is not inherently good or bad. Mixing with absolutely no compression at all will not sound good for a lot of genres of music, and some genres (like EDM) even use heavy compression as a sort of instrument, creating for instance the pumping bass and hyper-dense soundscapes.

I would say that most modern music is produced to a very professional standard, they just have different goals compared to your wishes.
 

Sal1950

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I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it’s a bit unfair to judge him for not being a good singer. Hip hop ain’t singing.
It ain't music either. ;)
 

xr100

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There is plenty of land to build on in Australia or the US, protected lands cover a very small area in comparison to the overall landmass. Protecting land with natural ecosystems of flora and fauna is exceedingly important for biodiversity and the overall health of the natural world.

It depends on _where_ the land is protected. It doesn't do much good for someone in the Sydney area, for example, that there is plenty of land in Western Australia available (if it is--I haven't checked--there is certainly a ton of "undeveloped" land there.)

People also need to learn that insisting on everyone having a huge useless wasteland of a lawn is a bad idea.

It depends on whether you are comparing the "lawn" to a "biodiverse" or agricultural land. In fact, the "useless wasteland" of people's back gardens/yards are, at least according to one study in the UK, vastly more useful to "nature at large" than monoculture crop, pesticide-laden agricultural land. And that's really pretty self-evident. Certainly mine is full of worms, slugs, snails, spiders, and who knows what else; and it is visited by neighbourhood foxes, cats and squirrels, as well as birds... It also has a variety of foliage, including a 100+ year old cherry tree.

In the US at least, there is absolutely no shortage of housing, and you cannot solve the problem by simply building more houses. The inflated prices are completely artificial.

Prices in large parts of the US aren't "inflated"--or rather, they aren't "unaffordable."

http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf

It's in the areas where there are restrictions one way or the other in relation to demand that other that they are "affordable." Some of these restrictions in the US are pretty absurd, such as areas zoned for extremely (and I do mean EXTREMELY) large minimum lot areas.

BTW, the complete failure to build sufficient housing in sufficient volume in the UK, especially London and environs, has led to seriously unaffordable accommodation. Anyway, I fear we are heading too far into political territory and off-topic.

Compression is a tool, it is not inherently good or bad. Mixing with absolutely no compression at all will not sound good for a lot of genres of music, and some genres (like EDM) even use heavy compression as a sort of instrument, creating for instance the pumping bass and hyper-dense soundscapes.

Indeed, the old Daft Punk "One More Time" side-chaining, for example. Yes, many genres--past the mid-20th Century, say, can't hardly _exist_ without compression, at least on a per channel basis.

I would say that most modern music is produced to a very professional standard, they just have different goals compared to your wishes.

I'm talking about badly mixed music*, not dynamic range. I have no problem with extensive (but considered, high quality and "correctly set") use of compression on a per channel basis and on the overall mix, as appropriate. And if there's one thing that generally sounds terrible (and is musically uggh)--it's "audiophile" recordings.

I would say that movie soundtracks are well mixed. But last time I checked YouTube's Top 20 list, and that was a few weeks ago--absolutely not.

(*Instruments sound bad too, not just "the mix," although it's a bit difficult to separate the two out.)
 
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Ceburaska

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Sal1950

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BTW, the complete failure to build sufficient housing in sufficient volume in the UK, especially London and environs, has led to seriously unaffordable accommodation.
I don't know about the UK but in the US it's not the governments job to build housing. In the early days you rolled up your sleeves and built your house. In more modern times, you rolled up your sleeves, got a job, and bought a house. That's what I did, for the first time at 27.
 

q3cpma

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Yes! And it sounds exactly like it should be. Grungy-sludgy-stonery-metal that assaults the senses. Don't see any other way their music could sound like.
Like their Blue or Red album. That's the difference between compression and clipping.

Blue - 08. O'er Hell and Hide:
08. O'er Hell and Hide.wave.png

Purple - 08. Desperation Burns:
08. Desperation Burns.wave.png
 
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L5730

L5730

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I've seen some nasty flat lining on Dua Lipa's self titled album. Multiple samples (10 or more) all at the top peak values of the track. What is strange, however is that the peak sample value of the track is not 0dBFS, but rather a little lower. This indicates that the tracks were clipped in isolation, prior to adding to the compilation. Now, it could be a case where the engineer should have saved to floating point, to preserve the clipped samples, but instead saved to 24 bit fixed which just chopped them straight off. Then these 24 bit files were imported into a project to make the compilation and slight level adjustments were made, the clipping was already baked in.

It doesn't sound terrifically bad, however, one cannot but wonder why these kinda things happen. I guess it's lack of care and QC like more things in the world.

1582052057837.png
 
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Fluffy

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Like their Blue or Red album. That's the difference between compression and clipping.

Blue - 08. O'er Hell and Hide:
View attachment 50727
Purple - 08. Desperation Burns:
View attachment 50728
Digital clipping is not present in any one of them. Here each red line shows were the waveform intersects with the 0 dbfs limit:
both.png


The spurious red lines are single-sample peaks, and are the normal result of normalizing.

If you are talking about hard compression/limiting, it very much existed in the blue album as well. Here is the waveform for O'er Hell and Hide zoomed in:
blue.png

Those flat wave tops are the result of hard compression. No album of this band is going to win any DR awards, so I don't see the point of worrying about it. Sounds to me like the it's last genre of music you should be listening to if you care about things like dynamic range…
 

q3cpma

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Digital clipping is not present in any one of them. Here each red line shows were the waveform intersects with the 0 dbfs limit:
View attachment 50740

The spurious red lines are single-sample peaks, and are the normal result of normalizing.

If you are talking about hard compression/limiting, it very much existed in the blue album as well. Here is the waveform for O'er Hell and Hide zoomed in:
View attachment 50741
The second one is obviously clipped then pulled down a bit. Could be done intentionally, or as a consequence of mastering/mixing issue. Anyway, my experience is that compression artifacts aren't perceived linearly, unlike these waveform pictures that can fool us easily into thinking that these are almost as bad.
Sox tells me one is clipped (functionally, not digitally) and the other isn't, though:
Code:
$ sox \(2015\)\ Purple/08.\ Desperation\ Burns.flac -n stat 2>&1 | grep -E '^(Maximum amplitude|Volume adjustment):'
Maximum amplitude:     0.999969
Volume adjustment:        1.000
$ sox \(2009\)\ Blue\ Record/08.\ O\'er\ Hell\ and\ Hide.flac -n stat 2>&1 | grep -E '^(Maximum amplitude|Volume adjustment):'
Maximum amplitude:     0.991272
Volume adjustment:        1.009

Those flat wave tops are the result of hard compression. No album of this band is going to win any DR awards, so I don't see the point of worrying about it. Sounds to me like the it's last genre of music you should be listening to if you care about things like dynamic range…
I'm not a DR fetishist and can listen to stuff like Belkètre without any problem, but Purple sounded clipped to me. I've deleted entire discographies of my hard drive because of this annoying thing (I can think of Cult of Fire, Saor or Celtic Frost's Monotheist CD that were even worse than this album).

Off-topic, but to be honest, everything after Blue wasn't as good as a full album experience, even if some songs were very good; it just lacks a coherent sound signature that makes albums more than the sum of their tracks.
 
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Fluffy

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The second one is obviously clipped then pulled down a bit. Could be done intentionally, or as a consequence of mastering/mixing issue.
Clipped and compressed are not the same thing. Here is the zoom in on the track from purple:
purple.png

If it was clipped, the waveform edge would be a perfectly straight line. Look at this track by Daft Punk (Around the World):
daft.png


In the Baroness track, it's not actually clipping, but very aggressive compression. Practically they are not so different, but what is different is the intention – Baroness sound is grungy and based on aggressive compression, so crushed waveforms are intentional in the mixing process. Most of the instruments probably get into the mixer already compressed quite a bit from pedal and effect racks. In daft punk, this clipping is very aggressive and not really part of the sound, but just a side effect of trying to boost up the levels while maintaining a very deep and loud bass beat.
Here is a side by side comparison where you can see the individual samples (upper one is Daft Punk):
all.png


In Daft Punks track it's clearly clipping and then normalized, and for so many samples that it wipes out any other frequency that would have existed over that bass note. In Baroness track there is still high frequency information when the bass gets compressed. But I guess both of these examples look highly offensive to the DR connoisseurs.

I'm not a DR fetishist and can listen to stuff like Belkètre without any problem, but Purple sounded clipped to me. I've deleted entire discographies of my hard drive because of this annoying thing (I can think of Cult of Fire, Saor or Celtic Frost's Monotheist CD that were even worse than this album).
You can like what you like, but I think it's a matter of perspective. If you listen to a high DR album and then to an extremely low DR one, the differences can be staggering. But throw songs from that album into a playlist of other compressed tracks, and you won't feel it as badly.

And off-topic, I was never really that much into this band, probably heard each album 2-3 times at most. I think they are one of those bands that tried to be Mastodon but didn't quite make it :p
 

q3cpma

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Clipped and compressed are not the same thing. Here is the zoom in on the track from purple:
View attachment 50746
If it was clipped, the waveform edge would be a perfectly straight line. Look at this track by Daft Punk (Around the World):
View attachment 50747

In the Baroness track, it's not actually clipping, but very aggressive compression. Practically they are not so different, but what is different is the intention – Baroness sound is grungy and based on aggressive compression, so crushed waveforms are intentional in the mixing process. Most of the instruments probably get into the mixer already compressed quite a bit from pedal and effect racks. In daft punk, this clipping is very aggressive and not really part of the sound, but just a side effect of trying to boost up the levels while maintaining a very deep and loud bass beat.
Here is a side by side comparison where you can see the individual samples (upper one is Daft Punk):
View attachment 50748

In Daft Punks track it's clearly clipping and then normalized, and for so many samples that it wipes out any other frequency that would have existed over that bass note. In Baroness track there is still high frequency information when the bass gets compressed. But I guess both of these examples look highly offensive to the DR connoisseurs.


You can like what you like, but I think it's a matter of perspective. If you listen to a high DR album and then to an extremely low DR one, the differences can be staggering. But throw songs from that album into a playlist of other compressed tracks, and you won't feel it as badly.
What happened after the supposed clipping could be smarter than just adjusting volume though. Anyway, the first poster was right when saying that Purple has a bad sound quality, it's at least worse than what came before by a long shot (including Yellow & Green). Though, as you said, bad sound quality is their trademark; but personally, this is bad not in a good way.

And off-topic, I was never really that much into this band, probably heard each album 2-3 times at most. I think they are one of those bands that tried to be Mastodon but didn't quite make it :p
Well, the entire genre of "metal for people who don't really like metal" love by image obsessed hipsters with more tatoos than a Bat' d'Af' soldier and plastic rings in their earlobes won't make history by its quality or sincerity.
But Mastodon's best (Leviathan or Crack the Skye, I'd say) wasn't quite as good as Baroness' early stuff (First, Second or Blue), in my opinion; at least it's not The Sword bad. Well, it's a bit like cheering in a pig mudfight, anyway.
 
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When I started this thread, I was thinking of it as a cheeky invitation to have a moan and groan about various elements of the quality of music, mainly modern because is happened a lot less with older stuff.

Transient clipping, hard limiting and aggressive fast compression, the typical tools used to just make stuff as loud as it can be, has been discussed many times in many places. This is only part of the loudness war thing. This is the bit more people pick up, demonstrating with waveform captures showing 'haircut' style waveforms.

Now, the other side of the the loudness war thing is collection of things and a bit harder to show visual examples.
One part is where there is a lack of light and shade in music. A vocalist maybe trying to be quiet and intimate, and in the old days the background would be quieter and sparse. As the song builds up the singer gets louder and more present, the backing builds in density and intensity. Nowadays, there tends to be a consistent fatness to vocals, even though the singer may almost be whispering (tonal quality) at one point and screaming at another.
Another part may be something to do with a different EQ setup. Older stuff was pretty much always destined for vinyl and was largely in the analogue domain. It all seemed high-passed around 20-50 Hz. Yeah, sure there are plenty of examples of buggered EQ choices on older stuff, scooped mids and of course incorrect tape sources when transferring to CD (LP cutting tapes), but I am talking more in terms of intentional decisions. As modern stuff has been living in the digital domain more or less start to finish, frequency range seems to be fuller, but instead of using that in a natural way, there is a lot of 'fake bass' sound. I guess that comes from the choice of instruments used, less analogue sythns and more brutal digital ones, with layers and layers of clear digital processing.
With tape and a mixer, there was a limit to just how many bounces one can do, adding to and processing a sound. It becomes softer and softer with each bounce. Then there is the whole issue with syncing things back up with the rest of the mix. Digital has none of this, allowing for some utterly bonkers levels of processing and 'impossible' sculpting.
I'm struggling to explain, so perhaps I mean kinda of a hard kicking bass, that isn't natural like a kick drum, but more like a synth bass, with grit and some strange dryness in the mids to make it cut through, what seems like, an overly mushy sound in general.
 

thunderchicken

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Yes! And it sounds exactly like it should be. Grungy-sludgy-stonery-metal that assaults the senses. Don't see any other way their music could sound like.
I disagree- it's one thing to talk about tone and style, and another entirely when the problem is actual microphone clipping. The latest albums sound like they were mixed in a living room by a deaf person. The songwriting and musicianship are excellent, the mastering and mixing are simply awful.

Smoke or Fire had the same problem- levels were set too high on mics and then pushed farther in mixing and mastering. Great songs, terrible SQ. I expect distortion from punk and metal guitars and bass and generally love the sound. What I'm complaining about is microphone clipping and pushing levels up in post. It's not a style thing, it's a series of mistakes by an amateur tech.

Torche is a good example- they have that sludgy sound but it's well done and well-recorded.
 
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