Am I wrong? It seems like there's one significant thing left that could improve audio playback for everyone

[Hatto]

Let me add one more thing:

Our perception is limited with our auditory system. So before you start fretting over any audio quality concerns, I suggest you to:
1. Get your ears cleaned (literally).
2. Run a quick and dirty hearing test with a frquency sweep audio file (you can even use youtube) to measure the limits of your hearing.

You might be suprised to find out what you can't even hear.

 

[Cbdb2]

Back in the 80s, a pretty huge portion of the music-listening public was enjoying their music on walkman cassette players and boom boxes. I know I was. Compared to modern IEMs with music sourced digitally from modern devices (yes, even via bluetooth) those cassette machines were a joke. Really...they simply were. Wow, flutter, loss of high frequencies...cassette tapes/players were shit. I get enormously better sound from a $20 pair of earbuds (yes, earbuds...not iems) and my Iphone now than I got from any of the walkmans I owned in the 80s. So if the problem with current recording is that it's being made to sound good on current bluetooth IEMs, then I'd hate to think of what was being done to recordings in the 80s...or 70s or 60s to make them sound good on that equipment.

Music from the 50s to the 80s was mixed to sound good on the radio, the car radio. Than in the 80s it was mixed for TV, music videos. Thats what sold records.
Not really. Music was mixed/mastered to sound good on everything. The reason studios have multiple speaker systems including the 3" Auratones. The loudness wars are producer driven. Very few engineers agree with it but if you want to eat you have to do it.

 

[Hatto]

Music from the 50s to the 80s was mixed to sound good on the radio, the car radio. Than in the 80s it was mixed for TV, music videos. Thats what sold records.

So, video killed the radio star?

 

[Cbdb2]

When a video for one song cost the artist 3 times what it cost to produce the entire album (which wasnt cheap in $200 (80s dollar) an hour studios) lots of talent never made it past there first album. Sad times for music makers.

 

[Sgt. Ear Ache]

Music from the 50s to the 80s was mixed to sound good on the radio, the car radio. Than in the 80s it was mixed for TV, music videos. Thats what sold records.
Not really. Music was mixed/mastered to sound good on everything. The reason studios have multiple speaker systems including the 3" Auratones. The loudness wars are producer driven. Very few engineers agree with it but if you want to eat you have to do it.

I think you've missed the point (or maybe I misunderstood your point?). I was responding to a comment suggesting that Bluetooth IEMs "sound better with loud highly-compressed recordings." There was an implied criticism of current Bluetooth IEMs - as though they are "lesser" forms of listening equipment. My point is that Bluetooth IEMs are capable of sounding better with every recording than most of the (portable) gear the general public was listening to 15-40 years ago. The fact that louder, more compressed recordings have become a predominant reality in music recording isn't a result of "trying to sound good on crappy Bluetooth iems." It's because the industry figured out that as a general rule, the music-listening public likes louder more compressed recordings.

 

[Cbdb2]

They are generalizing IEMs. Theres some great souding ones. With IEMs there is usualy more BG noise than your living room, and thats when compression helps the most. Similar to listening to music while driving. The AM radio is where the loudness wars started in the 50s? DJs would get payola to turn up your song, louder sold records and we were off to the races.

 

[Sgt. Ear Ache]

Your generalizing IEMs. Theres good and bad. With IEMs there is us usualy more BG noise than your living room, and thats when compression helps the most. Similar to listening to music while driving. The AM radio is where the loudness wars started in the 50s? DJs would get payola to turn up your song, louder sold records and we were off to the races.

Sorry...I can't tell if you're agreeing with me or disagreeing. It sounds like both. Yes, louder sells better. That's the point. It's got nothing really to do with the specific gear used for playback.

 

[henologist]

I wrote this while listening to the following record on Spotify through my Bose QuietComfort 35. AAC Bluetooth. No EQ.

View attachment 266987

I wouldn't worry about the DR rating of the music you listen to much. It doesn't even measure the thing it says it's measuring, the loudness range of the music, instead it's a ratio of RMS/peak volume aka crest factor. Sound On Sound did a good overview of the difference between crest factor and loudness range here, and here's a (thin, in my opinion) rebuttal. There's much more to the quality of a master than can be reduced to a decontextualized two-digit number, but some people like being overly reductive, especially if it helps their argument and their reputation. I'd assume most mastering engineers feel the same way, explaining why DR measurements never took off. That said, it's probably got some usefulness for comparing different masters of the same material at a glance or for music that should have limited compression if any, like orchestral recordings and jazz.

 

[Achim1812]

IEM, with the M for Monitor, and Bluetooth together? Paradoxum!

 

[Mr. Widget]

I sometimes think about "what's next" for the advancement of audio playback and my mind keeps going back to one thing.
I'm forfeiting my audiophile membership card until there's media that incentivises me to join the club again. I'll stay on the forums tho, that's still fun.

Hmmm... I can't agree. I find so much music that simply sounds splendid. I don't need ATMOS or even multi-channel to keep my musical enjoyment alive and I don't hear a difference between DSD, Hi Rez, MQA, and good old lossless Redbook, but there are so many wonderful recordings available to us I see the musical landscape as a source of great joy.

Sure, there are those contemporary recordings that sound positively crushed, but most of that is not music I care about anyway.

 

[Sal1950]

The Secret.

Hummm? Not mine.

foobar2000 1.6 / Dynamic Range Meter 1.1.1
log date: 2021-11-15 10:36:21

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Analyzed: Alan Parsons / The Secret (MCH DVDA 5.1 48k RT)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DR Peak RMS Duration Track
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DR16 -0.19 dB -22.51 dB 5:48 01-The Sorcerer´s Apprentice
DR13 -0.16 dB -17.57 dB 3:23 02-Miracle
DR14 -0.17 dB -17.98 dB 3:56 03-As Lights Fall
DR11 -0.15 dB -14.14 dB 4:42 04-One Note Symphony
DR13 -0.16 dB -19.18 dB 5:05 05-Sometimes
DR14 -0.15 dB -19.68 dB 5:28 06-Soirée Fantastique
DR14 -0.21 dB -20.14 dB 3:45 07-Fly To Me
DR14 -0.17 dB -19.90 dB 4:01 08-Requiem
DR12 -0.18 dB -18.06 dB 4:04 09-Years of Glory
DR15 -0.18 dB -18.78 dB 3:35 10-The Limelight fades away
DR14 -0.18 dB -17.59 dB 4:36 11-I Can't Get There From Here
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Number of tracks: 11
Official DR value: DR14

Samplerate: 48000 Hz
Channels: 6
Bits per sample: 24
Bitrate: 4266 kbps
Codec: FLAC
================================================================================

 

[goat76]

It's just integrated abomination of ReplayGain v 2.0 that all the streaming services are adopting quickly.
I said abomination as it's based on cut down EBU R128/ITU BS.1770 standard to - 18 LUFS (from - 23 LUFS).

I think it's great that a music format finally got a loudness normalization requirement built into the specs as a standard. If that specification is not met for a Dolby Atmos production it will be rejected, which means there's no longer any point at all in not using all that headroom available for the dynamic range, otherwise, it will just be a quiet mix.

-18 LUFS is also enough headroom to let most music releases keep the raw mixed dynamic range intact, and I don't think album releases with even lower LUFS numbers than that have any ambition to maximize the loudness anyway.

 

[Angsty]

Does remastering really improve old recordings? I thought a remaster meant "tweak the EQ a little here and there, bump up the overall volume, increase the price by 15%, include a bonus track for the customers who see through this scheme." Would rather just have the original.

Original pressings can be very pricey in good condition. I love the relative value of a Blue Note Tone Poet release that can sound better than a less than pristine original pressing at a fraction of the price of a NM copy.

I’ve also had the experience of hearing differences between compared remasters of the same album on CD. The first digital release is not always the best mastering.

 

[fpitas]

Does remastering really improve old recordings? I thought a remaster meant "tweak the EQ a little here and there, bump up the overall volume, increase the price by 15%, include a bonus track for the customers who see through this scheme." Would rather just have the original.

Very occasionally a remaster will improve a recording. But it sure seems to be hit or miss.

 

[Angsty]

I don’t care to invest in Atmos for the same reason as I didn’t invest in DVD Audio - I don’t think it will be around long. The network effects of LP and CD are durably strong; not so much for most digital formats.

 

[mhardy6647]

I don’t care to invest in Atmos for the same reason as I didn’t invest in DVD Audio - I don’t think it will be around long. The network effects of LP and CD are durably strong; not so much for most digital formats.

Yup. Thus is the way of the present in which we find ourselves. Even if the concept has legs, the execution will most likely change rapidly, steadily, and incompatibly.
The funny thing is that the driver for such churn probably isn't the market nor the "arc of technology", but rather the for-profit companies ("service providers") who need to show investors constant growth in revenues against a relatively stable world population. Economic growth ain't so easy to come by no mo' -- without playing games.

 

[robwpdx]

Listen to more live music, ideally acoustic, and ideally in a good hall. That is the baseline.

Compression and any number of deliberate distortion plug-ins on released recordings has become ubiquitous on vocals, drums, and bass. Same with any big PA show. On a recording it is likely the whole thing will be run through bus compression.

BTW, there are reports Apple is really promoting Dolby ATMOS and spatial audio, which requires recording and mastering engineers to learn a new skill and makes recording the individual tracks much harder.

 

[Sal1950]

Does remastering really improve old recordings? I thought a remaster meant "tweak the EQ a little here and there, bump up the overall volume, increase the price by 15%, include a bonus track for the customers who see through this scheme." Would rather just have the original.

Just depends on who does the remastering.
Some like Steven Wilson's give you a SOTA product with the best sound capable from the master tapes.
Some are just a money grab, compressed to death and sound worse than the original.
Like most things in life, you need to do a bit of homework so not to get scammed.

 

[Sal1950]

I don’t care to invest in Atmos for the same reason as I didn’t invest in DVD Audio - I don’t think it will be around long. The network effects of LP and CD are durably strong; not so much for most digital formats.

I think your wrong, Atmos isn't going anywhere.
Whatever the outcome will be in multich music, it is now a firmly locked in format for HT movies-video.
Without debating the sound quality, the fact that Atmos is scalable from 2ch playback to God knows
how many channels, it's gotten rapid acceptance by the labels and seeing the money-time-etc being
put into remastering older releases, I believe it will be around for a long time on the music scene also.

Besides, by not investing, you're only cheating yourself from enjoying a great immersive listening experience.
How many times over the years have you heard the same things said about investing in quad, 5.1 or any multich playback?
Who would have been the loser if you never invested in stereo gear and stayed mono?
YMMV

 

[ozzy9832001]

I think the mastering/mixing process has changed too. I remember listening to a ton of hair metal when I was younger. It still sounds good on cheap equipment, but to me, it sounds horribly imbalanced compared to anything more modern. Bass is virtually non existent on most of it. Now, on more modern music, I hear the bass and on even decent equipment it sounds really good.

Maybe my tastes have changed too. But 70/80's music always sounded "thin" to me.