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Loudness compression, loudness wars.. What exactly it is and why is it happening?

maty

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Loudness-war-NYT-20190207-2.jpg


Loudness-war-NYT-20190207-3.jpg


Loudness-war-NYT-20190207-4.jpg
 

maty

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...The war never really ended, but it has evolved. Streaming services like Spotify now normalize” the music’s output, so that we aren’t always adjusting our volume settings. This should lessen the incentive for mastering engineers to abuse compression. But according to Bob Ludwig, one of the industry’s pre-eminent mastering engineers (and a winner of Grammys for Best Engineered Album for artists like Alabama Shakes, Beck and Daft Punk), this hasn’t stopped mixing engineers from ladling on the loudness, reducing the dynamic range of the music even as the streaming normalization defeats their purpose. “The loudness war is worse than ever,” he recently told me. “It is a super-discouraging situation.”

If we consider the Grammy nominees in this year’s Best Record category as a representative cross section of today’s music, it is clear (as the sampling below shows) that aggressive compression is still the norm. But as in every era of music, there are exceptions. “Shallow” by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper displays a wider dynamic range than its competitors, a throwback — not just in theme, but also production value.
 

Juhazi

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You can download the free Audacity to do similar analysis as above. And multichannel recordings/mixes too!
https://www.audacityteam.org/

In the days of vinyl compressors etc. were used in much more hifi way! One problem is that various releases on CD and web have different mixing and mastering. Best CDs were produced in the '90s - go to flea markets!
 

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Sal1950

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If you want good sounding music you have to get the High Resolution stuff. Costs a bit more but worth it I've heard. o_O
Below the results of a search at the Dynamic Range Database for music from HDTracks and then listing them by the Avg DR
Screenshot at 2019-02-11 05-24-18.png
 

maty

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Off topic

Talking about vinyls, I listen to very good vinyl recordings with high/very high DR about 85%. The rest, SACD, CD and digital downloads. More of the vinyl are MINT and they do not need to be cleanned with soft (iZotope RX usually).

Almost 95%, with acoustic instruments and natural voices (without Autotune -vade retro satana).

One key with the vinyl is that the master is analog and not digital. If the master is digital the sound is worse, without life.

From the NYT article, comments:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/...-about-the-loudness-wars.html#permid=30514644

[ Bruce Rozenblit
Kansas City, MOFeb. 8
Times Pick

I'm an audio engineer. I don't make recordings, I make equipment. I can't listen to digital anymore, only vinyl. I have an original Rolling Stones album and the CD of it. The vinyl sounds like there is real band playing in my house and the digital sounds like it came out of a machine, which it did.

The recording industry has killed fidelity and replaced it with pumped up noise. It's horrible. People don't know what real music sounds like. Even in live venues, they compress it and pump it up and them play through horrible sounding class D amplifiers.

This excellent article provides graphical evidence of what many of us have known for years. The record companies are butchering music. They have taken the soul out of it. They have removed the need for a true high fidelity system which can reveal that emotional connection with the artist.

I have Johnny Cash's The Man Comes Around. It's glorious. Cash was involved with the mastering. He was old school and knew how to master. The new guys don't have a clue and the old timers are dying out. The music industry is doing to music what fast food did to cuisine. It's the lowest common denominator and it's all the same homogenize mediocrity.

They sell canned noise instead of artistic creativity. When my generation dies out, that will be the end of high quality music reproduction and the artistry it allows. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. The public has no idea of what they are missing. ]

Btw, some days before the article, in diyaudio.com xrk971 and I use the same analogy: fast food.
 
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Sal1950

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They sell canned noise instead of artistic creativity. When my generation dies out, that will be the end of high quality music reproduction and the artistry it allows. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. The public has no idea of what they are missing. ]
Right up there with the biggest bunch of Bull Shit I've ever read!
 

maty

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The musical taste is subjective but the recording quality is not.

The other simile that I used were the books. The best sellers, so badly drafted in its vast majority versus the good literature of yesteryear.

It is not worth reading modern books when there is such a large quantity of good literature. The same applies to my auditions.

Once there were weeks, months in the recording studio, now time is measured by hours. Hotel California would be unthinkable today.
 

Juhazi

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JJ Cale was interested in recording gear, so is Mark Knopfler. Cale's #5 is pretty high in DR scale! Source: Vinyl, 1979!
 

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ryanmh1

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There is something of a fix for this, and it works fairly well. I looked up an album in the DR database, and there was a "declipped" version listed with far more dynamic range. I couldn't find that album, but I did find a bunch of full albums that someone had just put up on Youtube, declipped. Here's a declipped version of a Metallica album that is horribly compressed in original form:
. Now compare to the original:
. The improvement is fairly clear. There's another one with some more processing here:
. Enter Sandman (the title track) is phenomenal.

How it does with something really nasty is even more impressive. There was a System of a Down album that was originally a DR6. It sounds terrible. The cymbals are just spray and splash lost in a sea of distortion. The declipped version actually sounds like music (if you can call SoaD music).
. You can actually hear the drumset as a drumset and not just noise. Dig up the original of this on Youtube and you'll see how impressive this really is. Look through the rest of this guy's channel (pretty much all metal) for more. I'm not familiar with most of the albums this guy put up, but the few I am sound far better than I've ever heard them.

If a power cord can somehow remove a "veil" from the sound, this removes more like a 6" thick wool blanket.

EDIT: When comparing tracks, don't forget to crank up your main volume control, and turn DOWN the original to the levels at least somewhat matched. That's when the difference becomes most apparent. It took me all of 15 minutes or so to hate this software since it makes you realize just how horribly molested and ruined a lot of what you've been listening to truly is. It's the same feeling you get if you've ever stripped a little bit of paint off of woodwork or furniture and realized it was all quartersawn oak or flame mahogany underneath. It's the work that lies ahead...
 
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Sal1950

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Phase Linear 1000 Auto Correlator
Ran one of these in my system thru the 1980s and quite a while later. They did a great job at replacing some lost dynamics and reducing surface noise from LP's of the time. Another ingenious device from Bob Carver. Well worth it's inclusion much of the time.
https://kenrockwell.com/audio/phase-linear/autocorrelator.htm
phase-linear-1000-autocorrelator_1_fac9cff0e38a433d3a3a8f1a8f39c264.jpg
 

Dro

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There is something of a fix for this, and it works fairly well. I looked up an album in the DR database, and there was a "declipped" version listed with far more dynamic range. I couldn't find that album, but I did find a bunch of full albums that someone had just put up on Youtube, declipped.
Interesting channel. Although most thing either sound undertweaked or overprocessed to me. I would rather make my own versions.
 

Habu

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tired_guru

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It is also worth mention that loudness war is strictly connected to mp3 era (around 1996 if I recall ?). Need for listening music in cars or portable players outside. Tracks with big dynamic range that used to be listen in house and sounded great, now was almost unlistenable outdoor, in car or public transportation when quiet parts took place. Dynamics peak was also not so appreciated there. It was more about being loud all the time to pierce through environment's noise and have fun.

For me the best albums still come from 80's and early 90's. Especially fusion-jazz, jazz, acoustic.

Of course when buying anything always check http://dr.loudness-war.info/ and look for year + label. There can be like a few edition of the same album starting from terrible one to amazing - with no clipping and with nice dynamic range. Don't waste your money and hearing on crap.

Here is something with impeccable dynamics on youtube:


Having a look at the level meters in audacity during whole track (mapped sound card output during youtube's playback to have a look at the dynamics), it has amazing dynamic range with quiet parts around -40dB, average about -20dB, with instant peaks up to -0.8dB (especially love the part @ 2:05):

index.php



This one is also amazing especially with jds atom + dt880 600ohms, still quite similar to T90 jubilee or HE-4 but prefer the cheapest one here (these headphones were born to play aggressive violin + piano, no matter the price, you can almost feel how the air around is accelerating and pushes on you at fraction of single second without hint of distortion, almost like in small music chamber listening acoustically without any processing):


This example shows how to lose loudness war:

 
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Juhazi

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Looks like you're right, I might have done a mistake when ripping the CD. I didn't find the Cd now. It could be someone else's mistake too, I use EAC and it's free databases for metadata.

By the way Timo Korhonen's mother is my second cousin!
 
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OP
Krunok

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Looks like you're right, I might have done a mistake when ripping the CD. I didn't find the Cd now. By the way Timo Korhonen's mother is my second cousin!

Wow, that's what I'm calling a nice coincidence! :)

P.S. I have that CD on my NAS, that's how I know. ;)
 

levimax

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The other day I picked up a couple of used CD's, I was surprised to see a "2019 Grammy Awards" CD used all ready but there it was, I was also pleasantly surprised to find an original "Japan for US" smooth case Steely Dan Gaucho CD (these were some of the original CD's made in Japan before US had production and because it was a new format they took a lot of care and many have excellent sound quality). Anyway attached are the DR reports for the two CD's. Loudness wars may have leveled off but at a very "loud" level. The fact that Taylor Swift is making DR3 recordings is not a good sign. To my ears, while I have been warming up to a lot of the songs on the Grammy's CD, and the sound quality is OK in my car, it is not pleasant on my home stereo (Tony Bennet and Dianna Krall sound OK.... like a breath of fresh air actually) .... the old Gaucho CD on the other hand is one of the best sounding CD's I have (and I have multiple versions on multiple formats of this title).
 

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