[71 dB]

The only bad one for me was the Alice In Chains Greatest Hits SACD.

SACD has practically two advantages (compared to CD):

1) Multichannel support
2) Recording and production for SACD releases are often carefully done meaning even the stereo downmixed SACD/CD versions on the disc sound great.

That's about it. If you are re-realising old stereophonic recordings on stereo only SACD you don't have these benefits. Of course you can make a new awesome sounding stereo remaster of the old stuff and have a good sounding disc, but you don't need SACD for that. CD is fine. Only if you create a new multichannel mix of old material does it make sense to release it on SACD. I don't know how Alice in Chains Greatest Hits is. Not my type of music. As a general rule, classical music on SACD is awesome thanks to new multichannel recordings done in places of natural acoustics.

There is no way that DR8 will sound good, specially with Rock or Classical. Maybe DR10 will sound better than DR13 if mastered well.

Well, nobody in their right mind would reduce the dynamic range of a classical music recording into DR8. Meanwhile, modern pop music uses small dynamic range skilfully (dynamic compression is crucial part of sound design) and DR6 can sound pretty dynamic. The same DR6 applied to a symphony would give comical results.

DR8-12 are what will depend on the genre, but less than DR8 is objectively horrible no matter what genre it is, and sadly modern recrodings have dynamic ranges of 4-5 and some I saw even 2! It's impossible to be a non-classical audiophile these days.

As I mentioned above, modern pop music uses dynamic compression in the sound design and mixing cleverly so that it works at lower DR values. Commercial music tends to be more compressed while less commercial, more "artsy" genres of music tend to offer bigger DR values. Classical music is not the only option, but one has to dig deeper beyond the commercial surface.

 

[bigshot]

Do any of us know how those dynamic range numbers are assigned? It seems to me that there is a lot more to dynamics than can be reduced to a number. And there are situations in music where something dynamic might not hit the algorithm right to reflect it. Judging dynamics is something that would be hard to measure without subjective judgement I would think.

 

[theaudiologist1]

1) Multichannel support

I actually don't care much for multichannel since

1) I'm a headphone audiophile.
2) The extracted 5.1 DSD files are HUGE. (8GB+ for an album in DSD64)
3) I don't know a headphone DAC/AMP that can do 5.1.
4) The LFE channel is completely useless on headphones

So I guess I'm part of the <1% who cares about the stereo layer.

As I mentioned above, modern pop music uses dynamic compression in the sound design and mixing cleverly so that it works at lower DR values. Commercial music tends to be more compressed while less commercial, more "artsy" genres of music tend to offer bigger DR values. Classical music is not the only option, but one has to dig deeper beyond the commercial surface.

My problem is that even for rock even remasters of old songs are brickwalled to death and sound terrible. It's one thing to compress it a bit it's another to brickwall it. All the CD masters from the 80s up to the mid 90s had good DR scores. Only since then we've gotten terrible results. All the albums that sound good with a low DR sound good in spite of, not because of, the low DR.

2) Recording and production for SACD releases are often carefully done meaning even the stereo downmixed SACD/CD versions on the disc sound great.

wait the stereo versions are downmixes of the 5.1? You can't do downmixing in the DSD realm. That means...

 

[71 dB]

I actually don't care much for multichannel since

1) I'm a headphone audiophile.
2) The extracted 5.1 DSD files are HUGE. (8GB+ for an album in DSD64)
3) I don't know a headphone DAC/AMP that can do 5.1.
4) The LFE channel is completely useless on headphones

So I guess I'm part of the <1% who cares about the stereo layer.

So why care about SACD at all?

My problem is that even for rock even remasters of old songs are brickwalled to death and sound terrible. It's one thing to compress it a bit it's another to brickwall it. All the CD masters from the 80s up to the mid 90s had good DR scores. Only since then we've gotten terrible results. All the albums that sound good with a low DR sound good in spite of, not because of, the low DR.

Get the old releases cheap/used. People have "upgraded" their CDs with the newer brickwalled ones so the old ones are looking for a new home.

wait the stereo versions are downmixes of the 5.1? You can't do downmixing in the DSD realm. That means...

Of course they are. They record in DSD format, then transform (integrate) it into PCM to "do the magic that you can't do to DSD" including making the stereo downmixes and the go back to DSD for the SACD disc.

 

[sander99]

3) I don't know a headphone DAC/AMP that can do 5.1.

A very convincing binaural simulation of loudspeakers in a room is possible with DSP. But for good results you need personalisation to match your hrtf (head related transfer function).

Two examples:

Smyth Realiser A16 (has DACs and amps but you can also just feed the processed digital signal to your own DACs and amps).
It can use headtracking to keep the virtual speakers at fixed positions. It can decode dolby atmos up to 16 or 24 (newer version) channels.

Impulcifer (free software by @jaakkopasanen, but you will need in-ear-mics) to do measurements and create a personal preset that can be used with other software, for example HeSuVi (also free). With this you can do 7.1 channels max. and no headtracking.
https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/Impulcifer
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/recording-impulse-responses-for-speaker-virtualization.890719/

Both these solutions require measurements of real speakers in a room (and of the headphones that you want to use) with in-ear-mics.

 

[bigshot]

It's fine if you can't do multichannel. My point was that when they did a multichannel mix they also cleaned up the stereo versions. That is the master used for your LP release. You say that the CD and streaming versions of the Doors albums aren't as good as the collectors' LPs. That isn't true. The exact same remaster you have is available on Apple Music streaming, as well as SACD and CD in an audibly transparent format (LPs are not transparent.)

It's not just the Doors catalog that you are wrong about. Your blanket assessment of CDs as being "brick walled to death" just isn't true. Some are, some sound fantastic. It's actually gotten better since the 2000s. But we've gone over and over that before and you insist on being a broken record of misinformation. It's the only subject you ever talk about and you never listen to anything anyone else says. Tiresome.

In addition to the Smyth Realiser, Apple is working on developing Dolby Atmos for AirPod headphones. They currently have both the spatial audio and remastered stereo versions of the Doors albums in Apple Music. Spatial audio isn't terribly spatial yet, but the Doors tracks in the Apple streaming service sound fantastic.

 

[danadam]

Do any of us know how those dynamic range numbers are assigned?

The original algorithm (called TT DR Offline Meter) is described here: https://web.archive.org/web/2018091....de/sites/default/files/Measuring DR ENv3.pdf
The new one (called MAAT DROffline) is not revealed, AFAIK.

 

[bigshot]

Math isn't my strongest subject, but I'm figuring that the amount of time the peak occupies has a big impact on the rating. A classical piece may have a huge dynamic range from low level to a big crescendo, but if the work consists mostly of low level, it would rank as a low dynamic number. In something like Dark Side of the Moon, individual songs would have completely different dynamic ratings, and an overall rating for the whole album would be averaged so much, you might not know if there really are wide peaks and valleys in there. I'm guessing this scale works best with fairly constant dynamics distributed equally throughout a whole album side, or with albums that have long stretches of uninterrupted peak and long stretches of uninterrupted quiet.

In short, this is fine as a ballpark figure, but individual circumstances of the way the peaks and valleys are laid out in time can make it vary a lot. One album rated as a six might sound much more dynamic than a different album rated as a six. So you can't necessarily say that a six is more dynamic than a five with different albums, but you can with two releases of the same album that measure that way. Am I right?

 

[71 dB]

Math isn't my strongest subject, but I'm figuring that the amount of time the peak occupies has a big impact on the rating. A classical piece may have a huge dynamic range from low level to a big crescendo, but if the work consists mostly of low level, it would rank as a low dynamic number. In something like Dark Side of the Moon, individual songs would have completely different dynamic ratings, and an overall rating for the whole album would be averaged so much, you might not know if there really are wide peaks and valleys in there. I'm guessing this scale works best with fairly constant dynamics distributed equally throughout a whole album side, or with albums that have long stretches of uninterrupted peak and long stretches of uninterrupted quiet.

In short, this is fine as a ballpark figure, but individual circumstances of the way the peaks and valleys are laid out in time can make it vary a lot. One album rated as a six might sound much more dynamic than a different album rated as a six. So you can't necessarily say that a six is more dynamic than a five with different albums, but you can with two releases of the same album that measure that way. Am I right?

The music is cut into 3 seconds long blocks. The the rms and peak values are calculated for each block. Histograms of the rms and peak values on dB scale are built. Then the rms sum of the 20 % largest rms values are compared to the 2nd largest peak value, and this gives the DR value for each channel. The final DR value is the average of channel DR values rounded up to integer value. So, this 20 % rule does affect things.

 

[bigshot]

How does that relate to different kinds of music? Does a 6 for 1812 Overture with a huge cannon blast peak far above the music sound like the same dynamics as a 6 heavy metal song that is loud through most of the track?

 

[71 dB]

How does that relate to different kinds of music? Does a 6 for 1812 Overture with a huge cannon blast peak far above the music sound like the same dynamics as a 6 heavy metal song that is loud through most of the track?

If the cannon blast happen inside one 3 second frame it only affects the largest peak. If it happen between two frames, the other frame become the 2nd largest and the cannon affects DR.

 

[bigshot]

Hmmm... And I'm assuming that a single song on an album can have a quite different rating than the album as a whole.

 

[71 dB]

Hmmm... And I'm assuming that a single song on an album can have a quite different rating than the album as a whole.

Yes, of course if the album has been made that way. Just as the tempo of the songs can vary a lot. Some artists may want to have commercial radio-friendly tracks (Typically lower DR value) to sell the album (they even have a sticker on the album cover saying "includes the hits songs..."), but also more artistic and less commercial tracks (typically larger DR value).

 

[bigshot]

I'm guessing that professional engineers don't use a semi-arbitrary rating system like this to master the dynamic ranges. They do it by ear creatively, and I bet different parts of the music have different dynamic ranges by design.

 

[71 dB]

I'm guessing that professional engineers don't use a semi-arbitrary rating system like this to master the dynamic ranges. They do it by ear creatively, and I bet different parts of the music have different dynamic ranges by design.

That's what the professional engineers would do if they had creative freedom, but often they don't have. The clients want "LOUD" mixes, because for most people louder means better.