[JaeYoon]

I enjoy your posts too amirm. You have done a good job of explaining your position.

You know it's just that when I read posts like someone linked from Rob Watts, about the benefits 200-300db of noise level (and why stop there, why not 500db?), I choke. When you do the (basic) math, and realize what is being said/written, well hopefully you can see why some are dubious when it gets into the 120db range. The numbers really don't convey the extremes being talked about.

Hey! if we can do 1,100 DB, we could make a giant black hole!

 

[RRod]

He is not charging us either way. He is being paid by the record label to do his "mastering" no matter what as they need that kind of down conversion for lossy encoding and CD. I made no argument that something would be cheaper if left at 24 bits.

What the music industry needs to do is take high-resolution music as a serious offering, not left to random mastering engineer to do whatever. They need to put quality standards in place and create that as a new deliverable. After all, in a market where they are struggling to make any profit, they have found an audience that is willing to pay more for high-resolution music. In the case of smaller independent labels this is happening, sans the hygiene that is lacking at times. Major record labels need to do the same thing. Once there, Gregorio wouldn't be making decisions for us to dumb down the dynamic range and bandwidth of audio for us. He will do as the label tells him to do. He can even charge more for "mastering for high-res" as another format. Why he is complaining in that context is beyond me. Mastering engineers should celebrate plurality of multiple formats!

And oh, the best thing they can do is disallow loudness compression for high-res music.

No, dither is already added to it in the process of conversion to 16 bits, reducing its dynamic range. I can't put that genie back in the bottle. As you say, since my output is 24 bit converter, no one should attempt to convert it down to 16 before I even get my hands on it. If what you say is what should happen, then he should be getting 16 bits just the same and not: "Typically 4 stems truncated to 24 or 32 bit float." What is good for him, is good for us. We perform signal processing on the content and for the same reason he and his software maker need more bit depth, we do too.

I'm perfectly fine with a world of various masters, I just don't think one should cost more than the other. Or do you disagree?

 

[gregorio]

[1] And no, this is not "my" data. It is data from a luminary in the industry, who is ex president of AES, and AES Fellow and has written multiple detailed papers for the Journal of AES.
[2] How much research have you read on this topic anyway?
[2a] I have yet to see anything quoted from literature from any of you.
[3] Until such time that you actually spend some time and a bit of money to learn about this topic from top signal processing and psychoacoustics experts in our industry, you are going to be in the dark on the core thesis and logic.
[4] They think their job is to take studio masters and reduce it to size and fidelity for us.
[5] Well, with advent of high-resolution music we no longer need that.
[6] We perform signal processing on the content and for the same reason he and his software maker need more bit depth, we do too.

1. Oh, I didn't realise it was from a luminary ex-president of the AES. In that case, the noise floor must be that of an empty hall with no musicians or audience in it, I take it all back! Going to be a bit tricky to get any dynamic range with no musicians or people in the concert hall but what do I know, I'm not an ex-president of the AES! BTW, do you want that empty hall recording delivered in 16, 24, 32 or 64bit? 768kHz? How about with a TYPICAL anti-imaging filter with a 500Hz transition band and rectangular dither?
2. A fair amount. Also, I once went to a concert hall with some audience and musicians in it, doesn't that count as research? Obviously not for you or an ex-president of the AES but not even for us poor normal people! Question: If I'd switched the HVAC off, thrown everyone out of the concert hall, so it was just me, then would it have counted as research or would I have to become an ex-president of the AES first?
2a. Ah, someone else who can't read.
3. Actually I have but until such time that you actually spend some time contextualising that core thesis and logic you're going to remain in the dark about what is "real life" and what actually happens in the recording industry! First hint (AGAIN), the noise floor of an empty hall with no musicians in it, is not what happens in a real life performance or recording, not even a real life performance of 4:33!!
4. I've obvious got my job wrong, I always thought my job was to take a final mix and make a studio master, not take a studio master and trash it, silly me, I better ring my clients and let them know. The size and fidelity of my masters are dictated by my clients; the artists, producers and/or record labels. Jeez amirm don't you even know the very basics of music creation roles? Maybe an ex-president of the AES needs to publish a paper for you?
5. You no longer need what, mixes, studio masters? Did the ex-president of the AES tell you that?
6. The reason I need that bit depth is because I'm often running 200+ audio channels, 50 or so EQ's, 10 or 20 compressors, 8 or more convolution reverbs and probably 100 plugins in total. That's what you're doing is it? That's why you need what I've got is it? And you need 20dB of headroom do you?

Honestly amirm, I started out having quite a bit of respect for you but now you're painting yourself into the corner of the nuttiest, most ignorant of audiophile extremists!

Why are you arguing for LoFi on a HiFi forum exactly

Err, for the same reason that you never learned to read.

G

 

[JaeYoon]

I feel like @gregorio is getting fired upon for being an audio engineer/producer/mixer.

I mean, if people put up a slogan that recording industry is doing horrible things to recording, it seems that someone has to be put to blame, and audio engineers are unfortunately the goat chosen to be in full display of the Anti-Loudness War and 16 bit chopped up mangledness.
We'd have to think about what the client/industry and why they want that, which is to sell music the way they wanted it done.

I know it's easy get a mob up against Audio engineers, but before we hang someone, we need to think about this before we spit fire on them.

 

[Cutestudio]

I feel like @gregorio is getting fired upon for being an audio engineer/producer/mixer.

An interesting view, but I rather think he's simply meeting 'consumer resistance' to his continued assertions that we are an ignorant minority not worth listening to and should be grateful that we pay for over-compressed and clipped music because it's stylistic/artistic, creative and compression is necessary so how can we complain when there is too much?

However it's a very positive thread for me because now I totally understand the attitudes of the people in the industry and the reason that sound quality is so dire, will continue to be dire, and we should really expect no improvement. We give our views, they not only refuse to listen but try to lecture us about how wrong we are, so the situation continues as before. Such is life.

This continues the fun of searching for those early CD masters and classic vinyl which is in many ways a lot more satisfying than buying rubbish with real money. By many orders of magnitude in fact. Which is what I've been doing for years now, my yearly CD bill fell sharply in around 2004 when I realised the CD waveforms were all mangled, and has all been diverted to 2nd hand eBay buys around the world and market stalls where for £2 one can find hidden gold, mastered by people smart enough not to clip the signal too badly so I can call it CD Quality.

The future of music is not with record companies anyway, The Market adapts and the internet enables, artists will start to realise that Simply Red had a point all those years ago: why give record companies all the power and money when you can just sell music yourself? There are various routes opening up that allow artists to keep far more control over the process and maintain far closer links with their customers. The smart bands will then not renew their contracts and start selling direct, as I think is already happening: middle man(gler) not required

 

[gregorio]

now I totally understand the attitudes of the people in the industry

You couldn't even accurately read (let alone understand) what one person in the industry posted and from that you "totally understand the attitudes of the people in the industry". Ignorance is bliss and delusion seems to be a lot of fun too! Anyway now that you've apparently got whatever it was you trolled this thread for, there's no need for you to post to it any more is there?

G

 

[TheSonicTruth]

If I ask a random person at work "what do you do for music?", the answer is likely to be "I just wear whatever earbuds come with my iPhone, but I only really listen on the subway in to work, and I usually just stream whatever is on." Music that requires dedicated, low-background listening isn't the norm any more. Are you saying you have a real reason to deny this as reality?

It is the reality. That's why I keep original issue CDs of most classic artists in my collection. I'm just fighting to keep furher damage from being inflicted to that pre-1990 legacy material trying to make it as loud as more recent releases. It's consumers and the artists that are destroying the sound of recorded music, not the engineers - both by demanding loudness and by buying it! smh

 

[TheSonicTruth]

^ this. And it has nothing to do with the use of compression in mixes either.



Music is engineered to suit the listening conditions of the audience for a particular type of music. That's why a Wagner opera is engineered different than Justin Bieber. If you'd like to know what a normal living room looks and sounds like, go out in the world and look at some. Any person in the entertainment business knows that if you don't know your audience, you risk losing them. We pay attention to how the stuff is going to be played by our target audience.

I really don't understand the people who say that sound quality is terrible across the board now. I hear great sounding recordings all the time. My shelves are packed with current releases that sound better than anything that came before. There are a bunch of lousy recordings too. It's a crap shoot and it's always been a crap shoot. For every remaster that sounds like crap, there's one that sounds much better than previous releases. The other day I got Fleetwood Mac's Tusk in 5.1. I remember when the album came out I bought it on vinyl. It sounded as thick as sludge. The CD didn't sound much better. This new 5.1 remaster sounds fantastic, like a totally different album. You roll the dice and you find out where they land. If you are concerned about sound quality, read reviews before you buy. If a remaster sounds horrible, return it to the store for a refund. I buy at Amazon. I have done that in the past. They refund your money with no questions.

I wouldn't expect k-pop to be mixed and mastered the same as jazz. There's a functionality that they're aiming for in their choices. I've always been puzzled by audiophiles that listen to lousy music. What's the point of buying a $50 gold plated CD of a crappy 70s dinosaur rock album? Why do people buy pristine sounding Mannheim Steamroller albums? No one actually *likes* Mannheim Steamroller! It's extremely irritating music.

The goal is a good mix that presents good music well. Those two go hand in hand. The best mixes are the ones that achieve a synthesis with the style of the music and the functionality of how it will be listened to. An approach that works for one type of music doesn't necessarily suit another. But complaining about mainstream pop not having dynamics is like ordering lake trout and complaining that it tastes like fish.

"And it has nothing to do with the use of
compression in mixes either."

Above a certain amount of compression, it DOES. Below that, compression helps tame a shaky vocal, or gives a drum track some 'beef'. Above that, dynamic compression, especially when combined with peak limiting and makeup gain to boost what's left back up to a tenth below full-scale, becomes a volume control, whether you care to admit it or not. And the relatively highly dynamic '70s era pop and rock CD transfers of 25-30 years ago sound just fine to me in my car via earbuds on a plane without the help of a squasher or buzzcut, whether or not you care to believe it.



"...CD of a crappy 70s dinosaur rock album?"

Born during or after Reagan, eh bigshot? smFh....

 

[reginalb]

...It is data from a luminary in the industry, who is ex president of AES, and AES Fellow and has written multiple detailed papers for the Journal of AES. Because you haven't read the research you are not understanding the methodology...

As I'm not an audio engineer or researcher, I've read the posts in your discussion without replying. But I'm sick of your constant appeals to authority. We get it, you think you're smarter than everyone else, but you just come across to me as incredibly arrogant. I've read your articles, and they aren't remotely compelling. I get it, I should spend a bunch of money and read all the AES papers they're based on, but there really isn't a point in doing that for me, so other people providing summaries of the information is interesting to me, I do enjoy it. But I wish you could present your arguments with a bit less arrogance and logical fallacy.

In another thread, you talked about how bad you feel about someone who runs some hi-res audio thingy because of people like bigshot and gregorio. Perhaps you should feel bad for people that get ripped off by snake oil peddlers pushing audio equipment and formats without any practical benefit. Sure, I could train myself to hear artifacts in music that's been compressed in a lossy format, and I could crank up quiet sections of my 16-bit music to hear the noise floor then complain about it. Or I could care about music. You know, the actual thing that these formats and equipment are supposed to be reproducing?

I get that this is the sound science section, and I actually find your posts interesting, but I really wish you could drop the appeals to authority and act in a bit less arrogant manner.

 

[TheSonicTruth]

First of all, you can leave the sample rate alone. Why are you converting that to 44.1?

Second, what is the format of the stereo mix you are getting to "master?"

Why are they converting to 16/44.1 for delivery? Because those specs more than adequately take care of what humans can hear.

If you can hear a difference between the same identical recording mastered at 24/192 vs 16/44.1, then either 1. you have golden ears or 2. something was *done* to the higher res version to make it sound different.

And no, I do not believe audio has to be compressed and or limited to 'fit' into 16/44.1, even though I actually have had engineers(on GearSlutz and rec.audio.pro) tell me that that final peak limiting to give the waveform that 'flat top' look is considered 'proper mastering', as opposed to leaving peaks ragged(intact!) to within 2dB of 0dBfs - as seen on waveform representations of most CD audio before the mid-'90s.

 

[old tech]

Mastering is for a format. As I have said over and over again, we no longer have a format called "CD" that requires you to crunch things for that. We don't need you to reduce the bit depth to 16 and sample rate to 44.1. Give us the choice of what is upstream about that. Why would insist on doing that conversion for us??? There will always be the option of 16/44.1 for many people who want that. Just provide the true "masters" that are above that specific rate.

Amirm, some of your comments appear to conflate bit depth/sample rates with mastering choices. The two are not necessarily related.

I doesn’t appear that big shot, gregorio or others are championing 16/44 over higher res formats but rather the obvious, that the higher res formats in themselves do not offer any improvement in consumer sound quality given that 16/44 already reproduces music within the bounds of human hearing. Any extension of bit depth or frequency range is moot.

The real issue is the mastering choices with regards to new music or remasters of the old. It is pointless blaming the engineers for the loudness wars as they need to serve their clients to make a living. It is their clients you should be directing your frustrations.

While no doubt there are some engineers who actually like producing loud, brickwalled music, the majority don’t. Many do not sit there idle with regard to this issue either. For example, Ian Sheppard, the guy you mocked for producing DR8 music, started the loudness day movement. Bob Ludwig, tries to educate his (artist) clients, usually by providing more than one version of a mastering so they can hear what a more dynamic production sounds like, but if they still choose the brickwalled version what can he do? Go on strike? It is better to try an influence the paying clients from within than from the outside.

As far as formats go, no one is suggesting that we should all stick with 16/44 even though that is all we need for accurate reproduction. I do needle drops of LPs and have done so for decades. Most of them are 16/44 because I used to make CDs from them. These days I leave them at 24/96 because I rarely listen to CDs, so it is more around practicality rather than a misplaced belief that 24/96 is going to sound better.

The bottom line is that we should be agitating for better mastering regardless of whether the recording is going to be on CD (remember that CDs still account for the majority of new physical format sales, easily eclipsing LPs and hi res downloads) or another format. Focusing on whether the file is 16/44 or hi res is irrelevant.

 

[TheSonicTruth]

Amirm, some of your comments appear to conflate bit depth/sample rates with mastering choices. The two are not necessarily related.

I doesn’t appear that big shot, gregorio or others are championing 16/44 over higher res formats but rather the obvious, that the higher res formats in themselves do not offer any improvement in consumer sound quality given that 16/44 already reproduces music within the bounds of human hearing. Any extension of bit depth or frequency range is moot.

The real issue is the mastering choices with regards to new music or remasters of the old. It is pointless blaming the engineers for the loudness wars as they need to serve their clients to make a living. It is their clients you should be directing your frustrations.

While no doubt there are some engineers who actually like producing loud, brickwalled music, the majority don’t. Many do not sit there idle with regard to this issue either. For example, Ian Sheppard, the guy you mocked for producing DR8 music, started the loudness day movement. Bob Ludwig, tries to educate his (artist) clients, usually by providing more than one version of a mastering so they can hear what a more dynamic production sounds like, but if they still choose the brickwalled version what can he do? Go on strike? It is better to try an influence the paying clients from within than from the outside.

As far as formats go, no one is suggesting that we should all stick with 16/44 even though that is all we need for accurate reproduction. I do needle drops of LPs and have done so for decades. Most of them are 16/44 because I used to make CDs from them. These days I leave them at 24/96 because I rarely listen to CDs, so it is more around practicality rather than a misplaced belief that 24/96 is going to sound better.

The bottom line is that we should be agitating for better mastering regardless of whether the recording is going to be on CD (remember that CDs still account for the majority of new physical format sales, easily eclipsing LPs and hi res downloads) or another format. Focusing on whether the file is 16/44 or hi res is irrelevant.

"Focusing on whether the file is 16/44
or hi res is irrelevant."

I mentioned 16/44 vs high res only in the context that the mastering matters more, sonically.

 

[old tech]

Can you point to the research that indicates only a tiny minority care about the sound quality?
Additionally can you qualify that research with the method of asking, because when I play a well mastered track to anyone young they suddenly realise what they were missing and become interested in better quality. Is this one reason why the record industry suppresses decent masters today?

Research is unnecessary, the market has spoken.

If interest in audiophile quality masterings were significant there would be a significant market catering to that demand. After all, music is a competitive business and how many labels wouldn’t participate in a market of high demand for such masterings, particularly if they can increase their margins. It just wouldn't make any commercial sense to "suppress decent masters".

But if you want evidence, consider the state of the market for audiophile releases. Most specialist labels do not sell large quantities to justify expanding their production. Indeed many go broke or just don’t see it as worth continuing, such as DCC or MFSL.

Of course some of those specialist labels still exist, eg MFSL, Speaker’s Corner etc but they are bit players with no impact on mass consumers. I’m willing to bet that if you sampled 1000 music consumers you’d be lucky to find one that has heard of any of these labels.

The music industry is in retreat but the reasons for its decline is far more complicated than “bad” mastering, indeed, “bad” mastering is not even a significant factor given the low demand for audiophile music. A much bigger issue is that the entertainment market is far broader than what it was back in heyday when choices were limited to the home stereo, TV with limited channels and cinema. Now we have video on demand, internet, cable TV and so on.

While two channel hi fi is becoming a thing of the past, the part that surprises me a bit is why the music industry hasn’t evolved into high fidelity, multi-channel music formats with video – like blu ray video. Sure there is some of that available but very little product offerings to have broad appeal.

 

[TheSonicTruth]

Research is unnecessary, the market has spoken.

If interest in audiophile quality masterings were significant there would be a significant market catering to that demand. After all, music is a competitive business and how many labels wouldn’t participate in a market of high demand for such masterings, particularly if they can increase their margins. It just wouldn't make any commercial sense to "suppress decent masters".

But if you want evidence, consider the state of the market for audiophile releases. Most specialist labels do not sell large quantities to justify expanding their production. Indeed many go broke or just don’t see it as worth continuing, such as DCC or MFSL.

Of course some of those specialist labels still exist, eg MFSL, Speaker’s Corner etc but they are bit players with no impact on mass consumers. I’m willing to bet that if you sampled 1000 music consumers you’d be lucky to find one that has heard of any of these labels.

The music industry is in retreat but the reasons for its decline is far more complicated than “bad” mastering, indeed, “bad” mastering is not even a significant factor given the low demand for audiophile music. A much bigger issue is that the entertainment market is far broader than what it was back in heyday when choices were limited to the home stereo, TV with limited channels and cinema. Now we have video on demand, internet, cable TV and so on.

While two channel hi fi is becoming a thing of the past, the part that surprises me a bit is why the music industry hasn’t evolved into high fidelity, multi-channel music formats with video – like blu ray video. Sure there is some of that available but very little product offerings to have broad appeal.

Why would I want 5/6/7.1 channels of dynamically bereft, brickwall limited owl vomit?


" A much bigger issue is that the
entertainment market is far broader
than what it was back in heyday when
choices were limited to the home stereo,
TV with limited channels and cinema.
Now we have video on demand,
internet, cable TV and so on."

Yes, more sources for information and entertainment, but of compromised production quality. Sad!

 

[bigshot]

Below that, compression helps tame a shaky vocal, or gives a drum track some 'beef'.

OK! There we go. That wasn't so painful was it? By the way, it isn't to tame shaky vocals. It's to make the enunciation of the lyrics clear.

Born during or after Reagan, eh bigshot? smFh....

I'm 58 years old. My tastes in music have improved and broadened since I was 17.