[TheSonicTruth]

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.



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

SMH! I'm only 47. Why are so many folks who are older than me making such millennial statements?? Guess I'm really conservative culturally: 'Put on some Who and Van Halen and put a six-pack in the fridge for when Mike and Jim and their wives come over!' Politically I'm a different story, LOL not for discussion here.

 

[pinnahertz]

Everyone here wishes loudness war never existed, but less "loud" music makes less money for the record companies and money runs the world, not fidelity.

I emphatically disagree with that! Within the commercial pop music business there is a distorted perception that loud music is more desirable, but it has never been proven to sell more music. What has been proven is that people listen to the music they want to with astounding general disregard for quality. In these days where higher quality than ever is possible, that's the real puzzler.

 

[pinnahertz]

I'm not following why the need for a compressor in the car stereo translates to the need to bake it into the source material. Why ruin it for everyone when not ruining it is easier? Pioneer etc. could just do it in the stereo for the car.

Well, when it comes to classical music, it's NOT baked in, so it has to happen in the car or car-destiined chain somewhere. Processing classical music for high-noise environment listening is darn difficult, and quite aggressive, so it absolutely would be rejected in that market for any other listening. So far I have yet to see a car stereo with actual dynamics processing in it. Link me up to one if you know about it.

In fact the last cheap Pioneer car radio I bought had a special setting to improve the sound of compressed music so it's hardly going to be difficult for them to add compression, they just replace their complex algorithm with a very simple one.

There's been an attempt by several manufacturers to improve the sound of compressed music with some sort of algorithm-based DSP. However, that's not dynamic compression they're talking about, that's the kind of lossy compression found in .mp3 files, etc. Technically, "compression" is the wrong term for that, it's bit-rate reduction with a lossy codec. But compression is easy and stuck, hence your confusion.

The problem with baking the damage into the material is that most compression is extremely difficult to reverse, so by selling the same clipped and over compressed rubbish to everyone guarantees that it won't quite sound right on anything, whereas the best qualified to compress music for a car is a company like Pioneer, not some talentless hack at the record company ruining the output for everyone.

I get the idea here, and sort of agree. You can't reverse loudness processing for many reasons, mostly you don't actually know how it's been applied, and if applied on a track level, you can't isolate that track ever again to reprocess it. Yes, baking it in is a one-way street. However, what you get out of anything is what the producer wanted you to get, which may or may not be garbage depending on the music and processing. I don't agree that it was a talentless hack that applied it. If you had ever attempted loudness processing yourself you'd know how actually difficult it is to do well. And a certainly don't believe Pioneer is a company capable of properly processing any type of music for all listening environments. There are companies that have specialized in audio processing for 40 years that I might turn to for that, perhaps with the end result being a chip or something, but otherwise processing is not simple to do well without side effects.

I note that the narrative is sticking with compression and ignoring clipping. Tracks like that in the Elephunk album from the Black Eyed Peas and many others are compressed sure, but also contain many perfectly flat clips, some over 200 samples long. Clipping is common is digital music, some clips are quite rough and there's a gray area between some severe brick wall limiting and clipping but the effect is the same and is a dishonest way of selling a product that is marketed with the pretence of CD quality.

200 samples at 44.kHz is about 4ms long, which frankly, depending on the degree, is just barely audible as being clipped. You don't have a handle on how clipping can be used, and when it becomes audible or not. It's time vs frequency vs degree, and not as easy as just peeping at a waveform, blowing it up and saying in horror "See! It's Clipped!". There actually can be inaudible clipping. But I'm not advocating clipping, just explaining it.

I don't see what's dishonest about selling your art. The CD represents that art flawlessly. The artistic choices were made, and the CD reproduces it. If you don't like the choices, return the CD and ask for a refund.

I agree the loudness war ruins a lot of good audio quality, but you keep pointing fingers at things you don't understand. I get you're mad at the audio world! You just don't understand what you're mad at.

Greg, Pizza, Biggs, fascinating replies but you entirely miss the point, sorry. I thought you would. Why are you arguing for LoFi on a HiFi forum exactly, is there something we should know?

I'm not arguing in favor of LoFi, I'm trying to help you understand what's going on, and why. You should do yourself a favor and stop zooming in on waveforms, and just listen. I'm sure you'll still hear loudness war processing, but you're not doing yourself any favors by magnifying the inaudible.
For the record, I oppose the kind of processing done on pop music today. I feel it's unnecessary and gets in the way of musical enjoyment. If I had my choice I'd prefer a whole lot less. But I do also understand two important things: 1. Artistic purpose - and processing and EQ and a whole lot of other functions come under that heading. You can't take away the palette! And 2. The real war is the result of a general distortion of values and reality, but it's not the engineers making the call, it's above them - the guys producing the music and writing the check. You've labeled the engineers as frauds, dishonest, talentless hacks...and on and on. You just have no idea what a real fraudulent dishonest talentless hack would do. I promise, the results would be far worse.

 

[ev13wt]

I emphatically disagree with that! Within the commercial pop music business there is a distorted perception that loud music is more desirable, but it has never been proven to sell more music. What has been proven is that people listen to the music they want to with astounding general disregard for quality. In these days where higher quality than ever is possible, that's the real puzzler.

Yup. I listenened to the top 25 yesterday. At least half is recorded really bad. Doesn't become better when you turn it up either. After that session, I thought my system is broken. Then I played "Morph the cat" at 96dB and the world was ok again.

 

[gregorio]

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.

No, that's way over-simplified to the point of being almost totally nonsense. There is no "certain amount of compression", it ALL depends on the track, the genre and other variables. Furthermore, you cannot compare the rock/pop of the '70's with the music today in simple terms of compression, because the music today is NOT 70's pop/rock! Modern R&B, Drum & Bass, EDM, Techno, Hardcore, Trance, Hip Hop, Death Metal, etc., these and others are the music of this millenium and even though pop/rock of the '70's required significant compression to "beef up the drum track" and "tame a shaky vocal", most modern genres require massive amounts of compression to create the drum like and other sounds which actually define these genres/sub-genres. In other words, you can't reduce the use of very heavy compression to the levels of the 1970's without taking away what makes today's genres, those genres in the first place! Therefore, some of the statements by cutestudio and this one of amirm's "And oh, the best thing they can do is disallow loudness compression for high-res music." are effectively the statements of Nazi's! They are effectively saying that most/all of the modern popular music genres should be disallowed. Now I don't think they are actually Nazi's, I just think they are so ignorant of how modern popular music genres are created that they don't realise they're effectively being Nazis.

Current professional music engineers and artists are obviously creating music for today, not for the 1970's, so of course they are going to look at the likes of cutestudio and amirm as some sort of nazi dinosaurs, stuck in a 1970's - 1980's time warp. That's OK though, it's always been that way, even Elvis in the 1950's was banned and slammed by nazi dinosaurs, so we almost take it as a compliment! I get that you don't like the modern popular genres and that's fine but by the same token, today's artists have the right to express themselves and their generation's culture however they want and no one is forcing you to buy it. If we take say Adele's "25", it's ranked as "bad" by the DR database, with a score of just DR 6. If it were down to me and if I were mixing or mastering it for my own critical listening pleasure, I'd have applied a fair bit less compression but it's won all the top awards (Grammys, Brits, etc.), garnered great critical acclaim and broken all kinds of historical sales records, which is even more impressive at a time when the album is supposed to be dead!

G

 

[Cutestudio]

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.

There is a chicken and egg situation here that you do not account for:
For instance if the average man on the street wants a genuine 96/24khz - or even an unclipped 44.1/16 copy of Sarah McLachlan's 'Solace' CD because they wanted to hear a version without 200 sample long clips in it, what does he do?
He can complain on a forum like this - (this IS a market force BTW known as 'demand') - and be told that he's wrong.
he can ask the record company and they'll tell him he's a tiny minority and there is no market for non mangled music.

But you are right about the market having spoken, but it has spoken for higher quality already:
Instead of complaining to the manglers what he does is go to Apple - not a record company but a large successful tech who does have a mangle free product known as 'Mastered For iTunes' which will hopefully have the album on that. Then he'll buy that version, helping to turn Apple in to a $1Tn cap company in the process.

Apple has basically found that mangling is unpopular and proven the manglers on here that they are wrong, music sounds better un-mangled and there is a market for it.
For the ostrich mimics - the manglers here's an explanation of Mastered For iTiunes:

https://www.justmastering.com/article-masteredforitunes.php
https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2012/02/24/147379760/what-mastered-for-itunes-really-means

So in a way we have already won the argument against clipped, over-compressed 16bit, the market has already spoken and been answered and one of the world's most successful companies has given us a route to bypass the manglers.
It would have been nice to have the option of buying a CD of Merchantable Quality rather than the fraudulent mangled mess of today. But given the huge amount of hostility to the idea on - a HiFi forum - I can see this will never happen. I hoe the record companies enjoy going bust, their decision to drop quality entirely has already resulting in their output have to shift to 12 year old singers and the whining mating calls of lovesick teenagers with auto-tune but I don't see that as a sustainable business model.

I still find it amusing how people on a HiFi forum campaign, twist, invent, obfuscate and tirelessly argue for LoFi, it's amazing.
Perhaps the average mumsnet contributor is enjoying better music on their iPhone that we are, even with our £400 USB cables sending the mangled mess into our poor DACS... LOL

 

[ev13wt]

They start making more money when they reject loudness as the sole criterion, in favor of fidelity, and start to sell more albums and downloads.

Nothing wrong with their art, just the way it is packaged/mastered.

Nope, they won't make more money - because only a tiny niche market cares about sound quality.

The typical consumer and mixdown are for era buds, BT speakers and Cellphones. Not much choice there for dynamic masterng, really. Users would not hear half the songs...

 

[Cutestudio]

No, that's way over-simplified to the point of being almost totally nonsense. There is no "certain amount of compression", it ALL depends on the track, the genre and other variables. Furthermore, you cannot compare the rock/pop of the '70's with the music today in simple terms of compression, because the music today is NOT 70's pop/rock!

Actually we can compare what we like, over-compression and clipping is more related to the year rather than style. The lie of 'it's a different era' is undone by looking at remasters, even Floyd's Final Cut and ABBA have been mangled in all the re-issues. That's the very SAME recording, the original is good quality, the more recent re-mangles are all mangles. So dies the argument about style.

today's artists have the right to express themselves and their generation's culture however they want and no one is forcing you to buy it.

The 'no one's forcing you to buy it' argument. What's up with that? What if we want to buy it but without clipping and over-compression? Isn't our money any good?

If we take say Adele's "25", it's ranked as "bad" by the DR database, with a score of just DR 6. If it were down to me and if I were mixing or mastering it for my own critical listening pleasure, I'd have applied a fair bit less compression but it's won all the top awards (Grammys, Brits, etc.), garnered great critical acclaim and broken all kinds of historical sales records, which is even more impressive at a time when the album is supposed to be dead!
G

Yes, lets take Adele.
In the top quote you incorrectly claim that we can't compare stuff (despite the litany of shoddy remangles that are now infamous for mangling and shunned by the HiFi community), so lets compare Adele to Adele. This is easy as she conveniently numbers her albums, take a look at the overall mangling of Adele's 19, Adele's 21 and Adele's 25. You can clearly see that the mangling on 19 is of it's time and that 21 is mangled worse. Then look at 25, its mangled even worse than 21.

So here you have provided a classic example of a single artist and genre who dates and tracks the trend to mangle records worse with each passing year.

Adele's 19: rather badly mangled
Adele's 21: mangled worse than 19
Adele's 25: mangled worse than 21

The mangling of music also coincides with the loss of interest in HiFi by the general public.
Once HiFi was something to aspire to and everyone I knew wanted a decent HiFi. It was big business and in every shopping center and mall.
Now no one cares because of one very simple fact: modern music sounds just as bad on HiFi as it does in the car, radio and MP3 player.
That's why the music industry has become a circus of 'The voice', BGT etc, because the mangling has removed all of the dynamic interest from the music. Without dynamics and with generic instruments and autotune what you are left with is a product of a) a whining teen, b) soppy PC lyrics, c) a youtube video.
So why would any millennial want a HiFi today? - there's no use for it.

So yes, Adele: Good example of the rot setting in, a good boast of 'not a single peak left unclipped'.

 

[ev13wt]

I listen to tons of classical music in the car… using a compressor!

Sorry bud, but we need to take away your audiophile card

 

[ev13wt]

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.

"Most music sound just as crappy on CD as it would in the DAW". CD IS high resolution, but 95% of songs don't care.

Maybe we need a standard of "no clipping = high quality" as a start. It won't fix anything, but it sure is a start. I do think that (listening to the stuff my "home studio beat makers make) many of the original samples they use are already cipped. I listenend to the top 25 yesterday - 23 songs where clipped or simply terribly recorded!

Had to listen to morph the cat on 44.1/16 after all that high res CRAP. Ahhhhh - much better sound quality than all those MQA high res song of Adele...

 

[71 dB]

So in a way we have already won the argument against clipped, over-compressed 16bit, the market has already spoken and been answered and one of the world's most successful companies has given us a route to bypass the manglers.
It would have been nice to have the option of buying a CD of Merchantable Quality rather than the fraudulent mangled mess of today. But given the huge amount of hostility to the idea on - a HiFi forum - I can see this will never happen. I hoe the record companies enjoy going bust, their decision to drop quality entirely has already resulting in their output have to shift to 12 year old singers and the whining mating calls of lovesick teenagers with auto-tune but I don't see that as a sustainable business model.

I still find it amusing how people on a HiFi forum campaign, twist, invent, obfuscate and tirelessly argue for LoFi, it's amazing.
Perhaps the average mumsnet contributor is enjoying better music on their iPhone that we are, even with our £400 USB cables sending the mangled mess into our poor DACS... LOL

Why do you think anyone here is for "mangled music"? The number of bits has nothing to do with loudness war and. CDs could have 100 bits and an obscenely high sampling rate and we'd still have DR6 pop. Maybe your favorite music is always mangled on CD, but mine isn't, because only a small part of my favorite music is commercial. The more they play the music on radio, the more it's mangled. If they don't play it on radio (most music is never played on radio) it's probably not mangled. It just means you have to find the music yourself, because you don't hear it on radio. There's tons of un-mangled CDs out there and if you don't find them… …well that's your problem, not my problem.

Also, this is not about how you get your music. This about the number of bits and sampling rates. 16/44.1 is not a synonym of CD and CD is not a synonym of mangling. When I say 16/44.1 is enough, it means 16/44.1 is enough and nothing else. It definitely doesn't mean I support loudness war.

 

[TheSonicTruth]

Actually we can compare what we like, over-compression and clipping is more related to the year rather than style. The lie of 'it's a different era' is undone by looking at remasters, even Floyd's Final Cut and ABBA have been mangled in all the re-issues. That's the very SAME recording, the original is good quality, the more recent re-mangles are all mangles. So dies the argument about style.


The 'no one's forcing you to buy it' argument. What's up with that? What if we want to buy it but without clipping and over-compression? Isn't our money any good?


Yes, lets take Adele.
In the top quote you incorrectly claim that we can't compare stuff (despite the litany of shoddy remangles that are now infamous for mangling and shunned by the HiFi community), so lets compare Adele to Adele. This is easy as she conveniently numbers her albums, take a look at the overall mangling of Adele's 19, Adele's 21 and Adele's 25. You can clearly see that the mangling on 19 is of it's time and that 21 is mangled worse. Then look at 25, its mangled even worse than 21.

So here you have provided a classic example of a single artist and genre who dates and tracks the trend to mangle records worse with each passing year.

Adele's 19: rather badly mangled
Adele's 21: mangled worse than 19
Adele's 25: mangled worse than 21

The mangling of music also coincides with the loss of interest in HiFi by the general public.
Once HiFi was something to aspire to and everyone I knew wanted a decent HiFi. It was big business and in every shopping center and mall.
Now no one cares because of one very simple fact: modern music sounds just as bad on HiFi as it does in the car, radio and MP3 player.
That's why the music industry has become a circus of 'The voice', BGT etc, because the mangling has removed all of the dynamic interest from the music. Without dynamics and with generic instruments and autotune what you are left with is a product of a) a whining teen, b) soppy PC lyrics, c) a youtube video.
So why would any millennial want a HiFi today? - there's no use for it.

So yes, Adele: Good example of the rot setting in, a good boast of 'not a single peak left unclipped'.

Cutestudio: See how both gregorio and bigshot condemn the truth as "nonsense"? Sounds just like what's coming out of the White House recently! There's only way to handle the likes of gregorio and bigshot: It begins with the letter 'I' and contains six letters. I'm going to do it, and I suggest you, and others fighting the good fight, also take heed. I'm tired of everything I say on here being called nonsense or ridiculous when those people have no way of justifying something, and will no longer waste any keystrokes on these individuals. I did it with Ian Shepherd, and will do it with others. Let them talk to walls on here.

 

[71 dB]

The 'no one's forcing you to buy it' argument. What's up with that? What if we want to buy it but without clipping and over-compression? Isn't our money any good?

Hate to break it to you Cutestudio, but our money is good only occationally. I'd like to upgrade my 1998-2005 J-horror movies DVD collection to Blu-ray, but only a few of these movies are out and some of them with Italian or Polish subtitles or whatever, not even English! Finnish subtitles would be nice, but unrealistic. So, yeah, my money isn't that good in this respect. I'd also like to have Good Wife tv show (one of the most underrated shows of the last decade imo) on Blu-ray, but they offer DVD only! They can keep them, it's not year 2001 anymore. We live in capitalism. If there's not enough demand there is not enough demand. If you want to get rid of your money then I recommend to do some discovering to find new things to spend your money on. Life will be pain in the ass if you assume everything revolves around you. It doesn't. It revolves around the 100 richest people in the world, people who own almost everything on this planet. You can thank capitalism for that.

 

[TheSonicTruth]

Sorry bud, but we need to take away your audiophile card

Rrod is onto something, only I've been suggesting it for the last five years: Put a barebones, basic compression codec in mobile audio gear(car, boat hi-fi, and as an app available across phone and player platforms. Better yet, a loudness codec as Apple has already done with SoundCheck for iTunes.

Right next to the 'bass, treble, balance' controls in the menus. Everything would play back at a predetermined RMS or loudness algorithm, and there would be no justification for artists & labels to demand the 'squashing' or limiting of anything any more!

 

[ev13wt]

Rrod is onto something, only I've been suggesting it for the last five years: Put a barebones, basic compression codec in mobile audio gear(car, boat hi-fi, and as an app available across phone and player platforms. Better yet, a loudness codec as Apple has already done with SoundCheck for iTunes.

Right next to the 'bass, treble, balance' controls in the menus. Everything would play back at a predetermined RMS or loudness algorithm, and there would be no justification for artists & labels to demand the 'squashing' or limiting of anything any more!

Sure sounds like you are on to something there!

I use a compressor for watching movies - I hate the dynamic range they put in there (vocals vs. music/effects) First you are straining to hear them talk over the crunch of chips, after the next scene the neighbors are whatsapping me (its just the bass)...