[amirm]

Amirm, do you know where the distortion was introduced? Was it caused by the encoder when the youtube video was uploaded?

No, as I said I heard the distortion in the original album I bought. Indeed the levels overall seem lower in Youtube and you can't hear the full (distorted) effect that I am hearing with the uncompressed original.

As to where it is, I see that where the meter pegs zero, is where the problem is so my money is that the analog EQ and compressor that Brian Lucey used is a lot at fault.

 

[bigshot]

No, as I said I heard the distortion in the original album I bought

Then it's probably recorded into the music. Nothing to be done about it.

 

[Niouke]

A track I like, and was shocked by the low DR score (no so much as she features drake on the album). I'm seriously doubtful of DR as a measure for quality music, or quality mastering in any case. These guys are wasting their time.

 

[Strangelove424]

Low DR does not necessarily mean loud and obnoxious. I went to sleep last night listening to Spotify relaxation playlists, and when they'd play a dynamic track I got really aggravated because I wanted calming, steady music. Something like "strings for sleep" really won't have a very high dynamic range at all. It won't have a high level either, but the point is you pick the mastering for the job, not the mastering that suits a theoretical number. People assume low DR=Nirvana, but low DR=lullaby music too.

I think I should stick this in my sig for a while: http://productionadvice.co.uk/its-all-about-great-sound/

 

[71 dB]

Sure, they should chase the money to put food on the table. But then don't come here and tell us that folks shouldn't charge more than 10 cents for a DAC or else we are being "ripped off." I got ripped off to the tune of $15 for that Ani DiFranco album. But no, let's complain about audiophiles. They are fools for buying expensive audio gears but somehow are not for buying over compressed music???

That is why we have this discussion. And the same one I was having with that mastering engineering bragging about how he tries to do good for his clients:

I wonder what I am doing here. What a waste of time

 

[bigshot]

It certainly is easy to see who's actually recorded music and who just thinks about doing it!

 

[Don Hills]

... Red Hot Chili Peppers' Californication has some amazingly distorted stuff on it, and it doesn't sound deliberate. I'm told that they recorded it that way.

They did indeed. There's a lesson in that album that seems to have been forgotten by many artists, though. It was composed and performed with that extreme compression in mind. Everything exists in its own space so when it gets crushed together the various parts don't stomp on each other. Putting the parts in their own spaces can be done to a certain extent during mixing, but it's most effective if it was performed that way.

 

[RRod]

I'm certainly not saying all concert halls. I was quoting amirm and his figures for the Dallas Symphony hall. I've actually worked at that concert hall and spent quite a few enlightening days with the hall's designer (Russel Johnson) back in the early 1990's when Birmingham Symphony Hall (UK) opened, which he also designed and to the same principles as the Dallas hall. If you turn the HVAC off and you're the only person in there (as I have done) they are amazingly quiet, as they're full suspended double shell constructions with no expense spared on acoustics and isolation. However, they are outliers! Two of the best symphony halls on the planet and certainly two of the quietest, which is presumably why amirm chose it! The great old concert halls such as the Vienna Musicverein and Concertgebouw, which I've also been lucky enough to work in, have lovely acoustics but their noise isolation is nowhere near that of the Dallas and Birmingham and of course we've got other famous concert halls such as the Royal Albert Hall, which I've worked in extensively, which has neither good isolation nor good acoustics but it does have a great atmosphere with a full house!

So yes, in general I would agree with you but amirm certainly does like his outliers!!

G

This is Meyerson? If so, there are a whole boatload of recordings done in it. Perhaps a certain party could find one of those recordings and give us a peak measurement with the pot set to where he hears 16-bit errors.

 

[Darren G]

You are doing it AGAIN amirm!! Yes the noise floor of certain concert halls, when they are empty with the HVAC switched off, can be 0dBSPL in the critical band. Yes, peak levels of say an orchestra can exceed 120dBSPL. I'm NOT arguing with those figures, I'm arguing what should, to anyone without a specific agenda, be painfully obvious: How can you possibly equate the two? In an empty concert hall there is no symphony orchestra, so can that non-existent orchestra produce 120dBSPL or in fact any SPL/Dynamic range at all? In "real life", which you like to quote, the noise floor is the hall plus musicians, plus audience, plus HVAC and all that most certainly is not 0dBSPL or anywhere near it!! So what actually is the noise floor and what is it's spectral distribution? I don't know, I can only guess based on experience. As far as I'm aware there are no AES papers with peer reviewed studies on concert hall noise floors including audience, musicians and HVAC. You seem to be saying that as it's not been published by the AES therefore the noise generated by all the musicians, audience and HVAC doesn't exist, that we can't mention it here in the sound science forum and you can completely ignore it and effectively state we need more than 16bit to reproduce with high fidelity the dynamic range of an orchestral symphony concert which was performed with no orchestra and no audience!

I really loved this post. Actually one live event I was at a noisy neighbor was so loud that we couldn't enjoy the music, but even at a relatively quiet event, there is a lot of noise. We tune much of the noise out, and focus on the music, but the noise is part of the musical experience. Listening to a live concert no audience, no wind or hvac, would probably sound unnatural

 

[gregorio]

Let's remember that not only was this offered to general population but also given to us as a "high-resolution" album.
You really don't think they could do better for us as the audience and for $16? Didn't we get taken to the cleaners here?

I've already explained it to you and you just don't seem to be getting it; yes, you are getting taken to the cleaners, that's why I started this thread! There is no "high-resolution", the only "resolution" you are getting beyond 16/44 is a "ton of garbage". Yes, at one time and for a short time, there was some advantage to 96kHz but that time passed with the advent of upsampling processors and better filters and, 24 bits was useful only for the very large amount of headroom it provides, which is great for recording but pointless for distribution.

The loudness war is a different topic, although obviously, music being crushed into a smaller dynamic range obviates the need for more bits. Now, I don't object to going off topic and discussing mixing/mastering because if people concentrated on what is actually put in the container format rather than the container format itself, then a lot of the silliness would go away! ...

Oh, I used my ears first.
Here is the track from 1990s UP UP UP UP album ['Tis of Thee]: ... Delightful. ...
[Deferred Gratification] Listen to those drum kicks and tell me they are not distorted to pieces. ...
[Pacifist's Lament] Here is Ani with live recording of the track I analyzed before and not subjected to so called "mastering": ... Isn't that delightful?
So go ahead, use your ears, tell us if you disagree.

Yes, I do disagree! Not with the generalities but at your conclusions and where you lay the blame:

'Tis of Thee: There are a few slightly strange things going on here; the snare for example, which while giving plenty of room for the breathy vocals, the big reverb but overall low level I find a little odd and I'm not convinced with how they've dealt with the ride cymbal either. The guitar is also unusual, mid rangy, almost like a banjo but with bass. The kick is also unusual, with relatively little attack but a lot of resonance, almost like an orchestral bass drum but probably achieved with standard kick and a lot of compression. Together with the bass guitar we've got a very low end which could do with a bit of taming. None of this is really "wrong" per se, just that some of it could be better IMHO. Artistic choices obviously play a significant role and it's natural (and desirable) that my artistic choices are not the exact same as everyone else's.

Deferred Gratification: Agreed, this is in a different league, there're a lot of serious problems but the kick distortion is one of the least of them! It sounds quieter and more insipid than the previous track, indicating it's more compressed and has then been loudness normalised, a very good demonstration for why loudness normalisation could help end the loudness war. The snare is much more prominent in this mix, although it's got far less reverb, as does the vocal, presumably to achieve a feel of intimacy but it doesn't work, it just sounds flat and dead. There's a lot of fighting in the track between the vocals and other parts, so it sounds like they've EQ'ed the vocal to help cut through but all they've done is made it sound rather boxy, made even worse by the over applied compression, which presumably was done to cut through the guitar which is EQ differently but also compressed. In the process they've manage to kill the life out of both the vocal and the guitar! The bass guitar is over-done, although the very low freqs (roughly below about 40Hz and down) sound better tamed than on the previous track. The kick has also been poorly handled and not so intelligently compressed as the previous track. ... All mixes are somewhat of a compromise, instruments fight with each other and the vocals, due to overlapping freq ranges and solving this, getting separation, creating width and depth and trying to make the song sound like a coherent whole is always a challenge. But it seems as if they've lurched from one issue to the next, making it worse at each step. It's impossible to say how much damage was actually done by the mastering itself but some/many of the worse problems could only have been done in the mix! It's a real dogs dinner of a mix and if it were me, I'd bin it and start again. A fair bit of what's wrong could even be due to poor recording, in which case the best thing might be to bin the whole lot and start again from scratch! But it certainly appears that some of the problems in the mix have been caused by looking ahead to a loud finished master. And this is the problem which I've tried to explain previously, most of the recent music genres are designed from the ground up to be very heavily compressed, in fact, they don't work nearly as well without it but this type of folk rock is NOT one of those genres and trying to mix and master similarly loudly is a train wreck waiting to happen. For me, this is where we find the real casualties of the loudness war! Maybe I'm doing it a disservice and without the loudness normalisation it would be a lot less dead, still not a great mix though.

Pacifist's Lament: No, it's not delightful! It's generally sort of OK but there's relatively little musical dynamic range, the severe fret noise gets in the way of some of the vocals, there are a lot of spurious instrument and clothes rustling sounds in there, some dodgy reflections in places and an obvious problem at 1:50. We obviously don't have the "fighting" issues to deal with as far as bass, kick, brass, snare, cymbals, etc., because there aren't any. But hey, it's a live acoustic performance so we can somewhat overlook some of it's issues but that makes it a musically apples to oranges comparison!

So yes, I do disagree, I disagree with you throwing all the blame on the mastering, when there's so much wrong with the mix and maybe even the original recording. And, yes, I've used my ears but I've apparently used them quite differently to the way you have used yours. You highlighted the distorted kick, which to be honest is one of the least of that mix's many problems! And this is the point which bigshot is trying to make and to which you seem completely impervious because presumably there is not an AES paper on it!

G

 

[gregorio]

This is Meyerson? If so, there are a whole boatload of recordings done in it.

Yes, it was the Meyerson and I'm not surprised a lot of recordings are done there, it's probably much quieter than most orchestral sized commercial studios, plus it's got great acoustics! I remember having to deal with traffic rumble on a recording we'd done at Air Lyndhurst.

[1] We tune much of the noise out, and focus on the music, but the noise is part of the musical experience. [2] Listening to a live concert no audience, no wind or hvac, would probably sound unnatural

1. Yep, the "we tune much of the noise out and focus on the music" is an important point which I won't dwell on now, except to say that just recording the sound as it would hit the audience's ears is not how we make modern classical recordings and is why we use mic arrays and spot mics rather than a stereo pair direct to disk.
2. It's difficult to know for sure because that only occurs during rehearsals and during rehearsals the musicians perform differently, there's not the adrenaline and pressure of a live audience, plus the musicians will be physically saving themselves for the actual performance. However, there is typically one difference which is not difficult to isolate, with no audience present the acoustics are very different. In most concert halls the presence of hundreds/thousands of human bodies (the audience) does a great job of sound absorption. While they obviously make a fair bit of noise themselves, they do have an effect on the frequency spectrum and overall level of the music being performed but commonly, the most noticeable effect is in terms of reverb, the hall will sound much "wetter" without the audience. Sometimes this effect is so pronounced that the musicians actually have to change the way they play (more legato and sostenuto) to compensate for the drier acoustics when the audience is there.

G

 

[gregorio]

There's a lesson in that album that seems to have been forgotten by many artists, though. It was composed and performed with that extreme compression in mind.

That's what I've been trying to explain, all this blame on the mastering engineers is unwarranted. Unless the music is composed, structured/orchestrated and performed that way to start with, then it's always going to sound like crap if you then demand it's mastered to the same loudness as last year's EDM favourite! There really is no easy solution to all this which is acceptable to everyone. I'm assuming it was entirely unwhittingly but cutestudio posted a link to actually a very good article which I'd not seen before. If you haven't already read it, it's worth the time: https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/dynamic-range-loudness-war

G

 

[amirm]

I've already explained it to you and you just don't seem to be getting it; yes, you are getting taken to the cleaners, that's why I started this thread!

No, you are barking at the wrong tree in this thread. First, as I have shown over and over again, all of your assumptions in the OP are wrong. You did no research on your own to determine true dynamic range of live content and threshold of audibility, and never read any research on that topic either. Both of those let you to create a platform to shout about while at the same time damning the work of others who toiled to bring us the real information.

So on that front, the case is closed unless you have some research to put forward which has not yet occurred in 309 pages (i.e. I am not holding my breath).

The second part is that you are part of an industry that given any bit depth available, work hard to use as little of it as possible. That aims to please the stakeholders in your business, but not ours. As audiophiles, we have cried over and over again about this but you don't want to use the hours and hours spending here complaining about too much fidelity, toward something that could do us some good. You being critical to your industry, as much as I am do our industry would be the right thing to do. But then again, you rather not make enemies in your space. I get that. But the whole thing smells of being disingenuous. See what I quoted from Brian Lucey.

Back to your OP, we are really done. I have presented data that shows it be the case. We need to put a fork in it unless some new authoritative data is available which you have yet to present.

As it is, you have joined the many well meaning "objectivists" who go around spreading their own myths. If there is one thing I absolutely hate about being an objectivist, is this casual and superficial approach to audio science by the few vocal posts online. Gives the whole movement a really bad name and deters any moderate subjectivists to want to give us time of day let alone listen and adopt what we have to say.

 

[amirm]

I wonder what I am doing here. What a waste of time

What are you doing here if I may ask? Dumbing down fidelity? To what end? Are we advocating that DAC chip vendors go back to 16 bits? That they don't support sampling rates > 44.1?

I have asked this question a number of times and no answer is coming back.

As I have said, you all are fighting a war that occurred nearly 20 years ago. The battle of SACD and DVD-A ended and with it, should have been this anti-high res attitude. Today we are not facing a format war. We can download all of these formats and play them with total ease. There is no royalty whatsoever. Even if your DAC doesn't support high sampling rates, the software does the conversion on the fly.

So I will answer why you are here: to say something and to beat down a group of people who you hope are less technical than you. When that dynamic changes, we get a post like you made. Life is not so good when we can't throw numbers around and claim they are scientific when we have not shown one shred of reference to indicate them to be so. Let's substrat this SPL from that SPL and you need 10 bits! Go and tell your friends!!! Right...

 

[bigshot]

Hey Amirm. If you want respect from us, you need to offer us some respect. We aren't dumb here. And it isn't a good idea to speculate about our motives, because that will only lead to us to speculate why you are so bloody desperate to be seen as an authority that you are willing to go to disingenuous means to avoid admitting you can be wrong.

We're all willing to forgive and forget and move on here. But if you continue down the road you've been taking here, you'll end up exactly like you have at the other audio forums where you've used this technique. And that won't be productive for advertising your website.