[wijnands]

Just looked up a piece of Donald Byrd to share on my facebook account. Found it on youtube but listening to it.. and then a few other tracks...
Am I going mental or is youtube now adding extra bass to audio?

 

[WraithApe]

It's well known that YouTube uses lossy data compression on the audio stream of uploaded videos, but AFAIK it doesn't use dynamic range compression. However, there is some suggestion that it uses another kind of loudness normalization which results in older, quieter recordings being made louder on playback - perhaps accounting for a perceived increase in bass due to the overall increase in loudness. No suggestion that it does any additional processing to the audio signal though, such as EQing bass frequencies up.

 

[karljs]

In addition to what WraithApe already mentioned, there's an unfortunate trend on youtube where people will rip the audio from someone else's videos and rehost them, presumably to try to get attention for their channel or to monetize views.  This could potentially result in multiple lossy re-encodings (although I don't know that it necessarily means that).

 

[wijnands]

thanks guys. I suspect it's the loudness bothering me