I thought dither reduced DR because of a higher noise floor, but I could be mixed up between actual vs perceived. But even with 96db, there’s still plenty of range left to damage hearing with, or perhaps even enjoy.
Have you ever had to put your hands to your head to protect yourself from the orchestra? Probably not. An orchestra is not a rock concert (~100db peak) so to assume you need any more than 96db to depict an orchestra isn’t correct. I’d assume a typical orchestra peaks around 80db. Factor in the ambient noise floor of every shuffle, cough, breath, and rustle of paper that must atleast make it to 30db, you’re back at a 50db range again between noise floor and max. As has already been point out, the DR doesn’t necessarily mean lowest SPL vs highest SPL, so you could very well be experiencing close to a 40 or 50db range on some classical CDs with much lower indicated DR. The problem is that there are so many different factors you are trying to compare with live vs reproduced music, that pinning it all down on DR isn't accurate. Of course a live symphony is better than reproduced, but reproducing the DR isn’t really the limiting factor. For one thing, most music halls have incredible acoustics and reproducing that, especially with mic limitations, I think is the hard part. Not to mention reproducing entire sections of instruments vs highly localized woofers. But I don’t find myself hating the DR of most classical music albums. I find I very much enjoying them actually. Reproduced music will never match live music, but I do not think of redbook standard as a wasted format.
Personally, I can enjoy a DR as low as 8 or so, but really like to stay in the teens. Anything too close to twenty is too much I think. Some movies mastering with DR of 30db I just hate. I could go on for days about how annoying that is, but just Google “always have to change volume on movies” and you’ll find other pissed off people like me. At a certain point, more DR really doesn’t help. Like I said before, it’s a really narrow range that's optimal. And once you have to go sprinting to your remote with your ears on your head for protection, I think the mastering engineer failed.
Edit: I think it's relevant to point out that you were only disappointed by the DR of your classical albums once you looked at a number. They sounded like 20 or 30db to you, and only until you looked at that number did your feelings change. Isn't listening the important part? If it sounded good, and dynamic, what meaning does the number hold on its own? The DR meter is not a benchmarking utility.
The difference between a typical rock concert and a symphony is that the symphony doesn't *stay* at those high levels for very long. Its average SPL is perhaps not even half that of a rock concert. Also it's not only about how loud either can get, but how low either goes.
Except maybe for a ballad or two, the rocker will stay up there, in average volume terms, for most of its duration. Average SPL might be as high as 100dB, and rarely dip below 85.
Conversely, a classical symphony might crescendo at 90dBSPL, but average around 50-60. It's that *difference* in loudness I'm talking about, and the difference in loudness within a live symphony performance is normally much greater than that at a live rock performance. Accordingly, the range of loudness in a classical recording should not be reduced to the range of loudness within a rock or pop recording, as measured in DR, on a format that can handle both loudness ranges very well.
I just find it interesting that among the older discs(1990 and earlier release) in my CD collection, DR12 seems to be the typical result that I get via Foobar2000, irrespective of genre(!) There are a couple outliers: "Brothers in Arms"(DR15), and a Chic compilation(DR14) - both of which clock higher than my classical CDs(most of which released in the 1980s). That would seem to indicate that more compression was used during transfer of that legacy material to CD than we might have suspected, even before the late 1990s "remastering" era.
Yes, DR is only a number, a snapshot, but it seems to hint that the symphonies in my collection might have had their 'wings clipped' so to speak, during mastering, rather aggressively compared to what is done with typically less dynamic pop or rock albums on CD.
In other words, if a symphony or jazz ensemble is more dynamic than a rock or pop concert, in person, then that should be, as much as is reasonable, the case with CDs of those genres. That's all I'm trying to say. Of course it's important that these classical performances "translate" reasonably on a wide range of listening devices(from iPods to 100watt per channel home rigs), but my final, ultimate priority is
realism.
