The Loudness War: Give It Up!

The fact is like it or not people don't care and usually vote against their own true interests. I know we can't discuss politics here but its the same thing. People think they are voting for good things but frequency they are not.

 

Au contraire, a lot of artists have chosen this path to get a nice slice of the cake... many of them were credited as mastering engineers as well as some producers,
a complete nonsense if you understand and realize the extension of the broken rules during the remastering's siege and BTW the producer is not the mastering engineer.
The army have a good word to describe a siege "Broken Arrow".

 

I'll agree with you there! There is the stereotype of the middle-aged audiophile who listened to the same old Diana Krall or Paul Simon recordings over and over, with a few classical or jazz albums thrown in. Many have kind of removed themselves as a target for the new/popular music market.

This is why Dr. Luke says he records and mixes at 16-bit, 44.1. Unfortunately, it shows.

I think you have the wrong idea about this one. Neil Young is directly competing with iTunes. Take a look at the Pono music site. They are getting the albums filed in, and it's the very same things you find on iTunes. The indie labels will follow. It will always be debatable about what people find interesting (you and I have had that argument before), but if you want to go after the major sales, you get the majors on board. Many young people like oldies, and that's what the majors own.

 

It's their music. They have veto power on the final master.

 

And with pono when albums are $5 people will buy but not in huge numbers for over $10 when it's the same album already purchased 5 or 6 times.

 

It's not the volume that borhers me with severe compression.

It's the fact that instruments doesnt sound realistic anymore. That thick in the middle sound.

Good luck getting some nice airy cymbals and a snare that really hit you out of a DR4. With new recording its like having the sound cut in half. In some cases only digital distortion left.

Cant stand it at all. Hoping for change.

 

Again, they have veto power over the mastering.

 

"Yeah, but what if you're listening on a good system?" audiophiles might ask. Well, chances are if you're listening to highly compressed music, you're not listening on a fancy hi-fi. As I hinted above, audiophiles generally don't listen to recent rock or hip-hop, any way. As Steve put it:
"We can clutch to our chests our 180-gram LPs of Dark Side of the Moon and Aja and reject all new music—a lot of folks my age checked out long ago, even before the late 1990s, when the Loudness Wars of ever-escalating compression crunch began. That's fine, but if you want to hear what's happening now, you'll have to accept that young bands aren't going to change their ways."

Well I disagree because this is also applied to remasters of classic recordings that the very people they say DON'T buy new stuff will buy. Me, I still listen to new bands and find it annoying.

"But if you really think that the mainstream recording industry is going to give up dynamic range compression -- or any of the other tricks in Pro Tools -- forget it. Look, I can feel your pain; I wish they'd never invented Auto-Tune. Face it, though: The recording industry is never going to change its ways to please perhaps 100,000 mostly middle-aged and elderly audiophiles. Nor should it."

How did he come to that idiotic conclusion? I should be forced to listen only to classical and jazz if I want dynamics? What an idiotic comment.

Should they cater to the 100,000 fans out there? Sure! Make the best sounding product possible.

It wouldn't be unheard of to have multiple mixes of the same work. 45's often featured dedicated mixes specific and different from the album versions. Why not do that with an album as well?

 

In a recent Rolling Stone article I read about Pono, the guy from Red Hot Chili Peppers was kind of wondering how many times he had to buy Aretha Franklin's "Respect" to get the best mastering.

 

That thick in the middle sound is just trying to reproduce that live experience of listening to "live" music played through a large PA system. Isn't the goal of hi-fi to reproduce that live experience?

 

But, then you have some people, like Lee Loughnane, from the band Chicago, who didn't care. He called the shots on the Rhino remasters of the band's catalog back in the early 2000s.

 

But, they went back to the original tapes for the Springsteen remasters, and they are using a new mastering process. let's just wait until they are actually on the street to critique whether this new process makes a difference.

 

lets all go buy crapy stero-system so the brickwalled music sounds better

 

I guess they will sound pretty sweet. The originals were not so great.

 

You know some of it actually sounds pretty descent coming from my crappy pc speakers

 

I've gone the opposite route and bought some high-end headphone gear that makes brickwalled music sound better.

 

That's not true, the majority of artists regularly sign contracts that seem to go against their best interest as a concession for gaining access to the means of production.

 

I was all hyped up to buy the Go-Go's remaster of "Beauty & The Beat" until I heard how they applied lots of mastering compression to it. I went back to the old CD.

I was excited to get Rick James' "Street Songs Deluxe Edition several years back, only to hear how much mastering compression they added to it. People told me I was crazy and that it was they way it is supposed to sound. Well, when I got the HD Tracks version, it sounded more like the original LP, only clearer, with bass.

 

its basicly true, compression sounds great on very small speakers. Mayby we all start listening from our mobile-phones instead. Reveiling hi-end speakers are not the way to go

 

Don't get me started...

 

Brent Butterworth [Stereos Expert]'s article "Quit Worrying About Dynamic Range Compression" has been examined very perceptively in many posts, I think.

One point that I have not run across in the discussions of heavy DR compression during mastering is that for some people their aversion to this is not a philosophy, a concept, an intellectual stance or a choice.

I listen to music because I like the way it makes me feel. DR compression can make good music feel bad.

I just took a little time and thought of different CDs that I have listened to lately, how I felt and looked them up on DR Database to see if there was a correlation. So far it looks like this:
DR6 - I can't listen to it. (They feel bad - no matter the music.)
DR8 - I can enjoy listening. (I am aware of compression but it does not spoil the experience.)
DR10 - I can enjoy the experience 100%. (It can be better but still no problem.)

If I didn't love listening to music, it wouldn't matter. I do and it does.

 

Perfectly expressed.

 

It's not that they can't hear the difference in the sound it's that they can't tell which one had the dynamic compression added to it. Big difference. But, once you add it to a playlist on your phone or iPod and you don't have a sound leveler on it, guess which one gets more play, the louder one. I know of some very dynamic recordings that I can't turn up loud enough on my phone sometimes when I am listening to it through headphones. That's a problem.

 

This just tells me the CD is limited and louder. I don't listen to wavefiles, they don't tell me the what it's really going to sound like.

 

19 years ago. One of the reasons I said 20 years