The Loudness War: Give It Up!

It's been said before and you pretty much said it again: Bad compression kills music because music is all about dynamics. It's rather simple really.

 

Well, if mij Retrac (Jim) doesn't "get it" by now, he probably never will, and doesn't care to.

 

http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/code/6538870/taylor-swift-1989-louder-acdc-back-in-black

 

First, thanks for posting.

However, I take issue with supposedly knowledgable journalists equating low DR with higher levels of "loudness." While DR compression is most definitely a technique used hand in glove with excessively high overall replay gain levels in order to make music sound loud, low DR does not inherently mean that a given song file is loud. A low DR song file certainly could have an overall replay gain set to anything. Sure, in practice everyone sets replay gain as high as possible but that is the real culprit in the loudness wars. Squashed DR just helps engineers accomplish that. Also, normalizing the sound file (as the article mentions) does nothing to correct for poor (low) DR, it only corrects overall replay gain.

Jeebus. The state of (what passes for) journalism these days is just wretched. One might expect someone writing for a music industry publication to do better than that.

 

Good read and I always like Ian's position on this.

But the reality is - no modern release that I have seen in the last 6 months or more - is showing any signs whatsoever of increasing DR. More the opposite. Case in point - I was very excited to see the new Alabama Shakes hitting the street last week - and then found out it's chock full of DR 3's, 4 and 5's. And the album is of course a painful annoying listen.

Artists could care less about how they sound on Spotify or iTunes radio if DR 3's are becoming commonplace. I am waiting patiently for the first record to have everything at DR0 - it can't be that far away now.

Mark Knopfler's latest sounds superb tho - Tracker is a tasty DR11 across the board.

Cheers!
VP

 

No need to wait! Certainly not directed at the Pop market, but still, DR0 through and through:
http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/27296

 

This looks promising: http://www.aes.org/technical/documents/AESTD1004_1_15_10.pdf

Perhaps if streaming audio can set the trend, other formats (downloads, CDs) will follow.

 

Superb explanation .

 

Thanks for sharing.

As someone who normalizes all my digital files with a ReplayGain tool, I don't notice really any overall loudness differences between songs. But I most definitely notice the lack of dynamic range in modern song files. I am now fairly convinced that squashed files prevent me from bonding with the music at a deep level. I mean it can sound perfectly polite... my brain may even tell me, "hey you should really like this... this is good." But I tend to get bored with those albums rather quickly. I don't think it's a coincidence.

 

Thanks to Mal I had the chance to watch this interesting clip .
The same feeling you had with the squashed files with the lack of dynamic range I had with lots of remastered cds , I felt that I like the music but I have a feeling of discomfort and difficulty concentrating in
the music , this is why I bought those titles on the original cds and then I was really able to enjoy the music.

 

I never use Replaygain. I want to hear everything as it is on the CD I ripped, or file I downloaded.

 

Aren't programs like Replaygain just an auto volume control?

 

All it does is set the overall volume level of the song to the same level. It doesn't compress anything or mess with the digital source at all.

People who tend to diss ReplayGain generally have never tried it. It can make a DRAMATIC difference in playback quality.

 

Even when you're listening to various dithers?..

 

I don't think this is true. Enough compression to kill dynamics usually does something far worse.
This is my conjecture based on my understanding of sound waves, I think it is true.
If you take two instruments, for example a piano and a guitar, and record them together, the timbre of each respective instrument is part of the sound as well as the timbre of how the two instruments sound waves effect each other.
Play a chord on a guitar or a piano and that waveform has a specific shape that contains the variations of the different sound levels within the chord, some frequencies not as present as others and like that. Play two instruments together and that relationship becomes more important.
When you compress those two instruments noticeably, it isn't just the loud and soft passages in the music that is changed, it is the sound level of the various nuances in the instruments, in this case the piano and guitar and the third sound created by combining the two. It sounds to me as if the timbre of the instruments is changed.
I think this does horrible things to instruments, especially distorted guitars. Taking all the sounds a mike picks up of a guitar through an amp and compressing them so every little nuance and every tone is at the same level is just devastating.

 

You are more correct then you might know. In classical music training and orchestration you learn about this as partials vs. the fundimental (aka the overtone series). The best example is the passage in a Brahms symphony where the first violin and french horn have a duet. You think to yourself "how can they play in tune with each other" then you look at the score and realize it is actual a trio, there is also an oboe playing. Brahms understood the overtone series enough to realize that the partials from the violin and french horn would cancel out the fundimental of the oboe, so the players would know they were in tune if they couldn't hear the oboe. When performed correctly the audience never hears the oboe. Brilliant and proves your observation was spot on.

 

Agreed. Drums annoy me the most though. If you want maximum loudness, good bye drums, that low end has to go.

 

I use Neutron Music Player on my Samsung tablet and frankly, I can't tell much difference between using Replay Gain and not using it. I have dozens of albums on the tablet, some needle drops and some CD rips, varying levels of quality and volume levels, and turning on Replay Gain doesn't seem to have much effect at all. Perhaps I need to set it up a particular way but I've never bothered to tweak it.

 

Very true. I must admit when I saw "Katy" in your post, for half a millisecond, I thought you were referring to "Katy Lied".

 

Hmmm. I think the article is largely BS. While it's undoubtedly true that compression has its uses, and it's undoubtedly true that lots of people (a majority) like their "music" noisy and either like or don't care about compression and reduced dynamic range, there are those of us who do care, and the implication that we, a vocal minority, should just totter off and listen to our old jazz and classical LPs is both insulting and stupid. What, an audiophile shouldn't like rock, heavy metal, industrial, etc.?

As long as there's been recorded music, there's been people for whom audio quality isn't much of a concern, as well as those who are quite obsessive about it. When I was a kid, lots of people were buying up little fruit colored radios from Radio Shack, while other people were spending outrageous amounts of money on hi fi equipment. Was one group "right" and the other "wrong"? Of course not. The good thing about the so called loudness wars is that it's made clear to the music industry that they do have an audiophile clientele that, while small perhaps, purchases a meaningful amount of music. We are a market, and we vote with our dollars.

If we follow the author's advice and just shut up, quality audio will simply go away.

 

And yes, it's an old argument.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/7fJmmDkvQyc

 

No, he's wrong.

 

Well yes that too, I was just boiling it down I guess. The funny thing is a lot of compression can be listenable (to my ears) but at a certain point it seems to tip over and become unlistenable.

 

You're right. There are much better reasons for not listening to Katy Perry.

 

Author of article is a spoon.
He is referencing instruments in the MIX compression, totally NOT what loudness war complainees are on about. Maximum limiting the master is what the so called loudness war is about, not how much your smashing drum room mics or whatever.