Are the loudness wars over?*

Yes, you're incorrect, the "loudness war" had nothing to do with the listener not having to fiddle volume knobs or even with the equipment the end user was suing. It had to do with making the recording "exciting" sounding and "hot" sounding, and more exciting sounding and hotter sounding than the next guy's recording on the belief that people liked a recording better when it was hotter and more exciting and that the sound of the bass and drums on these hotter more exciting sounding recordings really popped, and because the hotter and more exciting sounding recording would pop more next to the other recordings on radio.

The people making these records hotter and more exciting sounding by manipulating loudness did so with two goals in mind, first to make the loudest sounds on the recording as close to maxmium peak loudness as they could get it -- so a master that gets as close to 0 dBFS as possible at its peaks; and second to make sure that the music never strayed too far from that maxmium loudness by pushing up the lowest levels of the "quiet" parts of the recordings.

The practice really took off in the mid 90s when digital lookahead brickwall limiters became widely commercially available and people could just set the limiter near the theoretical maximum the format could handle, boost the level and create a track where every second of it is pretty much as loud as possible. The problem is that the end result is that in the most aggressive cases the waveform starts sounding like square wave distortion and the whole thing takes on the feeling of listening to a loud, unchanging vacuum cleaner over steady thumping. Also, while contemporary rock and pop and dance music don't tend to be style that are as dynamic as, say, orchestral classical music or jazz, still getting dynamic range down to barely perceptible levels of change robs the music of excitement in the name of chasing sonic excitement, and robs the music of air, breath and humanity (even electronically made music).

Modern digital playback loudness normalization -- which is different from old fashioned peak normalization -- has the potential to make the some of the original motivation for the loudness wars moot: by making tracks equally loud on average on playback for a given user set output volume level, but unless the normalization scheme also includes track by track compression, it won't do that other part of what volume war mastering does, which is squash dynamic range, so, if someone still wants their recording to be loud all the way through they may still have an incentive to squash it (though why the musicians didn't write and record a loud-all-the-way-through piece of music should be the question).

Now, there is an interesting question raised by recorded music moving to streaming as its primary distribution means and streaming platforms offering normalization to listener -- how will these squashed masters designed to pop and sound loud, sound when their average playback level is lowered and the same as every other records? In fact, they may sound crummy and it may help move people away from max loudness as a mastering goal. But I'm not sure it changes the goal off reducing in track dynamic range. It'll be interesting to see what happens, though I'm not sure I have enough years left to live to see if in 20 years we'll look back on streaming normalization as the beginning of something the way we look back on the commercial advent of digital lookahead brickwall filtering as the beginning of the modern loudness wars era.

 

My comment was about artists with some influence in the business (apparently not) who release brickwalled music and then claim it as an artistic decision. I made an exception for Bowie because his body of work was so great that it's more easy to overlook. Then there are artists like Neil Young who never really succumbed.

 

I think you make a presumption that hi-res streaming will become standard, but why? Most people are perfectly satisfied with lossy formats. The mass market for recorded music has never chosen anything based on audio quality, it's always chosen based on price and convenience. And without consumer demand for higher res streaming -- which would involve higher bandwidth costs for streamers -- there's no incentive for streaming platforms to offer it. I don't see any indication that hi-res audio will become widely adopted in any format or platform.

I also think you make a presumption that the CD and vinyl cut from the same master has different dynamic range, based I guess on the DR DB, but I'll question those presumption. If the same master is used, the music on the LP and the CD will have the same peak clipping and compression, end of story. If you're getting a reading of wider dynamic range from the LP, then there's something wrong with your measuring process or you're measuring the wrong thing (-- like you're measuring the dyanmic range between the rumble or the infrasonic arm-cart resonance and the highest surface noise tick). I am extremely skeptical of the DR DB numbers when comparing vinyl and CD. If you want to get closer to an apples to apples comparison, though it still won't be perfect because you can't eliminate all the mechanical noise from your vinyl rip, I suppose you can de-tick a vinyl rip, roll off all the bass noise below the music (say cut away everything below 40 Hz, notch filter out any rumble components above 40 Hz; and then compare that to a CD "rip" recorded from the analogue outputs of your CD player or DAC. But really, I think it's impossible to make an apples to apples comparison because of all the mechanical noise in a vinyl rip which any DB calculating software can't distinguish from musical signal. If the mastering is identical on the CD and the LP, the mastering is identical. If the formats seem to show different dynamic ranges, it has nothing to do with the mastering, some other anomoly either in the measuring or in the nature of the playback is causing some difference, but the master is not actually any more or less compressed if its the same master.

I actually think we're basically almost a full generation in to this new sonic paradigm being the norm for popular recorded music. We have an entire generation of 20 something and teens who only know this sound. And given that lots and lots of contemporary popular music isn't made in performance, where dynamic nuance is part of expressive practice, I don't think we're in for any kind of change in how recorded music sounds. We may step back from the ledge of extreme hashy noisy mastering. But I dunno, I listened to those new Taylor Swift singles, they're thumpy bass dominated squished right up against some hard limit. It's just the expected sound of popular music in the 21st century.

 

If you think the "loudness wars" is about turning up or down playback volume, you really have no idea what the "loudness wars" are. I really can't believe after all the time people have spent talking about this, how much confusion there still is about this. Turning down the playback volume on a track that has been hard limited at around 0 dBFS and then boosted going into the limiter to squash the track to what almost is a steady square wave, will have no impact on the sonic problems created by this kind of "loudness wars" mastering. In fact, it'll probably only make the music sound even worse. The "Loudness wars" does not refer to the volume of playback the user chooses, and these kind of masterings can't be changed by turning down the playback volume.

 

I agree 100% but can you confirm something. If you have an old CD and the peak value of the loudest point is say 82, then can you make this mastering louder by raising everything in proportion until that 82 peak reaches 100 and then it will be louder but still retain the same dynamic range (assuming no other limiting goes on, each point is raised by 18). Is that right?

In which case why are so many older CDs mastered so quietly?

 

As said I have heard records on certain tracks are maybe D6 max but as a whole the record is dynmaic

I get ya

 

Sure you can lift the level of the whole master. Why are some early CD mastered at X level? I dunno. Maybe worth asking our host.

 

Prob to do with the cd's were more a home listening experience where volume wasn't paramount. Sure there was portable cd players but I think there wasn't a need for crazy mastering, not saying there is now.

 

Technically it is louder - you've moved the meter. (i.e. Normalization)

However, since you haven't changed the dynamic range, in comparison to another mastering of the same material with squashed dynamics, at the same peak levels, it will still sound quieter.

This is because our ears hear averages, etc.

As to why CDs were mastered that way back in the day, I can only speak to my experience mastering to DAT. You basically did the mixdown to stereo in real-time, and if you pegged the meter above zero, you had to start over.

So - since I had 96 dB of dynamic range, I mixed low, and didn't really sweat the last few dB on the meter.

Better to be low, than risk the dreaded "digital overload".

The ability to set precise levels didn't happen until computers and modern A/D converters "soft overload", etc.

Cheers,
Paul

 

Resolution has nothing to do with loudness. The Pepper remix in the Blu-ray uses indeed higher resolution than the CD. My impression is also that it has been mastered differently, at least I prefer it over the CD.

And although it's a bit loud, I don't think it's excessive.

 

Very good points regarding the DR DB measures between an LP and a CD or a digital release for that matter. From what I can discern with respect to many new releases, if the DB measurement difference is less than 3 DR, then I would say that the master is the same between an LP and CD. A higher DR difference would indicate that a good dedicated vinyl master was used. Again, just my rule of thumbs at the moment.

Another thing to note is that that the LP version could be EQ'd from the same master as the CD.

 

Honestly, I wouldn't assume anything from the DR DB. If you don't know whether or not its from the same master, you don't know. Sure, I guess, there could be stuff done at cutting, I mean, there's certainly RIAA equalization. So yeah, that's a question, what if anything is done at cutting. Still, even then, if the master has squared off peaks, it has squared off peaks. I suppose if you're eq'ing and especially if your trimming bass with modern pop and rock, it will have an impact on the DR number.

 

Dynamic range has a direct relationship to bit depth. For a recording as compressed as Pepper, one is not going to hear any difference between 16 and 24 bits. There's not anything there with such low-volume subtleties. Blu ray does have a 96khz sampling rate as compared to CD's 44.1khz, but I've read that Pepper's blu ray only had 48khz resolution.
The CD is the same master as the blu ray, dithered to CD resolution.

Have you considered that your blu ray player may have a better D/A than your CD player?

 

The software automatically takes care of the volume and does not change the makeup of the file (Except for some metadata to enable the R128 actions).

Been analyzing the audio now for 4 years and I do not hear any DR6 song "stick out" of any playlist regardless of what it is surrounded with (DR10, DR14 etc). Works for me.

VP

 

My speculation about hi rez streaming to become the next main standard is based on the following:
1. Very soon data storage will be not a factor at all, and the speed and abilities of the internet connection will make the size of the music files also irrelevant - in other words - for the people there will be no difference if they streams or download 1 MB or 1 GB file
2. Having this in mind, the labels and online platforms would see an opportunity to sell again the old recording, now newly mastered for hi-rez streaming and download, also to boost the sales of new releases, and together with companies that develop audio electronic devices, to promote the hi-rez as the ultimate way to listen music (explaining how inferior are the lossy formats and CD's), and in order people to be hooked, they have to demonstrate the advantages in an effective way.

About the fact that recently all new releases are additionally compressed for their CD editions, while the less compressed/limited master is used for the vinyl pressings is not my measurement or speculation, but a well known fact, the labels and the engineers involved speaks without hesitation about this, and it's even advertised as a selling point of the new vinyl releases. I don't think that this is debatable, it's a well known fact, sometimes proudly underlined by the labels. By all means this is ridiculous, because there's not a digital music file with dynamics that exceeds the CD medium capabilities, but at the same time is perfectly fit to be cut on vinyl. So there have to be some other reason for such approach (the CD's to be mastered more compressed and limited than their vinyl counterparts).

 

Not only DR, but I don't hink it's excessively compressed anyway, except for a couple of moments. It could be better, but I don't see it as an example of mastering crimes.

Not true, it's 96 by my amp. Probably the user who wrote that used the wrong connector between player and amp, which may cut the sampling rate to 48.

They are different players, but I don't think all the difference I hear is because of that. I don't rule out differences in the mastering.

 

This

Album details - Dynamic Range Database

Judging by that it's getting worse

 

Thanks for clarifying that. I had kinda thought it was in playback, as our host once said it started with the introduction of the five CD changer. In hindsight what you said makes more sense. Either way, I do know what brickwalled music sounds like, namely the recent Radiohead and Fleet Foxes LPs; just sonic mush.

 

Well, even if download/streaming files were more dynamic than CDs and vinyl. I would NEVER invest my money into them . I will only pay for physical music (meaning a CD, LP, or even a cassette.) Regardless of quality, ANYTHING is still better than mp3/straming/downloads/etc.

 

That is exactly what I do. I'm more than happy just sticking with the old stuff. Because not only is the sound better, but the actual content is better too!

 

I understand your sentiment (I love collecting CDs and vinyl), but imagine the following scenario: a new release by your favorite artist, available as hi-res download, vinyl LP, and CD. The hi-res file is the unaltered original master with DR 12, the vinyl is cut from the same digital master, but additionally compressed and limited to DR 9, and the CD edition squashed to DR 5. Would you ignore the download, and would you bother at all to buy the CD? This may sound a bit hypothetical now, but actually they already do this with all new vinyl / CD releases - the CD edition is always additionally compressed/limited, compared to the vinyl - sometimes the difference is small, sometimes is quite significant, but it's always present, and it's already a rule - it goes without questions and explanations, and even the audiophiles accept it as something normal.

 

Happy Listening (Wars Are Over)

I do wish it were true...

 

It ended late sundzy night. Right after the final episode of Twin Peaks The Return

What year is it ? Scream!!!!!

 

The war is over. We lost.