At some point, the music is so loud and unnaturally compressed that the aural assault on the ear, while very impressively loud, has sucked the life out of the music and makes the listener subconsciously not want to hear the music again
Christopher wrote:DSOP wrote:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-castle/bob-ludwig_b_1175536.html
Great article. Thanks.
"At some point, the music is so loud and unnaturally compressed that the aural assault on the ear, while very impressively loud, has sucked the life out of the music and makes the listener subconsciously not want to hear the music again."
Powerful statement, there.
The Despair of the Mastering Engineer
The Level-War and the Lost Dynamics
I have been recording music from the age of 16 and have been working as a professional sound/mastering engineer since 1972. The Loudness-War has been with us for as long as I can remember. However, over the last couple of years it has grown completely out of proportion. So far that today's music is really suffering from this hyper-compression and so is the listener.
About Compression and Limiting.
Over-compression, as we hear on many CD's today, takes the life and excitement out of the music and only gives the listeners a headache. It takes all depth and detail out of the mix and just puts it "in your face".
"...this effect can obscure sonic detail, rob music of its emotional power and leave listeners with what engineers call ear fatigue."(David Bendeth/Rolling Stone).
The sad thing is that this loudness-war not only affects pop- and rock-music, but is starting to affect jazz- and even classical music. True, we need compression, some form of dynamic control is needed.
Pop and rock vinyl albums had an average dynamic range (difference between peak and RMS) of 14 to 16 dB, so did the early CD releases.
Digital dynamic control with preview option offered the possibility to reduce the dynamics further without the disturbing artefacts present in the analogue world. Then somebody invented the digital compressor/limiter as a computer plug-in and made it affordable. This is when the record companies discovered that everything could be louder and decided that "louder is better". So today's music ends up on CD with hardly any dynamic range at all, heavy metal or intimate ballad, all the same! Some recent rock albums I have measured only had a DR2.
Another argument is that radio programmers only listen to the first few bars and decide only on the impact this makes. Just make sure your song is musically interesting and they will listen beyond the first bars.
Radio Ready.
Radio is the great leveler. The argument that your CD will not be as loud on the radio than others just does not hold. All radio-stations use 5-band compressors that will make sure all songs to be broadcasted equally loud; radio is the great leveler. All will depend on the way your song has been recorded and its frequency content. By the very nature of the radio compressor an hyper-compressed song might sound less loud on the radio than a well balanced, open and moderately compressed one. A hyper-compressed track might even start to distort. Tests have shown that different degrees of compression on the same title makes hardly any difference to the loudness on the radio, they all sound equally loud. Hyper-compressed CD's even sound less loud and start to distort after passing through the radio processors. The fact that these days all CD's are converted to some form of data-reduction before being broadcasted makes matters worse than ever before: http://pleasurizemusic.com/en/why-do...ed-songs-radio
Numerous times I have been hearing this sentence: My song is not as loud on the radio as the others! It is all in-between the ears!!
The next argument we hear so often is: “When I play my CD in my car, I cannot hear the soft parts unless I turn up the volume so loud my system will start to distort when the loud parts play.” The old Compact Cassette had a greater dynamic range than today's' CD'sDon't believe it? Try it!), in-car noise-levels sure were higher in those days and car sound systems of inferior quality. So, what is going on? The only solution would be to put a compressor in car CD players; perfectly possible and affordable with today's technology.
It's not only the total dynamics and the dynamic balance between the songs that are ruined. It also ruins what we would call "the micro-dynamics", the difference between the level of the notes and the silence between the notes. The effect of the hyper-compression is off course most evident on percussive sounds like drums and piano, making everything sound loud but dull, uninteresting, hard and with lots of distorted transients. The term "Digitally Re-Mastered" has become synonymous for "Severely Reduced Dynamics".
Mastering is the art of making the final Master sound “better”, not necessarily “louder”! But “louder” is what most clients expect. Why mix your album for days, adjusting every single track of a song to within 0,5 dB to make your mix just right and then ask the mastering engineer to completely alter your entire album in a couple of hours by slamming a compressor-limiter over it, compressing it to death. And all this for the sake of being louder than the competition!??
I do not understand why mix-engineers are not up in arms against the mastering rooms for ruining their work. It is my sincere conviction that a lot of albums would have sounded a lot better without passing through some “Mastering Room”.
However, in most cases, it is not the mastering engineers’ fault. 89% of our clients ask to make everything louder, it’s epidemic.
Here is a very interested article on compression by Bob Katz: http://www.digido.com/compression.html
Every musician, music lover, recording engineer, mastering engineer I have spoken to recently thinks this madness must end. Still the first question I get after a session usually is: "Can you make it louder?" If clients ask:” Can you make it dynamic?" 99% mean: "Can you make it loud?" The engineers who make the "master", recording engineer as well as mastering engineer, are under constant pressure to compromise sound quality, most of them very reluctantly and sometimes under protest.
Listeners are by now so used to this over-compressed sound that they will reject a CD if the music is not cutting off their ears with the first bar ... or isn't it? Maybe they are buying less CD's because they are tired of this constant attack on their hearing.
I’ am getting blue in the face trying to explain there is an alternative to this madness. Most masters I receive from the studio already have enough compression anyway or are sadly enough already over-compressed . I always try to convince the client not to go for loudness, but for quality. There is still a level pot on every amplifier. If it is not loud enough: Turn it up! Laziness should no longer be an excuse, the remote control has been invented years ago.
Some years ago I was mastering the soundtrack of an international dance act. The technical crew asked for a copy for use with the show. They came back to me and asked for a less compressed version. I had to ask the studio for new uncompressed versions of the mixes before they were pleased with the result.
Other technical issues.
There are several other technical reasons why we should take care not to over-compress and watch out very carefully for overloads even for 0 dBFs. "Interleave Sample Overs" might occur at the playback side as explained here: http://pleasurizemusic.com/en/why-do...yback-what-are
To make matters even worse, a similar effect happens when tracks are converted to mp3: overs as high as 6 dB will occur with these kind of tracks, see: http://pleasurizemusic.com/en/why-do...rs-no-headroom
Here is the proof: Let's take Pink's "SoWhat" :
- Statistics for: 1 So What.wav Number of Samples: 9488556 -------------
- Left/Right Peak value: -0.01 dB/-0.01 dB
-Avg RMS: -6.50 dB/-6.63 dB
-DR channel: 4.85 dB/4.86 dB ------------
- Official DR value: DR5
If we now convert to mp3, even at 320 kbps, and then back to wav, we are getting overloads:
- Statistics for: 1 So What_mp3.wav Number of Samples: 9499392 -----
- Left/Right Peak value: over/over
-Avg RMS: -6.50 dB/-6.63 dB
- DR channel: 4.85 dB/4.86 dB -------------
- Official DR value:DR5
==========================================
Overs were at 1.5dB. If we were to use lower mp3 bitrates, the overloads would get worse!
It will be very difficult to agree on a standard of compression or average dynamic range. Every production is different. However, a solution has to be found; if the rate of dynamic reduction goes on as it is doing lately, it has nearly become a law: -1dB of dynamics/year, we will soon end up with CD's with white noise! Your tracks have been painstakingly mixed with adjustments of 0.5dB to different instruments and effects. If it is being over-compressed later, the whole mix will change by the very nature of the compression process. A DR14 seems to be a reasonable compromise.
If it is necessary I will ad compression or limiting, taking care that the balance of your mix changes as little as possible. So please do not over-compress your recording, do not us a limiter/compressor on the mix-bus; this leaves us very little room to do any equalizing if necessary.
Beware of, or forget about: finalizers, maximizers and other dangerous animals.
If you insist on a very loud compressed master I will of course do it for you, I just want you to consider the alternative. Let us bring the dynamics back to music. Please do not drive your AD-convertors into overload; do not use them as limiters. I receive a lot of CDR's with heavy overloads: this means DISTORTION. This distortion increases with every further digital- or analogue signal processing; the distortion might be quite unacceptable at the end of the process: Your CD or LP!
Please let us stop the level-war and bring back the dynamics to our music!
- Loudness makes no difference for radio broadcast.
Do not over-process your tracks for radio. The radio-engineer will put his processing on top of it, maybe making the end result unbearable.
- The quality of compressed (data-reduced) formats will be better if we reduce levels and the amount of compression. I-Tunes has an option in preferences, “Soundcheck” ,that, if checked, makes i-Tunes play all songs at the same loudness level. It takes some time to analyze all the tracks present in the i-Tunes library, then plays them all at the same loudness level. Maybe it works a bit like what Pleasurize Music propose: taking DR14 as reference and dropping the level of say a DR8 by 6 dB! All i-Pods users can benefit from the same feature. Users off other players can download a plug-in like i-Volume.
- Live sound might be loud, but is usually more dynamic.
So why are we still constantly compromising CD quality??
Finally the opposition against this murder of our music’s dynamics is getting organized. There are protests off music lovers and professionals all over the internet and organizations like “Turn It Up” http://turnmeup.org/ and “The Pleasurize Music Foundation” http://dynamicrange.de/en/our-aim might help to finally bring the dynamics back to our music. Let’s all join forces.
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