Loud

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

"Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication, branded 'unlistenable' by studio experts"

(insert obvious joke in comments)

More seriously, is this degree of compression something you notice when listening to new CDs? I had noticed that you need to set the volume control at a much lower level than you do with older CDs. But, rather naively, I assumed modern 'remastering' tended to broaden the dynamic range rather than narrow it.

Maybe it is only rock records that are mastered in the way this article complains about.

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Domino, Arctic Monkeys’ record company, defended its band’s use of compression on their chart-topping albums, as a way of making their music sound “impactful”.

Ahahahahahah!

Anyway. My werk computer has a very limited volume range for some reason - some CDs I have to turn right the way down in order to be able to listen to without going deaf, for some mp3s I have to boot the volume kn0b all the way up to max. There never seems to be anything in between.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Darn, you (inevitably) got there before me!

Is "impactful" even a word?

[cis.livejournal.com]

Nick Southall to thread etc etc: this is his major bugbear, isn't it? imprefect sound forever (http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/imperfect-sound-forever.htm) and all that.

[koganbot]

Yeah, I was just about to link this myself, an excellent piece. That said, I don't know that compression is hurting my enjoyment of music; probably hurts music if it's a demand (that all records must sound like this); otherwise, like anything else, whether it's good or bad depends on how it's used. The ones who know how to work within its constraints do well, those who don't (Iggy Pop on his terrible terrible terrible remix of Raw Power, for instance), or who really need the wide dynamics, screw up.

[koganbot]

That is, Nick's piece is the one that's excellent.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this link, cis. Great article (and I suspect I am in agreement with a lot of Nick's complaints).

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Pop stuff is often compressed a lot because a pop song doesn't generally need much dynamic range and it sounds "louder" that way. Also the radio is going to use compressors to get all the different tracks in a show sounding at a similar level, and limiters after that to make sure none of the program signal will distort the final output amplifiers. However mp3 downloads are generally taken from the CD master, so it's possible they're trying to make those sound as loud as poss too?

I would say it's more likely to be pop stuff and dance stuff that would be affected, rather than just rock.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

I don't remember if Nick mentions this in his article or not, but the modern sound of hip-hop wouldn't be what it is without "brick wall" compression--that extreme dynamic squshing makes the spare beats and solo-vocal-out-front arrangement of most pop hip-hop tracks sound even better. Compressors eat up the sudden drops and clearly deliniated parts of hip-hop tracks.

I think Sasha's line on this is probably the one I agree with--some stuff sounds great with brick-wall mastering (My Chemical Romance, the teenpop Liz Phair album, System of a Down, etc.) and some stuff doesn't. There's nothing wrong with the technique per se, and TBH it's pretty eye-rolly when people go on about the "scientific" effects of extreme compression upon the listener, but you just have to know when to use it and when not to. And how much, of course, like for example I can't really listen to Love Angel Music Baby anymore because the uber-compressed high-end sounds like a dentist's drill.

[damnspynovels.livejournal.com]

I thought Dynamic Range Compression and the compression of mp3s is totally different.

Isn't DRC the art of pushing the frequencies into the headroom of a CDs dynamic range, therefore making it sound louder at the expense of clarity, whereas creating an mp3 is all about trimming and squashing the audio as a whole in order to make a file smaller? It kinda sounds like a similar process but I am pretty sure they're unrelated.

From what I know, the irony is that using DRC for pop is futile considering pop radio stations already use forms of compression for their broadcasts.

What does correlate between the compression mp3s and DRC is the fact that the better the playback equipment (stereos, speakers etc), the worse both sound. I must admit that since I bought some expensive heaphones a year or so ago, I've now found that listening to music with heavy DRC is much harder on the lugs than anything released prior to the mid 90s.