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

[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.