The loudness wars: Why music sounds worse (2009) | Hacker News Reader

The loudness wars: Why music sounds worse (2009)

npr.org

42 pointsaycangulez23 comments

If you want to test the average loudness of your files you can use libebur128. I found amazing differences between same album re-editions. I'm not an audiophile, I just have a High-Enough-Fi systems.

    # cd /tmp
    # wget http://www-public.tu- bs.de:8080/\~y0035293/libebur128-0.1.11-Source.tar.gz
    # tar -zxvf libebur128-0.1.11-Source.tar.gz
    # cd libebur128-0.1.11-Source
    # cmake .
    # make -j 10
    # gcc minimal_example.c -I../include -L../ -lebur128 -lsndfile -o r128-test

    # r128-test "t/Yann Tiersen/1999 - Black Session/03 - Life on Mars (feat. Neil Hannon).flac"
    global loudness: -17.2 LUFS

http://www.dr.loudness-war.info/ is good for a large amount of albums, too.

Well, in some cases a modern signal chain has more headroom. The fact that the average loudness of a remaster is higher than the original doesn't tell you anything about the dynamic range.

The loudness war is actually pretty much over. Lots of the newest dance music from popular artists (deadmau5, Justice, etc.) have lower RMS than mid-2000s rock, which is the genre and time when lookahead loudness maximizers were seeing the most abuse.

(The article is full of technical inaccuracies. Compressors, depending on how they are set, do not reduce the attack transients of a sound like a snare drum, they exaggerate it. Also, it's from 2009.)

I still hate what Clear Channel does to classic rock, though. Should be criminal to treat music that way. Ever heard Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" with no dynamic range? * shivers

Ever heard Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", unaltered, while driving a car? Unless you turn up the volume pretty loud, you won't hear about 2/3 of the song. This is why radio stations process all tracks they play.

That's why playback devices should have a "compression" knob, instead of hardcoding it into the media itself. It would be useful in the living room (for television dialog) as well as in noisy environments like the car.

This is true. Due to mastering technology becoming cheaper and easier, artists are increasingly mastering their own records, or mastering each others records as part of the production process. Obviously they don't have the same incentive for over compression.

Compressors, depending on how they are set (eg, very, very short attack time), act as limiters which will reduce the amplitude of a transient sound. I assumed this is what the article was referring to based on the perceived result. Since transients tend to be perceived as louder, you're going to notice when they're not there.

Related and also somewhat dated: Apparently youngsters are starting to prefer the artifacts of MP3 sound in general:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music...

I don't think that is surprising. Maybe people enjoy the 'bugs' in LPs.

Not really. It is actually the opposite. See: "Harman debunks youthful music myths" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2427217

The "Digital Compression" section feels misleading. Maybe that's my misunderstanding, though.
As I understand it, when we compress audio file, so from a 100s MiB of raw wave data it'll become a several-MiB file, we perform a (discrete) Fourier transform, get rid of less significant frequencies (thus compressing the data), and record the coefficients. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.
So I don't get the "rough edges you end up with in the digital recording" part. It is applicable to pre-compressed data, but that's another topic.

While that is called "compression", it is not what is being referred to. This sort of compression takes audio that is sometime soft and sometimes lound and flattens out the volume differences in various ways.
This, too, is not the crime per se, because this isn't always bad. Making something completely flat can suck the life out of a piece, but there are contexts where you aren't really "listening" to the music where it makes sense, such as background music in the stores or something, and you're unlikely to find what they are playing "full of life" anyhow. The real criminal here is clipping. Compression is only mentioned here because it lets them "get away with" yet more clipping after they've compressed it.

You're confusing dynamic range compression with digital file compression. Totally different things. The only thing they have in common is that they make something smaller.

Did you read the article? There is a section entitled "Digital Compression" which actually seems to be just describing the nature of digital representation of sound, and what happens when you reduce the resolution of that representation ie. bit depth/sample rate. Then it awkwardly jumps into talking about MP3 compression. None of this is relevant to the "Loudness Wars" topic, which as you've rightly pointed out deals with dynamic range compression, yet all these things are referred to in the article. GP is confused by the inclusion of the unrelated material. The article is sloppy and unfocused.

I think it's conflating a lot of stuff. It seems like he's talking about quantization, but I think he's actually talking about the actual MP3 (or any lossy) compression scheme. It's really screwed up. Actual MP3 will result in the 'rough edges' and all the nice stuff he describes.
Well, kinda. The hilarious part is that while we some error introduced that sounds kinda like noise, MP3 is actually horrible at representing 'noise'. See the sizzle on your cymbals.
I remember reading this article when it came out, and I wasn't particularly impressed by it then either.

Shit like this makes me wish HN had downvotes for articles.

Good thing it has them for comments!

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I'm not complaining it's inappropriate, certainly it's on topic, just highly misinformative.
Honestly I thought people had gotten over ignorantly repeating the "Loudness Wars" meme by now.

can you explain or provide a URL that explains why this point of view is incorrect/misinformative?

Firstly this is just a terrible article as from the heading "Digital Compression" onwards it deals with an entirely unrelated topic to the "Loudness Wars" meme mentioned in the title; this is confusing to readers. More on this section later.
The "Loudness War" meme describes a trend in popular music towards having decreased dynamic range in the time-amplitude domain. In other words, less difference between the loudest and quietest passages of a piece of music; a higher average volume over time. While I totally agree that this trend has occurred, it's negative effects have been largely overstated. The reality is that a lot of music produced decades ago had such a large degree of dynamic range as to make it hard to listen to in most circumstances. Modern mastering techniques allow us to rectify this without losing any of the power of the original piece.
Proponents of the "Loudness War" idea often cherry-pick specific examples of poor mastering where average volume over time has been increased using naive methods that do in fact have a negative impact on the sound. This does not accurately reflect the state of the art of audio mastering. Unfortunately mastering is often seen as a bit of a "dark art" due to the large amount of domain-specific knowledge required.
Because of this lack of knowledge, people are easily deceived by naively credible diagrams[1] showing one "skinny" amplitude-time graph and one "fat" one, claiming that the fat one is dynamically flat/ruined. However, this graph gives no information about the time-frequency domain, where much of the 'magic' of mastering takes place. The reality is that modern mastering techniques make much more effective use of all space available in each of the domains (time/amplitude/frequency).
In fact, many of these dynamic range management techniques are applied at the mixing stage of production (where all elements are processed seperately), before the mastering stage (where all elements are processed together). With modern tools and an understanding of psychoacoustics we can make pieces feel louder while preserving the shape and power of the various elements. It might make the time-amplitude graph look "fat", but that's hardly the whole picture.
Why the "Digital Compression" section is misleading: after giving us an almost uselessly simplified explanation of the digital representation of sound, it implies that it is common to encounter digital sound with a low resolution (bit depth and/or sample rate) however this is not the case, all CDs and MP3s one is likely to encounter have a bit depth of 16bit, and a sample rate of 44.1khz[2]. This is high enough as to be generally indistinguishable from higher resolutions to all but highly trained listeners.
[1] http://media.npr.org/assets/music/news/2009/12/dynamic_wide....
[2] One might find a few MP3s lying around on the internet with a lower sample rate, but not from any reputable source.

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