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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, the loudness war was essentially fixed by the streaming services. They were in a similar situation as Tik Tok is now.

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You would think, but not in a way that matters. Everyone still compresses their mixes. People try to get around normalization algorithms by clever hacks. The dynamics still suffer, and bad mixes still clip. So no, I don’t think streaming services fixed the loudness wars.

What's the history on the end to the loudness war? Do streaming services renormalize super compressed music to be quieter than the peaks of higher dynamic range music?

Yes. Basically the streaming services started using a decent model of perceived loudness, and normalise tracks to roughly the same perceived level. I seem to remember that Apple (the computer company, not the music company) was involved as well, but I need to re-read the history here. Their music service and mp3 players were popular back in the day.

So all music producers got out of compressing their music was clipping, and not extra loudness when played back.

It hasn't really changed much in the mastering process, they still are doing the same old compression. Maybe not the to the same extremes, but dynamic range is still usually terrible. They do it a a higher LUFS target than the streaming platforms normalize to because each streaming platform has a different limit and could change it at any time, so better to be on the safe side. Also the fact that majority of music listening doesn't happen on good speakers/environment.

> Also the fact that majority of music listening doesn't happen on good speakers/environment.

Exacly this. I usually do not want high dynamic audio because that means it's either to quiet sometimes or loud enough to annoy neighbors at other times, or both.

Then why is youtube tv still blasting ads at completely different noise levels than the main content?

I hope they end up removing HDR from videos with HDR text. Recording video in sunlight etc is OK, it can be sort of "normalized brightness" or something. But HDR text on top is terrible always.

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