Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)
magicvinyldigital.net
magicvinyldigital.net
Hard limiting is a (stupid) choice, but some limiting has always been necessary.
The "warm vinyl sound" is basically analog compression with added low-end distortion from the RIAA compensation and some wrinkles at the high end caused by stylus resonance.
At my peak in the mid-00s I remember counting and finding I had just over 500 CDs in my car, almost all of which were MP3s burnt to playable CD-Rs laying in the passenger seat... the good old days. Nice thing about using CD-Rs is you didn't have to care about them getting scratched, either.
Sick of listening to whatever's in the deck right now?
Just rummage through them without looking using the gear-shift hand and hold one up in an instant without taking eyes very far off the road. Upon finding one that's Good Enough For Right Now: Pop the old one out of the tape player with a ker-chunk and a blast of radio noise, and then quickly plunge its replacement into the empty hole -- all with muscle memory.
Frozen mist on the windshield on a cold morning? There's a cassette-shaped ice scraper right there in the dash. Take it out, use it to scrape the ice off the window, and put it back in. It still works.
CD-Rs helped a ton and I deliberately avoided CDs in cars until I was able to make CDs cheaply at home. But they were still delicate things in ways that tapes never were, they still skipped in ways that tapes never did, and their sonic improvements weren't very meaningful over the wind and road noise with the factory stereo of a malaise-era Chevrolet.
lolno those things were a finicky failure prone analog nightmare.
Compact cassette tapes were profoundly robust compared to everything else.
What kind of cheap-ass CD-R discs were you buying?
Why most CD listening was done in the home, and cassettes held on for longer than expected.
CDs are able to store much louder tracks than can be cut on a record. The technical reason things on CD got louder is because they could.
A lot less than half.
It's around 20-30db and every 10db is a factor of 10. The CD has between 100-1000x more dynamic range.
For who wants to know: sound perception doubles every 10dB so. 30db of dynamic range is about 8 times as much dynamic range from the perceptual perspective.
As an audio engineer I'm well aware of how decibels work and why we use them.
You're talking about subjective perception but I'm talking about objective measurements.
When someone claims that vinyl has less than half the DR of a CD then I think it's important to clarify how big of a difference it actually is. I would imagine HN would care about 16bits vs aprox 10bits of dynamic range.
In theory, yes. In practice it depends on the "loudness".
It was the move to digital that facilitated the loudness war.
In modern years it’s been fairly common for masters to vinyl to be less compressed than the CD release, for the simple reason vinyl has more limitations.
https://www.therevolverclub.com/blogs/the-revolver-club/the-...
How is holding onto it instead of selling it for $1300 any less insane than buying it for $1300 in the first place?
Try raising the value of the record and see what you think about it.
I typed up something, but ended up almost antagonistic. I realize I just feel sad that for some people money is literally the single goal in their life, seemingly nothing else matters.
They didn't say anything about what decision is correct. They just said that the two decisions are equivalent.
Please note the use of the word "insane" is specifically because buildsjets said it was insane.
Emotionally, it feels different. It's fascinating to see downright angry gut reactions!
A few years ago my friend was selling his expensive camera on Kijiji. I asked him to sell it to me for slightly less as a friendly discount. He told me that's the same as just randomly one day giving me a wad of cash, so why would he do that?? I thought he's crazy and was a little bit offended. Actually maybe a fair bit offended!
It took me YEARS to realize that 1. He's absolutely completely Inarguably correct, and 2. People would find me no less crazy if I adopted same perspective.
Buy for $x, have and not sell for $x, same mathematically. But oh boy will people get instantly riled up emotionally :).
>Buy for $x, have and not sell for $x, same mathematically.
They're not the same.
£20 item to buy, I have £100; buying leaves me £80. Either, I have £100; not buying/selling leaves me £100 £20 item I own, I have £100; selling leaves me £120.
In the first case maybe I can't make rent now. In the last case I have more cash, but then I need to spend money if I want entertainment/utility that the item had. In the first case I lose 25% of my cash; in the last I gain 20% (this matters when you're sharing your money across different needs).
Price and value are not the same. The logic of your friend was basically putting a price on how "special" (or not) he saw your relationship versus some rando-buyer online.
That is why people (close to you) get riled up emotionally: they're being treated in a way no different than a complete stranger.
(I do think a slight discount often makes sense just because a friend is probably quicker and easier to deal with. But anything more substantial turns into asking for free stuff, and yes and no are both perfectly fine answers to that.)
Yes dealing with friends is nicer than strangers - but also when you're selling stuff, sometimes it's better to do strangers. Expectations of long term service and support are clearer and have more defined boundaries.
Declining to give you $600 out of the blue because you'd rather have more money is not being indifferent.
Perhaps this is a cultural thing. I routinely buy gifts for friends, pay for their meals, travel and vice versa. Having more money is not some supreme objective that is more important than the people around you. Money is just a tool for enjoying life. I come from an impoverished and deprived background, spent years homeless since I was a teenager, and I still recognize that putting money before friends is a scarcity mindset.
If this isn't your intent, you should reflect on how you've presented your argument.
I have no idea where you got saying no as a matter of principle.
Also if saying no is putting money above friendship then so is the friend asking for money for no reason!
right after this yous say:
> Also if saying no is putting money above friendship then so is the friend asking for money for no reason!
No, it isn't, and the fact that you see it that way perfectly illustrates the point I've been trying to make.
But you haven't explained why you think sometimes saying no is a problem. You said a thing about philosophical principles but I've explicitly told you that's not what I meant. So it's hard for me to make this comparison without knowing what you mean.
You replied, saying "Declining to give you $600 out of the blue because you'd rather have more money is not being indifferent," and so I responded to this and your earlier comment, "If you ask your friend for $100 for no particular reason, just because you want $100, that's an annoying request and "no" is a reasonable response," because I disagree with it as framed.
Since then, you have widened that argument to give it more support, and we can now both certainly agree that there's nothing wrong with saying no to a request for money/gifts from a friend. And we can agree it would be annoying for a friend to constantly ask that, or even to ask a single time in certain contexts without sufficient social capital.
I understand your intended meaning might be different than how it came across to me, and said, "If this isn't your intent, you should reflect on how you've presented your argument."
I mean no ill intent and don't want this to devolve into an actual argument, so it's probably best we wind it down. If I came across as judgemental, I apologize, for my part I was attempting to offer my own perspective on what friendship can mean to different people.
Not wrong, but it is also possible that the $600 'cash equivalent' discount would be considered a birthday or Christmas present, or a form of 'repayment' for the time he helped you out with the Thing with the Guy in the Place. (“I'd never been to Belize.”)
If a stranger walks up to you and asks for $100, you're unlikely to give it to him. If a friend does, there's a more likely probability that you will consider the request.
And depending on the relationship, you may expect for the money to be paid back (eventually), or you may not (considering it a gift). (Often the advice is to consider "loans" to family and friends as gifts in practice, as otherwise the expectation of repayment may sour the relationship.)
I don't know why so many people are acting like I said a "no" is the only acceptable answer.
But I would never sell something expensive to a friend, period. There be dragons.
On the other hand, I wouldn't ask my friend to pay more if selling, so maybe a par price is fair.
If I want a thing gone, for whatever reason I want that to happen, then I want it gone. I never want to see it again.
When I get rid of a thing with eBay or Craigslist or FB Marketplace or whatever this decade's thing is, or with a dumpster, then it is gone from my life. It will never resurface.
But friends have a habit of bringing things back. Whether it's "Hey, remember that camera you gave me?" or "Hey, my old lady is kicking me out -- can I store some shit in your garage [like these four giant rackmount Elo touchscreens that I wouldn't let you bin two years ago]?", things given to friends have a bad habit of coming back 'round.
Sort of. People are being less irrational than it sounds if you account for transaction costs. There's a lot of stuff I might "sell" if I could point a video-game-like pointer at it and right click and hit "sell", and it just instantly disappeared and money was credited to my bank account. Perhaps even more if buying was just as easy and I didn't need to hang on to something like my drill which I don't use very often and I could trivially "rent" it from the market by buying, using it, and selling in mere minutes.
But in practice one-off selling for anything less than $100 or so is a waste of time because there are significant transaction costs for one-off events like that.
An easy end to that line of reasoning for me.
And he doesn't necessarili need thos $1300
If you think its insane to spend that amount of money on it (essentially: it's not worth that much to you), then you holding onto it instead of having $1300 is pretty much the exact same scenario? By holding onto it you're saying it is worth that much to you.
It sounds like believing you hunted down a 'deal' causes you to wildly change how you perceive value at an emotional level.
I would probably do the same thing. It's just funny to see expressed on HN where everybody complains that advertising and marketing are evil/scams and proclaims loudly how rational they are.
On the topic of HN users, is it our collective first day on earth?
If you decline to sell a thing for an easy 1300, doesn't that mean you value it at 1300 or more?
The disease of financialization at work. Money is all that matters to people, everything is converted into money. It's only value is what you could get from selling it, and/or what you spent to acquire it.
Like those weird fuckers who buy $200k supercars so they can sit in a damn garage. (She said, having put 30k miles on a Corvette inside of 3 years)
someone, above: > believing you hunted down a 'deal' causes you to wildly change how you perceive value at an emotional level.
I'm going to quote myself, paraphrased, because i forget the exact phrasing.
"All else equal, which tastes better: ice cream you've paid for; or ice cream that cost you nothing?"
edit: i didn't intend the above to be snark, even though it may read that way.
I mean it's helped by the fact that I can only realistically drive it like 7-8 months out of each year, and it's my fun car, not a commuter. As much as I'd love to drive for fun every day that's just not feasible, lol. That said it's resale value has never once entered my mind. I'm waiting until the loan is paid off at which point I'm planning several modifications to get more power out of it, and probably a lambo-door-hinge kit.
It's burning $5 in gas and $20 in time to go to a store further away and save $25 on a sale item. And then proudly bragging "I'm not like those idiots who pay full price!"
OP didn't find a record...he found a $1300 arbitrage, then decided to spend the proceeds on the record by keeping it.
In other words, this is why selling stuff to consumers is a nightmare.
You have to trick them into believing they "won one over" on everybody else, via discounting and promotions, no matter if ultimately they're the ones losing by spending hours of their time jumping through hoops on a product that they legitimately value at full price.
Everyone who's replied thus far has fallen into the same trap, you saw money and you forgot the value of the actual thing he wanted. Now he has the thing, you're still stuck talking and thinking about the money.
This comment section sees two guys trading a briefcase of dollars bills all day long as a roaring economy. Somehow completely blind to the human.
You’re making a lot of assumptions here in your thinking. The first one is that you can just randomly turn around and sell that record for $1300. Hitting those peaks usually only happens with in person sales or amongst collectors who know each other well. It’s incredibly expensive to get to that point and requires thousands of hours of work. For a normal person without extensive contacts, it’s still a lot of leg work for a fraction of that price. That might yield maybe $30 an hour.
Some people value their time higher than that; it’s really not that deep.
I have the same problems with trading cards I own from a long time ago that are now expensive, I can keep them for sentimental reasons or sell them to put it towards some bill
You're logic is why so much in this world if fucking broken. Everything is a grift, a hustle, an opportunity for profit.
1. I have 10,000 in my bank account. 2. I see a 1,300 record I like 3. I buy it 4. My bank account now has 8700 5. There's 1,300 difference if I choose to buy it or not
1. I have 10,000 in my bank account 2. I have a 1,300 record 3. If I sell it my bank account will have 11,300 4. 1,300 difference if I choose to sell it or not
No "end of the world, this is what's wrong with everybody" gross hyperboles please, I don't care one iota about whether anybody buys or sells expensive records, I don't make any moral judgement whatsoever and would appreciate people in turn not making extreme assumptions about what I think about expensive records. But economically, buying an expensive item or selling expensive item is the same - Prove it wrong with numbers not appeals to emotion please.
But my point is that I don't care about the numbers. If fact my complaint was that it was made into a financial decision, just because the record happens to be worth $1300.
If it was a $10 record, bought used at $2, then few would argue that you should sell it and make $8. My argument is that it doesn't matter if you could make $8 or $1298, not if you enjoy the record and wish keep it. It's the defaulting to "You could make money" in so many of aspects of life that's starting to annoy me.
The argument is not "you could make money", the argument is that if you got the expensive thing for free and choose not to sell then you're roughly as "insane" as the person that paid full price. Go ahead and splurge but try not to be a hypocrite about it. It's not lmm that was passing judgement, it was the person that owns the record passing judgement.
It is a massive massive massive privilege of us here to even ponder keeping a record we bought for 2 which could be sold for 1300. For a lot of other population this would be not even an argument.
Again, I don't actually care, but I do believe that mathematically, if one starts with assumption / claim that buying a 1300 record is insane, not selling it is equally insane (or not;). Crux of my argument is that two sides of that equation are equal, not whether we should consider that equation or not. I find it dishonest to make one side of the claim, but go all "modern culture is all about hussle!" When pointing the equivalence of the other side of the claim.
That's the Crux of the conversation here, with two differing perspectives. I'm not assuming it, I'm putting my perspective forward. and asking either clear disproof or acknowledgement of two perspectives.
My perspective to be clear :
If I buy a thing for $2, somebody offers me $1,300 for it, and it is not worth $1,300 to me, I will likely sell it; or I will acknowledge that it's clearly worth 1,300 to me and not call others who buy it for 1,300 insane :).
(This is the opposite of claiming there is no sentimental value. This is acknowledging that somethings absolutely have sentimental value to me and others are more utility based).
Spend $2. Receive album worth $1000. Make $300 an hour at job. Have no immediate use case for $1000 in cash. Have somewhat immediate want for music on that album.
Time to sell album with high quality images/ description, deal with questions from discerning buyers (tire-kickers), post the album: 4 hours
Opportunity cost- $1,200 Sale value - $1000 Replacement album cost - $20
Deciding to sell would put this hypothetical guy down $220 vs just listening to his cool, potential appreciating album and working for the same amount of time.
The reason anyone buys anything other than the minimum clothing, food, and shelter for mere survival is because of intangible value.
Any time you see someone who is not opting to optimize tangible value, it is likely that you are simply failing to observe some intangible value.
> Prove it wrong with numbers not appeals to emotion please.
This is a false dichotomy. Intangible value is not some fallacious appeal to emotion -- it is a real thing that economists overwhelmingly agree exists, but also recognize is difficult to put a number on.
And in the meantime, you get to enjoy owning it.
I never bought into the recent vinyl hype. Though I really like the beautiful design of many new vinyl releases, I don't think they are for being played. But I used to buy new and used vinyl as a teenager to actually listen to them, and occasionally I still buy used vinyl. Vinyl records from the flea market were as cheap as 1€, so that was an efficient way to grow my music collection before file sharing was a thing.
But now I prefer CDs because what really interests me is the music itself and I simply prefer the version with the best mastering. That's often CD releases from the early 1980s to mid 1990s.
And yes, I still buy music because I don't trust music streaming to be around forever. At least I think there is a real chance CDs will outlast individual services for sure. And in case the internet gets shut down because of war, at least I still have music as long as I have power.
For me, it's the expense and the inconvenience... as the meme goes. But anyway - I just like it; when I put on a record it's like "I'm doing this now and nothing else". Sitting on the couch and listening to Dark Side with a glass of wine. Remembering when my dad used to play records and I wasn't allowed to touch it because the stylus was expensive and fragile. It's a vibe, as the kids say.
This. I'm 55. My teenage years were in the 1980s, where CDs started to appear but vinyl was still mainstream. I remember Dad having a significant vinyl library and I also got my own collection.
But I hated caring for that thing. The medium is finicky, prone to scratches and whatnot, and CDs had more length and also more range and better sound. So as soon as I was able to get CDs, I got rid of my vinyl collection faster than one does it with a hot potato in their hands. I used vinyl daily, hated the whole burden of caring for it; and against CDs, I really found them wanting.
Too bad the medium got degraded with idiots who used dynamic compression, but inherently CDs and lossless digital audio in general is way much better. I never understood the vinyl resurgence, until some people explained it as being something more performative and also a way to get better artwork and physical mementos of the music. Understandable, but I still feel it's weird.
The issue is that vinyl mastering is a special case and different from digital mastering. You have to consider extra things like the width of the grooves, they can vary depending on the runtime of a side, this affects low frequencies as grooves might cut into each other and you'll get skips. And high frequencies degrade the closer you get towards the center of the record. I just think the people who can do this craft are simply retiring or dying out. This affects major label and indie artists alike.
foo_dr_meter: A simple Dynamic Range meter based on DR estimation formula published by https://dr.loudness-war.info/
foo_truepeak: ITU-R BS.1770-5 compliant True Peak scanner.
ReplayGain is part of the core components of foobar2000, so automatically adjusting the volume depending on the loudness of the trakc or entire album is pretty much a default feature of this player. The latter two components, especially the latter one give valuable insights into the loudness and mastering quality of a recording. True Peak can calculate the Peak-to-Integrated Loudness of a recording for example the headroom between loudest part and the maximum possible loudness of the format, or it tells you the loudness range in LUFS meaning how squished or wide the dynamic range of a track is. Really nifty if you have a huge music collection and need numbers to quickly compare releases.
There are other tools that can compute it, including MAAT DROffline MkII (proprietary), as well as a couple open-source, Python-based tools (DR14 T.meter, DR Check), or https://github.com/sboukortt/speedr in C++.
I’m willing to help fix this, but the source code is not public, and when I emailed the author I got no response.
This is already way beyond what vinyl is able to reproduce. The best case is roughly 12-bits PCM equivalent. Literally not an issue in the slightest.
Anyhow that's my theory
Most people aren't in a quiet environment when they listen to music these days. Compression helps significantly with this.
What would be neat would be to have a compression metadata 'guide' that would allow a compressor on-device to perform the compression, rather than baked into the audio track.
This would allow the user to tune 'severity' of compression. In a car / fancy headphones, you could sample the ambient noise level and adjust accordingly.
You're conflating regular compression with the insanely over the top mastering people started doing. This goes way beyond keeping people off the volume knob. You do not need that much compression to keep your volume in a listenable range, and you certainly don't have to slam the entire master bus through a limiter. The loudness wars really was just about having a louder track than everyone else. So much so that the whole process of mastering became how to make it sound as loud as possible without sounding compressed. If it were just about keeping volume consistent, they would not do it through the master bus. There are so many interviews with mastering engineers who are frustrated with the pointless chase for volume.
Arguably, listeners have heard it so long that they've gotten used to the exaggerated compression, and they just like it now stylistically. Some of my favorite records are very loud.
.. which is ironic, because the end result usually sounded terrible. You know, overly compressed.
They overly compress the master channel specifically to make it very loud, and there's dozens of interviews with engineers that are frustrated with it.
Most people don't have cars
You of course miss the whole-body tactile vibration effect of loud bass played on speakers, but the sound itself is there.
Given that the highly vague cliche reference of your comments, this conversation is probably concluded, all the best.
To all other readers, please enjoy your IEMs and TWS but make sure they have an EQ and try to turn down the boomy base and piercing highs of some manufacturers like Bose and Sony.
Uhh, what? You go into any recording studio its is probably going to have a set of mdrv6 or mdr7506. Most of what you listen to are probably mixed and mastered with these same cans and its been that way with these same cans for like 4 decades now.
1. Audio-Technica ATH-M50x 2. Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro 3. Sony MDR-7506 4. Sennheiser HD 600 / 650
These are used in different situations. Most of the time headphones are used for tracking, which is listening to the live recording of one track. What most people call "monitoring", which is listening to the studio mix, is done on speakers, not headphones. Furthermore, items 1-3 represent quite distorted and inaccurate sound signatures, and people only buy these because it's their reference headphone, something they're used to. They're not actually the best sounding or accurate headphones, like say >1k Focals.
Most of the music is absolutely, definitely, is not mixed and mastered on headphones, let alone Sonys. Any decent mix requires speaker monitors for proper soundstaging. Mixes done without speakers sound quite wrong. This has been true since stereo recordings existed.
I'm sorry, but you're regurgitating cliches, and probably don't have deep knowledge of this subject.
You should get some Airpod Pros, you might like them.
>You should get some Airpod Pros, you might like them.
Talk about some nominative determinism between your prickish take and your HN username.
1. Compressed sound can be an integral (wanted) part of different genre aesthetics. I personally love dynamic mixes, but if you let your customers A/B mixes they will often chose the more compressed/louder one. If your song sounds weak after another bands song, that is an issue.
2. For reasons of health/liability there are maximum levels on headphones and mobile playback devices. That means if my mix has a high dynamic range the bulk of it may really just be too low when played back on the majority of headphones. If I mix my own music this is a bargain I can make if I mix other peoples music I would try to be a little more on the cautious side if the musicians didn't demand a highly dynamic mix.
3. Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music. 90% of people who listen to music do not listen to it actively, they just let it run in the background or are passively exposed to it. Try listening to a good dynamic recording of Beethovens fith in your car with the window rolled down. You will hear some strong phrases then inbetween nothing as it is below the ambient noise floor.
Vinyl has the benefit, that I as the mixing engineer can assume that the listener will be much more likely actively involved with the music than say in a radio mix.
I’ve always been curious - but presumably that’s true even after volume matching?
> 3 Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music
I’ve heard this is also why film and video game soundtracks are often very compressed, even when orchestral, because they have to fit in the background with dialog/sfx
Yes. Many musicians want their stuff to sound like the music of their heroes they grew up with, and that music is often compressed to a block as well. So compression isn't just about making things sound louder, it also has its own aesthetical value. Whether that is good or bad aesthetics can be argued about, but some people also like to distort their instruments which was also a thing people frowned upon in the past.
> I’ve heard this is also why film and video game soundtracks are often very compressed, even when orchestral, because they have to fit in the background with dialog/sfx
The official themes often are quite compact, but there is often also highly dynamic orchestral work used that is way less recognizable and used with more dynamics (think about te soon creating orchestral atmospheres). Cinema mixes are a thing btw. where many consumers complain about too high dynamic ranges. They complain that the dialog is low and the explosion loud. Cinemas being among the few spaces we mixing engineers have where we have a bit more control over the presumed levels, especially if we are talking about Dolby certified venues.
I particularly dislike when old intentionally-dynamic music is remastered to be “modernized” into a brick, which is sort of the opposite direction.
> Cinema mixes
I didn’t know about these, that’s neat! Makes sense that the levels can’t really be the same in my living room as a theater. Is it really a whole separate mix or just some compression in mastering?
I really hope that’s not another masterings collection rabbit hole I’m about to fall down haha. I’ll look out for some Dolby certified venues in my area too
I understand them, they want to shake you in the seat, to make it an experience (unlike watching at home), but it's ridiculous I have to consider bringing earplugs
Many reasons. A lot of the same reasons people buy, say, Pokemon cards and don't play the card game.
Speaking of, I think the sound quality of modern-day bluetooth speakers is really good.
The sound quality out of the speakers of some Apple products seems borderline impossible to me. The MacBook in particular makes me feel like I missed an important DSP lecture at university.
I had to record the vinyl to get usable digital files.
The reason it was backed off for the vinyl master is most likely due to physical limitations of the medium. If the audio channels are too loud (wide) there is risk that the needle will jump out of the groove.
You can see some examples of how dynamic range (they don’t track ‘mastering’ overall) varies across releases on this site: https://dr.loudness-war.info/
inability to encode very low tones.
> Especially since the answer to any loudness problem is to simply for the user to turn up the volume.
This isn't quite true as compression addresses differences in volume. Unless you expect the listener to actively turn up the volume during the quiet parts and down during the loud parts of your song, or be listening in a completely quiet environment with nothing but the music so they can appreciate the dynamics--which is the way a lot of vinyl aficionados do listen to music.
I've now got a pretty mixed collection of records, tapes, CDs, digital music, and even a rockbox modded ipod. An added facet of fun for me when I find new music is to decide what the most thematically appropriate format to own it is.
For example I own the CD for Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay because there's a CD in the art, and it feels like a very 00s album, but for vaporwave I almost exclusively buy cassettes.
The format is only relevant in that it requires audiophile level dedication and money to use the format in the first place. Not dissimilar to vinyl before its recent boom.
I have an SACD setup, but for what I want to listen to, everything is out of print and secondary market is insane. Players can be found relatively cheaply at thrift stores (many don’t bluray and multi-CD carousels support it with digital output).
Even without proper dithering, listeners could not tell the difference between that and the SACD[1], but could tell the difference between that and the CD version of the same album.
That and having an industry standard way to crank the center channel (user setting) when downmixing to 2.1
Am I meant to then override that by increasing the center channel volume so it's louder than the other speakers?
Or raise the system volume?
1: Powered by a Denon AVR, not separates if you want to "No true cinephile" me.
hint - the industry is doing EXACTLY what (most) consumers want. there is a big difference between what a consumer tells you they want, and what actually they pay for
As far as revealed preference goes, those who complimented me on it all had the smallest iPhone available when purchased.
This is anecdotal at best; "those guys" will be using hard data just like tech bros with ecommerce sites do, and the data does not lie.
Compression sells better than high dynamic range else they would have stopped. This is true for every "nobody likes this" statement people make on the internet about things that are commercially successful nevertheless. Big phones (as someone else mentioned), mobile games, video game movie adaptations, AI music, Marvel franchise entries, funko pops, they're all running circles around people that don't personally like it and who are in circles of like-minded people.
When people listen to two pieces of audio they generally prefer the louder of the two. That doesn't mean they want you to turn up the volume dial for them. They can adjust the volume dial themselves, and if everything gets louder they'll turn down the volume dial to compensate.
The change in mixing and mastering can be largely explained by people changing the way they consume it. Eg. people watch more movies on netflix than in a cinema. People used to sit in a room with a record player, now they listen in their car or headphones while doing other stuff.
If you just amplify the whole track until its max amplitude reaches the medium's maximum, yes you could undo that.
But the loudness war aims to make the whole track even louder than that, by quietening those max peaks so they don't clip, then that gives you room to amplify the rest of the track even further. The dynamic range of the recording is permanently reduced.
same here, but there is no real market for somebody to bother yet
That's a massive stretch.
They are able separate them sort of, but they are nowhere close the original quality of the individual tracks.
and true in practice too. what you get out of an ai demuxer isn't an exact match for what went into the mix. it's a plausible approximation, much like ai upscalers, upsamplers, colorizers, and such.
In the open metadata world there is ReplayGain which analyzes music peaks and tries to create a negative gain to equalize the dynamic range to a standard volume at both the individual track and full album level.
Apple Music, Spotify, and others have proprietary but similar systems.
(As someone who deeply loves to shuffle an entire library, having a music player that supports ReplayGain has long been a personal requirement.)
On Windows I've always liked Foobar 2000 for its strong ReplayGain support, both automating the analyzing pass and respecting the metadata in the tags once saved. On Unix I was using Banshee for playback and automating analyzing with a pair of CLI tools I've forgotten the names of, one was MP3 specific and the other Ogg/FLAC-specific, as I recall.
If you remember making a playlist where one song is suddenly much louder than the last, and you’re riding the volume knob on every other song, you’ll see why this is nice!
For analog there are similar limitations, but it's limited by other factors like noise.
These tools are most useful when used earlier in the process. Like when you just tracked an amazing vocal take, but the gain was too hot on one or two notes. The tools can mitigate some of the distortion artifacts to make it more usable. Applying these tools to complex material like a full mix will have some improvements, but at that stage there's less guarantee for convincing restoration of the record.
What I think non-professionals don't understand is that a record that is characterized by heavy compression is not something that happened at the very end with the mastering stage. It is an aesthetic choice that was made dozens of times along the way while recording, arranging, and mixing. Heavy compression is not necessarily a bad thing. Lots of amazing-sounding records harness it well. It's an art AND a craft. It takes audio engineers and producers years to do it well and with taste.
It's crazy watching some of the producer YT videos now and they open up these projects with 105 tracks, multi-layered/multi-voice drums, etc.
Queen's music is a massive pile of overdubs, especially for vocals and guitar. The Beatles also, and they were heavily into looping (physically cutting audio tape and gluing it in a loop, then re-recording it). Vocal and guitar double-tracking has also been the norm since the 50s, at least.
80s pop was also generally full of synthesizer stacks, where MIDI from one keyboard was simultaneously triggering several synths to create layers.
Where? The critical bit is missing!
https://web.archive.org/web/20260208100527/https://magicviny...
The loudness war was never exclusive to digital audio formats though, it just reached saturation point [heh] with CDs. This didn't happen earlier because clipping isn't a thing on records -- saturation (practically some margin below that) is a hard limit.
Hard article to follow unfortunately. Also the only example it gives just shows a compressed waveform. I understand disliking that compared to the more dynamic older record, but a perfectly reasonable explanation for this would be: it sounds more like what buyers today expect.
Is that really true? Anybody buying music today instead of streaming is somebody who takes music more seriously than most. It seems likely they're going to care more about sound quality than the streaming audience.
I don't know why you've introduced this 'serious' vs. streaming thing.
What does taking music more seriously even mean here? If you seriously like listening to normalised Purple Rain on 128 kbps mp3 and also like collecting physical media, you might seriously like to buy and listen to normalised Purple Rain on your preferred (lossless, or less-lossy) format.
What RIAA should do is promote universal use of ReplayGain across digital distribution platforms. That way people can manage relative volume as desired without the need to corrupt the audio. They could make money with a signed tag certifying the mix meets quality standards.
The ideal solution would be to distribute high dynamic range audio with metadata to configure optional playback-time dynamic range compression for noisy listening environments or weak playback equipment.
Or make a sound format (like video containers) that could have two separate mixes of a track.
I suspect you’re not involved in contemporary record making. Like it or not, clipping is a technique and a color that producers, mixers, and mastering engineers all choose to impart for aesthetic and technical reasons. It has it’s uses.
If your proposal were passed all that would be left for consideration would be a handful lame DSD jazz records from those hi-fi enthusiasts who are disconnected from the reality around how most records are made these days.
https://www.statista.com/chart/32863/genres-with-the-highest...
That is, they're more collectible than CDs in my opinion. Bigger packaging for better artwork, something physical and relatively sturdy, etc.
Jewel cases are fragile, but they’re largely standard and can be easily replaced if the crack or the dots in the middle snap off. It has no bearing on the artwork or the music itself.
If I am using an analog device (in my case tube amplifier) I want to listen to something that was mastered on analog equipment. If it's square wave pressed on to vinyl you might as well stream.
We can debate whether people can hear the difference, and mastering has as much (or more) to do with it, but I will take an AAA or AAD over an ADD all day.
1. Digital recording equipment had significantly improved
2. Audio engineers learned how to use the equipment
3. Heavy digital compressors weren't in use yet.
From the perspective of an amateur DJ and dedicated dancer, vinyl never really died in the underground dance scene, whether talking about the UK dubscene or German techno.
And as much as I love and respect vinyl DJs, the medium itself is often used to make vinyl exclusive releases (looking at you UK), gatekeeping the music literally, make the runs limited and super exclusive, and obviously super expensive.
Not to mention it makes little sense, musically, to put a digitally produced track on an analog medium. Collecting old music on vinyl is one thing, getting all your new music (produced on Abelton) as vinyl is just silly to me. Again, completely understand why vinyl only DJs do it.
To me vinyl is totally contrary to the DIY culture of underground dance music, and I simply won't buy any new vinyl (not to say DJ culture is DIY, but techno culture for example really is at its core punk DIY).
I would much rather the producer just made a shirt instead of a special deluxe vinyl edition for the super fans with too much money (and the couple of vinyl only DJs that will buy it). I'd rather spend that money on more new music, that I can own as FLAC forever.
And I would REALLY like if all the old vinyls were professionally ripped and sold by their labels. Because sooner or later they WILL all disappear, which I guess if you're a collector/secretive DJ is a good thing... Really shocking that a lot of this old music can only be found in good quality on Youtube rips. Yes, better than if you were able to dig out a 30 year old record in a store.