Break free from loudness- Video

[Mixmachine]

Apparently they are doing this for the Ipod generation , another reason to keep your vinyl

YouTube - I Want to Break Free from Loudness War

Cd Mastering and the music biz

Hall of well mastered cds

Of more interest here I see, Blondie, Kid Creole, ABBA, Banarama, Frankie goes to Hollywood, Madonna, Taking Heads, Kyllie Minoge...

CDs Hall of shame

I don't own any of this, but I'm surprised to find Sade's "Diamong Life" in this list

[Graham_Start]

Aggressive hard-limiting has become so ubiquitous that nowadays people will think there's something wrong with the disc if it isn't dynamically crushed. "These new discs sounds better because I can hear all sorts of detail when I'm driving down the highway with the windows down! Those old CDs suck, because I have to turn them up to hear them loud."

[QUINNY]

This whole subject makes me laugh as it seems to be another 'little man's rights over authority figure' argument as much as anything else. Don't people realise that the finished sound onto any medium has been controlled by someone, ever since the year dot (in recording terms).

It was in the 1970s that over the top compression first started.....and the biggest perpetrators of this were the engineers/producers who made Disco records. So musicians, engineers and producers have sought a limited dynamic range since then (and probably before), thinking it to be better.

With analogue, it was a necessary evil, otherwise the finished records would have been much less playable (especially over the loud amplified systems found in discos), especially if put against those records that had been compressed. Transfer any record you like from the 1970s to digital with a decent peak response meter and you'll see that vinyl has about 20dB useful dynamic range (in other words anything below -20dB is lost in the snap, crackle and pop of stylus from groove vinyl retrieval. By any stretch of the imagination, that is not a very big dynamic range and cassette tapes (with Dolby NR) would have had a better one.

Although not a lover of huge dynamic compression, Digital does allow for better dynamic control and quite frankly, most of the CD re-issues I've bought (some 600-700 now) that are from master tapes, sound soooo much better than any vinyl or cassette ever could have done. I've been surprised at how good I can get some of my vinyl transfers to sound, but none of them have sounded as good as master tape to CD when a like for like comparison can be made. NOT ONE!!!!

Final thought. Do you think the Disco engineers/producers and artists of the '70s would have been more content with a finished product with more dynamics or more loudness? I'd bet on the latter in 99% of cases.

[Graham_Start]

Q, I thought that with your fondness of jazz that you'd have more appreciation for dynamic recordings.

Originally Posted by QUINNY

It was in the 1970s that over the top compression first started.....and the biggest perpetrators of this were the engineers/producers who made Disco records.

Yes, Tom Moulton's early mixes are certainly examples of this. Gloria Gaynor's Never Can Say Goodbye is compressed within an inch of its life and it sounds dreadful for it. He backed off on heavy compression around '76 though.

Having said that, the compression used back in those days was a fraction of what is being applied to any contemporary release. Current releases have almost no dynamic range whatsover, which makes them fatiguing to listen to. To give a visual analogy, take all your digital pictures into a photo-editing program and crank the saturation and contrast to maximum. Now every picture has REALLY BRIGHT VIVID COLOURS! WOW!! ISN'T THAT GREAT?! Well, maybe initially they will look nice and pretty, or if you've got a really dim monitor they'll seem more life-like.

Worst of all, this is completely unnecessary, due to digital's lack of surface noise. Okay, dynamically-flattened recordings do sound more detailed on cheap PC speakers and in car stereos with the windows rolled down. But put them on a decent playback system and they're horrible. The better your sound system is, the worse they sound.

This isn't an analog vs digital debate, since analog can be just as dynamically crushed as digital. It is a debate about how louder *isn't* always better.

If nothing is quiet, then nothing is loud. Heavily-compressed recordings are lifeless.

[QUINNY]

Graham: Here's my own take on things.

With the advent of multitrack recordings, and subsequent close micing techniques, any notion of dynamics went out the window. Suddenly it was possible to manipulate (recorded) music in a manner that would have been in the realms of fantasy only a few decades before. So, any further manipulation via hard limiting at the mastering stage was to be expected. After all, what the engineers, producers and record companies are doing is hardly ruining a masterpiece of dynamic range.

Actually, I don't listen to any recorded Jazz on a regular basis as no recordings ever come close to experiencing it live. I made many, many hundreds of Jazz recordings in my time as a recording engineer, some of which were straight to stereo. The best of these (STS) have a certain something which was always nigh on impossible to capture on multitrack. Probably to do with having some 'air' around the instruments and to try my best to capture some of this, I went over to using omni directional microphones (even when close micing) and the results were certainly more live and invigorating.

Jazz msicians and moreover classical musicians would always go on about dynamics, but when given the opportunity to compress a particularly quiet section, they never refused, realising that what went for O.K. in a live situation was quite often less than perfect and could be improved upon. O.K., this was acheived using relatively subtle compression, combined with hard limiting (to the extent that 0dB wasn't exceeded which allowed all levels to be brought up to a greater or lesser degree), which with good quality digital equipment is absolutely fine (compared to analogue hard limiting which would introduce many faceted analogue distortions and horrible pumping artefacts).

Listen to any analogue multitrack recording on vinyl and the use of compression is quite awful, more than often. Once CD came around, the sound quality was soo much more life like. What vinyl purists have always claimed to be a better sound is actually their own preference for compression and hard limiting that not only squashed the dynamics but also radically altered the true sound. What was perceived as a hard sound with digital, was much nearer to a true sound than virtually any vinyl release.

All of the above is not in any way to be contrued as meaning that I approve of ultra hard limiting, so that the effective dynamic range is maybe 3 dB, but....as all they're doing is polishing a turd...what does it really matter?

[Graham_Start]

We seem to be discussing different things.

You're going on about how multitrack recordings are inherently artificial and how digital is a superior medium to vinyl. I already agree with you on both of those points.

However, aggressive hard-limiting pushes things to a ridiculous extreme, and the point here is that modern mastering is making all music resemble a modulated square wave, and that has a very high suck factor. The public still has the perception that louder is better fidelity, and we need to educate people that it ain't necessarily so.