A glimmer of hope in the Loudness War?

[burst]

As reported at The Sun Online, might there be hope for the dreadful state of modern record production?

Maybe I've began to just deal with it, maybe gotten too used to it, but even when watching television the commericals are absolutely UNBEARABLE. I reaiize that may be a slightly different issue than record mastering, but it's all related, isn't it? When everything is loud, nothing is. Except for the commercials on HDTV, which apparently have some sort of extra-super-duper-loudness-izer as a final step before transmission.

Is there hope? Will we ever enjoy dynamic range in recorded music again?

[lucey]

"And Britain’s leading studio engineers have launched a campaign to make records range in levels to avoid one loud blur."

I wonder what this is?

[Bob Olhsson]

Originally Posted by Randall

I don't get the attraction to smashed recordings myself

It's simple, the paranoia of every artists' manager who has sat in a sales or promotion meeting and watched a perfectly fine recording tossed in the wastebasket because it wasn't as loud as the previous five tracks the people in the meeting just listened to.

Paranoia created the problem and posers who want to sound like the latest big hit have kept the momentum going.

[Empty Planet]

Originally Posted by Bob Olhsson

Paranoia created the problem and posers who want to sound like the latest big hit have kept the momentum going.

Hey! Don't leave out the posers like me who love dynamics!

[Fredrik]

My guess is at one time (soon) some one will decide to put out a record with more dynamic range and the reaction will be that it sounds better than whats the norm now. That is what is needed IMO a new (better) example to copy.

[poncival]

I mastered a hip hop project last night and made sure it was a little lower average than "The Marshall Mathers LP" rather than just about the same as that like people usually ask for. Here's hoping I don't get angry phone calls today about why is it so quiet compared to Eminem?????

[Thomas W. Bethe]

From the article....

And one record boss admitted: “New techniques are causing our listeners fatigue.”

And I would add that more and more CDs are being over done everyday and the people who are asking for the increase are the record bosses.

It is not just pop and rock anymore. We are getting more and more requests to "turn up the volume" on mastering we do for classical and acoustic music.

Somewhere, sometime (and hopefully soon ) - this madness HAS to end.

I think the average listener has become so lazy that they do not want to touch the volume control therefore everything has to be brought up to its maximum level and the five disk CD changer has not helped this since people like to use the random selection button and no matter what they are listening to, from Bach to Rock, it all needs to be at the same LOUD level.

Less and less people are listening to music in their homes and most seem to do the majority of their listening when on the go. I assume that they are the ones that the music industry is currently catering to. People don't really listen to music anymore like they use to in the 50s, 60s and 70s while sitting in their living room or dorm room.

A lot of music today is used simply as back ground noise to block out the urban noises that surround us daily when outside. I live in a college town and I see students all the time with one ear bud in their ear, their other ear glued to a cell phone and they are walking and talking with two or more friends This maybe the extreme example of multi-tasking but are they really "listening" to the music or is it just another stimulant/noise source?

I have a few artist that are trying to buck this trend towards the ultimate in loudness but they inevitably call me up after the mastering session and ask me to boost the volume before sending off the the CD to have it replicated. They say that they are afraid of what the record execs will say when their CD is lower in level than others in their genre on the infamous 5 disk CD carousel.

Oh for the good old days....

[flatfinger]

Include 2 disc in every release ; one thats loud and one that has fidelity.

[andreªs]

Even the German "Spiegel" is moaning about it in an article today:

http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/musik/0...486752,00.html

Their technical explanation is quite "interesting" though. But hey...

[flatfinger]

Well , besides all the distortion, one group who's getting screwed by all this are the bass players!! I just checked out a song that measured 9.24 rms ( AES) in WL and the bass is starved out!! Really a shame because after I brickwalled everything above 250khz and soloed the bass line , the guy could play!!!! It's hard to catch all the nuiance he put into it in the full mix. Really too bad.

[beachhunt]

Originally Posted by flatfinger

Include 2 disc in every release ; one thats loud and one that has fidelity.

Possible! Duncan Sheik released that album with the second disc of multitracks for people to remix and upload, maybe someone will do "loud" and "good" discs.

[dropblacksky]

We should all digg this story...the only thing that will stop this madness is CONSUMER backlash...spread the word...

Digg - Official, rock music is too loud

[Thomas W. Bethe]

Anyone else seen this?

The Death of Dynamic Range

[mix-it-well]

I feel like the Problem is the CD/Wave Format itself.
Today we should be able to automate the volume...and i don't talk about mixer.

For example:
We got a wave file at the RMS Level of -25 db.
There are all those nice dynamics in it that we all love ,but the volume is pretty low right?
Now why hasn't somebody invented a fileformat that got an extended header to save the RMS Level of that file + a program that reads this information and turn the volume up to a defined point. Fully automated.
That would be a great thing.

Doh I should patent that asap.

[jdg]

they have such a thing for mp3s.
"replay-gain" its called

[mix-it-well]

Originally Posted by jdg

they have such a thing for mp3s.
"replay-gain" its called

But that's not the same system.
They analyse the material and try to adapt it.
But that doesn't work that well plus it doesn't rais the volume that far.
The RMS Level must be written in the header ,that would be much much more accurate.

[Bob Yordan]

Hiya

Just some thoughts.

While doing my loudness experiments, I discovered that it is rather easy to
get a mix with eg a RMS average value round - 9.0 without it sounding
so extremly loud or totally squashed. It does however generate more or less distortions.

But is really RMS average (AES) the best way to measure a mix loudness with?

Eg the (RMS) energy in the mix might be put into the low end. Making overall freq range kind of dynamic, while the bass pumps up the main level meters at max. On rather small speakers the energy is not heard, but the meters shows that it is squashed.

Removing/cutting away bass from a mix like that lowers the RMS average in a major way.

Best wishes

[narcoman]

all we gotta do is educate the music release license organisations that the RMS value HAS to be -15. Louder records would then HAVE to be more dynamic!! Simple.


c'mon AES, lobby the MCPS and other bodies..... MAKE them do it!!

[streaky]

Originally Posted by lucey

"And Britain’s leading studio engineers have launched a campaign to make records range in levels to avoid one loud blur."

Yeah we are! But I think this is a fairly vague statement regarding how everyone's getting sick of crap, loud music. For me this thread has been great, I've forwarded it to a client who was asking questions that this article addresses directly, so thanks to the poster!