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Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

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Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

#71

Post by Capricorn2481 »

hex4def6 wrote: post #37
entropicdrifter wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people listen to music in their car. More compressed audio means less fiddling with the volume knob as you drive, regardless of normalization done by Spotify et al. Anyhow that's my theory

Yep. 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 ambien…

You are very off here. People have been playing music in their cars and in clubs for decades, and a lot of them play tracks that predate the loudness wars. If anything, people are more isolated than ever and have much better headphones and speakers than even 10 years ago.

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.

Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

#72

Post by hurtigioll »

nighthawk454 wrote: post #62
atoav wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've always been curious - but presumably that’s true even after volume matching? 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…

Ah, I hadn’t thought about the generational aspect that’s interesting. The aesthetic totally makes sense to me when the music is intended for it / designed with it in mind, which I guess quite a lot of music is. 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…

among other things, cinemas can have many more channels - 12.1 is a standard which also has speakers above you (ceiling) and bellow you

Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

#73

Post by hurtigioll »

everdrive wrote: post #7

It's a weird social psychology quirk. For whatever reason, the entire music industry has been captured by the delusion that mixing all the sounds louder is good. No one likes it, except for those guys. For reasons I'll never understand, the movie industry has been captured by the opposite delusion; they're going to pump dynamic range so high that you can only understand about half the dialogue in the movie. And of co…

remember when HN was saying "nobody wants big smartphones, why does the industry keep doing this? iPhone 4 size is the perfect size"

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

Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

#74

Post by Capricorn2481 »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #16
pimeys wrote: post #11

I don't understand why they still release super compressed and loud masterings when most of the modern headphones are so good you don't really need to master for the old cheap stereo sets. And isn't headphones with Spotify the most common medium for music nowadays?

Most people listen to music in their car. More compressed audio means less fiddling with the volume knob as you drive, regardless of normalization done by Spotify et al. Anyhow that's my theory

Compression can definitely help with that, but so can automating the volume knob. If it were just about keeping volume consistent, they would compress different tracks differently (which they do).

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.

Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

#75

Post by hurtigioll »

amiga386 wrote: post #26
buo wrote: post #21

Are there any known ways to undo the compression? Assuming no clipping, the process should be reversible, right?

No, you need the original mix to remaster it yourself. 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 redu…

people said "it's impossible to separate tracks (voice, bass, ...) after they are mixed". true in theory, but neural-networks can separate them in practice

same here, but there is no real market for somebody to bother yet

Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

#76

Post by shmageggy »

esikich wrote: post #50
nighthawk454 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s completely true, when the vinyl has a different mastering. It can be a completely different version. It’s not because it’s vinyl

Mastering doesn't change much. They're just going to roll off the low end a bit. A separate mix is an entirely different thing though.

Sorry, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. Many releases get mastered separately for digital and for vinyl, and one or both of them often does “change much”. Usually the brickwall limiting (among other things) on the digital master.

Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

#77

Post by TylerE »

larodi wrote: post #6

Depending on which vinyl you're talking about. I care very little about big names signed to big corpo - they can do whatever they want to their vinyl. There are plenty of indi/underground artists releasing both on vinyl and tampe, who succumbed to nothing, but are alive and well actually. Check bandcamp more often for clues, should you disagree.

Yeah, I know a lot of indie artists. Most of that vinyl is produced straight off the 44.1/16 digital master. If you think it's analog (or in many cases even properly mastered at all), you're fooling yourself.

Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

#78

Post by shmageggy »

maqp wrote: post #68
larodi wrote: post #6

Depending on which vinyl you're talking about. I care very little about big names signed to big corpo - they can do whatever they want to their vinyl. There are plenty of indi/underground artists releasing both on vinyl and tampe, who succumbed to nothing, but are alive and well actually. Check bandcamp more often for clues, should you disagree.

PSA: https://dr.loudness-war.info/ is a great place to look for info on dynamic range of releases, and also, a great place to find new music with excellent dynamic range.

Good site, but it has some frustrating limitations that make it vastly less useful, specifically regarding the phenomenon in the article. The search UI doesn’t expose the release code (and many entries don’t even include it), so when it says “vinyl” you have no idea which of the possibly dozens of releases it refers to, some of which can be awful, like the article points out.

I’m willing to help fix this, but the source code is not public, and when I emailed the author I got no response.

Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

#79

Post by bravura »

lmm wrote: post #64
buildsjets wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep 3 pressings of Led Zep II out so I can demonstrate the difference to people who don’t believe that there is one. A first-week Robert Ludwig mastered version, a second-week pressing of the Ahmet Ertegun disaster, and 1977 remaster that really sounds just as good as the 1969 RL mix and is a lot cheaper. $20 for a VG+ copy compared to $1300. I am not insane so I did not spend $1300 on a used vinyl record, I found…

> I am not insane so I did not spend $1300 on a used vinyl record, I found mine for $2 at Goodwill. How is holding onto it instead of selling it for $1300 any less insane than buying it for $1300 in the first place?

Who taught you this? And why do you think this way?

Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

#80

Post by svelle »

hurtigioll wrote: post #75
amiga386 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you need the original mix to remaster it yourself. 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 redu…

people said "it's impossible to separate tracks (voice, bass, ...) after they are mixed". true in theory, but neural-networks can separate them in practice same here, but there is no real market for somebody to bother yet

> but neural-networks can separate them in practice

That's a massive stretch.

They are able separate them sort of, but they are nowhere close the original quality of the individual tracks.

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