Loudness (2007) • Hacker News Board

Re: Loudness (2007)

#21

Post by Fice » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 10:28 PM UTC

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #17

mortenjorck wrote: post #13

For practical listening, I actually prefer modern brickwall mastering techniques to more traditional mastering with a high dynamic range, for one reason: what the author sees as "hijacking the volume control from the listener" I would consider the opposite. With a high dynamic range, a headphones listener may feel the need to adjust the volume several times in a song to boost the clarity of softer sections or to make…

It's easier to remove dynamic range on playback than to add it back in... don't many stereos have a "loudness" function which brickwalls the audio?

The "loudness" switch on stereo amplifiers is for loudness compensation [1], not compression.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_compensation

Re: Loudness (2007)

#22

Post by Swizec » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 10:40 PM UTC

mortenjorck wrote: post #13

For practical listening, I actually prefer modern brickwall mastering techniques to more traditional mastering with a high dynamic range, for one reason: what the author sees as "hijacking the volume control from the listener" I would consider the opposite. With a high dynamic range, a headphones listener may feel the need to adjust the volume several times in a song to boost the clarity of softer sections or to make…

I have an even simpler wish. All I want is to comfortably listen to my audiobook when running without going deaf when Strava comes on to give me pacenotes. My kingdom for per-app volume control!

That's one benefit of podcasts. They often have lower quality but louder audio so I don't have to pump up the volume when I'm out and about.

Re: Loudness (2007)

#23

Post by mbell » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 10:43 PM UTC

mortenjorck wrote: post #13

For practical listening, I actually prefer modern brickwall mastering techniques to more traditional mastering with a high dynamic range, for one reason: what the author sees as "hijacking the volume control from the listener" I would consider the opposite. With a high dynamic range, a headphones listener may feel the need to adjust the volume several times in a song to boost the clarity of softer sections or to make…

There is value to constant volume, but I think a lot of the loudness war came from a time when there implementing a compressor on the user's side was expensive. It's trivially cheap now, basically every device you own that can produce audio now is capable of implementing a decent digital compressor with no additional hardware costs and about 5 minutes of an software engineer's time. If this wasn't hard when the loudness war set in, we'd probably just have a checkbox that defaults to 'on' in all these devises instead of the master being messed up. In other words, the timing of cheap, low power audio DSPs missed the boat by a couple years.

Re: Loudness (2007)

#24

Post by copperx » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 10:53 PM UTC

golergka wrote: post #18

Since Youtube and most streaming services started to automatically balance tracks based on their average perceived loudness (not all of them use the same metric, but the purpose is the same), loudness war is almost dead. If you brickwall your song, it will not be played louder than competition anymore.

The algorithms that determine perceptual loudness are very inaccurate, so it's still possible to game them.

Re: Loudness (2007)

#25

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 11:00 PM UTC

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #17

mortenjorck wrote: post #13

For practical listening, I actually prefer modern brickwall mastering techniques to more traditional mastering with a high dynamic range, for one reason: what the author sees as "hijacking the volume control from the listener" I would consider the opposite. With a high dynamic range, a headphones listener may feel the need to adjust the volume several times in a song to boost the clarity of softer sections or to make…

It's easier to remove dynamic range on playback than to add it back in... don't many stereos have a "loudness" function which brickwalls the audio?

[deleted]

Re: Loudness (2007)

#26

Post by ttoinou » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 11:14 PM UTC

Theses mastering techniques have their legitimate use ! Some notes :

* it's a step in musical production where having experience, skills and contact with the artist matters. Not all compressor and limiter are created equal and the default value you use in your media player may not sound as good as what an audio engineer might have done..

* Not everyone have good hardware and a good environment to listen to high dynamic range music like thoses listening to classical music / jazz / Philip Glass, so theses business decision to increase volume for the market made sense at that time I think. Audio engineer simply took profit of having a technically better medium (CD) to make audio sound better (from what I've read theses techniques did not work well on vinyl)

* Loudness wars didn't have an effect on old records since as one can see in this article, we could find the old dynamic ones (and so we actually have the choice of listening to the old untouched record, or the new compressed-for-the-market record, and that is a good thing !)

* Theses music stats (mean RMS, peak RMS, max mean RMS) look at instantaneous dynamic, but a look at the overall dynamic of a song is also very important ! A good article on this topic stating that songs did not lose overall dynamic range that much : ['Dynamic Range' & The Loudness War, 2011] http://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/dynamic-range-loudn...

Re: Loudness (2007)

#27

Post by moolcool » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 11:16 PM UTC

mortenjorck wrote: post #13

For practical listening, I actually prefer modern brickwall mastering techniques to more traditional mastering with a high dynamic range, for one reason: what the author sees as "hijacking the volume control from the listener" I would consider the opposite. With a high dynamic range, a headphones listener may feel the need to adjust the volume several times in a song to boost the clarity of softer sections or to make…

That's like saying you want low dynamic range on all of your photographs so you can see every detail. Dynamic range is an integral part of music

Re: Loudness (2007)

#28

Post by cromon » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 11:19 PM UTC

This is something I have battled with for a long time, personally I master to make the music sound good, sometimes that is loud (new dance music) sometimes not so much (old African recordings remasters).

Coupled with the data from this page [1] there is no point in going too loud anyways, that's why you have gain / volume control. I'm not sure how I feel about streaming services implementing extra processing tbh. Spotify is the worst culprit adding limiting which can significantly change the sound of a recording.

I just wish other engineers would have more pragmatism in this industry, way too much overcooked and distorted music around.

[1] http://productionadvice.co.uk/online-loudness/

Re: Loudness (2007)

#29

Post by bhj » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 11:22 PM UTC

ttoinou wrote: post #26

Theses mastering techniques have their legitimate use ! Some notes : * it's a step in musical production where having experience, skills and contact with the artist matters. Not all compressor and limiter are created equal and the default value you use in your media player may not sound as good as what an audio engineer might have done.. * Not everyone have good hardware and a good environment to listen to high dynam…

Also see SoS's "follow-up" article from 2014: http://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/end-loudness-war

Re: Loudness (2007)

#30

Post by cromon » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 11:37 PM UTC

microcolonel wrote: post #8

digi_owl wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found myself pondering this in relation to the resurgence of LPs. I wonder if the lower dynamic range of LPs restricts music released on them from being overly loud, and thus not as fatiguing to listen to as more modern formats.

Not exactly. It is technically the case that vinyls have less frequency response (basically a low pass filter) than good (really effectively perfect) reproduction formats like CD. That certainly means that the maximum loudness value is lower, but dynamic range is not required for loudness, gain and frequency response are. If anything, having less dynamic range would encourage people to make louder records.

A CD is limited to 22khz, whereas vinyl is analogue and doesn't have this limit, digital files obviously can go up to ~96khz due to the 192khz sample rate achievable by some sound cards.