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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)

#41

Post by mrob »

asdff wrote: post #33
Demiurge wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What AirPods are you talking about? The wired AirPods that sound pretty bad have been overtaken by wireless Bluetooth AirPods for many years now. The AirPod Pro 2 sound quality is a world of difference from the wired earbud style AirPods. In fact, most of the most popular TWS Bluetooth Earbuds have fantastic sound quality. The main issue with them is that they have a V shaped tuning, with various levels of bad. Howev…

All of them, compared to over ear monitors. You can't out engineer physics advantages of a larger speaker. Airpods fall short of other in ear monitors too fwiw, so they are a poor choice in class.

Physics doesn't prevent reproduction of bass in IEMs. Thanks to inverse square scaling of sound pressure with distance, putting the driver within the ear canal greatly reduces the required output level to the point where even tiny drivers can handle it. Lots of IEMs can reproduce loud, deep bass with low distortion.

You of course miss the whole-body tactile vibration effect of loud bass played on speakers, but the sound itself is there.

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

#42

Post by bigbuppo »

atoav wrote: post #36
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?

As a mixing engineer: 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 m…

And just wait until they find out that compressor/limiters came about for reasons other than shaping the dynamics of music. If you're not slammed against the wall, your AM broadcast signal isn't going far.

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

#43

Post by Melatonic »

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…

Or just have the default to be some level of acceptable compression turned on and then an advanced mode to turn it off (or tune it)

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

#44

Post by Melatonic »

bob1029 wrote: post #18
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…

The full dynamic range is nice if you actually want to experience it and have a system capable of reproducing it. A dedicated center channel with a few hundred watts of amplification behind it will cut through the ambient backdrop like a hot knife through butter. You can watch Transformers or MI3 at reference volume with crystal clear dialogue if you're willing to throw enough power at the problem.

What really would solve the movie issue is there was more standardised sound across different streaming services. Every single seems to have a different volume and compression / setup.

That and having an industry standard way to crank the center channel (user setting) when downmixing to 2.1

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

#45

Post by Melatonic »

WorldMaker wrote: post #39
buo wrote: post #21

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

"Assuming no clipping" is the biggest problem there, because the loudness wars resulted in a ton of very lossy clipping and similar artifacts. Arguably that sort of distortion became part of the expected sound, though, so just because it isn't reversible doesn't necessarily mean it is a problem. In the open metadata world there is ReplayGain which analyzes music peaks and tries to create a negative gain to equalize t…

ReplayGain sounds pretty cool. Does it pre analyse your library ?

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

#46

Post by Melatonic »

mrob wrote: post #17
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody is lazy nowadays and sends their ruined digital mixes out for everything. It's the production teams that need to fix their behavior. 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 modern equivalent of ReplayGain, EBU R 128, is already ubiquitous in the industry. People brickwall records anyway, presumably because more people are likely to complain about being unable to hear the quiet parts in their car, or about their phone speaker not being able to play it loud enough, than about the whole thing sounding squashed. The ideal solution would be to distribute high dynamic range audio with met…

Agreed

Or make a sound format (like video containers) that could have two separate mixes of a track.

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

#47

Post by CarVac »

wk_end wrote: post #19
CarVac wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true from time to time. Low's last digital releases are actually unlistenable due to heavy-handed compression, but the vinyl seems to have been spared. I had to record the vinyl to get usable digital files.

The loudness and compression on Low's last couple of albums is very much deliberate, so it's surprising that the vinyl doesn't have it. Though I heard similar claims about Sleater-Kinney's The Woods, which was also intensely compressed for artistic effect.

There's compression and distortion for sure on the vinyl, but when you look at the waveform on the digital it's right up to the max. It completely changes the sound.

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

#48

Post by Slow_Hand »

wk_end wrote: post #19
CarVac wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true from time to time. Low's last digital releases are actually unlistenable due to heavy-handed compression, but the vinyl seems to have been spared. I had to record the vinyl to get usable digital files.

The loudness and compression on Low's last couple of albums is very much deliberate, so it's surprising that the vinyl doesn't have it. Though I heard similar claims about Sleater-Kinney's The Woods, which was also intensely compressed for artistic effect.

This. The loudness is an aesthetic choice.

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.

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

#49

Post by bigbuppo »

apercu wrote: post #34
gosub100 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why get a canvas print when you could put up a TV and display the picture digitally?

I'm guessing you're not a musician or studio worker, or I wasn't clear. 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.

Hooboy. Where do I even start with this?

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

#50

Post by esikich »

nighthawk454 wrote: post #27
esikich wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not true and vinyl doesn't sound better by any measure.

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.
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