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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)

#51

Post by rahimnathwani »

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.

I've always set up my center channel volume using the test mode (by ear many years ago, and more recently automatically with Yamaha's YPAO).

Am I meant to then override that by increasing the center channel volume so it's louder than the other speakers?

Or raise the system volume?

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

#52

Post by rustcleaner »

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…

[flagged]

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

#53

Post by ghusto »

gosub100 wrote: post #32
apercu wrote: post #30

I've been avoidant of most modern vinyl, I don't want to get a vinyl pressing of something that was digitally remastered. What's the point?

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

Because the TV wouldn't be as good a representation of the original painting as the canvas print would be. Similarly, vinyl wouldn't be as good a representation of the original sound as CDs would be.

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

#54

Post by WorldMaker »

Melatonic wrote: post #45
WorldMaker wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 ?

Yeah, you run an analyzer on your library and it creates MP3 or Ogg Tags that the player. Often you can leave the rest of the file as it was originally, just the new metadata tags.

On Windows I've always liked Foobar 2000 for its strong ReplayGain support, both automating the analyzing pass and respecting the metadata in the tags once saved. On Unix I was using Banshee for playback and automating analyzing with a pair of CLI tools I've forgotten the names of, one was MP3 specific and the other Ogg/FLAC-specific, as I recall.

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

#55

Post by esikich »

Slow_Hand wrote: post #48
wk_end wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is exactly why vinyl is inferior to tape and digital.

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

#56

Post by nighthawk454 »

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.

It really does on some records, if you’re interested check out some comparisons on YouTube. Many times it’s subtle eq tweaks, granted, and that won’t much matter. But a lot of older rock and pop records for example go from being super dynamic and well produced to completely crushed with boosted bass and treble to ‘modernize’ the sound.

You can see some examples of how dynamic range (they don’t track ‘mastering’ overall) varies across releases on this site: https://dr.loudness-war.info/

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

#57

Post by nighthawk454 »

Melatonic wrote: post #45
WorldMaker wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 ?

ReplayGain is nice - but note it doesn’t ’fix the compression’. Compression and dynamic range is about loud/quiet _within_ the track. ReplayGain just turns the volume up and down for the entire track, the point being so all your tracks play back at about the same level. It saves a preset on the volume knob for you essentially.

If you remember making a playlist where one song is suddenly much louder than the last, and you’re riding the volume knob on every other song, you’ll see why this is nice!

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

#58

Post by nighthawk454 »

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…

> 1 … they will often chose the more compressed/louder one

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

> 3 Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music

I’ve heard this is also why film and video game soundtracks are often very compressed, even when orchestral, because they have to fit in the background with dialog/sfx

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

#59

Post by buildsjets »

soupfordummies wrote: post #15
sneela wrote: post #2

Also covered by Tech Radar (2025) -- You need to be careful when buying new vinyl – the digital music loudness war can mean they sound worse than second-hand records: https://www.techradar.com/audio/turntables/you-need-to-be-ca...

I prefer original pressings whenever possible. It's still sometimes cheaper, but that is quickly going the other way.

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 mine for $2 at Goodwill.

https://www.therevolverclub.com/blogs/the-revolver-club/the-...

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

#60

Post by Demiurge »

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.

There is no such thing as over the ear monitoring. There good headphones like HD600. It has good mids and great highs, however the base rolls off towards 20hz. Many AirPods, include AirPod Pro 2 have better low end than what people use for monitoring, which is what, by the way? I play electric guitar, and use different types of audio equipment, and I really wouldn’t care if I use BD DT770 for tracking, despite the fact that it has absolute terribly inaccurate response curve. Just because they call it “studio” on the box, doesn’t mean that it’s the pinnacle of audio fidelity. There are many IEMs, including Bluetooth ones that are better for listening to music for music sake, as opposed to trying to hear some exaggerated spikes in 8khz.

Given that the highly vague cliche reference of your comments, this conversation is probably concluded, all the best.

To all other readers, please enjoy your IEMs and TWS but make sure they have an EQ and try to turn down the boomy base and piercing highs of some manufacturers like Bose and Sony.

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