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Loudness (2007)

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Re: Loudness (2007)

#61

Post by munificent »

ryandrake wrote: post #31
trevyn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Movies generally have a wide dynamic range so that loud action scenes are very loud. You don't want your normal dialogue to be at the same volume as your explosions, unless you're watching at home with the volume down.

Much to the chagrin of people like my wife, who, during scenes with just dialog will remark, "I can't hear it, turn it up!" and then when the action starts, "Too loud!" I end up adjusting the volume up and down over and over throughout a 2-1/2 hour film. As much as I appreciate good dynamic range in recordings, I wish my sound system had a "constant loudness" function that I could just engage and put the remote down.

I have this problem too. I'm assuming it's because I don't have a center channel, just to big stereo speakers. Even with the receiver set to know that there isn't a center channel, it doesn't seem able to compensate. I guess movies are just mastered assuming 5.1 now and if you only rock stereo, you get compromised sound.

Re: Loudness (2007)

#62

Post by munificent »

moolcool wrote: post #27
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

> That's like saying you want low dynamic range on all of your photographs so you can see every detail.

Which is actually a super common problem in amateur and even some pro photography today. "High dynamic range" (HDR) lets you capture an image with a greater dynamic range than the sensor itself can detect, usually by stacking a few photos taken with different settings. It preserves details that would otherwise be lost in shadows and highlights.

In other words, it's compression for images. And it gets over-applied really often, leaving hideous painful to look at photos. They end up too flat and in your face.

Re: Loudness (2007)

#63

Post by tjoff »

ryandrake wrote: post #31
trevyn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Movies generally have a wide dynamic range so that loud action scenes are very loud. You don't want your normal dialogue to be at the same volume as your explosions, unless you're watching at home with the volume down.

Much to the chagrin of people like my wife, who, during scenes with just dialog will remark, "I can't hear it, turn it up!" and then when the action starts, "Too loud!" I end up adjusting the volume up and down over and over throughout a 2-1/2 hour film. As much as I appreciate good dynamic range in recordings, I wish my sound system had a "constant loudness" function that I could just engage and put the remote down.

This is what subtitles are for.

Re: Loudness (2007)

#64

Post by usrusr »

ryandrake wrote: post #31
trevyn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Movies generally have a wide dynamic range so that loud action scenes are very loud. You don't want your normal dialogue to be at the same volume as your explosions, unless you're watching at home with the volume down.

Much to the chagrin of people like my wife, who, during scenes with just dialog will remark, "I can't hear it, turn it up!" and then when the action starts, "Too loud!" I end up adjusting the volume up and down over and over throughout a 2-1/2 hour film. As much as I appreciate good dynamic range in recordings, I wish my sound system had a "constant loudness" function that I could just engage and put the remote down.

Somehow I suspect that the same people who like overcompressed music (to drown out everything else) love a big dynamic range in movies (gut-shaking explosions when dialog is at comfortable listening volume) and that those who like music with silent parts really would not mind being able to leave a cinema without a minor tinnitus. It's a confusing world.

Re: Loudness (2007)

#65

Post by rocqua »

hashmal wrote: post #58
em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #53

Fortunately many audio providers now have been fighting back against this. For instance YouTube will punish video uploads that are louder than -13 LUFS by attenuating the level. This will provide a somewhat level playing field and encourage people to upload with a reasonable dynamic range.

And some others are going full retard. Some streaming services actually add compression to everything…

Which ones?

Re: Loudness (2007)

#66

Post by DiThi »

swiley wrote: post #43
pdkl95 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> boost the clarity of softer sections or to make louder sections more comfortable to the ears You can create these effects during playback with a compressor, which are available in many players[1]. Knowledge about compressors isn't as widely known as it should be; it's an important feature that would help a lot of people, especially anyone dealing with hearing loss. > headphones Maybe try better headphones (or a dif…

I knew about them and the copy of Android I had installed on my phone included compression. Like most things in that OS it's very buggy, one day it just dumped full volume noise into my headphones and that really hurt. After that I hardly trust anything in Android to handle audio and don't like plugging headphones into my phone.

Out of curiosity, when did that happen?

Re: Loudness (2007)

#67

Post by elmar »

chrismealy wrote: post #45

It's not just about volume. Tracks mastered with a ton of compression trick your brain into sounding louder than they really are, which is great for a song or two (or if you want pay people to pay attention to your tv commercial), but for listening to a whole album it wears you out. If you have an album you love but somehow never make it all the way through this is probably why. The perception of full volume gets you…

Today if you want dynamic range you have to buy Vinyl or lossless downloads.

http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Roger+Waters&a...

http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Roger%20Waters

Re: Loudness (2007)

#68

Post by adrianN »

TheNewAndy wrote: post #20
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…

As an analogy, how about if all text was served to you as .png files where the person writing the text has guessed what size text you want? This is vaguely equivalent - it is difficult to go from image->text, just as it is difficult (or impossible) to go from low dynamic range -> high dynamic range. The reverse direction is cheap (and possible). In fact, some compression codecs even have well defined compression curv…

Isn't it more like the artist wrote his text using all kinds of font sizes that require the user to zoom in and out all the time to read it comfortably? Compression would mean that the range of font sizes is compressed so that one zoom level works reasonably well for the whole text.

Re: Loudness (2007)

#69

Post by sjwright »

elmar wrote: post #67
chrismealy wrote: post #45

It's not just about volume. Tracks mastered with a ton of compression trick your brain into sounding louder than they really are, which is great for a song or two (or if you want pay people to pay attention to your tv commercial), but for listening to a whole album it wears you out. If you have an album you love but somehow never make it all the way through this is probably why. The perception of full volume gets you…

Today if you want dynamic range you have to buy Vinyl or lossless downloads. http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Roger+Waters&a... http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Roger%20Waters

Occasionally that's true, very often it's not. Looking at your second link, there's only one album that has been substantively remastered. (And that better mastering could have been distributed on CD or through iTunes, presumably they just didn't bother to do so.)

Re: Loudness (2007)

#70

Post by cr1895 »

elmar wrote: post #67
chrismealy wrote: post #45

It's not just about volume. Tracks mastered with a ton of compression trick your brain into sounding louder than they really are, which is great for a song or two (or if you want pay people to pay attention to your tv commercial), but for listening to a whole album it wears you out. If you have an album you love but somehow never make it all the way through this is probably why. The perception of full volume gets you…

Today if you want dynamic range you have to buy Vinyl or lossless downloads. http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Roger+Waters&a... http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Roger%20Waters

No, it still depends how it was mastered. You can have crap sounding vinyl and lossless, too.
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