Loudness (2007)
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Loudness (2007)
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Re: Loudness (2007)
#2Was there any way we could have prevented the "loudness war"?
Re: Loudness (2007)
#3Was there any way we could have prevented the "loudness war"?
There is research that shows that on a casual listen, people believe louder music sounds better. Similarly, people tend to find brighter pictures more appealing at a glance, even though both of these can be fatiguing and cause discomfort. That's why stereo stores (in so much as they still exist) crank up the music to very loud volumes and all the TVs at Best Buy are grossly mis-calibrated.
Unfortunately, most musicians are just hoping you will notice their song when it comes up on the radio, pandora, a friends iPhone and so everyone is incentivized to crank their song to the max.
The thing that bums me out is that there were really good records released in the 2000's that are mastered terribly, and we may never hear a better version. It's one thing when a stooges album is fucked up on re-release, I can always grab the original, there may never be another version of "Is This It".
Re: Loudness (2007)
#4Tangential, but for the longest time I couldn't figure out why VLC always played music / DVDs at such low volume. Setting the system volume to max and overdriving VLC's volume slider was the only way I could actually hear the soft parts.
Recently I found out about the volume compressor, which with a single check box does exactly the right thing. I asked myself "why the heck isn't this box checked by default?" I think the answer is with audio purists wanting to stem the loudness war.
When reading about CD mastering maxing out the volume, It seems like it is the right decision. Most people do want the loudest setting, no mess with the EQ, compressors, etc. Only a tiny population wants to preserve the fidelity of the amplitude.
Re: Loudness (2007)
#5Was there any way we could have prevented the "loudness war"?
There is research that shows that on a casual listen, people believe louder music sounds better. Similarly, people tend to find brighter pictures more appealing at a glance, even though both of these can be fatiguing and cause discomfort. That's why stereo stores (in so much as they still exist) crank up the music to very loud volumes and all the TVs at Best Buy are grossly mis-calibrated. Unfortunately, most musicia…
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.
Re: Loudness (2007)
#6Was there any way we could have prevented the "loudness war"?
We could have by having EBU R128/ITU-R BS.1770 published before CD, and having those metadata built in to the CD standard, and perhaps requiring it.
The loudness war started before CD, but if we had this stuff back then it might have been possible to avoid these problems. As a consumer, I add BS.1770-based replaygain tags to all of my music, and set a constant gain offset for all applications which don't have loudness normalization.
I'm most annoyed by albums which have huge loudness gradients for completely different movements or independent tracks, it forces me to manually remove album replaygain tags in favour of the track values.
Notable also, this page makes no mention of loudness monitoring, which I think is outrageous. To complain about this problem without mentioning the existing solution is pretty bogus.
Re: Loudness (2007)
#7Was there any way we could have prevented the "loudness war"?
There is research that shows that on a casual listen, people believe louder music sounds better. Similarly, people tend to find brighter pictures more appealing at a glance, even though both of these can be fatiguing and cause discomfort. That's why stereo stores (in so much as they still exist) crank up the music to very loud volumes and all the TVs at Best Buy are grossly mis-calibrated. Unfortunately, most musicia…
I'm guessing a deep learning approach could correct those badly mastered tracks. At least, it is pretty easy to find and generate training data.
(?)
Re: Loudness (2007)
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is research that shows that on a casual listen, people believe louder music sounds better. Similarly, people tend to find brighter pictures more appealing at a glance, even though both of these can be fatiguing and cause discomfort. That's why stereo stores (in so much as they still exist) crank up the music to very loud volumes and all the TVs at Best Buy are grossly mis-calibrated. Unfortunately, most musicia…
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.
Re: Loudness (2007)
#9Was there any way we could have prevented the "loudness war"?
There is research that shows that on a casual listen, people believe louder music sounds better. Similarly, people tend to find brighter pictures more appealing at a glance, even though both of these can be fatiguing and cause discomfort. That's why stereo stores (in so much as they still exist) crank up the music to very loud volumes and all the TVs at Best Buy are grossly mis-calibrated. Unfortunately, most musicia…
The thing that bums me out is that there were really good records released in the 2000's that are mastered terribly, and we may never hear a better version.
There's an excellent example of this occurring in the recent remastered re-release of Oasis's Be Here Now which had horribly thick and overdone production but has now been opened up somewhat. It's still loud, but it's Oasis after all.
I don't have an example of the before, but the 'after' is good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyJU2136ym4 .. interestingly, this is also an example of remastering and re-editing an old music video too.
Re: Loudness (2007)
#10Tangential, but for the longest time I couldn't figure out why VLC always played music / DVDs at such low volume. Setting the system volume to max and overdriving VLC's volume slider was the only way I could actually hear the soft parts. Recently I found out about the volume compressor, which with a single check box does exactly the right thing. I asked myself "why the heck isn't this box checked by default?" I think…
I think the reason it's not on by default is that so much music is already compressed to insane levels that sounds terrible - double-y compressing things doubles the terribleness.
I love music, but I wouldn't call myself an audiophile (heck, I'm listening out of my lappy's default sound card with cheap headphones) but in this case I totally agree with the audiophile's term "fatigue". Music that is over-compressed doesn't sound bad to my untrained ear, but it's just fatiguing after a while. The silence that finally comes is a pleasure!
But having it double-compress by default is like hearing those people who want to play there car stereo louder than their system can handle and it distorts like crazy: they are obviously still enjoying it - but it's not the song the artists recorded. (Ok, maybe an exaggeration... but I still don't think we should encourage it!)