KVR Audio

Burillo · Post by **Burillo** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 2:22 pm

Google loudness war. this topic is beaten to death.

dewgong · Post by **dewgong** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 2:35 pm

Burillo wrote:Google loudness war. this topic is beaten to death.

I know about the loudness war but the left side of the genre spectrum has generally avoided it. Usually the tracks that have been overcompressed like that are commercial/styles where distortion is commonplace. Left field hiphop/jazz doesnt really seem to have this problem. BBNG in all other areas are brilliant but for some reason they produced a gorgeous album and decided to destroy the timbre. Its just bizarre

Burillo · Post by **Burillo** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 2:46 pm

every genre has been more or less affected by this. i've heard mellow country records that have been squashed to death. no one is immune from Rick Rubins of the world.

dewgong · Post by **dewgong** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 3:18 pm

Burillo wrote:every genre has been more or less affected by this. i've heard mellow country records that have been squashed to death. no one is immune from Rick Rubins of the world.

Hmm I had no idea it had gotten so pervasive :-/ that's frustrating. Even cosmogramma was overcompressed actually. Cosmogramma in terms of composition is my favourite flylo record but UTQC is vastly superior when it comes to the actual quality of the soundworld itself

JCJR · Post by **JCJR** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 3:42 pm

Clipping and squashing are not necessarily the same thing. It is possible to squash the crap out of music and keep it squeaky clean. On the other hand, a seriously clipped distorted mix would also "usually" have a squashed dynamic range.

It seems most people at least like a little distortion on some instruments, in some situations. Then there are those who actually prefer lots of distortion as far as I can tell.

Maybe people generally do not listen to music on the radio anymore. But for decades radio has typically been very compressed. Laws restrict modulation amount to avoid interference between stations, so radio uses very powerful clean expensive multiband squashing and enhancing.

If a musician has done lots of his listening over the years on the radio, he might get the idea that music releases are all seriously squashed, because its almost always squashed on the radio. So when they make their own recordings, they expect their records to sound like the radio, not like the less squashed recordings that he likes, the way they were before the radio squashed them.

Because mp3 releases in some ways are modern substitute for radio distribution, perhaps modern musicians who cut their teeth listening to mp3, get the same idea that uber squashed is the way "good music ought to sound", and un squashed sounds weak and unprofessional by comparison.

Burillo · Post by **Burillo** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 3:51 pm

JCJR wrote:Because mp3 releases in some ways are modern substitute for radio distribution, perhaps modern musicians who cut their teeth listening to mp3, get the same idea that uber squashed is the way "good music ought to sound", and un squashed sounds weak and unprofessional by comparison.

in what way? mp3 music can sound perfectly dynamic - squashing isn't a requirement for mp3. a well-compressed mp3 also doesn't sound like crap unless your listening environment is above average ("the average" includes moderately good hifi headphones). i don't think mp3 is analogous to radio in this sense. bad listening chain and crap mastering (squashed or even distorted), are more of a factor here IMO.

JCJR · Post by **JCJR** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 4:28 pm

Burillo wrote:
JCJR wrote:Because mp3 releases in some ways are modern substitute for radio distribution, perhaps modern musicians who cut their teeth listening to mp3, get the same idea that uber squashed is the way "good music ought to sound", and un squashed sounds weak and unprofessional by comparison.
in what way? mp3 music can sound perfectly dynamic - squashing isn't a requirement for mp3. a well-compressed mp3 also doesn't sound like crap unless your listening environment is above average ("the average" includes moderately good hifi headphones). i don't think mp3 is analogous to radio in this sense. bad listening chain and crap mastering (squashed or even distorted), are more of a factor here IMO.

I usually save mp3 at 320 kbits and to my ear is not bad fidelity at that bitrate. As you say, there's nothing innate about mp3 which demands that it be squashed.

Perhaps most commercial mp3 releases are not excessively squashed. Dunno, as I don't usually buy mp3, and rarely listen to pop music anymore.

Was just thinking that if mp3 is the modern substitute for radio broadcast, it may tend to be processed in similar ways. There were valid technical reasons for radio to squash the program material, but the squashing also provided user benefits for casual mobile listening-- It can be comfortably listened to in noisy environments, in public, on the beach, office cubicals, in vehicles, background music for conversations.

The listener can initially set the level then all the songs are about the same level. User doesn't have to constantly ride the volume control to prevent quiet segments from being lost in background noise then later getting blasted out by loud sections.

So if mp3 would be a substitute for radio, perhaps there are reasons commercial mp3 would be prepared in similar fashion to radio broadcast.

Burillo · Post by **Burillo** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 4:33 pm

mp3 isn't a thing though. there are no "commercial mp3 releases". it's just compressed CD. it's no different from a CD master. (well, unless it's "Mastered for iTunes", which is a recent phenomenon and not many releases are actually available in this "format")

so it can't "tend to be processed in similar ways".

and the thing that sets all music to the same level isn't mp3. it's called ReplayGain, and it's a separate technology independent of mp3 (it basically analyzes average volume and stores metadata in the file so that later it's played back with target gain adjustment).

dewgong · Post by **dewgong** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 8:32 pm

Burillo wrote:mp3 isn't a thing though. there are no "commercial mp3 releases". it's just compressed CD. it's no different from a CD master. (well, unless it's "Mastered for iTunes", which is a recent phenomenon and not many releases are actually available in this "format")

so it can't "tend to be processed in similar ways".

and the thing that sets all music to the same level isn't mp3. it's called ReplayGain, and it's a separate technology independent of mp3 (it basically analyzes average volume and stores metadata in the file so that later it's played back with target gain adjustment).

His reasoning is sound imo. MP3 uses psychoacoustic tricks to compensate for data loss. One of the algorithms used to encode mp3's is the minimum audition threshold. This makes assumptions about the human frequency range and makes dynamic adjustments. The overall frequency response and dynamic content of an mp3 is quite different to lossless formats.

Whether this can be linked to radio is speculation

Burillo · Post by **Burillo** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 11:05 am

dewgong wrote:His reasoning is sound imo.

no. just because MP3 uses psychoacoustic tricks doesn't mean mastering engineers produce CD masters designed for MP3 compression. that's not "sound reasoning".

dewgong · Post by **dewgong** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 12:13 pm

Burillo wrote:
dewgong wrote:His reasoning is sound imo.
no. just because MP3 uses psychoacoustic tricks doesn't mean mastering engineers produce CD masters designed for MP3 compression. that's not "sound reasoning".

The fact that commercial music is going to be heard in mp3 by most customers means that audio engineers make decisions based on that format. MP3 has difficulty reproducing the extreme low and high end due to the assumption that most adults cant perceive those frequencies. Certain compromises have to be made and clipping and squashing could well be products.

MP3 is an encoding process. It subjects an audio signal to various transformations to compress the data. The comparison to radio is sound

dewgong · Post by **dewgong** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 12:14 pm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i21VUDt_I7U

Here's a track from BBNG which demonstrates how their music sounds without clipping. Truly truly beautiful.

VariKusBrainZ · Post by **VariKusBrainZ** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 12:31 pm

An interesting and entertaining book which explains the loudness wars, going right back to the first commercial recording is 'perfecting sound forever'.

VariKusBrainZ · Post by **VariKusBrainZ** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 12:36 pm

Mp3 processing and radio style compression are not the same

Burillo · Post by **Burillo** » Fri Apr 17, 2015 12:38 pm

dewgong wrote:The fact that commercial music is going to be heard in mp3 by most customers means that audio engineers make decisions based on that format.
...
Certain compromises have to be made and clipping and squashing could well be products.

so a mastering engineer will sacrifice quality of the master so that it "sounds better" as mp3? i find it very hard to believe. a much more plausible explanation is this is the result of loudness war and mp3 has nothing to do with any of that.

dewgong wrote:MP3 has difficulty reproducing the extreme low and high end due to the assumption that most adults cant perceive those frequencies.

exactly. so how does squashing play into that exactly? and why does the CD master still contain those frequencies, if mastering engineers "aim for mp3"? if they really did, there would be little to no difference between a CD master and an mp3 made of that CD master. hell, why bother, just store the master as mp3 and do away with uncompressed sound completely!

dewgong wrote:MP3 is an encoding process. It subjects an audio signal to various transformations to compress the data. The comparison to radio is sound

i would agree with you if the squashing came with the mp3 format. but it didn't. it came long before mp3 was popular. back when Rick Rubin squashed and clipped the hell out of RHCP's Californication, mp3 wasn't even remotely as pervasive as it is now. and it's been moving in that direction for the past, i dunno, 50 years or so. it's just that there was so much headroom that the final stage of the loudness war (clipping and squashing) was reached only relatively recently.

Clipping in commercial music