Idea to fix loudness war releases

[xtp]

I threw away 74 cd's last year that i purchased new. ..
Upon playing, when they did not sound right, i ripped them onto the computer one-by-one and took a look at the wave forms; they were all without transients.

what kind of trigger material are you writing here? Deteriorating binary stored on an audio cd resulted in flattened transients?

Can someone please ask this guy what's going on?

I dont understand what you were meaning.

Does the pic make more sense?

The same song, two different masters. The bottom one sounds awful through my amp. The bottom one i purchased new last year, the top is from a second hand cd, the original transfer before remastering.

[Jbravo]

Loudness is definitely still a thing, and a pain in the arse when used heavy handedly.

Perfect Declipper is a good program to introduce some extra dynamic range. I only found out about it when trying to restore a CD which is roaring with distortion.

[mcbpete]

Is the loudness war even a thing anymore, given the move to streaming, and the fact that most of those platforms now have volume normalization?

Absolutely, everything streaming now being crushed to around -14 LUFS I'm thinking we'll soon be going from the loudness war to the transient war!

[CinningBao]

I threw away 74 cd's last year that i purchased new. ..
Upon playing, when they did not sound right, i ripped them onto the computer one-by-one and took a look at the wave forms; they were all without transients.

what kind of trigger material are you writing here? Deteriorating binary stored on an audio cd resulted in flattened transients?

Can someone please ask this guy what's going on?

I dont understand what you were meaning.

Does the pic make more sense?

The same song, two different masters. The bottom one sounds awful through my amp. The bottom one i purchased new last year, the top is from a second hand cd, the original transfer before remastering.

Aaah, no I misunderstood what you were saying. I thought you were literally saying that some old deteriorating CDs, when the audio files were extracted, had the peaks trimmed off! See, that would be crazy talk! You mean some later re-issues of CDs released before the loudness war have had the peaks smoshed to make it louder.

Yes, this happened.

[xtp]

Loudness is definitely still a thing, and a pain in the arse when used heavy handedly.

I certainly find it frustrating.

I am still using the same amplifier's as i was in the 70's when everything was still either record's or tape's, i have just over time replaced the record player with a cd player.

Unfortunately the modern world has forgotten what the volume control was designed for.

The trend of the last 20 years seems to be to set the volume level with the audio file, rather than including a dynamic range, and then letting the user adjust the volume.

[el-bo (formerly ebow)]

Unfortunately the modern world has forgotten what the volume control was designed for.

Once the digitisation of media allowed for consistent 'shuffle', constantly grabbing for the volume knob becomes a real PITA. Besides, the real issue is not about increased volume so much as reduced dynamic range. If it was, then just reducing the volume would make today's music sound more pleasant. It doesn't. Dynamically smashed music sounds just as obnoxious, and is just as fatiguing, at low volumes as when the volume is louder

[xtp]

Unfortunately the modern world has forgotten what the volume control was designed for.

Besides, the real issue is not about increased volume so much as reduced dynamic range. Dynamically smashed music sounds just as obnoxious, and is just as fatiguing, at low volumes as when the volume is louder

^True enough.

I admit I dont use shuffle or any such, and I have a single cd, cdplayer. My habits are rather set towards listening to one album at a time and then changing it. I like the break of getting up every forty minutes or so and then changing the album before settling back for the next.