11 ms·

The single worst thing that harms audio quality is excessive compression. It's ruining everything, I'd say. Heck, I'm sure everyone who knows their worth would

The single worst thing that harms audio quality is excessive compression. It's ruining everything, I'd say. Heck, I'm sure everyone who knows their worth would agree that compression harms audio quality. Recommended reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war edit: compression as in dynamic range compression, not data compression like mp3 in audio

muraiki 11y ago
Reading "compression" as both a programmer and audio-minded person made that first sentence difficult to parse at first. :) But yeah, it's obvious when I have my car stereo nearly on max to listen to classical or jazz, and then if I turn the radio and get a pop music station my ears are about to explode.
- JonnieCache 11y ago
  Don't worry, the loudness war is basically over. itunes and youtube normalize everything to -15dbRMS and -13dbRMS respectively. Spotify uses the ReplayGain algorithm. Broadcasters worldwide now use the EBU R128 standard, which is a more effective form of loudness normalization, hopefully to be adopted by online services too at some point. All that's required is for personal media players to widely implement loudness normalization (by default) for preexisting records in peoples collections. http://productionadvice.co.uk/lufs-dbfs-rms/ http://productionadvice.co.uk/lufs-dbfs-rms/
  - muraiki 11y ago
    Yeah, I should have read the wikipedia article in full before commenting. I'm glad the war is over!
  - hammock 11y ago
    The normalization is song-by-song to my knowledge. It doesn't normalize the audio within the song itself. (Over)compression is a key part of the aesthetic of a lot of pop hits today, and while in the face of normalization you won't be able to make your song overall louder than the next, it won't necessarily stop you from creating a "wall of sound" waveform if that's the sound you're looking for.
    - lmm 11y ago
      Absolutely, and nor should it. But what it should mean is that if you make your song mostly quiet, your peaks will be louder than a wall of sound.
  - baddox 11y ago
    > itunes and youtube normalize everything to -15dbRMS and -13dbRMS respectively. Are you using "normalize" in the audio production sense, as in adding or subtracting a constant gain to an entire track? I'm pretty sure that iTunes doesn't do this, at least not by default.
  - Radle 11y ago
    Wait, what does that mean for somehow who records music as a hobby? If my recording is all the time at around -10dbRMS, it will sound as loud to the listener as if it was on -15dbRMS(itunes)? Also, how exactly does it sound when most of my recording is at -10dbRMS and a couple peaks are at -5dbRMS?
- bitwize 11y ago
  It's not just the acoustic properties of dynamic-compressed music. The compression forces music to be more simplistic, because there's less "room" for complexity. Michael Jackson's "Thriller" is a standard pop hit, engineered for chart performance and not artistic virtuosity, but it is still a rich, deep, satisfying piece of music to listen to in part because there's a whole lot of stuff going on. If you tried to cram that many instrument parts into a modern Katy Perry tune, it would clip like crazy and become unlistenable hash.
  - muraiki 11y ago
    I mostly play acoustic instruments now, but I discovered what you were talking about when I used to make electronic music. I'd naively use some heavy compression for loudness, but as I added more parts things would get quite muddled. I'm no great audio engineer so maybe something else was the cause, but I'm pretty sure this was it.
  - copperx 11y ago
    No, compression doesn't force the music to be more simplistic. It enables simplistic music to sound fuller. Anyone that has mixed 120+ tracks for a single "modern rock" song with a compressor at the end would tell you so.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
CamperBob2 11y ago
This. The reality is that we're arguing over whether it's best to use 16 bits or 24 bits to distribute 8-12 bits worth of information. The problem that really needs to be addressed is in the studio, not in the iTunes store. Compression-happy producers are doing more than their share of the work required to make music suck. </pet_peeve> Edit: Some useful educational material to read before moderating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war .
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rudolf0 11y ago
Excessive data compression will also lower dynamic range, though, no?
- klodolph 11y ago
  Not really, no. Maybe if you really mangled your audio by encoding at extremely low bit rates. But in general, no.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Actually, yes. mp3, for example, loves to save space by cutting away sounds just above the noise floor, and some less-noticeable frequencies.
  - cthalupa 11y ago
    Go find a CD that has been mastered to be just below the clipping point. (e.g. Fallujah - The Flesh Prevails) Convert it to MP3 directly, use whatever settings you want Watch as the mp3 rip is now clipping due to further compression of the dynamic range.
    - nitrogen 11y ago
      That's not because of dynamic range compression; it's because MP3 discards some phase and frequency information, e.g. so harmonics that wouldn't have clipped get phase shifted on top of a peak and clip.
hammock 11y ago
Dynamic range compression is an important part of the aesthetic of pop music today, like it or not. Pop hits don't sound the same without it. For this reason (unaffected by normalization on itunes/youtube) it will be slow to go away.
- nosuchthing 11y ago
  If you listen to pop recordings between 1950-1980, you'll notice there's more depth and character to every instrument. Yes, dynamic range compression is currently used/abused extensively in pop music productions, but if mixes weren't compressed they would have a much wider range for the sounds to play around in. Not only is Justin Bieber's My World 2.0 louder than Metallica's The Black Album, it's louder than The Sex Pistols' Never Mind The Bollocks. http://www.sonicstate.com/news/2011/02/21/why-is-justin-bieber-louder-than-acdc/ http://www.sonicstate.com/news/2011/02/21/why-is-justin-bieb...
  - chillingeffect 11y ago
    that is tragically and hilarious ironic. with older songs, you can turn them up louder, then the dynamic parts really punch you. with newer songs, it's just a steady fatigue.
    - ddingus 11y ago
      Yep. Compression is an important part of both experiences. I like to think of it this way: The soundscape has two axis, one is the overall perception of loudness, the other is the range of frequencies occupied by a given element, or track if you will, in a piece of music. In a stereo, or multi-track recording such as surround sound, there are more axis involving perception of placement, or "imaging" But the basics are all that are needed to consider this compression matter. When you take one of those tracks, say the drum, or the bass guitar, in isolation a raw playback at volume on a reference system is going to largely reproduce what went in. So far so good. Now, start adding the various bits and what happens? That soundscape gets crowded! Little quiet bits you could appreciate are suddenly lost amidst all that is going on, so what to do? Compress! And that's a very good thing. First, few people actually have systems that can reproduce high dynamic range material in a quality way, and they don't have a listening environment that would make any sense if they did. So there is that. But more importantly, the details, subtle bits really are quiet! They will get lost, and so we compress the track overall to make sure those are present in the final mix, and pleasing to the ear too. Yes, there is a style and art to this, no doubt. But the compression really is necessary too. A secondary reason for compression, and light processing by things like auto-tune, is to polish up a performance. Vocalist might be a little soft on part of an expression, or someone playing guitar might not deliver the same solid stroke every time. These things stand right out on a raw recording. If they get mixed in, they will get lost, or feel wrong, weak, etc... Compression can level this out and result in a solid, consistent sound. Again, the minds ear tends to want to hear this. Ever listen to something a bit distorted and then play it back in your mind? Notice how your mind tosses out a lot of stuff, leaving you with that which you really craved? It's actually pretty difficult to recall something with high aural clarity for most people. Good production involves training the mind and the ear to actually pick this out so it can be managed into something people will really crave over and over. One might also process things a bit too. This may be done to emphasize some characteristics of the sound with respect to the overall context of the mix. For a vocal, maybe it makes sense to punch the formant frequencies a bit, or dampen them to maximize the color and character in the vocalists vocalizations, for example. Our brain is an awesome audio machine, and it does a lot for us that recordings do not do. So we must bring those out and make them available to listeners of those recordings. Now, comes more of the basics in the art! What the minds ear hears is what we want to put on the record. Take that bass, compress it so that it occupies a smaller range in the loudness department (reduce it's overall dynamic range), and set it's LEVEL to one that's appropriate for it's overall contribution to the mix, which itself represents the overall perception of the music. Think two components here. The individual component of the mix, or track, has an overall dynamic range, but it also has a level at which it's present in the mix too. What makes sense here varies a lot and is highly subjective. Good production involves listening to the music and picking out what defines it as good, that which is resonant in terms of style, color, etc... A strong bass in one tune might make great sense, yet on another it might be pushed to the background more, etc... Depends. A good producer will spread these things out in the soundscape so that the listener can hear them! Bringing up the little details, while bringing down the punch is needed to make room for it all to get in there and have an impact without fatigue or overloading the medium itself. A CD has it's limits, cassette other limits, radio still others, etc... An appropriate balance must be struck here, and that's not always optimal either. This is what you are hearing when you listen to those older tunes, well produced. And it's damn good stuff too. You aren't wrong about it at all. Just blaming a good tool, when you should be blaming who ever is wielding it poorly. (this is why remastered recordings exist Here's something fun. Go and get the DVD or Blu Ray of something you really like and compare it to what you might hear on the radio, or off a CD, or download. Often those are pushed out to the edges with the assumption the consumer has much better gear and or will pay for better production. Sometimes, shitty production on a CD can be avoided this way. Interestingly, some video game music gets remastered and I've heard more than a few wall of sound tracks sound great off my PS3...) When this is done properly, the dynamic range is filled with a lot of things, each occupying their frequency range, sometimes overlapping, sometimes not, and each having an overall level that makes sense and that is aesthetically pleasing to the listener. This is why you can hear a great vocal right on top of that awesome guitar lick and drum set, despite the fact that they may be sharing a significant set of common frequency components. Someone applied appropriate compression and some processing to make room for everything when it's mixed down into the final track. When they get it right, you don't even notice. It's just fucking good sound you crave. When they get it wrong, it's the tiring wall, or you find yourself straining to hear interesting bits that should just flow. And I love this done well. To me, it's the most important thing I can say differentiates producers I love. Good production qualities in these areas are what makes a recording "pop" and you feel "there" No joke. This stuff, right here, is what makes a recording "immersive" for you. The sound goes right in, the audio engineers have made sure that's gonna happen, and it tickles your mind, taking you away from the fact that it's a recording. Now, that brick wall... Take all that nice work, and listen to it on a great system, appropriate volume level, and the music will just stand out there, crisp, clear, every important part audible and enjoyable right? Right. A final processing layer can further crush this into a wall of sound, removing more and more of the dynamics to a point where it's all one intense thing, yet people can largely still differentiate the details! This can also be done, and likely and frequently is, in the mixing stage. But I'm mentioning it because commercial radio employs this processing extensively, due the limitations inherent in broadcast. FM, for example, has bandwidth and dynamic range / signal to noise limits that require this kind of processing to combat road and car noise. newer digital radios are controversial, and a topic for another day, but they do not have those same limits, and can deliver the perception of a much better overall experience that many listeners will say is comparable to a CD. (it's not though, again another day) It's the abuse that you don't like. Neither do I. Often the clowns even let it clip a little for "grit" or some other BS. That really sucks, because we don't even get the music, crushed as it is! But, let's set that ugly crime aside, and just stay with the brick wall for a moment longer. It's all still there, LOUD, and that is tiring to you because it does not "breathe", "punch", etc... Graphically, it's a lot like cranking the gamma up on images. More subtle details stand out in more conditions, but the overall depth and feel are lost... and it's tiring to listen to, even at low volume. Our minds expectation of what things sound like can clash with this kind of excessive production, even though the first impression can be good. Producing for that initial, "wow" by maxing out the medium is, IMHO, always an ugly mistake, but the brutal truth is sales metrics select for LOUD over GREAT. All that said, compression is good. We need it. Vocals, in particular, can very seriously benefit from appropriate compression and processing to really bring out the harmonics inherent in a great set of pipes owned by someone who knows who they are and how to express that well. But it all adds up, and it all needs that bit of compression love to make sure the good stuff isn't lost on the way into your head. Maybe this helps a little to get at where some of the pain and fatigue really is.
darkmighty 11y ago
I have mixed feelings about it. But I fully agree all music should be uncompressed by default. The good thing about compression is that it allows you to save your hearing quite a bit. Some music have dramatic parts that get super loud, which can have awesome emotional response; but it does take a toll on your hearing, unless you are in a very silent environment or have fantastic headphone insulation (I have none) -- so compression actually allows me to hear everything the music has to offer. I also use compression tool on my soundcard to play most games, specially FPSes that have incredibly loud bangs and yet you need to hear footsteps and quiet environmental noises -- with a compressor that's possible without blowing up your ears.
- donatj 11y ago
  I'm truly curious how having good isolation would help your hearing? Is the room noise a large additive?
  - darkmighty 11y ago
    Yes, specially for the quieter parts (where the Signal-to-noise ratio is lower) I noticed considerable difference, at least for my urban environment. You can get away with lower sound pressure levels [volume].
    - donatj 11y ago
      Oh. I see. The problem is that they cause you to turn your volume up, lol. That's my favorite part of Pink Floyd's The Wall, most of the album is really quiet which lets it get REALLY LOUD on a couple occasions.
snissn 11y ago
This actually helps me articulate what I don't like about Spotify and why I don't use it, they only seem to have modern remasterings off all of the albums from the 70s, 80s and 90s that I'd want to listen to, but they lose a lot of the feel of the originals that I'm used to.
pseudosavant 11y ago
The irony is that extreme dynamic compression only became popular after all of the mediums we listen to (CDs, MP3, digital radio, etc) went digital and we got >90 db dynamic range and signal-to-noise ratio. Tapes and records are typically less than 60 db. So our digital music is capable of being as dynamically expressive as our ears but we clamp/ruin the dynamic range down to <20db.
- thrownaway2424 11y ago
  There's a fundamental difference between analog and digital, though. On digital you have to stay well away from the limits or you will get extreme artifacts. On analog, you can stomp on the limits, and reconstruct the original signal with filters (analog or digital) after the fact, because tape doesn't simply stop responding, it just responds less as the inputs get more extreme.
beat 11y ago
I've played acoustic and electric instruments for over 30 years, and recorded numerous albums. Compression is the best tool we have for accurately reproducing the musicality and emotion of a musical performance. Without compression, most recordings would be unlistenable. Don't confuse the foolishness of the loudness wars for "compression is bad". That's like saying the internet is bad because there's porn on it.
- chillingeffect 11y ago
  I respect your opinion, but it's only your opinion, not a global truth. Compression is a style. There is far more to musicality and emotion than compression. The problem compression solves is that the environments where industrialized cultures now listen in are not dedicated listening areas, but alternately loud and quiet places, so compression makes all parts of the music almost equally loud so there are no drop outs where the quieter parts would be. There is no need to compress music in headphones, for example, to the extent that it is currently compressed. I find compression and other techniques such as removing vocal breath sounds, makes most recordings unlistenable. They don't sound like humans anymore, but synthetic puppets animated by humans with conflicting values. Take the Foo Fighters, for example. They're popular, sure, but all of their songs sounds like one continuous din. Between the compression induced by the guitar distortion settings and the compression added to the recording, then the compression added by the radio station, it just sounds like a waterfall with a few bandpass filters changing between the verse and chorus. Also their vocals have no dynamics. When he yells loud, the vocals don't get louder but the timbre changes. That changes it from cathartic to strained. The dynamics have all been flattened. Why do you think the indie rock movement and bands and styles with wide dynamic range like the Pixies, Nirvana and dubstep got so popular? They eschewed the trend of hardline compression with alternating loud and quiet parts. They match the rhythm of human thought and motion which has fast and slow, detail and empty parts. > That's like saying the internet is bad because there's porn on it. Yes but on the internet you can go where there is no porn. Where can you find music with no compression?
  - lfam 11y ago
    > it just sounds like a waterfall with a few bandpass filters changing between the verse and chorus. That's a good way to put it. I hate over-compressed music. It sounds terrible and is no fun to listen to once you notice the issue. But, are you an audio engineer? I ask because I work in the field, and all engineers I know accept that dynamic range compression is a necessary part of creating recorded music. The problem is when you abuse compression to create a wall of noise with no dynamic range. It's like autotune: you can use it to correct one bad note, or you can abuse it create T-Pain. The engineers behind The Pixies and Nirvana [1], and all dubstep producers use or have used compression at various stages of the creative process. [1] I guarantee you that whoever mixed Smells Like Teen Spirit spent a lot of time doing the compression on that song.
HNSucksAss 11y ago
Yes, the real problem is dynamic compression. Some of it is certainly valuable and probably necessary for a good mix in most cases. But come on people, you know what we mean: EXCESSIVE compression, which is basically EVERY popular-music recording mastered (or "remastered") since the mid-'90s. It's depressing to see so much space wasted discussing something that's not the real problem at all. The loudness war has ruined music. Period.
maloney 11y ago
I think you are confusing limiting with compression.
bootload 11y ago
This is a good point. Further recommended listening, "Neil Young on Why High-Resolution Music Matters" ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oTtylYR76o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oTtylYR76o (55min, 2015JAN17)
sagawee 11y ago
You are talking about (dynamic) compression applied to an entire song with the sole purpose of making it as loud as possible to the human ear but still complying to the max allowed peaks (or to the energy of the signal). This does degrade the quality, sometimes heavily. Nevertheless it is done by mastering engineers (they rarely enjoy it) as well as by radio and tv stations extensively because of the psycho-acoustic fact that a songs appears to be better if it is played louder. This gives them an advantage over the competition: On average, people searching for a radio station are more likely to listen to your radio station if it is louder than the competition. The main issue lies in the fact that the current peak measurement of audio signals does only marginally correlate with the perceived loudness and heavy compression is used to trick this system. The broadcasting industry is aware of this. An open and quite effective loudness measurement algorithm [0] has been introduced a few years ago and it gets slowly adapted all over the world by new broadcasting laws: AGCOM 219/09/CSP (Italy), ARIB TR-B32 (Japan), ATSC A/85 PRSS CALM Act (US), EBU R128 (Europe) and OP-59 (Australia). iTunes Soundcheck is also based on [0] and since this year Youtube applies this to newly uploaded videos as well [1]. Even games use [0] to keep their audio at a consistent loudness. So slowly, the over-usage of compression does not give music producers and broadcasters any advantage anymore and beautiful dynamic music will be competitive again. I have collected some links [2] about this topic. Because of the lack of any affordable implementation at the time I created one myself [3] with some additional notes [4]. [0] ITU-R BS.1770, http://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/rec/bs/R-REC-BS.1770-4-201510-I!!PDF-E.pdf http://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/rec/bs/R-REC-BS.1770-4-2... [1] http://productionadvice.co.uk/youtube-loudness/ http://productionadvice.co.uk/youtube-loudness/ [2] https://www.klangfreund.com/lufsmeter/manual/#about_loudness https://www.klangfreund.com/lufsmeter/manual/#about_loudness [3] https://github.com/klangfreund/LUFSMeter https://github.com/klangfreund/LUFSMeter [4] https://github.com/klangfreund/LUFSMeter/tree/master/docs/developmentNotes https://github.com/klangfreund/LUFSMeter/tree/master/docs/de...

muraiki 11y ago

Reading "compression" as both a programmer and audio-minded person made that first sentence difficult to parse at first. :) But yeah, it's obvious when I have my car stereo nearly on max to listen to classical or jazz, and then if I turn the radio and get a pop music station my ears are about to explode.

JonnieCache 11y ago
Don't worry, the loudness war is basically over. itunes and youtube normalize everything to -15dbRMS and -13dbRMS respectively. Spotify uses the ReplayGain algorithm. Broadcasters worldwide now use the EBU R128 standard, which is a more effective form of loudness normalization, hopefully to be adopted by online services too at some point. All that's required is for personal media players to widely implement loudness normalization (by default) for preexisting records in peoples collections. http://productionadvice.co.uk/lufs-dbfs-rms/ http://productionadvice.co.uk/lufs-dbfs-rms/
- muraiki 11y ago
  Yeah, I should have read the wikipedia article in full before commenting. I'm glad the war is over!
- hammock 11y ago
  The normalization is song-by-song to my knowledge. It doesn't normalize the audio within the song itself. (Over)compression is a key part of the aesthetic of a lot of pop hits today, and while in the face of normalization you won't be able to make your song overall louder than the next, it won't necessarily stop you from creating a "wall of sound" waveform if that's the sound you're looking for.
  - lmm 11y ago
    Absolutely, and nor should it. But what it should mean is that if you make your song mostly quiet, your peaks will be louder than a wall of sound.
- baddox 11y ago
  > itunes and youtube normalize everything to -15dbRMS and -13dbRMS respectively. Are you using "normalize" in the audio production sense, as in adding or subtracting a constant gain to an entire track? I'm pretty sure that iTunes doesn't do this, at least not by default.
- Radle 11y ago
  Wait, what does that mean for somehow who records music as a hobby? If my recording is all the time at around -10dbRMS, it will sound as loud to the listener as if it was on -15dbRMS(itunes)? Also, how exactly does it sound when most of my recording is at -10dbRMS and a couple peaks are at -5dbRMS?
bitwize 11y ago
It's not just the acoustic properties of dynamic-compressed music. The compression forces music to be more simplistic, because there's less "room" for complexity. Michael Jackson's "Thriller" is a standard pop hit, engineered for chart performance and not artistic virtuosity, but it is still a rich, deep, satisfying piece of music to listen to in part because there's a whole lot of stuff going on. If you tried to cram that many instrument parts into a modern Katy Perry tune, it would clip like crazy and become unlistenable hash.
- muraiki 11y ago
  I mostly play acoustic instruments now, but I discovered what you were talking about when I used to make electronic music. I'd naively use some heavy compression for loudness, but as I added more parts things would get quite muddled. I'm no great audio engineer so maybe something else was the cause, but I'm pretty sure this was it.
- copperx 11y ago
  No, compression doesn't force the music to be more simplistic. It enables simplistic music to sound fuller. Anyone that has mixed 120+ tracks for a single "modern rock" song with a compressor at the end would tell you so.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

CamperBob2 11y ago

This. The reality is that we're arguing over whether it's best to use 16 bits or 24 bits to distribute 8-12 bits worth of information. The problem that really needs to be addressed is in the studio, not in the iTunes store. Compression-happy producers are doing more than their share of the work required to make music suck. </pet_peeve> Edit: Some useful educational material to read before moderating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war .

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

rudolf0 11y ago

Excessive data compression will also lower dynamic range, though, no?

klodolph 11y ago
Not really, no. Maybe if you really mangled your audio by encoding at extremely low bit rates. But in general, no.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Actually, yes. mp3, for example, loves to save space by cutting away sounds just above the noise floor, and some less-noticeable frequencies.
- cthalupa 11y ago
  Go find a CD that has been mastered to be just below the clipping point. (e.g. Fallujah - The Flesh Prevails) Convert it to MP3 directly, use whatever settings you want Watch as the mp3 rip is now clipping due to further compression of the dynamic range.
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    That's not because of dynamic range compression; it's because MP3 discards some phase and frequency information, e.g. so harmonics that wouldn't have clipped get phase shifted on top of a peak and clip.

hammock 11y ago

Dynamic range compression is an important part of the aesthetic of pop music today, like it or not. Pop hits don't sound the same without it. For this reason (unaffected by normalization on itunes/youtube) it will be slow to go away.

nosuchthing 11y ago
If you listen to pop recordings between 1950-1980, you'll notice there's more depth and character to every instrument. Yes, dynamic range compression is currently used/abused extensively in pop music productions, but if mixes weren't compressed they would have a much wider range for the sounds to play around in. Not only is Justin Bieber's My World 2.0 louder than Metallica's The Black Album, it's louder than The Sex Pistols' Never Mind The Bollocks. http://www.sonicstate.com/news/2011/02/21/why-is-justin-bieber-louder-than-acdc/ http://www.sonicstate.com/news/2011/02/21/why-is-justin-bieb...
- chillingeffect 11y ago
  that is tragically and hilarious ironic. with older songs, you can turn them up louder, then the dynamic parts really punch you. with newer songs, it's just a steady fatigue.
  - ddingus 11y ago
    Yep. Compression is an important part of both experiences. I like to think of it this way: The soundscape has two axis, one is the overall perception of loudness, the other is the range of frequencies occupied by a given element, or track if you will, in a piece of music. In a stereo, or multi-track recording such as surround sound, there are more axis involving perception of placement, or "imaging" But the basics are all that are needed to consider this compression matter. When you take one of those tracks, say the drum, or the bass guitar, in isolation a raw playback at volume on a reference system is going to largely reproduce what went in. So far so good. Now, start adding the various bits and what happens? That soundscape gets crowded! Little quiet bits you could appreciate are suddenly lost amidst all that is going on, so what to do? Compress! And that's a very good thing. First, few people actually have systems that can reproduce high dynamic range material in a quality way, and they don't have a listening environment that would make any sense if they did. So there is that. But more importantly, the details, subtle bits really are quiet! They will get lost, and so we compress the track overall to make sure those are present in the final mix, and pleasing to the ear too. Yes, there is a style and art to this, no doubt. But the compression really is necessary too. A secondary reason for compression, and light processing by things like auto-tune, is to polish up a performance. Vocalist might be a little soft on part of an expression, or someone playing guitar might not deliver the same solid stroke every time. These things stand right out on a raw recording. If they get mixed in, they will get lost, or feel wrong, weak, etc... Compression can level this out and result in a solid, consistent sound. Again, the minds ear tends to want to hear this. Ever listen to something a bit distorted and then play it back in your mind? Notice how your mind tosses out a lot of stuff, leaving you with that which you really craved? It's actually pretty difficult to recall something with high aural clarity for most people. Good production involves training the mind and the ear to actually pick this out so it can be managed into something people will really crave over and over. One might also process things a bit too. This may be done to emphasize some characteristics of the sound with respect to the overall context of the mix. For a vocal, maybe it makes sense to punch the formant frequencies a bit, or dampen them to maximize the color and character in the vocalists vocalizations, for example. Our brain is an awesome audio machine, and it does a lot for us that recordings do not do. So we must bring those out and make them available to listeners of those recordings. Now, comes more of the basics in the art! What the minds ear hears is what we want to put on the record. Take that bass, compress it so that it occupies a smaller range in the loudness department (reduce it's overall dynamic range), and set it's LEVEL to one that's appropriate for it's overall contribution to the mix, which itself represents the overall perception of the music. Think two components here. The individual component of the mix, or track, has an overall dynamic range, but it also has a level at which it's present in the mix too. What makes sense here varies a lot and is highly subjective. Good production involves listening to the music and picking out what defines it as good, that which is resonant in terms of style, color, etc... A strong bass in one tune might make great sense, yet on another it might be pushed to the background more, etc... Depends. A good producer will spread these things out in the soundscape so that the listener can hear them! Bringing up the little details, while bringing down the punch is needed to make room for it all to get in there and have an impact without fatigue or overloading the medium itself. A CD has it's limits, cassette other limits, radio still others, etc... An appropriate balance must be struck here, and that's not always optimal either. This is what you are hearing when you listen to those older tunes, well produced. And it's damn good stuff too. You aren't wrong about it at all. Just blaming a good tool, when you should be blaming who ever is wielding it poorly. (this is why remastered recordings exist Here's something fun. Go and get the DVD or Blu Ray of something you really like and compare it to what you might hear on the radio, or off a CD, or download. Often those are pushed out to the edges with the assumption the consumer has much better gear and or will pay for better production. Sometimes, shitty production on a CD can be avoided this way. Interestingly, some video game music gets remastered and I've heard more than a few wall of sound tracks sound great off my PS3...) When this is done properly, the dynamic range is filled with a lot of things, each occupying their frequency range, sometimes overlapping, sometimes not, and each having an overall level that makes sense and that is aesthetically pleasing to the listener. This is why you can hear a great vocal right on top of that awesome guitar lick and drum set, despite the fact that they may be sharing a significant set of common frequency components. Someone applied appropriate compression and some processing to make room for everything when it's mixed down into the final track. When they get it right, you don't even notice. It's just fucking good sound you crave. When they get it wrong, it's the tiring wall, or you find yourself straining to hear interesting bits that should just flow. And I love this done well. To me, it's the most important thing I can say differentiates producers I love. Good production qualities in these areas are what makes a recording "pop" and you feel "there" No joke. This stuff, right here, is what makes a recording "immersive" for you. The sound goes right in, the audio engineers have made sure that's gonna happen, and it tickles your mind, taking you away from the fact that it's a recording. Now, that brick wall... Take all that nice work, and listen to it on a great system, appropriate volume level, and the music will just stand out there, crisp, clear, every important part audible and enjoyable right? Right. A final processing layer can further crush this into a wall of sound, removing more and more of the dynamics to a point where it's all one intense thing, yet people can largely still differentiate the details! This can also be done, and likely and frequently is, in the mixing stage. But I'm mentioning it because commercial radio employs this processing extensively, due the limitations inherent in broadcast. FM, for example, has bandwidth and dynamic range / signal to noise limits that require this kind of processing to combat road and car noise. newer digital radios are controversial, and a topic for another day, but they do not have those same limits, and can deliver the perception of a much better overall experience that many listeners will say is comparable to a CD. (it's not though, again another day) It's the abuse that you don't like. Neither do I. Often the clowns even let it clip a little for "grit" or some other BS. That really sucks, because we don't even get the music, crushed as it is! But, let's set that ugly crime aside, and just stay with the brick wall for a moment longer. It's all still there, LOUD, and that is tiring to you because it does not "breathe", "punch", etc... Graphically, it's a lot like cranking the gamma up on images. More subtle details stand out in more conditions, but the overall depth and feel are lost... and it's tiring to listen to, even at low volume. Our minds expectation of what things sound like can clash with this kind of excessive production, even though the first impression can be good. Producing for that initial, "wow" by maxing out the medium is, IMHO, always an ugly mistake, but the brutal truth is sales metrics select for LOUD over GREAT. All that said, compression is good. We need it. Vocals, in particular, can very seriously benefit from appropriate compression and processing to really bring out the harmonics inherent in a great set of pipes owned by someone who knows who they are and how to express that well. But it all adds up, and it all needs that bit of compression love to make sure the good stuff isn't lost on the way into your head. Maybe this helps a little to get at where some of the pain and fatigue really is.

darkmighty 11y ago

I have mixed feelings about it. But I fully agree all music should be uncompressed by default. The good thing about compression is that it allows you to save your hearing quite a bit. Some music have dramatic parts that get super loud, which can have awesome emotional response; but it does take a toll on your hearing, unless you are in a very silent environment or have fantastic headphone insulation (I have none) -- so compression actually allows me to hear everything the music has to offer. I also use compression tool on my soundcard to play most games, specially FPSes that have incredibly loud bangs and yet you need to hear footsteps and quiet environmental noises -- with a compressor that's possible without blowing up your ears.

donatj 11y ago
I'm truly curious how having good isolation would help your hearing? Is the room noise a large additive?
- darkmighty 11y ago
  Yes, specially for the quieter parts (where the Signal-to-noise ratio is lower) I noticed considerable difference, at least for my urban environment. You can get away with lower sound pressure levels [volume].
  - donatj 11y ago
    Oh. I see. The problem is that they cause you to turn your volume up, lol. That's my favorite part of Pink Floyd's The Wall, most of the album is really quiet which lets it get REALLY LOUD on a couple occasions.

snissn 11y ago

This actually helps me articulate what I don't like about Spotify and why I don't use it, they only seem to have modern remasterings off all of the albums from the 70s, 80s and 90s that I'd want to listen to, but they lose a lot of the feel of the originals that I'm used to.

pseudosavant 11y ago

The irony is that extreme dynamic compression only became popular after all of the mediums we listen to (CDs, MP3, digital radio, etc) went digital and we got >90 db dynamic range and signal-to-noise ratio. Tapes and records are typically less than 60 db. So our digital music is capable of being as dynamically expressive as our ears but we clamp/ruin the dynamic range down to <20db.

thrownaway2424 11y ago
There's a fundamental difference between analog and digital, though. On digital you have to stay well away from the limits or you will get extreme artifacts. On analog, you can stomp on the limits, and reconstruct the original signal with filters (analog or digital) after the fact, because tape doesn't simply stop responding, it just responds less as the inputs get more extreme.

beat 11y ago

I've played acoustic and electric instruments for over 30 years, and recorded numerous albums. Compression is the best tool we have for accurately reproducing the musicality and emotion of a musical performance. Without compression, most recordings would be unlistenable. Don't confuse the foolishness of the loudness wars for "compression is bad". That's like saying the internet is bad because there's porn on it.

chillingeffect 11y ago
I respect your opinion, but it's only your opinion, not a global truth. Compression is a style. There is far more to musicality and emotion than compression. The problem compression solves is that the environments where industrialized cultures now listen in are not dedicated listening areas, but alternately loud and quiet places, so compression makes all parts of the music almost equally loud so there are no drop outs where the quieter parts would be. There is no need to compress music in headphones, for example, to the extent that it is currently compressed. I find compression and other techniques such as removing vocal breath sounds, makes most recordings unlistenable. They don't sound like humans anymore, but synthetic puppets animated by humans with conflicting values. Take the Foo Fighters, for example. They're popular, sure, but all of their songs sounds like one continuous din. Between the compression induced by the guitar distortion settings and the compression added to the recording, then the compression added by the radio station, it just sounds like a waterfall with a few bandpass filters changing between the verse and chorus. Also their vocals have no dynamics. When he yells loud, the vocals don't get louder but the timbre changes. That changes it from cathartic to strained. The dynamics have all been flattened. Why do you think the indie rock movement and bands and styles with wide dynamic range like the Pixies, Nirvana and dubstep got so popular? They eschewed the trend of hardline compression with alternating loud and quiet parts. They match the rhythm of human thought and motion which has fast and slow, detail and empty parts. > That's like saying the internet is bad because there's porn on it. Yes but on the internet you can go where there is no porn. Where can you find music with no compression?
- lfam 11y ago
  > it just sounds like a waterfall with a few bandpass filters changing between the verse and chorus. That's a good way to put it. I hate over-compressed music. It sounds terrible and is no fun to listen to once you notice the issue. But, are you an audio engineer? I ask because I work in the field, and all engineers I know accept that dynamic range compression is a necessary part of creating recorded music. The problem is when you abuse compression to create a wall of noise with no dynamic range. It's like autotune: you can use it to correct one bad note, or you can abuse it create T-Pain. The engineers behind The Pixies and Nirvana [1], and all dubstep producers use or have used compression at various stages of the creative process. [1] I guarantee you that whoever mixed Smells Like Teen Spirit spent a lot of time doing the compression on that song.

HNSucksAss 11y ago

Yes, the real problem is dynamic compression. Some of it is certainly valuable and probably necessary for a good mix in most cases. But come on people, you know what we mean: EXCESSIVE compression, which is basically EVERY popular-music recording mastered (or "remastered") since the mid-'90s. It's depressing to see so much space wasted discussing something that's not the real problem at all. The loudness war has ruined music. Period.

maloney 11y ago

I think you are confusing limiting with compression.

bootload 11y ago

This is a good point. Further recommended listening, "Neil Young on Why High-Resolution Music Matters" ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oTtylYR76o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oTtylYR76o (55min, 2015JAN17)

sagawee 11y ago

You are talking about (dynamic) compression applied to an entire song with the sole purpose of making it as loud as possible to the human ear but still complying to the max allowed peaks (or to the energy of the signal). This does degrade the quality, sometimes heavily. Nevertheless it is done by mastering engineers (they rarely enjoy it) as well as by radio and tv stations extensively because of the psycho-acoustic fact that a songs appears to be better if it is played louder. This gives them an advantage over the competition: On average, people searching for a radio station are more likely to listen to your radio station if it is louder than the competition. The main issue lies in the fact that the current peak measurement of audio signals does only marginally correlate with the perceived loudness and heavy compression is used to trick this system. The broadcasting industry is aware of this. An open and quite effective loudness measurement algorithm [0] has been introduced a few years ago and it gets slowly adapted all over the world by new broadcasting laws: AGCOM 219/09/CSP (Italy), ARIB TR-B32 (Japan), ATSC A/85 PRSS CALM Act (US), EBU R128 (Europe) and OP-59 (Australia). iTunes Soundcheck is also based on [0] and since this year Youtube applies this to newly uploaded videos as well [1]. Even games use [0] to keep their audio at a consistent loudness. So slowly, the over-usage of compression does not give music producers and broadcasters any advantage anymore and beautiful dynamic music will be competitive again. I have collected some links [2] about this topic. Because of the lack of any affordable implementation at the time I created one myself [3] with some additional notes [4]. [0] ITU-R BS.1770, http://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/rec/bs/R-REC-BS.1770-4-201510-I!!PDF-E.pdf http://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/rec/bs/R-REC-BS.1770-4-2... [1] http://productionadvice.co.uk/youtube-loudness/ http://productionadvice.co.uk/youtube-loudness/ [2] https://www.klangfreund.com/lufsmeter/manual/#about_loudness https://www.klangfreund.com/lufsmeter/manual/#about_loudness [3] https://github.com/klangfreund/LUFSMeter https://github.com/klangfreund/LUFSMeter [4] https://github.com/klangfreund/LUFSMeter/tree/master/docs/developmentNotes https://github.com/klangfreund/LUFSMeter/tree/master/docs/de...