3 ms·

It also isn’t really compression that’s being used but brick wall limiting. While many compressors can do a form of this, there are still the usual suspects tha

by S_A_P 9y ago

It also isn’t really compression that’s being used but brick wall limiting. While many compressors can do a form of this, there are still the usual suspects that started the loudness wars-like waves L2 ultramaximizer. For the most part the egregious over limiting has fallen out of fashion but things way more compressed than they used to be. Light soft knee compression can make things sound a bit punchier since they don’t affect the initial attack transient but boost volume of the remander of the sound.

mortenjorck 9y ago
Further, most modern streaming services actually apply a normalization to playback by default. Spotify, for example, normalizes all tracks to -11 LUFS (a scale for perceptual loudness): https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/mastering-streaming-services https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/mastering-streaming-... So something from the peak of the loudness wars (like the Metallica album cited by the author) will actually sound a bit quieter and duller on Spotify than something with -11 LUFS of dynamic range.
vortico 9y ago
Yes, I shouldn't be stealing the term dynamic range compression from the article since that's inaccurate. Hard dynamics would be a better term to describe overcompression, brick wall limiting, and maximizing. Slow-attack compression certainly makes things sound punchier, but do they increase transients relative to the loudness of the track? No, I still think they can only decrease them. Hearing is damaged by large absolute volumes of transients, with the small exception that your ears are able to become slightly temporarily desensitized around high levels of loudness. Since higher loudness causes listeners to turn down music, they will also turn down the transients, so loudness makes tracks safer. Possibly the worst thing to do to your hearing music-wise, is to listen to uncompressed kick drums for half and hour. They might even not sound loud at all, but the pain will start kicking in before you know it.

by S_A_P 9y ago

mortenjorck 9y ago

Further, most modern streaming services actually apply a normalization to playback by default. Spotify, for example, normalizes all tracks to -11 LUFS (a scale for perceptual loudness): https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/mastering-streaming-services https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/mastering-streaming-... So something from the peak of the loudness wars (like the Metallica album cited by the author) will actually sound a bit quieter and duller on Spotify than something with -11 LUFS of dynamic range.

vortico 9y ago

Yes, I shouldn't be stealing the term dynamic range compression from the article since that's inaccurate. Hard dynamics would be a better term to describe overcompression, brick wall limiting, and maximizing. Slow-attack compression certainly makes things sound punchier, but do they increase transients relative to the loudness of the track? No, I still think they can only decrease them. Hearing is damaged by large absolute volumes of transients, with the small exception that your ears are able to become slightly temporarily desensitized around high levels of loudness. Since higher loudness causes listeners to turn down music, they will also turn down the transients, so loudness makes tracks safer. Possibly the worst thing to do to your hearing music-wise, is to listen to uncompressed kick drums for half and hour. They might even not sound loud at all, but the pain will start kicking in before you know it.