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They Don’t Make Music Like They Used To
- agumonkey 8y agoBeside the technological aspects, there's a cultural one. And the ratio of the two.
- trophycase 8y agoYou can't really compare volume dynamics across different genres in any meaningful way. There's still plenty of great music out there, don't worry.
- aiyodev 8y agoThis is interesting. I know that audio compression is also used by talk radio hosts. I know that Rush Limbaugh designed a special compression system that he uses on his show. He mentions it in this quote: > The incorrect way to use a microphone is to put it right in front of you like this (leaning in close) and speak into it because you pop your P’s real bad, and that could be dangerous on certain words. We broadcast professionals turn it aside and speak across it so that our P’s do not pop. We don’t have to worry about anything like that, and with the compression that is built into our system here, I can move this microphone even further — well, you’re probably hearing me not quite as loud, but the presence is still there. As I move it in closer, it gets a little bit more present, but not really louder. Now, sometimes I do what we professional broadcasters refer to as eat the microphone. That is when I really want to make a point. I am eating this microphone. My lips are touching this microphone right now. There are any number of highly trained specialist techniques that we who are professionals in this business use. Audio compression is why talk radio sounds like garbage even when streamed compared to something with a wider dynamic range like NPR. It helps give talk radio hosts that loud, booming voice which helps them sound convincing to their audiences.
- grawprog 8y ago>The incorrect way to use a microphone is to put it right in front of you like this (leaning in close) and speak into it because you pop your P’s real bad, and that could be dangerous on certain words. Wouldn't a pop filter stop this? That's what most vocalists use. They're like $20. I've got one for use with my compressor mic. It works great. Also, i've been listening to a lot of tunes mastered for vinyl lately that doesn't use high compression(modern music). The same tracks on youtube sound noticeably worse not because of the file format but because of the automatic compression and gain youtube adds. You have to take this into account when you upload a music track there.
- shermanyo 8y agoI found this site for comparing my mixes to the requirements of different streaming sites before uploading: https://www.loudnesspenalty.com/ https://www.loudnesspenalty.com/
- cyberferret 8y agoA pencil and rubber band is a great trick that I use all the time. Simply band the pencil so it is positioned at the centre of the condenser diaphragm does a good job of reducing plosives.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago> Wouldn't a pop filter stop this? Clearly, the real solution is to speak a language that doesn't use aspirated stops. :D
- thosakwe 8y agoYou can get a decent pop filter for like $6 online, or just make a simple DIY one (there are YouTube videos about this).
- analog31 8y agoAs I understand it, Limbaugh is also deaf, which adds to the complexity of working with his speech in the studio. He may need special compression if he can't effectively perceive (and thus control) his own volume.
- Rebelgecko 8y agoHe got cochlear implants at some point, so I don't think he's totally deaf
- ruytlm 8y agoRelated, and interesting in my opinion, is that NPR also use the same microphone for everything, to create a 'signature sound': https://current.org/2015/06/a-top-audio-engineer-explains-nprs-signature-sound/ https://current.org/2015/06/a-top-audio-engineer-explains-np...
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoBrandi Carlile got 6 nominations and now has a show at MSG. The corporate music machine isn't 100% efficient at limiting exposure to only cookie cutter acts.
- perfmode 8y agoThe music machine is weaker than ever. The machine is forced to compete on equal terms with independent acts.
- cmurphycode 8y agoI think that an underrated factor in the dynamic range compression is the way we listen to music. I'm not sure if it's accurate to say that the average quality of listening devices (that is, speakers/headphones) has decreased, but certainly it has become more common to hear music through bad earbuds, tinny smartphone speakers, or laptops simply because those devices are so prevalent. In these settings, music with lots of dynamic range may legitimately not sound as good. Due to the quality of reproduction, the low-loudness parts are hard to perceive. For me, there are certainly songs that I enjoy listening to on good headphones in a quiet room that don't have anywhere near the impact when played on laptop speakers.
- dsr_ 8y agoMeanwhile, it's possible for someone to spend less money than ever before to get really good sound. Sell the Beats earmuffs and pick up Superlux HD668B headphones for under $50. Drop the Apple earbuds in the garbage and get TRN V80 in-ear-monitors for under $50. Add a pack of random eartips to figure out which ones are most comfortable for you. Your MBP's built-in speakers have no bass below 160Hz or so, and bluetooth party speakers have all the sonic charm of a box of Kleenex. Spend $300 on a pair of JBL 305P powered speakers and plug anything into them -- they're a distinct upgrade from basically everything costing less and an awful lot of speakers costing twice as much. Buy your music on CDs and spend the ten minutes per disc copying them. Do you know you can fit 1300 full CDs in a one terabyte disk without any compression at all? Or buy FLAC or any other non-lossy compression version. Buy directly from artists whenever possible: give them the best margins. Use wires. Use headphone jacks. Use cheap ground loop isolators when you get hum from power lines -- they used to be really expensive, now they cost $10. We live in a time of high-quality low-cost devices that play music much better than anything your parents could have bought without spending a month's grocery money.
- cowpig 8y agoIs there somewhere reliable I can go to do this kind of research before I buy speakers and/or headphones in the future?
- verisimilitude 8y agoI read about the loudness wars, got super upset about the injustice of lost dynamic range, posted something about it on my dorm room door... 15 years ago. NOTHING has changed. The article notes that Spotify, but originally it was terrestrial radio, that hyper compresses their music -- it makes listening in the car far less annoying. But to see the dynamic range destroyed on the album itself, that is tough. This quote from the article "It is a super-discouraging situation." summarizes it quite well.
- skybrian 8y agoIt's a problem when it's baked into the recording. In Spotify or in audio equipment, compression often makes sense. It's user-adjustable, and there are times where compression is useful, such as listening to music in a car, where the quiet moments would get washed out by road noise.
- baddox 8y agoAnd how about movies. I am as much a fan as anyone of having the highest quality home theater experience possible, but some movies (generally the ones with the highest quality audio mixes) are impossible to listen to in my apartment (while being a decent neighbor) without using dynamic range compression.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoGood point. What works great in the cinema gives a home play needing subtitles for the quiet parts or it'll take the windows out later.
- tremon 8y agoBut as the parent says, these can be applied after-the-fact (in most modern movie players it's called "night mode"). This doesn't mean the original recording has to be shipped with deteriorated sound. In a way, loudness compression is like a hash function: the operation itself is largely mechanical, but destroys information in the process. Shipping with good-quality audio should be the default, and let compression be applied on playback. In fact, most home theatre systems already do sound post-processing in the form of room correction anyway (Audyssey, Dirac), so why not the let player do the compression?
- jumelles 8y agoThis has been going on for two decades now. Teenagers have grown up used to the sound and aesthetic of compression. Whether you like it or not compression is here to stay.
- ukyrgf 8y agoThe home recording revolution is something that just never gets its due, because people want to find a problem with it. Auto-tune is a style now. Smushed dynamics is an intentional choice. You can make a Superbowl halftime show song with a shoestring budget.
- WalterBright 8y ago> A blaring television commercial may make us turn down the volume of our sets, but its sonic peaks are no higher than the regular programming preceding it. I've heard that before. The VU meters on my stereo say otherwise.
- crooked-v 8y agoIt's roughly as useful as saying "well, a microwave that beeps three times technically isn't actually louder than the fire alarm going off in the other room".
- baddox 8y agoVU meters that do some sort of temporal averaging (i.e. all of them), of course. The fact that the peaks are the same is meaningless unless you mention how often the signal hits the peaks.
- WalterBright 8y agoThe VU levels during the commercials were consistently about 20-25% higher than the maximum I ever saw during the show.
- WalterBright 8y agoWhen I buy a CD of older music, I avoid the "remastered" ones and look for the original CDs among the used ones for sale. I suppose it helps that my stereo and speakers are circa 1980 :-)
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoBut everything sounds better with no dynamic range and the volume turned up to 11. I also seek the original masters to avoid this, and often prefer the vinyl release as they seem to have mostly escaped this game. The technical limits of vinyl are a big help here.
- WalterBright 8y agoAs a counterpoint, I've never liked classical music on vinyl. There just isn't enough dynamic range there. CDs greatly improved the matter. Disco music on vinyl also had problems, as the base beat was too much for the groove. Hence my preference for the 45 rpm 12" disco singles, where the wider spaces between the grooves and the faster speed made for much more dynamic range. The K-TEL compilations would reduce the dynamic range so the LP would play much longer, as the grooves were smaller and closer together. That wasn't really what one wanted if one really wanted to get into the music. But I liked the K-TEL compilations if one regarded them as a "sampler". Other problems with vinyl are the crosstalk between successive grooves, bubbles in the plastic due to poor quality control, and the usual rumble, wow, flutter, hiss, snap, crackle and pop. Though one could enjoy that like one enjoys the primitiveness of an older car :-)
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago80s and 90s Decca, DG etc CDs greatly improved things. Current classical, outside the smallest labels, often seems to be blessed with the same compression game. It's disappointing, but at least it's easy to work around. Understanding why they do is more of a challenge. Cheap pressings and compilations are always going to be an issue. Just like those old compilation tapes you used to get in motorway services that would stretch on first play. I suspect KTel would find a way to make CDs self-destruct after 5 plays. Most of those other problems went away with a decent deck. Mainly leaves the scratches to "enjoy". :p
- puranjay 8y agoI'm an amateur musician. One of the more common pieces of advice you'll see floating around in the community is to make your music "louder", especially if you're creating electronic music of any form. Two reasons for this: 1. More and more people are listening to music through equipment that is significantly inferior. Mobile phones, cheap Bluetooth speakers, cheap earphones - they're all subpar in their ability to render sound faithfully. 2. There is a constant "war for loudness". Once you've listened to a David Guetta song that can be ferociously loud, anything not as loud will be perceived as "soft" that "kills the vibe".
- dagw 8y agoMore and more people are listening to music through equipment that is significantly inferior. I cannot imagine that this is true. Even listening to Spotify on a cheap phone using the headphones that came with the phone offers far better sound quality than listening to the nth generation tape copies on the cheap tape players or the bad reception of the tinny radios that we used to have.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoYeah but most people had some stack system or separates at home as well as the walkman or tinny radio. Often horrible by hifi standards, almost always better than the tiny bluetooth speaker, or included headphones. When you went out you knew the walkman or car was second best, but enough background noise that it was still OK.
- benj111 8y agoParents had separates, they wouldn't take kindly to me blasting out whatever in the living room though.
- puranjay 8y agoYou're forgetting that the vast majority of consumers use cheap Android phones and the earphones packaged with them. This gear usually has very poor mid-range response. Hence, producers crowd tracks in the bottom-end (bass) and treble ranges. Try listening to a track with a cheap $15 earphones and then with a set of studio headphones like ATH-M50x and you'll hear what I mean.
- rjf72 8y agoThe article was a play on words (in that it's quite literal) but interestingly enough there was a very recent study [1] indicating that millennials are more capable of recognizing songs from the 1960s-1990s, music created in many cases before they were born, than of recognizing contemporary hits. Makes one wonder about the notion of nostalgia. Especially in today's world where marketing is playing an ever larger role in society, there's no real reason to assume that the directionality of things is always going to be positive. [1] - https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-02/nyu-wag020419.php https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-02/nyu-wag02041...
- magduf 8y agoI definitely think the idea of nostalgia with music is complete BS. I've met way too many younger people who prefer music from well before they were born (60s-90s); the music after the 90s really is different from what came before, due to various factors that affected the popular music industry in America (and the west) starting with the rise of the internet. The "loudness wars" are one obvious thing setting newer music apart from older music.
- theshrike79 8y agoFor the unbelievers, listen to Metallica's Death Magnetic first from the official version. After that, try the Guitar Hero version and it'll quite literally blow your mind. A video comparing both: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Nfqpr3ygSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Nfqpr3ygSg I tend to get physically and mentally exhausted when I have to listen to music that's maximised for loudness, took me a while to figure that out. A comparison between these two versions was the eye opener for me.
- adrianN 8y agoI can't hear a difference in that video. Maybe Youtube broke it?
- MindTwister 8y agoYou wont notice any difference until about a minute in where all the instruments come into play.
- darkpuma 8y agoI put on my headphones to be sure. The audio quality seems uniform throughout to me. Which isn't to say it sounds good (it doesn't.)
- ddtaylor 8y agoNot even around 3:10?
- mynameishere 8y agoShrug. They used to compress music so it would sound okay coming out of the speakers in a 57 Plymouth. "What's Going On?" changed all that, much to Berry Gordy's chagrin. But dynamic range has nothing to do with the decline in quality of music. Shit is shit no matter how you mix it.
- golergka 8y agoThe "loudness war" articles pop up on HN every three months or so, and they haven't changed for the last 10 years, always with Death Magnetic references. However, what have been changing is actual mastering. The primary target now is streaming, and streaming services have started to balance the tracks by their "true" loudness (not getting into technical details here), which pretty mush defeats the purpose of making your track louder than competition. Now, if your track has more dynamic range, it will actually sound better, because the streaming service itself bring other tracks down, and push yours up gently. So, this trend is starting to get reversed - also most mastering engineers and musicians are used to "getting it loud", there are many who're taking advantage of the new reality.