5 ms·

The loudness wars: Why music sounds worse (2009)

42 points by aycangulez 16y ago

tumult 16y ago
The loudness war is actually pretty much over. Lots of the newest dance music from popular artists (deadmau5, Justice, etc.) have lower RMS than mid-2000s rock, which is the genre and time when lookahead loudness maximizers were seeing the most abuse. (The article is full of technical inaccuracies. Compressors, depending on how they are set, do not reduce the attack transients of a sound like a snare drum, they exaggerate it. Also, it's from 2009.)
- sp332 16y ago
  I still hate what Clear Channel does to classic rock, though. Should be criminal to treat music that way. Ever heard Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" with no dynamic range? * shivers
  - cynicalkane 16y ago
    Ever heard Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", unaltered, while driving a car? Unless you turn up the volume pretty loud, you won't hear about 2/3 of the song. This is why radio stations process all tracks they play.
    - qjz 16y ago
      That's why playback devices should have a "compression" knob, instead of hardcoding it into the media itself. It would be useful in the living room (for television dialog) as well as in noisy environments like the car.
- JonnieCache 16y ago
  This is true. Due to mastering technology becoming cheaper and easier, artists are increasingly mastering their own records, or mastering each others records as part of the production process. Obviously they don't have the same incentive for over compression.
- elptacek 16y ago
  Compressors, depending on how they are set (eg, very, very short attack time), act as limiters which will reduce the amplitude of a transient sound. I assumed this is what the article was referring to based on the perceived result. Since transients tend to be perceived as louder, you're going to notice when they're not there.
pixdamix 16y ago
If you want to test the average loudness of your files you can use libebur128. I found amazing differences between same album re-editions. I'm not an audiophile, I just have a High-Enough-Fi systems. # cd /tmp # wget http://www-public.tu- bs.de:8080/\~y0035293/libebur128-0.1.11-Source.tar.gz # tar -zxvf libebur128-0.1.11-Source.tar.gz # cd libebur128-0.1.11-Source # cmake . # make -j 10 # gcc minimal_example.c -I../include -L../ -lebur128 -lsndfile -o r128-test # r128-test "t/Yann Tiersen/1999 - Black Session/03 - Life on Mars (feat. Neil Hannon).flac" global loudness: -17.2 LUFS
- CrazedGeek 16y ago
  http://www.dr.loudness-war.info/ http://www.dr.loudness-war.info/ is good for a large amount of albums, too.
- gabrielroth 16y ago
  Well, in some cases a modern signal chain has more headroom. The fact that the average loudness of a remaster is higher than the original doesn't tell you anything about the dynamic range.
zwieback 16y ago
Related and also somewhat dated: Apparently youngsters are starting to prefer the artifacts of MP3 sound in general: http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music...
- steve19 16y ago
  I don't think that is surprising. Maybe people enjoy the 'bugs' in LPs.
- aycangulez 16y ago
  Not really. It is actually the opposite. See: "Harman debunks youthful music myths" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2427217 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2427217
drdaeman 16y ago
The "Digital Compression" section feels misleading. Maybe that's my misunderstanding, though. As I understand it, when we compress audio file, so from a 100s MiB of raw wave data it'll become a several-MiB file, we perform a (discrete) Fourier transform, get rid of less significant frequencies (thus compressing the data), and record the coefficients. Please, correct me if I'm wrong. So I don't get the "rough edges you end up with in the digital recording" part. It is applicable to pre-compressed data, but that's another topic.
- jerf 16y ago
  While that is called "compression", it is not what is being referred to. This sort of compression takes audio that is sometime soft and sometimes lound and flattens out the volume differences in various ways. This, too, is not the crime per se, because this isn't always bad. Making something completely flat can suck the life out of a piece, but there are contexts where you aren't really "listening" to the music where it makes sense, such as background music in the stores or something, and you're unlikely to find what they are playing "full of life" anyhow. The real criminal here is clipping. Compression is only mentioned here because it lets them "get away with" yet more clipping after they've compressed it.
- gabrielroth 16y ago
  You're confusing dynamic range compression with digital file compression. Totally different things. The only thing they have in common is that they make something smaller.
  - mambodog 16y ago
    Did you read the article? There is a section entitled "Digital Compression" which actually seems to be just describing the nature of digital representation of sound, and what happens when you reduce the resolution of that representation ie. bit depth/sample rate. Then it awkwardly jumps into talking about MP3 compression. None of this is relevant to the "Loudness Wars" topic, which as you've rightly pointed out deals with dynamic range compression, yet all these things are referred to in the article. GP is confused by the inclusion of the unrelated material. The article is sloppy and unfocused.
mambodog 16y ago
Shit like this makes me wish HN had downvotes for articles.
- gabrielroth 16y ago
  Good thing it has them for comments!
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - mambodog 16y ago
    This article is stupid and misinformative in a multitude of ways. Maybe there was a grain of truth somewhere in there among the technical inaccuracies, but the whole "Loudness Wars" meme rode in on a wave of ignorant populist sentiment. It smacks of the kind of BS that people repeat in relation to analogue synthesizers and "the vinyl sound". It has a certain aesthetic appeal but falls apart upon any technically informed examination.
- leviathant 16y ago
  From the guidelines (linked in the footer): Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
  - mambodog 16y ago
    I'm not complaining it's inappropriate, certainly it's on topic, just highly misinformative. Honestly I thought people had gotten over ignorantly repeating the "Loudness Wars" meme by now.
    - qq66 16y ago
      can you explain or provide a URL that explains why this point of view is incorrect/misinformative?

42 points by aycangulez 16y ago

The loudness war is actually pretty much over. Lots of the newest dance music from popular artists (deadmau5, Justice, etc.) have lower RMS than mid-2000s rock, which is the genre and time when lookahead loudness maximizers were seeing the most abuse. (The article is full of technical inaccuracies. Compressors, depending on how they are set, do not reduce the attack transients of a sound like a snare drum, they exaggerate it. Also, it's from 2009.)

sp332 16y ago
I still hate what Clear Channel does to classic rock, though. Should be criminal to treat music that way. Ever heard Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" with no dynamic range? * shivers
- cynicalkane 16y ago
  Ever heard Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", unaltered, while driving a car? Unless you turn up the volume pretty loud, you won't hear about 2/3 of the song. This is why radio stations process all tracks they play.
  - qjz 16y ago
    That's why playback devices should have a "compression" knob, instead of hardcoding it into the media itself. It would be useful in the living room (for television dialog) as well as in noisy environments like the car.
JonnieCache 16y ago
This is true. Due to mastering technology becoming cheaper and easier, artists are increasingly mastering their own records, or mastering each others records as part of the production process. Obviously they don't have the same incentive for over compression.
elptacek 16y ago
Compressors, depending on how they are set (eg, very, very short attack time), act as limiters which will reduce the amplitude of a transient sound. I assumed this is what the article was referring to based on the perceived result. Since transients tend to be perceived as louder, you're going to notice when they're not there.

pixdamix 16y ago

If you want to test the average loudness of your files you can use libebur128. I found amazing differences between same album re-editions. I'm not an audiophile, I just have a High-Enough-Fi systems. # cd /tmp # wget http://www-public.tu- bs.de:8080/\~y0035293/libebur128-0.1.11-Source.tar.gz # tar -zxvf libebur128-0.1.11-Source.tar.gz # cd libebur128-0.1.11-Source # cmake . # make -j 10 # gcc minimal_example.c -I../include -L../ -lebur128 -lsndfile -o r128-test # r128-test "t/Yann Tiersen/1999 - Black Session/03 - Life on Mars (feat. Neil Hannon).flac" global loudness: -17.2 LUFS

CrazedGeek 16y ago
http://www.dr.loudness-war.info/ http://www.dr.loudness-war.info/ is good for a large amount of albums, too.
gabrielroth 16y ago
Well, in some cases a modern signal chain has more headroom. The fact that the average loudness of a remaster is higher than the original doesn't tell you anything about the dynamic range.

zwieback 16y ago

Related and also somewhat dated: Apparently youngsters are starting to prefer the artifacts of MP3 sound in general: http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music...

steve19 16y ago
I don't think that is surprising. Maybe people enjoy the 'bugs' in LPs.
aycangulez 16y ago
Not really. It is actually the opposite. See: "Harman debunks youthful music myths" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2427217 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2427217

drdaeman 16y ago

The "Digital Compression" section feels misleading. Maybe that's my misunderstanding, though. As I understand it, when we compress audio file, so from a 100s MiB of raw wave data it'll become a several-MiB file, we perform a (discrete) Fourier transform, get rid of less significant frequencies (thus compressing the data), and record the coefficients. Please, correct me if I'm wrong. So I don't get the "rough edges you end up with in the digital recording" part. It is applicable to pre-compressed data, but that's another topic.

jerf 16y ago
While that is called "compression", it is not what is being referred to. This sort of compression takes audio that is sometime soft and sometimes lound and flattens out the volume differences in various ways. This, too, is not the crime per se, because this isn't always bad. Making something completely flat can suck the life out of a piece, but there are contexts where you aren't really "listening" to the music where it makes sense, such as background music in the stores or something, and you're unlikely to find what they are playing "full of life" anyhow. The real criminal here is clipping. Compression is only mentioned here because it lets them "get away with" yet more clipping after they've compressed it.
gabrielroth 16y ago
You're confusing dynamic range compression with digital file compression. Totally different things. The only thing they have in common is that they make something smaller.
- mambodog 16y ago
  Did you read the article? There is a section entitled "Digital Compression" which actually seems to be just describing the nature of digital representation of sound, and what happens when you reduce the resolution of that representation ie. bit depth/sample rate. Then it awkwardly jumps into talking about MP3 compression. None of this is relevant to the "Loudness Wars" topic, which as you've rightly pointed out deals with dynamic range compression, yet all these things are referred to in the article. GP is confused by the inclusion of the unrelated material. The article is sloppy and unfocused.

mambodog 16y ago

Shit like this makes me wish HN had downvotes for articles.

gabrielroth 16y ago
Good thing it has them for comments!
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- mambodog 16y ago
  This article is stupid and misinformative in a multitude of ways. Maybe there was a grain of truth somewhere in there among the technical inaccuracies, but the whole "Loudness Wars" meme rode in on a wave of ignorant populist sentiment. It smacks of the kind of BS that people repeat in relation to analogue synthesizers and "the vinyl sound". It has a certain aesthetic appeal but falls apart upon any technically informed examination.
leviathant 16y ago
From the guidelines (linked in the footer): Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
- mambodog 16y ago
  I'm not complaining it's inappropriate, certainly it's on topic, just highly misinformative. Honestly I thought people had gotten over ignorantly repeating the "Loudness Wars" meme by now.
  - qq66 16y ago
    can you explain or provide a URL that explains why this point of view is incorrect/misinformative?