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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

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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?
  - mambodog 16y ago
    Firstly this is just a terrible article as from the heading "Digital Compression" onwards it deals with an entirely unrelated topic to the "Loudness Wars" meme mentioned in the title; this is confusing to readers. More on this section later. The "Loudness War" meme describes a trend in popular music towards having decreased dynamic range in the time-amplitude domain. In other words, less difference between the loudest and quietest passages of a piece of music; a higher average volume over time. While I totally agree that this trend has occurred, it's negative effects have been largely overstated. The reality is that a lot of music produced decades ago had such a large degree of dynamic range as to make it hard to listen to in most circumstances. Modern mastering techniques allow us to rectify this without losing any of the power of the original piece. Proponents of the "Loudness War" idea often cherry-pick specific examples of poor mastering where average volume over time has been increased using naive methods that do in fact have a negative impact on the sound. This does not accurately reflect the state of the art of audio mastering. Unfortunately mastering is often seen as a bit of a "dark art" due to the large amount of domain-specific knowledge required. Because of this lack of knowledge, people are easily deceived by naively credible diagrams[1] showing one "skinny" amplitude-time graph and one "fat" one, claiming that the fat one is dynamically flat/ruined. However, this graph gives no information about the time-frequency domain, where much of the 'magic' of mastering takes place. The reality is that modern mastering techniques make much more effective use of all space available in each of the domains (time/amplitude/frequency). In fact, many of these dynamic range management techniques are applied at the mixing stage of production (where all elements are processed seperately), before the mastering stage (where all elements are processed together). With modern tools and an understanding of psychoacoustics we can make pieces feel louder while preserving the shape and power of the various elements. It might make the time-amplitude graph look "fat", but that's hardly the whole picture. Why the "Digital Compression" section is misleading: after giving us an almost uselessly simplified explanation of the digital representation of sound, it implies that it is common to encounter digital sound with a low resolution (bit depth and/or sample rate) however this is not the case, all CDs and MP3s one is likely to encounter have a bit depth of 16bit, and a sample rate of 44.1khz[2]. This is high enough as to be generally indistinguishable from higher resolutions to all but highly trained listeners. [1] http://media.npr.org/assets/music/news/2009/12/dynamic_wide.jpg http://media.npr.org/assets/music/news/2009/12/dynamic_wide.... [2] One might find a few MP3s lying around on the internet with a lower sample rate, but not from any reputable source.

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?
- mambodog 16y ago
  Firstly this is just a terrible article as from the heading "Digital Compression" onwards it deals with an entirely unrelated topic to the "Loudness Wars" meme mentioned in the title; this is confusing to readers. More on this section later. The "Loudness War" meme describes a trend in popular music towards having decreased dynamic range in the time-amplitude domain. In other words, less difference between the loudest and quietest passages of a piece of music; a higher average volume over time. While I totally agree that this trend has occurred, it's negative effects have been largely overstated. The reality is that a lot of music produced decades ago had such a large degree of dynamic range as to make it hard to listen to in most circumstances. Modern mastering techniques allow us to rectify this without losing any of the power of the original piece. Proponents of the "Loudness War" idea often cherry-pick specific examples of poor mastering where average volume over time has been increased using naive methods that do in fact have a negative impact on the sound. This does not accurately reflect the state of the art of audio mastering. Unfortunately mastering is often seen as a bit of a "dark art" due to the large amount of domain-specific knowledge required. Because of this lack of knowledge, people are easily deceived by naively credible diagrams[1] showing one "skinny" amplitude-time graph and one "fat" one, claiming that the fat one is dynamically flat/ruined. However, this graph gives no information about the time-frequency domain, where much of the 'magic' of mastering takes place. The reality is that modern mastering techniques make much more effective use of all space available in each of the domains (time/amplitude/frequency). In fact, many of these dynamic range management techniques are applied at the mixing stage of production (where all elements are processed seperately), before the mastering stage (where all elements are processed together). With modern tools and an understanding of psychoacoustics we can make pieces feel louder while preserving the shape and power of the various elements. It might make the time-amplitude graph look "fat", but that's hardly the whole picture. Why the "Digital Compression" section is misleading: after giving us an almost uselessly simplified explanation of the digital representation of sound, it implies that it is common to encounter digital sound with a low resolution (bit depth and/or sample rate) however this is not the case, all CDs and MP3s one is likely to encounter have a bit depth of 16bit, and a sample rate of 44.1khz[2]. This is high enough as to be generally indistinguishable from higher resolutions to all but highly trained listeners. [1] http://media.npr.org/assets/music/news/2009/12/dynamic_wide.jpg http://media.npr.org/assets/music/news/2009/12/dynamic_wide.... [2] One might find a few MP3s lying around on the internet with a lower sample rate, but not from any reputable source.