6 ms·

Loudness War

56 points by _han 5y ago

sedivy94 5y ago
If loudness is a war, then OTT is my scepter.
medstrom 5y ago
But why?
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  Low-quality playback equipment. Mastering music correctly makes it sound "worse" on crappy hardware. But mastering it for crappy hardware makes it sound worse on quality speakers. Some people backed the wrong horse. Much music exists mastered for old shitty car stereos and earbuds and the like. Sometimes, the original recordings are lost or nobody bothers to remaster them.
  - bratwurst3000 5y ago
    Yeah I got one of those „high end“ systems and some albums are just not made for quality speakers. Bands like metallica are sounding very bad on those speakers
    - dotancohen 5y ago
      Surprisingly, the first Korn album and the first RATM album sound great on high-end gear. And for what it's worth, Justice and the Black album do sound really good on quality equipment. And if your equipment is really really good, you can even hear Jason on Justice :).
      - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
        You just gave me a flashback to kid me listening to Korn on my dad's new stereo while jumping on his bed. I do indeed remember how good it sounded. Also had a Sony Walkman, pretty good but nothing like a good furniture-size stereo.
      - bratwurst3000 5y ago
        Hahaha yeah that is true. That is also one of the first thing I hear in a good recording. A well defined bass. Its crazy how on bad equipment and mixes the bass is only a static noise in the background
  - cik2e 5y ago
    I've noticed this to be especially annoying with recordings that artificially inflate the bass. Yay for earbuds but it's a real pain in the ass when my car speakers rattle until I have to turn the sound down so low that road noise becomes an issue. I like to listen to playlists on shuffle and the inconsistency between different albums has me fiddling with the bass on a song to song basis. Luckily my car has steering wheel controls for this. But most modern vehicles would have you fucking with a touch screen which is a non-starter while driving.
  - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    More detail: It's because different speaker construction techniques make for different frequency response curves - i.e. there's sounds a cheap speaker can't produce well, so music mastered for listening on commodity hardware of a bygone era sounds "compressed", because they squeeze all of the sound into a narrower band, so you could hear all of it.
- michaelgrafl 5y ago
  The other replies aren't incorrect. But I think the main reason is out of fear that other music tracks sound louder in a club which would make them feel more exciting. This is kind of repeating with playlists now. Not all services normalize perceived loudness across tracks (e.g. Spotify web player).
  - declnz 5y ago
    This. And related cause: A&R people listening to xyz's new album and judging it sounds "huge" / "phat" / "modern"... when actually it's just a bit louder than the other guys, but nobody's adjusting volumes between demos...
theshrike79 5y ago
If you don't believe in the Loudness War, or think that you can't hear the difference, here is a challenge for you: Grab Metallica's Death Magnetic. Listen through it all the way. Now find the Guitar Hero III remastered version of the same album, listen through it. I guarantee you feel exhausted after the official master version, because there is no dynamic range, it's just a full spectrum of noise. Here's a Youtube video visualising the difference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Nfqpr3ygSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Nfqpr3ygSg
- haunter 5y ago
  Am not an expert but... that doesn't show loudness difference to me. That shows dynamic range difference to me (even the Youtube description says they actually normalized the volume). I can hear the difference between the two version and how distorted the retail version is compared to the more clean sound of the GH3 version but it's not simply up to loudness. Honestly maybe loudness war is a wrong term? Should be dynamic range war or compression war.
  - Fooloo 5y ago
    Well you get things louder but you sacrifice dynamic range for it. If you do not normalise it.
  - foo_barrio 5y ago
    The final mastering/mixing has an avg db level they target. The more compressed mixes tend to have much louder avg db. Some of these modern "loud" mixes target -3db whereas the previous ones could be -10db or something. Played at an identical volume, the more compressed track will sound louder due to this target. Loudness war is an apt name. Just look at the sample waveforms on the wikipedia page: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
  - piva00 5y ago
    The psychoacoustic effect of compression and loss of dynamic range is a perceived increase in loudness.
  - 5y ago
spupe 5y ago
This is also happening with ads, and it's crazy annoying.
janandonly 5y ago
My personal thinking was that as there are more roads, cars, machines and industry since the 1940’s, records simply tried to continue to be audible when played so they HAD to increase volume. That is not the article’s explanation, however. Also interesting how this war ended: > Mastering engineer Bob Katz had argued that "The last battle of the loudness war has been won", claiming that mandatory use of Sound Check by Apple would lead to producers and mastering engineers to turn down the level of their songs to the standard level, or Apple will do it for them. He believed this would eventually result in producers and engineers making more dynamic masters to take account of this factor.
- genericacct 5y ago
  I strongly concur, modern life comes with a lot more noise than in the past
- Ellipsis753 5y ago
  People can simply set the volume on the player louder if there's more background sounds. The trick to the loudness wars is to sound louder (than other songs) at the _same_ volume. If a bar or radio is in the background at a fixed volume, the loudest songs stand out.
  - LinAGKar 5y ago
    Not if the volume is uneven. The either the silent parts will be inaudible or the loud parts will be extremely loud.
adriand 5y ago
"Loudness War" is a bit of a misnomer and this Wikipedia article is rather incoherent in its treatment of the phenomenon (which is real, but poorly explained here). What controls how loud a piece of recorded music is playing at? The volume knob/buttons (depending on the device); or to put it another way, when you are playing the music for yourself, you control it. If you turn the knob all the way down it will be quiet, if you turn it all the way up, it will be loud. It is therefore trivial to play an album from 1950 louder than an album from 2020: if you want your 1950s jazz record to play louder than your 2020 metal record, the means for doing so is literally at your fingertips. What has actually happened is that the dynamic range of recorded music has decreased. Dynamic range is the difference between the smallest and largest parts of the signal. Audio compressors reduce the peak amplitude of the signal and can also boost the weaker parts of the signal, so the effect is that the parts of music that were musically intended to be quieter start to sound just as loud as every other part in the music. This does not mean that the actual volume of the sound coming out of your speakers is any greater, again, you control that with the volume knob. In fact, I would bet that the end result is that the parts of songs that are musically intended to be the loudest tend not to be emitted at as high a volume as they would be otherwise. The reason for that: if a piece of music has quiet parts (especially at the beginning, as is common in intros), you tend to turn it up. Now that you have increased the total volume, when the loud/energetic part of the song comes on, it will be louder than it would have been had you not turned it up (obviously). If there are not quiet parts, then you never need to turn it up, and you will tend to listen to the music at a consistent level, thus avoiding the peaks of maximum volume that would have occurred had the music had more dynamic range. This is also why this issue is most annoying when you are listening to a range of different music from different eras (e.g. an eclectic playlist), or, when your music is interspersed with ads. You will turn up music that has greater dynamic range, but then a heavily compressed song or ad will come on, and now your volume setting is much too high to listen to it comfortably. Lastly, in terms of why: the louder music is, the better it tends to sound (up to a certain point of course). To really get the full experience of a piece of music, you need to listen to it fairly loud. So in an era of songs with plenty of dynamic range, people could make songs stand out by making them much louder by comparison. Once the dynamic range of everything has been ruined, however, this effect goes away and the end result is what you have today.
amelius 5y ago
See also: sugar war.
yannikyeo 5y ago
Kind of sad for digital version of latest by Tears for Fears https://magicvinyldigital.net/2022/03/04/tears-for-fears-the-tipping-point-review-lp-cd-qobuz-tidal-amazon-atmos-blu-ray-audio/ https://magicvinyldigital.net/2022/03/04/tears-for-fears-the... Its common for CDs in the 80s and early 90s to have DR12-DR14. Nowadays its only DR6-DR8. Why don't modern mastering engineers wake up to this regression?
- pbronez 5y ago
  I think it's a combination of things. - Showroom effect. You want to put your best foot forward when a consumer is only dipping in for a moment. Louder grabs attention harder. - Crappy consumer stereo equipment. Low sensitivity, poor linearity, disposable earbuds and android phone speakers are the default. There's no room for nuance on those systems.
  - yannikyeo 5y ago
    The high res version has a crappy DR, which is not expected, which means the only way to get a good digital version is to rip from vinyl. I understand the need to cater for low-end consumer equipment. It can be done by having good DR for vinyl , a good DR version for high-res Flac and physical Hybrid SACD and physical CD, and a loudness version for lossless/lossy streaming. It is safe to say most people who listen to Hybrid SACD/CD/High-Res Flac will have sufficient hi-fi equipments.
declnz 5y ago
Something very close to my heart. Here's an old but related site / campaign with lots of links too: https://www.turnmeup.org/ https://www.turnmeup.org/
joshstrange 5y ago
> Modern recordings that use extreme dynamic range compression and other measures to increase loudness therefore can sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The competitive escalation of loudness has led music fans and members of the musical press to refer to the affected albums as "victims of the loudness war." I had some serious deja vu reading that as I knew I had head it before. Took me minute to find it but it's said (almost) verbatim at 0:23 seconds into this song [0] that was on a playlist I sometimes listen to. [0] https://open.spotify.com/track/17NCISfYJl0GITXs8G75Ae?si=4dd358db68514766 https://open.spotify.com/track/17NCISfYJl0GITXs8G75Ae?si=4dd...
omar_alt 5y ago
Music has moved further away from the idea of the album since Loudness became a really big thing in the noughties. The one positive is that vinyl masters means that engineers have to consider some dynamics as a lot of albums since the mid 90s have been crushed

Loudness War

56 points by _han 5y ago

sedivy94 5y ago

If loudness is a war, then OTT is my scepter.

medstrom 5y ago

But why?

hypertele-Xii 5y ago
Low-quality playback equipment. Mastering music correctly makes it sound "worse" on crappy hardware. But mastering it for crappy hardware makes it sound worse on quality speakers. Some people backed the wrong horse. Much music exists mastered for old shitty car stereos and earbuds and the like. Sometimes, the original recordings are lost or nobody bothers to remaster them.
- bratwurst3000 5y ago
  Yeah I got one of those „high end“ systems and some albums are just not made for quality speakers. Bands like metallica are sounding very bad on those speakers
  - dotancohen 5y ago
    Surprisingly, the first Korn album and the first RATM album sound great on high-end gear. And for what it's worth, Justice and the Black album do sound really good on quality equipment. And if your equipment is really really good, you can even hear Jason on Justice :).
    - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
      You just gave me a flashback to kid me listening to Korn on my dad's new stereo while jumping on his bed. I do indeed remember how good it sounded. Also had a Sony Walkman, pretty good but nothing like a good furniture-size stereo.
    - bratwurst3000 5y ago
      Hahaha yeah that is true. That is also one of the first thing I hear in a good recording. A well defined bass. Its crazy how on bad equipment and mixes the bass is only a static noise in the background
- cik2e 5y ago
  I've noticed this to be especially annoying with recordings that artificially inflate the bass. Yay for earbuds but it's a real pain in the ass when my car speakers rattle until I have to turn the sound down so low that road noise becomes an issue. I like to listen to playlists on shuffle and the inconsistency between different albums has me fiddling with the bass on a song to song basis. Luckily my car has steering wheel controls for this. But most modern vehicles would have you fucking with a touch screen which is a non-starter while driving.
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  More detail: It's because different speaker construction techniques make for different frequency response curves - i.e. there's sounds a cheap speaker can't produce well, so music mastered for listening on commodity hardware of a bygone era sounds "compressed", because they squeeze all of the sound into a narrower band, so you could hear all of it.
michaelgrafl 5y ago
The other replies aren't incorrect. But I think the main reason is out of fear that other music tracks sound louder in a club which would make them feel more exciting. This is kind of repeating with playlists now. Not all services normalize perceived loudness across tracks (e.g. Spotify web player).
- declnz 5y ago
  This. And related cause: A&R people listening to xyz's new album and judging it sounds "huge" / "phat" / "modern"... when actually it's just a bit louder than the other guys, but nobody's adjusting volumes between demos...

theshrike79 5y ago

If you don't believe in the Loudness War, or think that you can't hear the difference, here is a challenge for you: Grab Metallica's Death Magnetic. Listen through it all the way. Now find the Guitar Hero III remastered version of the same album, listen through it. I guarantee you feel exhausted after the official master version, because there is no dynamic range, it's just a full spectrum of noise. Here's a Youtube video visualising the difference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Nfqpr3ygSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Nfqpr3ygSg

haunter 5y ago
Am not an expert but... that doesn't show loudness difference to me. That shows dynamic range difference to me (even the Youtube description says they actually normalized the volume). I can hear the difference between the two version and how distorted the retail version is compared to the more clean sound of the GH3 version but it's not simply up to loudness. Honestly maybe loudness war is a wrong term? Should be dynamic range war or compression war.
- Fooloo 5y ago
  Well you get things louder but you sacrifice dynamic range for it. If you do not normalise it.
- foo_barrio 5y ago
  The final mastering/mixing has an avg db level they target. The more compressed mixes tend to have much louder avg db. Some of these modern "loud" mixes target -3db whereas the previous ones could be -10db or something. Played at an identical volume, the more compressed track will sound louder due to this target. Loudness war is an apt name. Just look at the sample waveforms on the wikipedia page: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
- piva00 5y ago
  The psychoacoustic effect of compression and loss of dynamic range is a perceived increase in loudness.
- 5y ago

spupe 5y ago

This is also happening with ads, and it's crazy annoying.

janandonly 5y ago

My personal thinking was that as there are more roads, cars, machines and industry since the 1940’s, records simply tried to continue to be audible when played so they HAD to increase volume. That is not the article’s explanation, however. Also interesting how this war ended: > Mastering engineer Bob Katz had argued that "The last battle of the loudness war has been won", claiming that mandatory use of Sound Check by Apple would lead to producers and mastering engineers to turn down the level of their songs to the standard level, or Apple will do it for them. He believed this would eventually result in producers and engineers making more dynamic masters to take account of this factor.

genericacct 5y ago
I strongly concur, modern life comes with a lot more noise than in the past
Ellipsis753 5y ago
People can simply set the volume on the player louder if there's more background sounds. The trick to the loudness wars is to sound louder (than other songs) at the _same_ volume. If a bar or radio is in the background at a fixed volume, the loudest songs stand out.
- LinAGKar 5y ago
  Not if the volume is uneven. The either the silent parts will be inaudible or the loud parts will be extremely loud.

adriand 5y ago

"Loudness War" is a bit of a misnomer and this Wikipedia article is rather incoherent in its treatment of the phenomenon (which is real, but poorly explained here). What controls how loud a piece of recorded music is playing at? The volume knob/buttons (depending on the device); or to put it another way, when you are playing the music for yourself, you control it. If you turn the knob all the way down it will be quiet, if you turn it all the way up, it will be loud. It is therefore trivial to play an album from 1950 louder than an album from 2020: if you want your 1950s jazz record to play louder than your 2020 metal record, the means for doing so is literally at your fingertips. What has actually happened is that the dynamic range of recorded music has decreased. Dynamic range is the difference between the smallest and largest parts of the signal. Audio compressors reduce the peak amplitude of the signal and can also boost the weaker parts of the signal, so the effect is that the parts of music that were musically intended to be quieter start to sound just as loud as every other part in the music. This does not mean that the actual volume of the sound coming out of your speakers is any greater, again, you control that with the volume knob. In fact, I would bet that the end result is that the parts of songs that are musically intended to be the loudest tend not to be emitted at as high a volume as they would be otherwise. The reason for that: if a piece of music has quiet parts (especially at the beginning, as is common in intros), you tend to turn it up. Now that you have increased the total volume, when the loud/energetic part of the song comes on, it will be louder than it would have been had you not turned it up (obviously). If there are not quiet parts, then you never need to turn it up, and you will tend to listen to the music at a consistent level, thus avoiding the peaks of maximum volume that would have occurred had the music had more dynamic range. This is also why this issue is most annoying when you are listening to a range of different music from different eras (e.g. an eclectic playlist), or, when your music is interspersed with ads. You will turn up music that has greater dynamic range, but then a heavily compressed song or ad will come on, and now your volume setting is much too high to listen to it comfortably. Lastly, in terms of why: the louder music is, the better it tends to sound (up to a certain point of course). To really get the full experience of a piece of music, you need to listen to it fairly loud. So in an era of songs with plenty of dynamic range, people could make songs stand out by making them much louder by comparison. Once the dynamic range of everything has been ruined, however, this effect goes away and the end result is what you have today.

amelius 5y ago