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Just what we need, a new loudness war, but for our eyeballs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
by munificent 11mo ago
Just what we need, a new loudness war, but for our eyeballs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
- eru 11mo agoInterestingly, the loudness war was essentially fixed by the streaming services. They were in a similar situation as Tik Tok is now.
- aoeusnth1 11mo agoWhat's the history on the end to the loudness war? Do streaming services renormalize super compressed music to be quieter than the peaks of higher dynamic range music?
- eru 11mo agoYes. Basically the streaming services started using a decent model of perceived loudness, and normalise tracks to roughly the same perceived level. I seem to remember that Apple (the computer company, not the music company) was involved as well, but I need to re-read the history here. Their music service and mp3 players were popular back in the day. So all music producers got out of compressing their music was clipping, and not extra loudness when played back.
- cdash 11mo agoIt hasn't really changed much in the mastering process, they still are doing the same old compression. Maybe not the to the same extremes, but dynamic range is still usually terrible. They do it a a higher LUFS target than the streaming platforms normalize to because each streaming platform has a different limit and could change it at any time, so better to be on the safe side. Also the fact that majority of music listening doesn't happen on good speakers/environment.
- account42 11mo ago> Also the fact that majority of music listening doesn't happen on good speakers/environment. Exacly this. I usually do not want high dynamic audio because that means it's either to quiet sometimes or loud enough to annoy neighbors at other times, or both.
- Demiurge 11mo agoYou would think, but not in a way that matters. Everyone still compresses their mixes. People try to get around normalization algorithms by clever hacks. The dynamics still suffer, and bad mixes still clip. So no, I don’t think streaming services fixed the loudness wars.
- irae 11mo agoI hope they end up removing HDR from videos with HDR text. Recording video in sunlight etc is OK, it can be sort of "normalized brightness" or something. But HDR text on top is terrible always.
- JamesSwift 10mo agoThen why is youtube tv still blasting ads at completely different noise levels than the main content?
- morshu9001 11mo agoWhat if they did HDR for audio? So an audio file can tell your speakers to output at 300% of the normal max volume, even more than what compression can do.
- Cthulhu_ 11mo agoIsn't that just by having generally low volume levels? I'm being pedantic, but audio already supports a kind of HDR like that. That said, I wonder if the "volume normalisation" tech that definitely Spotify, presumably other media apps / players / etc have, can be abused to think a song is really quiet.
- saint_yossarian 10mo agoHDR audio already exists in the form of 24-bit and 32-bit floating point audio (vs. the previous 16-bit CD standard). Volumes are still mapped to the same levels because anything else doesn't make sense, just as SDR content can be mapped to HDR levels to achieve the same levels of brightness (but not the same dynamic range, as with audio).
- lambdaone 10mo agoIt's presumably only a matter of time before there's a Wikipedia article for "Brightness war"