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I think the increasing importance of the car as a place where we listen to music may be a contributing factor. I have some old, well-mastered CD's which I love

I think the increasing importance of the car as a place where we listen to music may be a contributing factor. I have some old, well-mastered CD's which I love to listen to at home but they're hard to listen to in my car. The quiet sections are too quiet to hear above the engine/road noise and if I turn the volume up, the loud sections are too loud. I'd much rather have a well-mastered CD and a 'Loud' button (as many car stereos have nowadays) to reduce the dynamic range for in-car listening. However, the record companies know not everyone has a 'Loud' button or knows how to use it so perhaps this is just one more reason they're killing dynamic range in their products.

marksutherland 18y ago
Hmm. A more cynical explanation is that they all want to have the loudest CDs in the jukebox. In noisy public environments (pubs, parties, etc.) the volume of whatevers playing music is likely to be set according to the loudest tracks that are played. As a result anything quiet become hard to hear over the background noise of folk chatting. So you end up with a sort of prisoners dilemma scenario where it seems like you have no option but to master your CDs loud. Similarly, adverts on TV are usually much louder than the shows they're interrupting to try and grab your attention and they all compete with each other for that attention. Very annoying.
- Edinburger 18y ago
  Absolutely, I agree with all of your points. I'm suggesting the car as one more factor, not the only factor :-)
  - marksutherland 18y ago
    Ah. Fair enough :)
- derefr 18y ago
  Or you could pay jukebox manufacturers to put in a chip that does the same thing the radio broadcast techs do--flattens out the average volume-per-track to whatever the volume knob says it should be. If the volume knob on my CD player actually said "mean track SPL" and had real measurements on the ticks (calibrated for a certain set of reference speakers, obviously), rather than just going "to 11", I'd be a lot happier (especially at night when I might have adjusted my volume while listening to a quiet song, and then the next song wakes up my neighbours.)
bbgm 18y ago
Cars are definitely a reason for this. In my own experience, where I do use the car as a place to check how things side, you have to remind yourself that it's not the ideal environment. Or maybe producers today are just lazy
jerf 18y ago
That explains the use of compression. That doesn't explain clipping. Compression does not imply clipping. Nothing explains clipping, really. It's just wrong.
pwk 18y ago
I used to rip my music losslessly, and then process tracks using an unholy mixture of iTunes, AppleScript (shudder), perl (semi-shudder), and ecasound (command line sound processing) to add audio-domain compression for use in the car. It made a difference, but not enough to bother fixing my script when a new version of iTunes broke things. A 'Loud' button would have been much easier.
sho 18y ago
The car is one, but I would have thought the iPod was the obvious example (and other portable music players, of course). People use them to listen to music in noisy environments with bud-style headphones. If the dynamic range is too high, you simply can't hear anything too quiet in the mix. And if you do turn it up, you'll be deafened when the loud part kicks in. I consider myself a bit of an audio nut but even I choose "hot" mixes when I'm sitting on the train. Not sure what the solution is other than providing two mixes of each track. Perhaps a feature for future media formats.
- Erf 18y ago
  It shouldn't be too difficult for such players to analyze the range of a track in advance and compress it appropriately in real time, perhaps to a user-specified degree.
  - sho 18y ago
    Good idea, but I see three problems: 1. Chicken and egg: Until such a feature is ubiquitous, labels can't rely on its presence, and won't release in a suitable format. Until there is demand, player manufacturers won't include it. And I don't see much independent consumer demand. 2. There is no one algorithm or processing technique which will give optimal results for all inputs. The process is still an art requiring a lot of skill and, well, taste. Mastering is still a real necessity. There's crude automated compression, sure, but for the real end product I don't think anyone wants that. 3. The sound is already mixed at the consumer end. For successful remastering (which is basically what you're doing on the fly) the separate tracks would be needed. For example, in an otherwise uncompressed track, a distorted electric guitar is pretty much naturally compressed. Drums are the opposite. Naively just compressing the whole thing will keep the guitar and lose the drums. I'm really oversimplifying here but hopefully you get the picture. I do think such an approach could work, but you'd need to supply the mixable tracks, or relevant groups of them at least, and then supply mixing/compression instructions to the player. If the instructions were standardised with fairly predictable and consistent results, that could be a way to implement such a scheme.

marksutherland 18y ago

Hmm. A more cynical explanation is that they all want to have the loudest CDs in the jukebox. In noisy public environments (pubs, parties, etc.) the volume of whatevers playing music is likely to be set according to the loudest tracks that are played. As a result anything quiet become hard to hear over the background noise of folk chatting. So you end up with a sort of prisoners dilemma scenario where it seems like you have no option but to master your CDs loud. Similarly, adverts on TV are usually much louder than the shows they're interrupting to try and grab your attention and they all compete with each other for that attention. Very annoying.

Edinburger 18y ago
Absolutely, I agree with all of your points. I'm suggesting the car as one more factor, not the only factor :-)
- marksutherland 18y ago
  Ah. Fair enough :)
derefr 18y ago
Or you could pay jukebox manufacturers to put in a chip that does the same thing the radio broadcast techs do--flattens out the average volume-per-track to whatever the volume knob says it should be. If the volume knob on my CD player actually said "mean track SPL" and had real measurements on the ticks (calibrated for a certain set of reference speakers, obviously), rather than just going "to 11", I'd be a lot happier (especially at night when I might have adjusted my volume while listening to a quiet song, and then the next song wakes up my neighbours.)

bbgm 18y ago

Cars are definitely a reason for this. In my own experience, where I do use the car as a place to check how things side, you have to remind yourself that it's not the ideal environment. Or maybe producers today are just lazy

jerf 18y ago

That explains the use of compression. That doesn't explain clipping. Compression does not imply clipping. Nothing explains clipping, really. It's just wrong.

pwk 18y ago

I used to rip my music losslessly, and then process tracks using an unholy mixture of iTunes, AppleScript (shudder), perl (semi-shudder), and ecasound (command line sound processing) to add audio-domain compression for use in the car. It made a difference, but not enough to bother fixing my script when a new version of iTunes broke things. A 'Loud' button would have been much easier.

sho 18y ago

The car is one, but I would have thought the iPod was the obvious example (and other portable music players, of course). People use them to listen to music in noisy environments with bud-style headphones. If the dynamic range is too high, you simply can't hear anything too quiet in the mix. And if you do turn it up, you'll be deafened when the loud part kicks in. I consider myself a bit of an audio nut but even I choose "hot" mixes when I'm sitting on the train. Not sure what the solution is other than providing two mixes of each track. Perhaps a feature for future media formats.

Erf 18y ago
It shouldn't be too difficult for such players to analyze the range of a track in advance and compress it appropriately in real time, perhaps to a user-specified degree.
- sho 18y ago
  Good idea, but I see three problems: 1. Chicken and egg: Until such a feature is ubiquitous, labels can't rely on its presence, and won't release in a suitable format. Until there is demand, player manufacturers won't include it. And I don't see much independent consumer demand. 2. There is no one algorithm or processing technique which will give optimal results for all inputs. The process is still an art requiring a lot of skill and, well, taste. Mastering is still a real necessity. There's crude automated compression, sure, but for the real end product I don't think anyone wants that. 3. The sound is already mixed at the consumer end. For successful remastering (which is basically what you're doing on the fly) the separate tracks would be needed. For example, in an otherwise uncompressed track, a distorted electric guitar is pretty much naturally compressed. Drums are the opposite. Naively just compressing the whole thing will keep the guitar and lose the drums. I'm really oversimplifying here but hopefully you get the picture. I do think such an approach could work, but you'd need to supply the mixable tracks, or relevant groups of them at least, and then supply mixing/compression instructions to the player. If the instructions were standardised with fairly predictable and consistent results, that could be a way to implement such a scheme.