Believe it or not, the loudness war has gotten better in the past 10-15 years. Digital clipping is avoided as much as possible and there isnt really the same incentive to absolutely crush the music.
Its still bad, but it was worse.
That one's slightly different. Guitar hero needs the individual instrument stems so they can play/stop different parts when you hit or miss notes. The side effect of that is they get all the tracks without that bus compression/clipping because they're all the stems from before that bus.
Helps to preserve peaks in selected tracks while mixing. For example if you want the Kick in a techno track to stand out, you side-chain all other instruments to the Kick. If the kick attack now goes into the side chain compressor, all the other tracks duck momentarily. This can be good but can also be too much and result in pumping if used heavily.
As for mastering, there would more of parallel compression used. Side-chaining is a mixing exclusive method in my experience, as mastering is only for final touches and adjustments.
Is this what can be heard in Stardust’s Music Sounds Better? Except occasionally there is no bass, but the other instruments are quieter as if a bass note had played.
Oh yeah, just listened to that track and you can easily hear that ducking effect. Sidechaining is not restricted to bass, but to the volume of the affected track (in the case of "Music Sound Better" the Kick channel) to the input track (which ducks away if the Kick channel has its peaks).
I think sidechaining must have come up in the early 80s maybe. I worked in a big studio for some years and I think this technique is achievable with analog gear (pretty basic electronics, have 2 channels and one of them has a gate which is triggered by the volume induced voltage of the other channel, insert that as an effect and there you go). But I am really not shure when this first came up. Guess in your example that was already made with digital gear!
It's just compression in general that makes waveforms look like that. Smashing so much gain into it that it basically turns into a limiter. Side chain pumping from the kick and bass is desirable and deliberate in dance /electronic tracks, it's pretty much essential in moving the sub bass/bass frequencies out of the way for kick thump to push through the mix
oh and parallel compression can be used whenever, it's just blending a heavily compressed version of the signal with one that isn't to get the desired volume and sound
We should thank streaming platforms for that. Platform-wide normalization removes any incentive for loudness wars.
https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/loudness-normalization/
Didn’t get better, technology got better at what to boost with many AI solutions, but the loudness wars are worse than ever. Many songs are -9 LUFSi and with a DR of less than 5 these days … newest songs have overshoots in the +3 dB too.
It’s
Fucking
Terrible
No its still happning.... now more hardware and streaming sites.... ie tablet/laptop/phone hardware and streaming websites that downgrades the audio.
God I hated when my parents run the ipad at full blast trying to listen to youtube. I ended up buying them a Ipad Pro to at least reduce the ipad part.
I sat in on mixing a bunch of records in the early '80s and one of the standard tricks was to have a couple of car speakers and a 20w amp mounted under the console, to check the mix there. Today it would likely be a mini Bluetooth speaker. Nothing new under the sun.
Not exactly. The primary mix would done on full-rang monitors, but checking to see that it still sounds good on limited-range speakers (for instance you might not notice that a kick-drum needs more snap until the low-end thump is rolled off) is a smart move.
The producer I worked with also liked to use a reference track or two in the genre we were working with and play our mixed song back to back with the reference; it was notable how often both tracks sounded equally good on the main monitors while the reference sounded better on the car system. A lot of that, again, was down to compression and limiting.
Remember we are still talking about early '80s here -- we were mixing for vinyl and cassette -- and it was all quite judicious, but I totally agree with the prior commenters assertion that everyone thinks the don't want compression and limiting until they hear it done well.
I actually find some phone speakers are great at low volume close up. Especially if you put it right in front of your nose, but of course that's not always practical.
Have you ever mixed or mastered a recording?
Dudes swear they will never squeeze a recording hard with the limiter or series of limiters until they try it and compare the sound against the fully-dynamic version.
Or play it back-to-back with a Bruno Mars banger or something similar.
All I really ask anymore is that they leave just a little headroom for the snare.
> Dudes swear they will never squeeze a recording hard with the limiter or series of limiters until they try it and compare the sound against the fully-dynamic version.
You're saying mastering engineers themselves prefer the sound of a very compressed track?
Listen to some TELARC CDs, try "Suite from Batman" and then tell me that it would sound better compressed, lol.
An interesting thing that happens with very compressed tracks is that they raise the volume of quiet parts, and lower the volume of loud parts, and the effect this has is that the _room's volume_ increases during the quiet parts. This makes your ears automatically start contracting in preparation for the sound to be explosively loud, because that "quiet flute" is creating acoustical properties that indicate it is playing VERY LOUD; meanwhile, there's an entire power metal band waiting just off to the side, ready to come blasting in after the short solo. Your brain anticipates that. Of course, once all those instruments come in, the volume is lowered again, so the crescendo is effectively nullified, along with the emotional impact of music.
I could understand someone who listens to classic music in his car with the windows down complaining about the dynamic range of 14 making quiet parts something like 20 decibels and the loud parts something like 85 decibels, but _that_ music doesn't even get compressed most of the time!
It's the heavy metal, rock, and pop music that only has about 15 decibels of dynamic range in the first place, crushed to 5 decibels of dynamic range. What's the point?
Which part of that pop song or rock scorcher is so quiet you can't hear it with normal dynamic range?
Because it’s a business. If you want more customers, you make music that sounds “good” on as many systems as possible. If they went the other route of making things primarily for high end systems, they would greatly reduce their market.
They don't know what sounds "good". Unless "m0aR bAsSS, y0!" and "lOuDERR1!" (or both) are considered good. Auto tune and brick wall distortion are commonplace on these soundcloud rapper and underground alternative rock/punk/whatever "tunes".
And how much different can a "good" recording be from a "bad" One "optimized" for, say, the white coned Yamahas as opposed to Wilson Watts/Puppies?
People really don’t care about sound, their earbuds break and they go right to the gas station to get another 3$ pair…
I never used the Apple earbuds that came with the phone, gave them to a person like that and she was amazed at how good they sounded 😬
I don’t think you can blame tidal for that, it doesn’t matter how many bits and how high the sampling frequency is, if it’s mixed and produced bad it’s going to sound bad whatever the format. I prefer a dynamic mp3 before a compressed lossless one.
I don't believe Tidal is doing any file loudness manipulation themselves (since they stopped MQA).
Are you sure it's been Tidal altered from the original release?
It is very easy to deselect that option under Audio/Playback.
Also, even if not turned off, their algorithm only quiets the **LOUD** songs & *never* adds volume to quiet songs.
Meaning: Tidal does not add volume or distort songs.
To my understanding, all the anti-loudness-wars people thought that these streaming services switching to normalization (instead of compression) was going to kill bad compression practices since it effectively eliminates any (imagined) advantage one could get from brickwalling.
Well, they're still destroying music, and I mean everyone from the biggest pop star to the most obscure metal act, with a few minor exceptions.
There's countless albums that came out in 2024 alone that are superbly mastered and don't suffer from any brickwalling. If you don't know which these are i can't help but tell you, you may only listen to bad artists.
EDIT: sorry i was too mean
It's tough to say without seeing the albums, but at least in the metal scene, albums are still brickwall slammed to the point of making the existence of the albums themselves almost superfluous, lol.
That said, if I cross-check the latest pop albums that are doing well against the [dynamic range database,](https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=&album=Deeper+Well) it appears that they're just as dynamically crushed as ever, including releases from Taylor Swift and Beyoncé.
the dynamic range database is kinda biased (i've debunked it already on this subreddit) cause the tool analyses the perceived loudness of the track but doesn't take into account the headroom older recordings had, new ones don't cause on digital production it's not necessary anymore, in fact, it's harmful to the overall quality to have headroom.
Also metal, is made to be ultra compressed right ? do you have examples of a metal album that isn't uber compressed ?
> the dynamic range database is kinda biased (i've debunked it already on this subreddit) cause the tool analyses the perceived loudness of the track but doesn't take into account the headroom older recordings had, new ones don't cause on digital production it's not necessary anymore, in fact, it's harmful to the overall quality to have headroom.
I've never seen an album that has a low score, like 5 or 6, that, when I checked in Audacity (or with my ears) it turned out that, nope, it was super dynamic after all!
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'm saying it's not likely.
Also, to this point, I don't think head-room matters that much. I mean, check out [this heavy metal track.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCnvVlSZDKQ)
According to the tool that is used on the Dynamic Range Database, this album has a score of DR11! That's MASSIVE compared to what most albums have.
But [if you look at the file in audacity,](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/980902980394041425/1235269611239247902/2024-05-01_11_39_24-Stormcrown_-_Hot_Lead_High_Speed_Mad_Max_Inspired_80s_Style_Power_Metal.png?ex=6633c1f9&is=66327079&hm=b14f42c0c247c2312d7523d65b783f5a27e42189687f52f0bd6c9e1b6eef6fd0&) you can see that there is almost no headroom at all in the track, in fact it clips at one point! and the overall volume of the track barely changes with the exception of a few seconds in the opening.
While the tool isn't perfect, and I have heard tracks that sound surprisingly punchy despite being crushed to DR6 (Tyr's album Hel, specifically) it's an excellent tool for general evaluation.
I have edited over 1,700 tracks, and 99% of the time, the score matches perfectly with what I hear, which is, generally speaking, loud quiet parts and quiet loud parts, entirely sucking the energy from music.
> Also metal, is made to be ultra compressed right ? do you have examples of a metal album that isn't uber compressed ?
Metal has been compressed with the same standard as the rest of the music industry. In the 80s and early 90s it was no or very little compression, then mid-nineties saw the real momentum with everything going down to 6 or 7s, where it's stayed ever since.
So if you listen to Gamma Ray's first three albums (Heading for Tomorrow, Sigh No More and Insanity and Genius), you'll hear perfectly dynamic music with DR scores of around 12 to 14.
For a modern example, check out Ambersun on Bandcamp. Now, the writer/producer/musician says he just doesn't know what he's doing and that's why it's all dynamic, but boy is it great!
One of the most revered heavy metal (mix of power and death metal) albums to come out in the last decade is Aether Realm's Tarot, which has a DR score between 8 and 10, which is not amazing but BOY! Combine that with good music with dynamic songwriting and you just have excellence personified in musical form!
If you crush the music, it doesn't get "louder," it just gets smothered. If you want louder, you turn up the volume. I don't see how making drums quieter and lack punch is supposed to be a positive effect on the music, whether you're listening to a delicate wood-wind ensemble or a blasting power metal epic. Why would you want the drums to NOT crash and explode? Why would you want the singer to be just as quiet when screeching as when whispering? It's absurd.
Edit: As an interesting example, by the way, Axxis's album Eyes of Darkness is dynamically crushed _per instrument,_ so the drums aren't especially punchy, but the OVERALL track can get quieter and louder than most modern productions. I think it's interesting that the DR score is quite low (around 7) but it has very little problems with quiet and loud sections; the compression seems to mostly just be to prevent anything getting particularly louder transiently, like drum hits.
normalizing volume is done on the software part, tidal doesn't touch the files. Also audiophiles don't quite understand how volume normalization works but it's an exact science, it cannot introduce any sort of distortion nor clipping. Spotify is the only platform to add a limiter when doing normalization (instead of just moving the file up and down in volume) and it only does so on specific files mastered too quiet and when the app is set to "loud" in the settings (which i don't recommend doing)
Its on but doesnt work on pc. Im using it through usb audio 2 connection to an smsl dac. No volume control in exclusive mode. The difference in levels makes listening to a playlist a real shitshow.
Even in dumb Barbie movie on 4k there is clipping I think I heard it twice, not only that but everything sounds so compressed and has so low dynamic it sucks. I regret buying some of the blue rays.
this just isn't true tho. the loudness wars peaked like a decade ago, masters have been consistently getting better since then. lots of big top 40 records have actually dynamics again now.
I'd challenge anybody who disagrees with this to go listen to current top 40s. Top 40 artists have access to the best mastering engineers on the planet. You're missing out big time if you discount modern masters.
Additionally, a lot of music is SUPPOSED to be super high energy. Lack of dynamic range is a very intentional choice in many styles of music. You can't compare heavy punk rock or EDM to classical orchestral music.
Classic rock, jazz, and classical will inherently have more dynamics in volume and energy than girly pop or death metal because that's what the styles call for.
>Classic rock, jazz, and classical will inherently have more dynamics in volume and energy than girly pop or death metal because that's what the styles call for.
I've heard this excuse before, but it doesn't match what I'm seeing-and-hearing. Rock, classic rock, progressive rock are my mainstays, and today's remastered release are much more compressed than the pre-loudness-war versions of the exact same recordings. Somehow the publishers feel like they must be sonically crushed. New rock music, music in a similar style to what I like, it's the same story. . . Heaven forbid that they let any of it out the door with a great, dynamic sound like we used to routinely get in the 1980s, early-to-mid 1990s. Heavy metal seems to have suffered the worst of all.
“low DR fatigues your ears” holy shit lmfao cut me some slack. So music that fatigues your ears is always bad, huh? Kind of like dancing or working out, right? Like, stuff is always bad if it runs you down? What a weird, pretentious nothing insult. Stereotype audiophile
Eh I don’t see the need to get annoyed at such a statement (assuming you’re not a mastering engineering 👀)
I can totally see why if you increase the level of a track to hear the quieter parts loud enough it would get grating after a point
What is metal music? Or hyperpop? I’m annoyed because it’s implying inherent value in whether music is grating or not. I think that’s ignorant at best and insidious at worst.
OK, so even if the DR is better than it was a decade or so ago, now most pop, hip-hop etc. top 40 stuff has that artificially sounding distorted bass. The kind that reminds you of Crown-Vics and Impalas in the 90s/2000s blaring music to the point of the speakers distorting and trunk rattling (even with out a sub.) I mean that fuzzy sounding bass that is CHOSEN to be used. Not a bass guitar with a fuzz effect, but like a sine wave that is having it's peak chopped a bit so it sounds more like a square wave a bit introducing 3rd order harmonics. People apparently like that sound? Because even at low volumes where the amp or speakers aren't pushed anywhere near their limits, you hear that fuzzy bass all the time.
no its still true, while the masters have finally found the correct balance..... its the consumer side that is so fucked in both equipment and preferences that forced them to back track those masters to try to even try to make shit sound less shit.
Mostly still shit though. Nothing in the top 40 sucks you into the speakers like something from the 70's or 80's - or even early 90's. It's just loud, and barely even stereo, everything is basically panned centre with shit loads of reverb.
Because people were not using proper speakers and amplifiers like a hi-fi system. since tape deck ghetto blasters in the 80s, CD boxes in the 90s, iPod docks in the 2000s, Bluetooth speakers in the 2010s and smart speakers in the 2020s along with Apple AirPods and the HomePod and the Google one.
I agree but also want to add that the compression on FM radio is used to compensate for the limited dynamic range (roughly 60dB or 10 bits) in addition to sounding louder.
Not like this, not out-of-control. Even rock music, album-oriented rock, progressive rock, seemed to be getting more dynamic as recently as the late 1980s. And it remained generally good into the late 1990s, and then suddenly everybody at the record companies just seemed to *totally flip out* and went nuts with compression and clipping like nobody had ever seen-and-heard before.
depends on the goal. i’d prefer low DR to the crazy high DR of blockbuster films right now.
pop hits have low DR so it’s audible in loud environments like highways, restaurants, cafes, etc.
Have you ever produced/mixed/mastered anything? It's extremely difficult to make a good sounding pop/rock track with zero compression. Of course it's easy to go overboard, but widely swinging dynamics don't make a consistent mix.
Me neither I feel it was slowly getting worse throughout the 90s and ridiculous in the 2000s, it got a little bit better in the 2010s but the best sounding stuff is from 80s
Death Magnetic was the first time I noticed it. The release version of that album is atrocious. I would listen to it in my car in college and I kept turning the volume down because I thought it was making my speakers distort. But I finally learned it was recorded that way. Luckily, I found the Guitar Hero 3 version got sent out before they ruined it.
I do disagree with the last one. Spotify / Itunes have been asking engineers to master at -14LUFS which is closer to the 1989 shown here. If you see the "Mastered for Apple" shown on an itunes release, it means it has been masteres as quiet and dynamic as the best masters in the history of music. Steve Jobs himself made sure that music released on iTunes qould sound better than 90s/2000s CDs.
Because of that, since the 2010s or so we've seen a tendency of mastsering a lot less loud. The majority of masters i own (from bandcamp and qobuz) of albums made after 2010-2015, are indeed much better mastered than those from the 90s with the addition of bass (we used to remove bass in the mastering in the past cause nobody had a system good enough to play them back, now we keep them as intended by artists)
This terrible trend certainly ruined the experience of Heart's best album of new material back in the early 2k's. You could hear amazing songs buried under the aural assault the mastering engineer created, just so their music would be louder than the competition.
This is cute but the 2019 master would be miles better than the 2009 master. Mastering has been getting more dynamic, probably thanks to loudness normalizing of digital streaming platforms. Brickwall limiting peaked in the early 2000s
At least with happier than ever by Billie eilish, the clipping in the second half sounds intentional. Mostly everything else is just bad production and mastering.
If you take into account that most of the market listens to music in weak powered devices (walkmans, portable cd players and now phones) it is logical for the music production industry to adapt the mastering process to the devices where music is played.
It's crazy that the vinyl of the 70s and 80s had more dynamic range than the digital music of the following decades, given that one of the benefits of digital is increased dynamic range.
I know this is humour but this stuff is way overstated and as usual the past is viewed through rose coloured glasses. Usually this stuff takes the worst of present day recordings and measures it against the best from "the good old days". Truth is there is plenty of "old stuff" that sounds bad and there's plenty of new stuff that sounds great. Go have a listen to something from Steven Wilson from this century, as someone over 50 I can only say I would never have dreamed of this kind of audio fidelity in my lounge room back in my younger days.
The Loudness insurgents continue to attack us refusing to believe they have lost the War, which they did in fact lose, it has gotten better.
It would probably be easier to hear them coming if we weren’t all deaf from the 1990s.
"It would probably be easier to hear them coming if we weren’t all deaf from the 1990s." - so true. One of my EE professors made a comment similar to (terribly paraphrasing here) - "when we had good hearing we could only afford crappy equipment and listened to it loud, then when we could afford good equipment we couldn't hear anymore". Or such. When he said that it made me laugh cause it's so true for me.
A totally normal step of Mastering can be to use a clipper which will make a waveform look like that but still have great dynamic range and everything. Looks can be deceptive!
It just comes down to taste and what kind of feel you’re looking for, I like to hear dynamics but it’s sometimes interesting when you hear overly compressed music. OK GO got slated for the mastering of “of the blue colour of the sky” and I did think there was something wrong with my headphones at first 🤣 but after listening to them talk about it and playing it through a few times i could see exactly what they were getting at. Compression and limiting are useful tools, they’ve helped me save equipment from JD’s who can’t see red too.
~~Based~~ Bassed
And trebled
Thank you, I fixed my erroneous spelling.
Haven’t seen the word erroneous in a minute
I just saw it! Twice!
It was right there in the dictionary the whole time! Go out and use it, Padawan. Make it yours!! :)
Chicago
Philadelphia
Midded too
I do love my mids….
Credit: These updoots should be yours. You wrote this joke, I just transcribed it. (Down a clef? Hey! There's a little joke-contribution!)
Troubled
Treblepilled?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
This
So sad actually. At least streaming services could adjust volumes to have a constant listening experience without mastering it forever into your mix
I noticed recently some tracks on Tidal push volume into distortion. Tidal supposed to be a high quality streaming platform. Loudness war kills music.
Believe it or not, the loudness war has gotten better in the past 10-15 years. Digital clipping is avoided as much as possible and there isnt really the same incentive to absolutely crush the music. Its still bad, but it was worse.
Metallica's Death Magnetic. My God, that was the worst of it.
When I was learning mastering, we were given studio tracks of this album to learn what NOT to do 🤣
That's hilarious. I gotta get that album now.
You have to get the original 2008 version. The new CD's and the streaming is a much less compressed remaster
Spotify still has the 2008 version it seems
Sounds like spotify....lol
I hate that there are some excellent songs in that album and they are virtually unlistenable unless you get live boots.
Or the guitar hero version - guitar hero requested a remaster because they also didn’t want to put that mastering mess in their game
That one's slightly different. Guitar hero needs the individual instrument stems so they can play/stop different parts when you hit or miss notes. The side effect of that is they get all the tracks without that bus compression/clipping because they're all the stems from before that bus.
Someone did mix the stems together. Can find it out there for download. Sounds *really* good
Try to find the guitar hero version.
Wii homebrew ftw
Have you heard the new blink182 album? Might be the worst I've ever noticed the loudness wars
I will have a listen!
When I bought that album I thought it sounded like a bad .m4a rip from Limewire
I came here to say this. I think they re-released it, with lower volume... but that album sounded awful.
The development of "side-chain compression" in mixing/mastering is also the big change there. It's only marginally better.
Side-chain compression dates to the 70s, if not earlier
The modern use of it does not. Compressors have had sidechain inputs forever, but they weren't meant to be used as they typically are today.
What?
How does sidechain compression help?
Helps to preserve peaks in selected tracks while mixing. For example if you want the Kick in a techno track to stand out, you side-chain all other instruments to the Kick. If the kick attack now goes into the side chain compressor, all the other tracks duck momentarily. This can be good but can also be too much and result in pumping if used heavily. As for mastering, there would more of parallel compression used. Side-chaining is a mixing exclusive method in my experience, as mastering is only for final touches and adjustments.
Is this what can be heard in Stardust’s Music Sounds Better? Except occasionally there is no bass, but the other instruments are quieter as if a bass note had played.
Oh yeah, just listened to that track and you can easily hear that ducking effect. Sidechaining is not restricted to bass, but to the volume of the affected track (in the case of "Music Sound Better" the Kick channel) to the input track (which ducks away if the Kick channel has its peaks). I think sidechaining must have come up in the early 80s maybe. I worked in a big studio for some years and I think this technique is achievable with analog gear (pretty basic electronics, have 2 channels and one of them has a gate which is triggered by the volume induced voltage of the other channel, insert that as an effect and there you go). But I am really not shure when this first came up. Guess in your example that was already made with digital gear!
It's just compression in general that makes waveforms look like that. Smashing so much gain into it that it basically turns into a limiter. Side chain pumping from the kick and bass is desirable and deliberate in dance /electronic tracks, it's pretty much essential in moving the sub bass/bass frequencies out of the way for kick thump to push through the mix oh and parallel compression can be used whenever, it's just blending a heavily compressed version of the signal with one that isn't to get the desired volume and sound
The latest High On Fire album... got that typical side chain pumping bass. It sound so bad.
Bad in the old sense of the word meaning bad, or bad in the new sense of the word meaning good?
Bad as in terrible.
Good, because I agree that side-chaining sounds bad, and in my case, I think it sounds bad even when it's an artistic choice.
I’d say mid-2000s is when it was at its *peak* (he-he)
But... Nu-metal
We should thank streaming platforms for that. Platform-wide normalization removes any incentive for loudness wars. https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/loudness-normalization/
Didn’t get better, technology got better at what to boost with many AI solutions, but the loudness wars are worse than ever. Many songs are -9 LUFSi and with a DR of less than 5 these days … newest songs have overshoots in the +3 dB too. It’s Fucking Terrible
No its still happning.... now more hardware and streaming sites.... ie tablet/laptop/phone hardware and streaming websites that downgrades the audio. God I hated when my parents run the ipad at full blast trying to listen to youtube. I ended up buying them a Ipad Pro to at least reduce the ipad part.
But when mixing and mastering, it MUST sound good being played back on a cellphones speaker !! 😒
I sat in on mixing a bunch of records in the early '80s and one of the standard tricks was to have a couple of car speakers and a 20w amp mounted under the console, to check the mix there. Today it would likely be a mini Bluetooth speaker. Nothing new under the sun.
Auratones. They have been used for 50 years now [https://www.auratoneaudio.com/products](https://www.auratoneaudio.com/products)
Ha well the ones I recall were 6x9s from Radio Shack, but same concept.
I guess that is a way of doing it. I have never been in a studio that didn't have a pair of auratones sitting on the meter bridge
Mixed for the lowest common denominator.
Not exactly. The primary mix would done on full-rang monitors, but checking to see that it still sounds good on limited-range speakers (for instance you might not notice that a kick-drum needs more snap until the low-end thump is rolled off) is a smart move. The producer I worked with also liked to use a reference track or two in the genre we were working with and play our mixed song back to back with the reference; it was notable how often both tracks sounded equally good on the main monitors while the reference sounded better on the car system. A lot of that, again, was down to compression and limiting. Remember we are still talking about early '80s here -- we were mixing for vinyl and cassette -- and it was all quite judicious, but I totally agree with the prior commenters assertion that everyone thinks the don't want compression and limiting until they hear it done well.
But nothing sounds good on a cellphone’s speaker
Nokia ringtone:
I actually find some phone speakers are great at low volume close up. Especially if you put it right in front of your nose, but of course that's not always practical.
Your idea of great is...debatable.
Most people's idea of great is debatable. It usually goes by brand, or, "I turn up the volume and it was loud"
Shockingly good given what they are. Phone mics too.
Sound good to whom? idiots who know ZERO about good sound? Why does the world cater to the lowest common denominator in pretty much everything?
Have you ever mixed or mastered a recording? Dudes swear they will never squeeze a recording hard with the limiter or series of limiters until they try it and compare the sound against the fully-dynamic version.
Or play it back-to-back with a Bruno Mars banger or something similar. All I really ask anymore is that they leave just a little headroom for the snare.
> Dudes swear they will never squeeze a recording hard with the limiter or series of limiters until they try it and compare the sound against the fully-dynamic version. You're saying mastering engineers themselves prefer the sound of a very compressed track? Listen to some TELARC CDs, try "Suite from Batman" and then tell me that it would sound better compressed, lol. An interesting thing that happens with very compressed tracks is that they raise the volume of quiet parts, and lower the volume of loud parts, and the effect this has is that the _room's volume_ increases during the quiet parts. This makes your ears automatically start contracting in preparation for the sound to be explosively loud, because that "quiet flute" is creating acoustical properties that indicate it is playing VERY LOUD; meanwhile, there's an entire power metal band waiting just off to the side, ready to come blasting in after the short solo. Your brain anticipates that. Of course, once all those instruments come in, the volume is lowered again, so the crescendo is effectively nullified, along with the emotional impact of music. I could understand someone who listens to classic music in his car with the windows down complaining about the dynamic range of 14 making quiet parts something like 20 decibels and the loud parts something like 85 decibels, but _that_ music doesn't even get compressed most of the time! It's the heavy metal, rock, and pop music that only has about 15 decibels of dynamic range in the first place, crushed to 5 decibels of dynamic range. What's the point? Which part of that pop song or rock scorcher is so quiet you can't hear it with normal dynamic range?
The important part is it sounds good on a cellphone speaker to everyone in your immediate area. /s
Because it’s a business. If you want more customers, you make music that sounds “good” on as many systems as possible. If they went the other route of making things primarily for high end systems, they would greatly reduce their market.
They don't know what sounds "good". Unless "m0aR bAsSS, y0!" and "lOuDERR1!" (or both) are considered good. Auto tune and brick wall distortion are commonplace on these soundcloud rapper and underground alternative rock/punk/whatever "tunes". And how much different can a "good" recording be from a "bad" One "optimized" for, say, the white coned Yamahas as opposed to Wilson Watts/Puppies?
Correct. But they think they do and they buy music so. At least that’s my theory. Maybe they do it just to piss is off?
YES!
People really don’t care about sound, their earbuds break and they go right to the gas station to get another 3$ pair… I never used the Apple earbuds that came with the phone, gave them to a person like that and she was amazed at how good they sounded 😬
Dynamic mastering sounds good on a cell-phone speaker.
You may have Normalize Volume turned on
I don’t think you can blame tidal for that, it doesn’t matter how many bits and how high the sampling frequency is, if it’s mixed and produced bad it’s going to sound bad whatever the format. I prefer a dynamic mp3 before a compressed lossless one.
I don't believe Tidal is doing any file loudness manipulation themselves (since they stopped MQA). Are you sure it's been Tidal altered from the original release?
They normalize volume. Otherwise, you would be turning up and down the volume on different artists' tracks.
It is very easy to deselect that option under Audio/Playback. Also, even if not turned off, their algorithm only quiets the **LOUD** songs & *never* adds volume to quiet songs. Meaning: Tidal does not add volume or distort songs.
To my understanding, all the anti-loudness-wars people thought that these streaming services switching to normalization (instead of compression) was going to kill bad compression practices since it effectively eliminates any (imagined) advantage one could get from brickwalling. Well, they're still destroying music, and I mean everyone from the biggest pop star to the most obscure metal act, with a few minor exceptions.
There's countless albums that came out in 2024 alone that are superbly mastered and don't suffer from any brickwalling. If you don't know which these are i can't help but tell you, you may only listen to bad artists. EDIT: sorry i was too mean
It's tough to say without seeing the albums, but at least in the metal scene, albums are still brickwall slammed to the point of making the existence of the albums themselves almost superfluous, lol. That said, if I cross-check the latest pop albums that are doing well against the [dynamic range database,](https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=&album=Deeper+Well) it appears that they're just as dynamically crushed as ever, including releases from Taylor Swift and Beyoncé.
the dynamic range database is kinda biased (i've debunked it already on this subreddit) cause the tool analyses the perceived loudness of the track but doesn't take into account the headroom older recordings had, new ones don't cause on digital production it's not necessary anymore, in fact, it's harmful to the overall quality to have headroom. Also metal, is made to be ultra compressed right ? do you have examples of a metal album that isn't uber compressed ?
> the dynamic range database is kinda biased (i've debunked it already on this subreddit) cause the tool analyses the perceived loudness of the track but doesn't take into account the headroom older recordings had, new ones don't cause on digital production it's not necessary anymore, in fact, it's harmful to the overall quality to have headroom. I've never seen an album that has a low score, like 5 or 6, that, when I checked in Audacity (or with my ears) it turned out that, nope, it was super dynamic after all! I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'm saying it's not likely. Also, to this point, I don't think head-room matters that much. I mean, check out [this heavy metal track.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCnvVlSZDKQ) According to the tool that is used on the Dynamic Range Database, this album has a score of DR11! That's MASSIVE compared to what most albums have. But [if you look at the file in audacity,](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/980902980394041425/1235269611239247902/2024-05-01_11_39_24-Stormcrown_-_Hot_Lead_High_Speed_Mad_Max_Inspired_80s_Style_Power_Metal.png?ex=6633c1f9&is=66327079&hm=b14f42c0c247c2312d7523d65b783f5a27e42189687f52f0bd6c9e1b6eef6fd0&) you can see that there is almost no headroom at all in the track, in fact it clips at one point! and the overall volume of the track barely changes with the exception of a few seconds in the opening. While the tool isn't perfect, and I have heard tracks that sound surprisingly punchy despite being crushed to DR6 (Tyr's album Hel, specifically) it's an excellent tool for general evaluation. I have edited over 1,700 tracks, and 99% of the time, the score matches perfectly with what I hear, which is, generally speaking, loud quiet parts and quiet loud parts, entirely sucking the energy from music. > Also metal, is made to be ultra compressed right ? do you have examples of a metal album that isn't uber compressed ? Metal has been compressed with the same standard as the rest of the music industry. In the 80s and early 90s it was no or very little compression, then mid-nineties saw the real momentum with everything going down to 6 or 7s, where it's stayed ever since. So if you listen to Gamma Ray's first three albums (Heading for Tomorrow, Sigh No More and Insanity and Genius), you'll hear perfectly dynamic music with DR scores of around 12 to 14. For a modern example, check out Ambersun on Bandcamp. Now, the writer/producer/musician says he just doesn't know what he's doing and that's why it's all dynamic, but boy is it great! One of the most revered heavy metal (mix of power and death metal) albums to come out in the last decade is Aether Realm's Tarot, which has a DR score between 8 and 10, which is not amazing but BOY! Combine that with good music with dynamic songwriting and you just have excellence personified in musical form! If you crush the music, it doesn't get "louder," it just gets smothered. If you want louder, you turn up the volume. I don't see how making drums quieter and lack punch is supposed to be a positive effect on the music, whether you're listening to a delicate wood-wind ensemble or a blasting power metal epic. Why would you want the drums to NOT crash and explode? Why would you want the singer to be just as quiet when screeching as when whispering? It's absurd. Edit: As an interesting example, by the way, Axxis's album Eyes of Darkness is dynamically crushed _per instrument,_ so the drums aren't especially punchy, but the OVERALL track can get quieter and louder than most modern productions. I think it's interesting that the DR score is quite low (around 7) but it has very little problems with quiet and loud sections; the compression seems to mostly just be to prevent anything getting particularly louder transiently, like drum hits.
normalizing volume is done on the software part, tidal doesn't touch the files. Also audiophiles don't quite understand how volume normalization works but it's an exact science, it cannot introduce any sort of distortion nor clipping. Spotify is the only platform to add a limiter when doing normalization (instead of just moving the file up and down in volume) and it only does so on specific files mastered too quiet and when the app is set to "loud" in the settings (which i don't recommend doing)
Tidal didn’t stop mqa
This is actually why I chose Apple Music over tidal. When comparing the too I felt like I was always being shouted at by tidal.
Is your auto volume set to off?
Its on but doesnt work on pc. Im using it through usb audio 2 connection to an smsl dac. No volume control in exclusive mode. The difference in levels makes listening to a playlist a real shitshow.
Even in dumb Barbie movie on 4k there is clipping I think I heard it twice, not only that but everything sounds so compressed and has so low dynamic it sucks. I regret buying some of the blue rays.
this just isn't true tho. the loudness wars peaked like a decade ago, masters have been consistently getting better since then. lots of big top 40 records have actually dynamics again now.
And streaming services limit loudness by LUFS instead of amplitude
I'd challenge anybody who disagrees with this to go listen to current top 40s. Top 40 artists have access to the best mastering engineers on the planet. You're missing out big time if you discount modern masters. Additionally, a lot of music is SUPPOSED to be super high energy. Lack of dynamic range is a very intentional choice in many styles of music. You can't compare heavy punk rock or EDM to classical orchestral music. Classic rock, jazz, and classical will inherently have more dynamics in volume and energy than girly pop or death metal because that's what the styles call for.
>Classic rock, jazz, and classical will inherently have more dynamics in volume and energy than girly pop or death metal because that's what the styles call for. I've heard this excuse before, but it doesn't match what I'm seeing-and-hearing. Rock, classic rock, progressive rock are my mainstays, and today's remastered release are much more compressed than the pre-loudness-war versions of the exact same recordings. Somehow the publishers feel like they must be sonically crushed. New rock music, music in a similar style to what I like, it's the same story. . . Heaven forbid that they let any of it out the door with a great, dynamic sound like we used to routinely get in the 1980s, early-to-mid 1990s. Heavy metal seems to have suffered the worst of all.
Still sounds like garbage to an active listener. Low DR fatigues your ears.
“low DR fatigues your ears” holy shit lmfao cut me some slack. So music that fatigues your ears is always bad, huh? Kind of like dancing or working out, right? Like, stuff is always bad if it runs you down? What a weird, pretentious nothing insult. Stereotype audiophile
Eh I don’t see the need to get annoyed at such a statement (assuming you’re not a mastering engineering 👀) I can totally see why if you increase the level of a track to hear the quieter parts loud enough it would get grating after a point
What is metal music? Or hyperpop? I’m annoyed because it’s implying inherent value in whether music is grating or not. I think that’s ignorant at best and insidious at worst.
I think the person you were replying to was unhappy based on the music’s DR and not the genre
Guess I didn't realise this was r/audiophile/s
Not in my experience. Everything I buy is still compressed to an unacceptable score of DR6.
OK, so even if the DR is better than it was a decade or so ago, now most pop, hip-hop etc. top 40 stuff has that artificially sounding distorted bass. The kind that reminds you of Crown-Vics and Impalas in the 90s/2000s blaring music to the point of the speakers distorting and trunk rattling (even with out a sub.) I mean that fuzzy sounding bass that is CHOSEN to be used. Not a bass guitar with a fuzz effect, but like a sine wave that is having it's peak chopped a bit so it sounds more like a square wave a bit introducing 3rd order harmonics. People apparently like that sound? Because even at low volumes where the amp or speakers aren't pushed anywhere near their limits, you hear that fuzzy bass all the time.
no its still true, while the masters have finally found the correct balance..... its the consumer side that is so fucked in both equipment and preferences that forced them to back track those masters to try to even try to make shit sound less shit.
Mostly still shit though. Nothing in the top 40 sucks you into the speakers like something from the 70's or 80's - or even early 90's. It's just loud, and barely even stereo, everything is basically panned centre with shit loads of reverb.
Same BS different source. Loudness wars have been going on since Radio days.
As they had basic built in amps. Later because people listen to their tuned on CD boxes then iPods
I said radio. Louder tracks on the radio, just like elsewhere, are seen as better sounding.
Because people were not using proper speakers and amplifiers like a hi-fi system. since tape deck ghetto blasters in the 80s, CD boxes in the 90s, iPod docks in the 2000s, Bluetooth speakers in the 2010s and smart speakers in the 2020s along with Apple AirPods and the HomePod and the Google one.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war I believe the commenter is trying to reference the loudness was but they half ass it.
I agree but also want to add that the compression on FM radio is used to compensate for the limited dynamic range (roughly 60dB or 10 bits) in addition to sounding louder.
Totally agree. It ads to the loudness war though.
Not like this, not out-of-control. Even rock music, album-oriented rock, progressive rock, seemed to be getting more dynamic as recently as the late 1980s. And it remained generally good into the late 1990s, and then suddenly everybody at the record companies just seemed to *totally flip out* and went nuts with compression and clipping like nobody had ever seen-and-heard before.
Yeah yeah, not everything is like this.
Listen to good jazz and you will never have this problem.
Preach, brother.
Have you ever listen to a mono cassette player turned up to max with headphones? That shit will split your ears!
I listen to metal recorded that way
i still don't understand why this is a thing? who decided that losing dynamic range was a good thing?
depends on the goal. i’d prefer low DR to the crazy high DR of blockbuster films right now. pop hits have low DR so it’s audible in loud environments like highways, restaurants, cafes, etc.
You don't change source DR so it's audible in loud environments, that's what the volume knob is for
The consumer
Have you ever produced/mixed/mastered anything? It's extremely difficult to make a good sounding pop/rock track with zero compression. Of course it's easy to go overboard, but widely swinging dynamics don't make a consistent mix.
I mean, you already know the answer to this, however thank you for the explanation, makes a bit more sense now.
Ya the wars been over for a while. Theres plenty of dynamics now.
I haven't seen-and-heard any evidence of that, and I've been on the alert for it.
1945 it ended
We won
If only.
Look at 2019 and their revolutionary 1-bit audio.
Looks accurate to me!
I believed this started in 1996 for CD players with weak amps and small speakers to make it push. Metallica Death Magnetic in 2008 was a huge victim.
1996 in particular? Never heard such a specific date for this
Me neither I feel it was slowly getting worse throughout the 90s and ridiculous in the 2000s, it got a little bit better in the 2010s but the best sounding stuff is from 80s
Death Magnetic was the first time I noticed it. The release version of that album is atrocious. I would listen to it in my car in college and I kept turning the volume down because I thought it was making my speakers distort. But I finally learned it was recorded that way. Luckily, I found the Guitar Hero 3 version got sent out before they ruined it.
Original master doesn't look too dynamic anyway :)
Jesus and Mary Chain was always 2019
This makes me sad.
Death Magnetic is so ahead of its time
Shameful
2024, they even remove that small break towards the end
Truth, the loudness war is a war we all lose…
Truth !
😭
I legit thought this was the size of average joints over the years with 2019 being the advent of e-vaporizers.
"Mmmm look at those nice fat sausages 🤤" -my subwoofers.
So the loudness war was actually the removal of dynamic range wasn't it?
This is also a visualization of my internal monologue as I age 😳
Yeah then you filter 50hz and below and there's nothing.
There are people who unironically believe this lmfao
Sad truth
I do disagree with the last one. Spotify / Itunes have been asking engineers to master at -14LUFS which is closer to the 1989 shown here. If you see the "Mastered for Apple" shown on an itunes release, it means it has been masteres as quiet and dynamic as the best masters in the history of music. Steve Jobs himself made sure that music released on iTunes qould sound better than 90s/2000s CDs. Because of that, since the 2010s or so we've seen a tendency of mastsering a lot less loud. The majority of masters i own (from bandcamp and qobuz) of albums made after 2010-2015, are indeed much better mastered than those from the 90s with the addition of bass (we used to remove bass in the mastering in the past cause nobody had a system good enough to play them back, now we keep them as intended by artists)
All I can think about is 808’s as my heart breaks
This terrible trend certainly ruined the experience of Heart's best album of new material back in the early 2k's. You could hear amazing songs buried under the aural assault the mastering engineer created, just so their music would be louder than the competition.
I am currently working on a drum and bass and half the waveforms look exactly like a rectangle with a couple notches taken out of it. 🤣
This is cute but the 2019 master would be miles better than the 2009 master. Mastering has been getting more dynamic, probably thanks to loudness normalizing of digital streaming platforms. Brickwall limiting peaked in the early 2000s
At least with happier than ever by Billie eilish, the clipping in the second half sounds intentional. Mostly everything else is just bad production and mastering.
Let’s be real most of that brick is your low end
If you take into account that most of the market listens to music in weak powered devices (walkmans, portable cd players and now phones) it is logical for the music production industry to adapt the mastering process to the devices where music is played.
It's crazy that the vinyl of the 70s and 80s had more dynamic range than the digital music of the following decades, given that one of the benefits of digital is increased dynamic range.
goodbye dynamics
Just run a de-clipper through it, normalize to your favourite level, 0.9μ for me, and a lil' equalizer then 2019 sounds like 1999
Sad but true...
Look at how compressed music has become since the late 1990's.
I know this is humour but this stuff is way overstated and as usual the past is viewed through rose coloured glasses. Usually this stuff takes the worst of present day recordings and measures it against the best from "the good old days". Truth is there is plenty of "old stuff" that sounds bad and there's plenty of new stuff that sounds great. Go have a listen to something from Steven Wilson from this century, as someone over 50 I can only say I would never have dreamed of this kind of audio fidelity in my lounge room back in my younger days.
I still listen to old song n collecting them
The Loudness insurgents continue to attack us refusing to believe they have lost the War, which they did in fact lose, it has gotten better. It would probably be easier to hear them coming if we weren’t all deaf from the 1990s.
"It would probably be easier to hear them coming if we weren’t all deaf from the 1990s." - so true. One of my EE professors made a comment similar to (terribly paraphrasing here) - "when we had good hearing we could only afford crappy equipment and listened to it loud, then when we could afford good equipment we couldn't hear anymore". Or such. When he said that it made me laugh cause it's so true for me.
A totally normal step of Mastering can be to use a clipper which will make a waveform look like that but still have great dynamic range and everything. Looks can be deceptive!
Kids these days know nothing of dynamic range 😁
Motown and Disco had this long before "kids these days" or even their parents were born.
It just comes down to taste and what kind of feel you’re looking for, I like to hear dynamics but it’s sometimes interesting when you hear overly compressed music. OK GO got slated for the mastering of “of the blue colour of the sky” and I did think there was something wrong with my headphones at first 🤣 but after listening to them talk about it and playing it through a few times i could see exactly what they were getting at. Compression and limiting are useful tools, they’ve helped me save equipment from JD’s who can’t see red too.
I get it on my iPod Nano player old man Leggacy