The Death of Dynamic Range - people against Loudness War-
Candyheart33 Is this why they normalise radio stations? I can't even listen to them anymore for that reason. I hate when it gets to the chorus and it drops down in volume. It's so anti-climatic and sounds really lame. Happens on some CDs as well :(
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nichtstuer -
lemmling Disappointing and annoying, fortunately I haven't bought it already :(
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rettrou Mars Volta's Noctourniquet is DR 3. Loudest of the year in database. http://dr.loudness-war.info/details.php?id=18713
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metawirt RHCP: Californication Unmastered... ;)
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Ton87 Oh and Steve Hoffman's forums are really good indeed. http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/index.php You can search google with for instance something like this "site:stevehoffman.tv hendrix electric ladyland best sounding".
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Ton87
@ Bolshevized: I've heard MFSL, AF and Steve Hoffman issues with less dynamics than not-audiophile issues. Seems like even some audiophile labels think compression is a requirement to make music sound good.
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Athropos Public Enemy No. 1 from Megadeth's latest album: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/593/pen1t.jpg/ Enjoy...
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rettrou
Nightwish will do it again. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09MTDBb8qro They have a sad history with overcompressing their music. http://dr.loudness-war.info/index.php?search_artist=nightwish&search_album=
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tonique Ok, to be fair, not every song is clipping on that album. But curiously, the songs are squashed but have different peak amplitudes; there's no consistency.
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tonique
Buffy Sainte-Marie, Running for the Drum: album replaygain -9.55 dB. Bleh. AND IT'S CLIPPING!
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Bolshevized Honestly, a pretty good rule of thumb is just to assume a remaster is going to be inferior, unless there are special circumstances (for example, albums remastered by Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab or Audio Fidelity often sound good; if a remaster is done by Steve Hoffman, it's quality assured; etc.). In addition to what people mentioned below, you can also search the Steve Hoffman forums for information on different masterings. That place is a goldmine.
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Maellril I bought Seasons in the Abyss about two weeks ago, same problem. The digital remaster is shit and I'm just gonna download a better version.
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Athropos
Cool, exactly what's needed. So original version of Seasons in the Abyss has a DR of 10, while my remastered version has a DR of 4... Should have known this website before...
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Maellril
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Athropos
Don't know if one exists, but if that isn't the case it would be great to create one. People could contribute by posting e.g., waveforms of the different versions of albums.
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JeffersonBV Hi! Does anyone know any website where I can check if some remastered versions clip like crazy? I don't want to waste my money. Thanks!
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Bolshevized
The good thing about Red Hot Chili Peppers ruining their latest album with more shit mastering is that it does help to raise at least a little awareness about the loudness war. Not likely to be enough to change much, but at least some people will be able to better tell good mastering from bad.
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Athropos
I recently bought a remastered version of Slayer's Seasons in the Abyss, and two minutes into the first song I could already tell my money was lost. The original one sounds so great, I just don't understand that shitty practice...
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Maellril
I just took a quick look through my CD collection and this is just freaking horrible. There is nearly no dynamic range in most of the albums I own and the waveforms are just about as loud as it fucking can. So now I've spent my money on a bunch of shit recordings. Thanks, loudness war.
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nichtstuer
pathetic
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Corn8 -
Watchful_Eye Awesome article! Thank you for the link.
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nichtstuer
http://thequietus.com/articles/06872-loudness-wars-dynamic-range-compression-mastering
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DraKi91 -
Simon-Claudius -
rettrou
I know you didn't talk about artwork. I don't know if Peppers are "supervising" the production. Seems they that should. If Peppers don't care how it's mastered, then they are partly responsible.
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Simon-Claudius
I didn't talk about any artistic decisions at all - including the artwork or cover. I was only refering to the production/sound quality :)! Why should Meller and Rubin not be responsible?
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rettrou
And what a hideous cover it has, literally depressing. There aren't many complaints about sound quality in RHCP shoutbox. It's a mystery to me why artists let it happen. I guess you just can't blame Rubin and Meller. Or else Peppers should wake up.
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Simon-Claudius
@rettrou: Indeed they did. Well, Rick Rubin/Vlado Meller did. I'd be very annoyed to say the least if I was one of the engineers who put a lot of energy in recording/mixing an album just to find out that the mastering process basically destroyed all the hard work. I tested the CD release: http://dr.loudness-war.info/details.php?id=10687 I don't really get it, since Flea for example just tweeted about how great he thinks Vinyl is as as opposed to mp3's/compressed digital formats. He also talked about Neil Young's new mysterious 'sqs' which "will be out sometime soon and the quality of music listening will be a million times better". I mean, apparently he cares/they care about those things. It's really menacing to see that the label/the producer just enforce something like that. No disrespect towards Rick Rubin, but him being such a supporter of the loudness war is just a shame.
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rettrou
Peppers are doing it again? http://dr.loudness-war.info/details.php?id=10636
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cholero We are more than 500 members now!
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vitos Intertesting article on Last.FM blog: http://blog.last.fm/2011/07/15/anatomy-of-the-uk-charts-part-4-survival-of-the-flattest
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Mark_H Well, I've been reading about this a lot lately and am astonished and depressed by what I have found out. I've been a music collector for years and have diligently replaced "old" CDs which shiny new remasters. Recently I started analysing my collection and without fail the original releases have more dynamic range than newer versions, often significantly so. I'm now rebuying original versions of my favourite albums again, having sold them to fund the remasters :/ Like roebeet I'm wondering whether it's time to dust down my turntable once more...
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sleeplesstown It's just awful. I hate when my ears hurt three quarters into an album. Makes it really hard to enjoy.
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roebeet Been a last.fm user a long time, but just found this group. The loudness wars finally forced me to vinyl, after a 20 year hiatus - very happy with this as an "alternative" solution until CD mastering catches up. New vinyl releases themselves are not perfect, but comparing them to their CD counterparts they are usually better as far as DR. I'm going to start uploading data to the Dynamic Range database, as I have a small collection of contemporary vinyl.
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Ton87
I have an 11 CD set of Dutch composer Simeon Ten Holt, great minimal/serial piano music. I was shocked to see the loudest parts of the compositions are hard limited. Some CDs are even first hard limited, then attenuated 3dB. I always assumed classical music was the only type of music not affected by the loudness war.
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nichtstuer
As for me, first of all, Last.fm is searching engine. Radio is great thing, when you want to find new names. Statistics simply helps it, calculating your taste.
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DjCuervo i mostly use last.fm for scrobbling purposes. i prefer to listen to bit-perfect 1411kbps wavs on foobar2000 (creative asio) im glad more people are becoming aware of sound quality & loudness war.
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HugMySoul Nicely done N3fr0n :-)
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vitos
@Bolshevized: I have similar observations. But in most cases after more through analysis I find many modern releases still loud, but at least they sound decent (no clipping, not so muddy and tinny, but still quite flat) more often.
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N3fr0n Once I was so angry I drew this: http://xtom.deviantart.com/#/d3bs7qe
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nichtstuer
Maybe. I used to think, that urban music had poor dynamic range, and then I heard last album by Janelle Monae.
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Bolshevized
Well, while it's not exactly victory, I think releases from the last few years aren't quite as loud as they were in the, let's say mid-00s period (2005, 2006, 2007, whatever). That's just my own observation and could be wrong. Things are still quite bad, of course, but I think the worst may be past us. Maybe the reaction to Metallica's Death Magnetic mastering marked the beginning of the small improvement I think we've seen.
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musicdreamer11 I really wonder what one can do about these sonic atrocities? Boycott? (That's what I feel like...)...A lot of releases sound worse than tapes (brittle, tinny...distorted...Worse than a bit of hiss to me...Give me tapes to this crap anytime, actually I listen to tapes too), so tapes now sound better than CD's..Pure ear- & headache sound! ...I fiddle with declippers etc and that free dominion vst plugin...But I really am fed up with all of this cursed loudness war horror! ...*sigh* :(
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vitos
@mvordeme: I don't remember deleting any discussion... @Februarysilence: I'm open to any ideas about better group description for better promotion. :)
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Februarysilence Only 461 members after roughly 3 years... it's a start, I guess. Maybe a few ideas on how to promote this group in the description section would be useful.
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salimos mp3gain is an pretty good program for songs that have bass that clips because of compression. I've used it on a few Flying Lotus and Kanye West songs since they're big offenders and it works well even when listening to the tracks on iPods. Windows Mac
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tonique
This is but one of the victims of loudness war. There's some nice clipping on Pain's "Psalms of Extinction", even though peak is -0.1 dBfs. At least the song is called Nailed to the Ground...
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mistertones You may like to get involved with this: http://www.DynamicRangeDay.com
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