Why your high quality stereo is useless for modern music

[marurun]

Yup, not video game related at all, but still frustrating.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/5429

[racketboy]

Yup, not video game related at all, but still frustrating.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/5429

I've known about this for a while, but this article does a good job describing it.
Good find!

I think music genres have a lot to do with it though. I'm not sure if every modern CD falls into this problem... If I had nothing better to do, I'd analyze some of my music.

[marurun]

Classical CDs and any music intended specifically for audiophiles is likely to be unaffected, but any kind of recent (or recently remastered) rock or pop or anything that'll have either car or iPod play is going to be crap.

[racketboy]

Classical CDs and any music intended specifically for audiophiles is likely to be unaffected, but any kind of recent (or recently remastered) rock or pop or anything that'll have either car or iPod play is going to be crap.

I'm wondering about something like Jazz (Norah Jones) or popular classical (my with is a Josh Groban fan) or rock that is on smaller labels....

Is there any software to easily analyze this without much effort?

[marurun]

Well, according to the article a lot of indie labels also do dynamic compression. And Norah Jones is something of a popular artist, so there's likely to be some dynamic compression, if of a milder sort, going on there as well. My wife also is a big fan of Josh Groban, but like Norah Jones, he does sell well. Here's a way to get an idea. Just listen to the track. Does the average volume seem roughly the same to your ears as the other stuff you listen to that you KNOW is likely to be dynamically squashed? Do you have to turn the stereo up to hear it as well? Do the tracks have really soft spots where you feel like you maybe have to adjust the audio again to hear it as well? Or do the softer spots of the track, even though they sound softer and more intimate, remain just as easy to hear without volume adjustment?

As for cheap software... I dunno. Probably. Really, all you have to do is find something that'll give you a visual waveform of the entire track with db data. Some standard audio editors may be able to do this. I haven't looked into it.

[lordofduct]

I know it is there in a lot of mainstream music.

But I know a lot of my underground industrial doesn't have this. I've played around in audio editors (mostly just to cut them up for various reasons) and found the audio samples to be rather dynamic.

Though, the more I think about it, this 'might' have something to do with what draws me to certain albums. I.E. Clint Mansell has VERY dynamic 'loudness' (like the song death is the road to awe, on the fountain soundtrack) and anything he does just drags me in.

[marurun]

Here's an extra piece of info, just as an FYI. The maximum "loudness" a CD can replicate is 0 db. That's the peak. So if the volume level for the whole song is, say, -5 db, that means the song will probably vary in intensity from -10 db to 0 db. That's not a whole lot of dynamic range there at all.

[RadarScope1]

This is another reason why the major labels are shooting themselves in the foot. Dynamic range is part of what makes music sound like music. Music has ups and downs, give and take, tension and release.

Ugh.

[tHePhAnToM!??!]

if the sound is not right then i just rip the cd to my computer(laptop). i do not listen to much music when i am home. so when we are driving in the car i just hook up the cassette adapter to the laptop and play it off of the winamp. and if you have good enough speakers then all you have to do is tweak with the equalizer and that changes the whole sound. you could do that as a home alternative but i dont know if you guys would want to.

but i still do not understand why they would want to do that shit anyhow.

[gradualmeltdown]

nothing new, this trend has been building for years. problem is the listener is the one driving the trend. People are satisfied with a crappy monophonic garbage. When 90% of people listen to horrible MP3 compression and venue P.A. systems are often tuned terribly engineers aim for the loudest, not the best.

In my world of electronic dance music it may be worse than any other. Dj's are usually fools and distort both the input and output values of their mixers. A soft record = a record not played. On top of that the PA systems are generally not tuned at all and end up being a mono wash with terrible phasing. Not much motivation for an engineer to make things sound good.

My releases come in 2 forms. The listening version and the live version. Live tracks are sloppy, loud, and lack dynamics. The CD release is pretty and rarely approaches 0 db and might even try to create some nice stereo imaging. The key to mastering is knowing the intended listening environment. I don't like the trend, but I understand.

I use a BlueSky 2.1 monitoring system in the studio and have a nice old pair of Stax headphones. kenny Rodgers "The Gambler" is the best mastered song ever, believe it!