[JungleDJPlus]

The following wikipedia page covers it pretty well
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

I pretty much hate the fact that everything gets processed by a
compressor and mastering levels are so high that the audio is clipped.

My belief is simple: throw away the compressor or use it only as the
last tool to fix and audio problem and never clip the audio no matter
how quiet the recording may sound at the end. I believe consumers are
more and more aware of the loudness war and will demand better quality
CDs. Everything on CDs out there is pretty crappy these days. It almost
seems like recording/mastering engineers have no freaking clue.

[Geoff]

JungleDJPlus wrote:
The following wikipedia page covers it pretty well
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

I pretty much hate the fact that everything gets processed by a
compressor and mastering levels are so high that the audio is clipped.

The audio is most cases is not necessarily clipped.

People often confuse two separate problems, flat-ENVELOPED sound, and
actually clipped audio. The two are not the same, and only the second is a
'fault' as such. The prior is a production choice, however objectionable.

geoffclue.

[Joseph Ashwood]

"JungleDJPlus" wrote in message
oups.com...
The following wikipedia page covers it pretty well
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

I pretty much hate the fact that everything gets processed by a
compressor and mastering levels are so high that the audio is clipped.

My belief is simple: throw away the compressor or use it only as the
last tool to fix and audio problem and never clip the audio no matter
how quiet the recording may sound at the end. I believe consumers are
more and more aware of the loudness war and will demand better quality
CDs. Everything on CDs out there is pretty crappy these days. It almost
seems like recording/mastering engineers have no freaking clue.

I will disagree with you. Using the compressor "only as the last tool" often
causes more problems than it solves. The key to a good sound is to use the
proper tool with the proper settings, sometimes this is a compressor,
sometimes it is as simple as adjusting the volume, sometimes it's an
entirely different tool. Also the theory that no recording should ever clip
is entirely false. The simple fact of the matter is that with all
instruments there is a different SPL for the attack than the sustain, this
is heard most in the common snare drum where the attack is often in the
neighborhood of 150dB SPL while the sustain can be 90dB. If you avoid
clipping the attack (also known in this case as a transient) you lose a
great deal of definition of the sustain when working at 16-bits simply
because you're losing the bottom several bits of the desired samples while
maintaining the top bits of the sample you you really don't care about. I'll
admit that we can get past this by putting out formats with more bits per
sample, but CD is fixed at 16-bits, and is important. My point being that
there are specific times to use a compressor where it is the correct tool to
achieve the desired sound, so removing it as an option is simply not a
workable solution.

This is also not to say that there are some badly clipped CDs available,
there are, the loudness war has resulted in a number of CDs that have an
unacceptable number of clips, occassionally you'll find that clips hundreds
of times, but these are rare. Based on your name I assume you are a Jungle
DJ, unfortunately the loudness wars have very much taken hold in electronic
music, going back over a decade it has been considered proper to make each
track as loud as possible, even if it means sacrificing quality, with DJ
rigs this is actually not a bad decision. This has resulted in some
particularly poor releases over the years with the occassional one that I
have referred to as "The Clipped Album" and the move to MP3/Ogg is simply
not improving things, even though both of these formats include a built-in
volume control that should be used instead. It is my view that the recording
process should get very close to, but only very rarely exceed the limits of
the media (e.g. 3 clipped samples spread through a single track will not
notably reduce the sound quality, whereas 300 in a row clearly will).

Music is an art, and as with any art once you have mastered the tools, you
can break rules.
Joe

[Peter Larsen]

JungleDJPlus wrote:

The following wikipedia page covers it pretty well
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

Not read, but thank you for the pointer.

I pretty much hate the fact that everything gets processed by a
compressor and mastering levels are so high that the audio is
clipped.

It generally is not clipped, but yes, some releases are.

My belief is simple: throw away the compressor or use it
only as the last tool to fix an audio problem

Alas the world is unsimple. On the site http://www.raw-tracks.com you
will find commented mixes and thus several different versions of the
same basic tracks.

and never clip the audio no matter how quiet the recording
may sound at the end.

You need to distinguish between where in the process dynamic range is
modified.

I believe consumers are more and more aware of the loudness
war and will demand better quality CDs. Everything on CDs
out there is pretty crappy these days. It almost
seems like recording/mastering engineers have no freaking clue.

They have a clue, they know where the audio is played and most of it is
not played at home in good listing circumstances. The audio also has to
work well on a JVC boomblaster on a warehouse wall and on a transistor
radio next to a printing press, etc. - if it sounds good there, then
there is a chance that the CD will get purchased on the way home and end
up residing in the car. I don't advocate it, but that is how it is.

Vinyl was mastered for playing at home because you generally could not
play it anywhere else, but popular CD's are in my assessment more likely
to be played at work, in car or while jogging. That said, the more
extreme amounts of processing sound unpleaseant also on a 0.5 watt
transistor radio, and especially so if non-modest FM radio signal
processing has been applied ....


Regards

Peter Larsen

[Laurence Payne]

On Sun, 14 Jan 2007 21:47:39 +1300, "Geoff"
wrote:

The audio is most cases is not necessarily clipped.

What a lot of hedge words!


People often confuse two separate problems, flat-ENVELOPED sound, and
actually clipped audio. The two are not the same, and only the second is a
'fault' as such. The prior is a production choice, however objectionable.

Flatline it by pushing it hard against a limiter, flatline it by
pushing it hard against the zero line. Both ways you get a flat line.

[Geoff]

Laurence Payne wrote:
On Sun, 14 Jan 2007 21:47:39 +1300, "Geoff"
wrote:

The audio is most cases is not necessarily clipped.

What a lot of hedge words!


People often confuse two separate problems, flat-ENVELOPED sound, and
actually clipped audio. The two are not the same, and only the
second is a 'fault' as such. The prior is a production choice,
however objectionable.

Flatline it by pushing it hard against a limiter, flatline it by
pushing it hard against the zero line. Both ways you get a flat line.

The word used was 'clipped'.

geoff

[JungleDJPlus]

Geoff wrote:
JungleDJPlus wrote:
The following wikipedia page covers it pretty well
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

I pretty much hate the fact that everything gets processed by a
compressor and mastering levels are so high that the audio is clipped.

The audio is most cases is not necessarily clipped.

People often confuse two separate problems, flat-ENVELOPED sound, and
actually clipped audio. The two are not the same, and only the second is a
'fault' as such. The prior is a production choice, however objectionable.

geoffclue.

No clipped, but forced flat. Either way, it is not how music should be
heard. You lose depth, you lose instrument placement and separation
when you do that. Why is it that older CDs sound better than recent
ones? Isn't dynamics important?

[Carsten]

Well,

compressor are used to bring certain audio into the foreground like a
voice with too much dynamic space. You use the compressor just fatten
it a little so that you can hear it besides the drums and maybe lead
guitarrs. If you wouldnt, you could not hear the voice which is not the
quality you want to archieve. i don't want to go too deep into detail
here but there is also other effects and dynamics to use and no
recordig is so good, that you could use it "out of the box" for a
professional production.

I am against setting the compressor to hard so that it pumps or sounds
bad or that you completely loose the dynamic. But as apor you shoud
have learned it somewhere at some school.

Master professionals know their job! It's the fact, that less money is
spent on mastering these days. That's the rason, why the quality is so
bad.

Its a good mix and a good mastering.

[Geoff]

JungleDJPlus wrote:
Geoff wrote:
JungleDJPlus wrote:
The following wikipedia page covers it pretty well
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

I pretty much hate the fact that everything gets processed by a
compressor and mastering levels are so high that the audio is
clipped.

The audio is most cases is not necessarily clipped.

People often confuse two separate problems, flat-ENVELOPED sound, and
actually clipped audio. The two are not the same, and only the
second is a 'fault' as such. The prior is a production choice,
however objectionable.

geoffclue.

No clipped, but forced flat. Either way, it is not how music should be
heard. You lose depth, you lose instrument placement and separation
when you do that. Why is it that older CDs sound better than recent
ones? Isn't dynamics important?

That's the producer's decision. Like it or not. But it still isn't
'clipping'.

geoff

[Benj]

Geoff wrote:

That's the producer's decision. Like it or not. But it still isn't
'clipping'.

Do I hear correctly? Is there a large undercurrent here that is
DEFENDING the mashing and smashing of the loudness wars? Somehow, maybe
it's just me, but if the produce says, "hey, I want this record to
sound like ****!" I know I should be a "good boy" and make it sound
that way for him, but I'm old school and I find audio engineering an
art. I find it a valid contribution to the final product. There comes a
point when I have to say, Hey, MY name is on this thing too and I'm not
going to let YOU make ME seem incompetent. (unless I'm really strapped
for cash at the time, natch!). And this isn't a new thing either. I
remember the old reverberation wars of yore. So many of those pop hits
were done with so much echo that we'll probably never be able to pull
the original music back out to appreciate the talent of some of these
early stars. Same goes for now.

[Mark]

That said, the more
extreme amounts of processing sound unpleaseant also on a 0.5 watt
transistor radio, and especially so if non-modest FM radio signal
processing has been applied ....


It seems the pendulum has swung,,,,

the FM stations have backed down on their processing while the CD
producers have cranked it up....

so now an old CD sounds better even on the radio than a new CD on a
local player.

Mark

[Fletch]

Benj wrote:
Geoff wrote:

That's the producer's decision. Like it or not. But it still isn't
'clipping'.

Do I hear correctly? Is there a large undercurrent here that is
DEFENDING the mashing and smashing of the loudness wars? Somehow, maybe
it's just me, but if the produce says, "hey, I want this record to
sound like ****!" I know I should be a "good boy" and make it sound
that way for him, but I'm old school and I find audio engineering an
art. I find it a valid contribution to the final product. There comes a
point when I have to say, Hey, MY name is on this thing too and I'm not
going to let YOU make ME seem incompetent. (unless I'm really strapped
for cash at the time, natch!). And this isn't a new thing either. I
remember the old reverberation wars of yore. So many of those pop hits
were done with so much echo that we'll probably never be able to pull
the original music back out to appreciate the talent of some of these
early stars. Same goes for now.

What Geoff said was not endorsement, but a statement of fact that the
producer drives the project. Put another way, the money drives the
content and result.

You say you wouldn't, except if you're starving, do what the producer
wants in that regard? You won't be working long. If someone else is
writing the check, it's their project, their "baby". You either do it
or not, and if not, you don't get paid.

Like it or not, if your business is as a recording/mixing engineer, and
you want to stay in business; you are beholden to them who pay you. If
you are a 'god' in the business, they hired you because of what you do
and will generally defer to you.

However, if you are not one of these fabled 'gods', you can only
(maybe) make suggestions that, in your experience doing such and so is
not a good idea. If you have the ability, show them the difference.
They may agree with you. But if they decide against your artistic
views, you have to sublimate your opinion and defer to their vision --
or walk away without the pay.

Your only other option to have the control is to produce the project
yourself. That way you can record, mix and master the project the way
you want it.

--Fletch

[Geoff]

Benj wrote:
Geoff wrote:

That's the producer's decision. Like it or not. But it still isn't
'clipping'.

Do I hear correctly? Is there a large undercurrent here that is
DEFENDING the mashing and smashing of the loudness wars? Somehow,
maybe it's just me, but if the produce says, "hey, I want this record
to sound like ****!" I know I should be a "good boy" and make it sound
that way for him, but I'm old school and I find audio engineering an
art. I find it a valid contribution to the final product. There comes
a point when I have to say, Hey, MY name is on this thing too and I'm
not going to let YOU make ME seem incompetent.

Depends if you hire the producer, or he hires you.

There presumably IS some demand and preference for ultra-compression. I
don't like it, but it is real and is there, and it doesn't seem to be going
away.


geoff

[Ben Bradley]

On 13 Jan 2007 21:40:13 -0800, "JungleDJPlus"
wrote:

The following wikipedia page covers it pretty well
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

I pretty much hate the fact that everything gets processed by a
compressor and mastering levels are so high that the audio is clipped.

I just saw this tract online (it features the guy who created
Christian Rock, among other musical discoveries such as Elvis and The
Beatles):
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0034/0034_01.asp
.... and when I read this statement I immediately thought of this
thread (and previous hypercompression discussions):

(11 panels down)
"Next, I started invading and distorting country, classical, soul
and Christian music... Who do you think started Christian Rock? I
did!"
"I have hooked the adults, young people, and children."
Here's the line:

"Everyone loves it because it ALL sounds the same."

That settles it. The Loudness Wars were started by Satan.

My belief is simple: throw away the compressor or use it only as the
last tool to fix and audio problem and never clip the audio no matter
how quiet the recording may sound at the end. I believe consumers are
more and more aware of the loudness war and will demand better quality
CDs. Everything on CDs out there is pretty crappy these days. It almost
seems like recording/mastering engineers have no freaking clue.

[Deputy Dumbya Dawg]

****in deluded christians

I pray everyday that jexus will rapture the
mother****ers so there can be peace on earth.

peace
dawg.

[Carey Carlan]

"Deputy Dumbya Dawg" wrote in
link.net:

(11 panels down)
"Next, I started invading and distorting country, classical, soul
and Christian music... Who do you think started Christian Rock? I
did! I have hooked the adults, young people, and children."
Here's the line:

"Everyone loves it because it ALL sounds the same."

That settles it. The Loudness Wars were started by Satan.

****in deluded christians

I pray everyday that jexus will rapture the
mother****ers so there can be peace on earth.

peace
dawg.

Sounds like the voice of Satan to me...