Talk:Loudness war

My first attempt at any kind of wiki article. Comments? Corrections? Karl

Jan. 3, minor changes, added note about lack of emotional expressiveness caused by dynamic flattening, independent of distortion. Karl

Counterexamples?

Can we get some examples of albums released during the years of the "loudness war" that dont subscribe to the loudness philosophy? For instance, I believe most of Brendan O'Brien's releases (Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden's "Superunknown") don't really have any clipping. There's a totally audible difference between Audioslave's first album (not engineered by O'Brien), which has over-the-top digital clipping, and their second album (engineered by O'Brien) which seems to substitute tape clipping for digital (correct me if I'm wrong but I definitely think I hear tape on that album). Even so, the dude clearly does use compressors and limiters extensively.

Tool has a few albums, such as Lateralus, which have tons of headroom.

David Gilmour's latest album, On An Island, seeme to be very dymanic (to my ears anyway as I haven't looked at any time domain plots of it yet). Neilius 01:08, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Needs work

This article needs some work. It doesn't seem to be in a neutral POV and parts of it are wrong (or at least misleading.) There's a big difference between distortion caused by clipping and distortion caused by "companding," for example. It's unlikely that commercially produced CDs will actually have clipped waveforms on them; clipping is more likely to come from the playback hardware. People just assume that heavily expanded audio must be clipped but this is usually incorrect. Also, many of the concepts in this article do not apply to digitally produced (not recorded) music, especially purely synthesized music, where "louder" can actually improve the quality of the sound, at least in theory. Better general explanations of the concepts involved and fewer references to external sources would improve this article and make it more neutral. As it stands, it seems more like a magazine article to me.

I don't want to discourage you, but you did ask for comments... Please try to improve this article as it has some important concepts.

Actually, most of CD's have at least some clipping. Heavy dynamic compression and clipping became standard in audio mastering.

Agreed - I think this needs to be simplified or renamed. I too would like to kick the guy who mastered any of the RHCP's later CD's, but I think the article content is very subjective and POV. I'd say it should be a section of Audio_mastering, where it would be in context. --Jgritz 01:54, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Agreed about audio mastering. — Omegatron 06:08, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree also, and am slowly working through the article to make it more neutral. As a sound engineer though, the loudness race is a huge problem and I absolutely detest it! We should NOT be in the business of making square waves! ;-) Neilius 02:29, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

On the other hand, if that's what people want... — Omegatron 03:21, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Maybe... But the target audience of most pop music, to which these loudness wars are a huge part of, are young kids who don't know any better (which isn't their fault) and don't tend very often get the chance to listen to a dynamic, naturally recorded piece, see an orchestra or big jazz performance etc. I personally find listening to heavily limited masters unbearable after a few minutes, even with the volume down, a bit like trying to read a sentence typed in capital letters. More importantly though, I do think the article needs work to 'neutralise' it and make it more factual as it seems very opinionated at the moment (and I do agree with those opinions!). Warm regards, Neilius 12:56, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

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Digital Clipping

Yes, although I am not professional, my understanding of the subject is that maybe masterers would occasionally allow clipping of maybe half a decibel, but more often, dynamic devices are used with brick-wall limiters on the end. Could someone in the industry please verify, but this information sounds like a description of mastering ten years ago. Nowadays mastering is often done completely digitally and the engineer is not guessing at the peak levels at all. Engineers rarely treat digital full-scale the same as analog saturation point. More often, they simply compress or limit the mix aggressively which causes the whole thing to pump with the kick drum. One reason why engineers are able to achieve high dynamic ranges is because with digital technology, the clip point is accurately known and not guessed at all. Peak metres are readily available, and an engineer can tell exactly when clipping will occur and is able to position a limiter so that it limits exactly at the threshold of clipping as opposed to the analog days when the line between clean and saturated was more blurry. I have generally noticed more compression during mastering in recent times, and less distortion. (there was some serious saturation in early Led Zeppelin albums).

Compression and limiting still decreases the quality in music though, and I do believe that there is little understanding of audio quality by consumers. It seems that people are quite happy to listen to low quality MP3 music. My opinion is that it is worthwhile sacrificing some RMS level and not always using all 16 bits of CD quality audio, however it may be a good idea to represent other people's ideas in the article. I think it would be advisable to place more emphasis on the fact that through decreasing the dynamic range of the audio, the 16 bit quality of CD is better put to use for more of a song. It is worthy of note that by digitally encoding a passage of audio six decibels louder, there are twice as many different levels used by the samples making up the waveform.

This is my understanding, but I do not pretend to be an actual masterer, just a hobbiest, so I think that we should wait for someone in the industry.

Don't merge please

I came across this page while trying to bring together all Sound recording and reproduction topics under the Wikipedia:Root page concept. This is a topic that causes me much grief and I think it is important enough to stand alone as a branch of the Root page, where it will be easily found by those looking at any audio page. It is of equal interest to the listener as to the recording engineer, and so I have not placed it under Post production. --Lindosland 16:45, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Merge request has been removed per majority opinion after reviewing the discussion pages both here and at Talk:audio mastering. -- Dept of Alchemy 21:57, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Some more comments

Despite the above view, I am still unsure whether it is necessary to have this as a separate article. In my view, the criticisms would be better placed in a general article, something like A History of Sound Recording, Popular Music, Modern Sound Recording Techniques etc., as a comment on the sound quality of modern releases. Some pictures of clipped samples would help. How good a recording is is quite a subjective point and maybe a revision of this article would benefit from a more objective approach.

There is a Dolby paper (Are Movies Too Loud?, Presented at SMPTE Film Conference, March 22, 1997 Author: Ioan Allen, Vice-President Dolby Laboratories Inc.) which could serve as a useful model in revising this entry. It deals with a subject which is similar in some regards to this one. It is freely available at: http://www.dolby.com/assets/pdf/tech_library/54_Moviestooloud.pdf

Noriega

I was thinking that this article was about the military use of loud music as a weapon. One example was the US Army attack by playing loud rock and roll against Manuel Noriega when he was refuged in the Nuncio residence in Panama City.