Loudness

[Koehandel]

More and more CD are recorded really loud. This is done because some artists/labels/producers etc wanted to make sure theit product was louder then the competition.

But as a result lots of dynamics are lost on the CD, the whole CD sounds like it is screaming at you the whole time. It makes me sad that with all the modern recording technologies we still get a product that sounds crap.
I would like that the whole loudness war would die, give me back my music with a proper dynamic range.

Original recordings are often much better the then remasterd version. With many remasterd versions the just make everything louder and as a result all dynamics are gone. The remaster the "one of use" album by ABBA is a famous fictim of the loudness war.

Stop the madness and give us back our music.


Even Amazon have a page with victim of the loudness war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
http://images.google.nl/imgres?imgurl=http://...
http://www.austin360.com/music/content/music/stories/xl/2006/09/28cover.html
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17777619/the_death_of_high_fidelity
http://www.prorec.com/Articles/tabid/109/EntryID/247/Default.aspx
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/news/a...ar-stirs-quiet-revolution-by-audio-engineers/
http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/dynamics/dynamics.htm
http://www.turnmeup.org/

Please fight the producers/sound technicians/bands etc who support loudness. I think people like Andy Sneap are responsible for the very low quality of today's CD's. They may sound ok on the radio but on a good hifi set the sound as heavy as the Kelly family.

STOP THE MADNESS FIGHT LOUDNESS

 

[Rabid Headbanger]

This is why all my albums are kvlt basement recorded demo tapes.

 

[panzerfaust666]

This doesnt make sense to me.Making a file "louder" doesnt harm anything. Perhaps if they boosted certain frequencies and tampering with the sound.
Im pretty sure thats what your getting at, because what you say doesnt make much sense.

 

[SouthernTrendkill]

Personally I really love the modern production. Very powerful stuff. The only thing I don't like is when I make mixed CDs and the track volumes are out of balance because newer CDs are louder. But other than that I love the new loudness.

 

[MasterOLightning]

Listen to something that came out this decade vs. anything that came out prior to. Modern albums are certainly mixed louder. This will become very apparent to you if you ever put on random select on your pc, and you get something like Nile against something semi-modern, like Rust In Peace. It gets worse the further back you go.
EDIT: By worse, I mean that the difference is more noticeable.

 

[panzerfaust666]

yeah I know thats totally true.
For example, Annihilation of the wicked sounds exactly like how that guy explained it, and you.

 

[Rabid Headbanger]

Thats because kids today are to stupid to reach the volume nob.

 

[panzerfaust666]

no dude, it it more than that.every frequency is boosted to fuck, almost distorted.

 

[MasterOLightning]

The OP was totally right to mention Andy Sneap, who just blasts the shit out of everything. Very unnecessary.

 

[Rabid Headbanger]

It is pretty annoying. I'll be the first to bitch about pro-tools.

 

[panzerfaust666]

Fuck Pro tools.Logic Pro FTW!
Seriously though, our music market was destroyed by the introdcution of Pro Tools.It lets the most un talented people sound great and fucking fake.

 

[genocide roach]

damn, i was hoping this was a thread about the japanese trad metal band. akira takasaki fucking shreds
~gR~

 

[Rabid Headbanger]

Fuck Pro tools.Logic Pro FTW!
Seriously though, our music market was destroyed by the introdcution of Pro Tools.It lets the most un talented people sound great and fucking fake.

Tape Recorder.

Fuck yea.

 

[panzerfaust666]

That reminded me of Team America.
Perhaps I'll watch it

 

[Rabid Headbanger]

Here to save the motherfucking day.

 

[cookiecutter]

Vader is the worst offender in terms of loudness. Also you can definitely hear a change if you listen to early Slayer or Bolt Thrower and then listen to their newer albums.

 

[Koehandel]

This doesnt make sense to me.Making a file "louder" doesnt harm anything. Perhaps if they boosted certain frequencies and tampering with the sound.
Im pretty sure thats what your getting at, because what you say doesnt make much sense.

Offcourse it makes a different. When the whole CD is at the same loudness you lose all dynamics. The way they mkae CD's louder is they take all the loud parts aka a drummer hitting a bassdrum. They tune down the volume so that it is a loud as the average of the CD. They do this to all the peaks. Next the take the quite parts and they boost that signal till it is the same loudness as the other music.
When this is done the whole CD is the same loudness. Next they boost the sound so it is at the maximum a CD can handle.

It should be a crime to do that.

In the end a bass drum sounds like someone hitting a plastic bucket and when someone sings quietly he sounds like he is screaming.

No one would dare to use this kind of compression on classical music. Sure they use some since a concert hall has better acoustic properties so you can hear the quiet parts better. But no one would dare to give a solo violin the same loudness of a 100 man orchestra.

Yet it is done all the time in pop and metal.

 

[Rabid Headbanger]

I almost have trouble listening to some albums because of this.

 

[audiophileguy]

​

Before I saw this video I never really cared about the differences between remasters and originals. I thought it made no difference at all. Hell, I preferred buying remasters cause I believed newer was always better. Well, anyways, I decided to do some comparisons a few weeks ago to see if the video was true. The first comparison I made was between the znowhite org and remaster. When I tried out the remaster I noticed right away that every song sounded monotonic and very sterile. So I gave the original a listen and instead of sterile, boring sound that the remaster had the org had this warmer, more emotional, and more natural sound going on. Yeah, the org wasn't MFSL audiophile grade shit, but the improvements were very noticeable. After I did the comparisons I dled some software to see the waveforms and unsurprisingly the remaster was one giant clipped wave. Here's a pic, it's pretty nasty looking. Well, I did this for a lot of my CDs and the majority of my recent remasters were clipped pretty badly. Some of them were fine, but the majority looked almost as bad as the znowhites. I decided to sell off all the remaster that were really clipped and pick up the original versions instead. I'm probably only going to buy about half of what I sell tho cause some of the albums aren't worth rebuying.

Buy what you guys want, I don't care. I'm just explaining why I've been mainly buying original cds lately to the few people who have asked.

 

[ShredHeadJHJ]

I agree that it would seen they are destroying the dynamics of some of our favorite, but there are some records that they have done justice to by remastering them as well. It's a double edged sword.