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Is louder... better?

Gario

By Gario,
in Music Composition & Production

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avaris Newbie

avaris

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Mastering at 0db is a bad idea. Inter sample peaks will cause problems. ISP metering is essential (page 8)

http://www.fabfilter.com/help/ffprol-manual.pdf

There is a whole litany of affects audio levels can have on your brain and mechanical hearing system. For example your ear canal will actually start closing and distorting the sound when peak levels go over a certain threshold. Hence why the levels of your speakers / listening environment are uber important.

Usually smacking the crap out of a limiter or compressor on the master channel never yields good results. 1-2db of gain reduction on a master compressor can really help glue a track together. Mastering is all about subtlety.

Mixing and mastering is a balancing act. There is so much science in how our brain perceives sound. Here is a great video from a master going through some individual tracks to enhance loudness:

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timaeus222 Enthusiast

timaeus222

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Mastering at 0db is a bad idea. Inter sample peaks will cause problems. ISP metering is essential (page 8 )

http://www.fabfilter.com/help/ffprol-manual.pdf

There is a whole litany of affects audio levels can have on your brain and mechanical hearing system. For example your ear canal will actually start closing and distorting the sound when peak levels go over a certain threshold. Hence why the levels of your speakers / listening environment are uber important.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. When I hear harsh resonances, it feels like my ear contracts a bit, and tells my brain that it hurts. Even if the resonance is minor, I still feel that slight contraction, telling me that it's actually there somewhere. Same when there's a high amount of sub bass for me.

And with the 'making things sound loud without actually blasting the compressor' idea, I'm sure you know that that has a lot to do with how often the peaks deviate from some average peak value and the fullness of the frequency spectrum occupied by the instruments you're using. A full spectrum that peaks at about -3 dB every few seconds is probably a little 'louder' than a sparse spectrum peaking at -0.5 dB every now and then. For example, this is louder than this, but either one has a suitable respective loudness from what I can hear. The loudness also largely depends on the quality of your limiter. Personally, the limiter I use is very forgiving on loud peaks, so I don't have to worry so much about overcompression. :)

Edited by timaeus222
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timaeus222 Enthusiast

timaeus222

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This doesn't really make any mathematical sense. :-|

Well, here's my reasoning. The louder your music is, the more dynamic range you cover, but again, obviously, you don't want to squash your dynamics. I know if you keep pushing the limiter, you're going to either get overcompression or overcrowding, and if you get either one, you lose transient detail and uppermost treble, at the very least. But, my point is, something at, say, consistently -5 dB peaking amplitude vs. -2 dB peaking amplitude has details that are less audible, and you end up having to turn up the volume to hear them. That's why when I downloaded zircon's "Vessel of the Void" and saw that it was peaking at -3 dB consistently, I re-mastered it to 0 dB and the bass was siiiiiiiick. :grin:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't the argument been that if you make it loud as hell via squashing everything with limiting and compression, you get less details and dynamics?

That's if you get too loud. I'm referring to quite below vs. near the 0 dB peak, or at the 0 dB peak vs. a little above (with a tolerant limiter, of course).

Edited by timaeus222
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Nabeel Ansari Newbie

Nabeel Ansari

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Well, yes, but your wording is careless and you're giving a skewed idea of how sound actually works.

Mastering louder allows you to hear the quieter details in your mix, *yes*. However, this has no different effect from a person turning up their volume knob on a quiet master.

You have no more room for detail in a quiet mix than you do in a loud mix. The difference is whether your playback is loud enough to hear it or not. The *reason* you master loudly is not for "more detail", rather it is to be at the standard loudness that people will listen at such that they don't have to turn their playback system up or down in volume to hear that detail.

The purpose of mastering is not to modify the sound (outside of spectral balancing, perhaps) but rather to unify and normalize. I'm speaking in general terms, so like making all songs on an album have a universal loudness, one coincident with modern-day production standards, and frequency balance. If you're using mastering as a tool to bring details into your mix that weren't there before, it means your mixdown stage needs improvement.

If the production standard were to master at -3 dBFS instead of -0.2 dBFS, and you ignored that to mix at -0.2 dbFS anyway, then I would say your mastering is flawed, because you're making your music much louder than everybody else's and audiences will have to adjust their systems for you, especially if you're on shuffle with other libraries. But there's no mathematical reason to mix loud (other than it's potentially easier to play clean on playback systems with low power output), nothing to do with detail or such. You just mix loud because everything else is loud, and you need to be consistent.

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nOkbient Newbie

nOkbient

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This is a topic that irritates me. I can't tell you how many people have told me that "making things as loud as they can be is stupid because it removes dynamics." It entirely depends on what the composer is going for, and that should be obvious, but apparently some people have difficulty grasping this.

Basically, If a listener doesn't need to adjust the volume after listening to other music, you're good. You don't want it to be too loud, or you might scare the shit out of someone, or give the elderly heart attacks. You don't want it to be too quiet, or someone might get into a car accident because they were too busy turning the volume up to see where they were going. Ok, maybe that's a bit extreme.

In either case, having a piece too quiet instead of too loud is, in my opinion, ALWAYS better. You can always make a track louder without much issue, but making an already loud track quieter is not easy if there's compression involved.

All in all, make your pieces sound nice. If you think it's too loud, then turn it down a bit, and vice versa. :)

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timaeus222 Enthusiast

timaeus222

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The purpose of mastering is not to modify the sound (outside of spectral balancing, perhaps) but rather to unify and normalize. I'm speaking in general terms, so like making all songs on an album have a universal loudness, one coincident with modern-day production standards, and frequency balance. If you're using mastering as a tool to bring details into your mix that weren't there before, it means your mixdown stage needs improvement.

Well, yeah, that's of course the idea. I just wasn't talking specifically about that. Yes, you're supposed to keep tracks on an album at a relatively close loudness so the dynamic flow makes sense and people aren't thrown off by drastic discrepancies in necessary listening volumes, i.e. ending a song quiet and proceeding into a very loud song is obviously going to be startling, and proceeding to a quiet intro from a loud song causes people to turn up the volume, only for the quiet intro to proceed into a loud portion, which is then too loud. Yes, you're supposed to be near a 'standard' dB RMS, more or less, but that's straightforward, at least to me.

So no, it's not as if I don't understand that, it's that I didn't talk about it. Maybe I also just mixed up the cause/effect or wrote ambiguously. i.e. it's not that you should mix loudly so you can incorporate more details into your music, but that it's the consequence of mastering loudly that you can hear more detail in certain music without changing your volume. It's not a case of being careless if I didn't know I was being ambiguous. That's almost like saying speaking in ignorance is a result of not having time to proofread your notes. I'm not constantly on here, repeatedly revising what I say in the past before someone else reads it (sometimes I stay logged in for a long time, but that's only so I don't have to type as much out of sarcastic laziness). We're both in college, so you should understand both our perspectives here.

Edited by timaeus222
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avaris Newbie

avaris

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Louder is almost always better. Higher RMS values are not louder, just more compressed. Real dynamic loudness is possible when there is room for it, otherwise you're just bombarding your brain with clipped distortion that damages your ears and the quality of the music.

Well said with few words! Inharmonic digital clipping most of the time sounds like crap. There is so much more to how we perceive loudness than just merely a single peak or rms reading for the entire track.

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