Loudness War video explanation

[analoq]

hey guys, i caught this over at the R:K:O forums.

it's a 2 minute video that makes the loudness war simple enough for anyone to understand.

youtube's encoding mechanisms lose a large chunk of the audio fidelity but it's good enough to get the idea.

it's rare to see such an elegant primer to an audio engineering topic, so i thought i'd share it.

[OverCoat]

What software lets you do that volume maximizer thing around 0:28? That was pretty cool, lol

Good video btw

[avaris]

Good stuff, another reason why so much music today feels emotionless and fake.

[zircon]

Cool video.

OverCoat; I'm not entirely sure that's real software... kind of looks like an editing effect to me. But a brickwall limiter might achieve the same result, right?

[The Vagrance]

Great find, a very simple yet informative look at it.

[Souliarc]

Nice video. When everything is loud, there is no room for loud. A seemingly paradoxical statement, but true. Other than the loss of sound quality from over limiting, engaging volume dynamics are also lost. Sad really on both ends: How the record companies enforce it, and how listeners are fooled by it.

If you want to get more in depth about the discussion of the "Loudness Wars" you can take a gander at this article.

[Cerrax]

Awesome video. Really gets the point across about how sound quality suffers from pushing the loudness too much.

[OverCoat]

I'm not really interested in the effect itself, rather the method of editing the waveform. lol.

I know Samplitude does something like that, unfortunately Cool Edit 2 [what I use] lacks all those neat mouse features

[Nicole Adams]

I read about the Loudness War about a year or so ago, but it was nice to see it in action. Thanks.

[lazygecko]

The example there is really nothing compared to what radio stations apply to already compressed music.

[Legion303]

What software lets you do that volume maximizer thing around 0:28?

Melodyne 3.

-steve

[Yoozer]

You mean Photoshop. Check the pixels .

[sgx]

Yeah that was just a video capture of someone in photoshop, then audio edited in later.

I actually kinda enjoy the sound of squashed audio in some cases. Though a lot of modern recordings are way too squashed.

[po!]

nice simple video

but i have yet to hear anybody do anything about the loudness war and lower the volume

[zircon]

Well, lots of people have done something about it, but perhaps we don't see any impact in the major label release market. Hell, I'll use myself as an example. For all my tracks, even the dance ones which are generally supposed to be loud and maxed out, I try not to succumb to the loudness war. Here's an overview of a song from the album I'm working on.

Yeah, it's compressed, but the dynamics are all there. There are soft and loud sections of the song (breakdowns, buildups, etc.) More importantly, so are the transients. Here's a closer look.

Compare this to "Ten Miles Back", a song by the Crystal Method that is in a very similar style.

Basically, one big square wave. Here's a closer look.

Lopped off samples all over. Great song, but I don't like the mastering.

So if nothing else, at least smaller independent musicians like me are doing their part.

[lazygecko]

Hard compression does serve a purpose. The boss tunes for Streets of Rage Remake are heavily compressed, and it really helps keep the adrenaline high.

[po!]

So if nothing else, at least smaller independent musicians like me are doing their part.

well i'm doing my part too. but i'm still not happy with it.. actually i wanna go even more extreme and go back to the late 70s early 80s mastering, which i consider to be ideal

here's an example, Dinorah Dinorah by George Benson from 1980

thats just the perfect looking waveform...

[zircon]

Yeah, that's awesome... I wonder how one gets results like that? Maybe vintage comps had something to do with it.

[CC Ricers]

This is the problem I'm trying to solve whenever I DJ mix. Yeah, I could follow the volume LEDs of my mixer but it doesn't help me keep all the songs at a consistent level. Maybe it's because my mixer is a Gemini

[Yoozer]

Yeah, that's awesome... I wonder how one gets results like that? Maybe vintage comps had something to do with it.

Tape saturation. Which is technically speaking compression.

[zircon]

Perhaps not ONLY compression though, I would imagine. The tonal characteristics of the sound (not just dynamics) were probably shaped too in some way. Extra harmonics/noise getting added in a way that sounded good.