Unprofessionally Mastering a trend ?

Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2007 2:15 am

No, I actually liked the song.

It wasn't until I saw it played in Media Player, with visual effects turned on [Curves], that I saw it hitting the roof.
I ripped it with EAC [lossless wave] into Audacity and saw to my surprise, that it did in fact hit the roof.
It looked like someone had stuffed it through a pipe.

I have two CD's of "Communique" with Dire Straits.
An early version that I just bought and a newer one, that came into my posession a couple of years ago.
The thing of getting old CD's from the early 80's is just a hobby.
I heard a difference with these two. One was louder than the other.
These were also "investigated" in Audacity.
All the toppes that are available in the old CD, are now suddenly wiped out .
There's no need of doing that. It's destructive behaviour.

I think theres some sort of assumption of a nonexisting consensus, that consumers wants everything to be louder and of a lower and clipped quality.
If they can't hear the difference, what about bringing high quality audio into circulation instead.

Why lean towards bad stuff ? I actually really can't see the point of doing that.

By the way. Don't get me wrong.
I'm the amateur here Smile

Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2007 2:45 am

I just found this article on Wikipedia, describing what's going on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
Now. I'm on the hunt for more early CD-releases.
It seems like a good idea.

Thank you all for replying.
Have a great day.

Yours truly

Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2007 7:20 am

pr0gr4m wrote:

Hmm....the link works for me from a couple different machines. You can go to prorec and do a search...or google search "Loudness Rush".

.

Link hasn't worked for me yet, either. Googled or otherwise...

You must have a copy of the page cached in your browser., that is why it is working for you...but poor us who wants to read and cannot:(

Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2007 10:46 pm

Since linky no worky do this...

Go to www.prorec.com. Don't click on that address, type it in your address bar. Then in the search box search for "loudness rush". The first article returned is "Over the Top". That's the good stuff. 5 seconds of work and your there.

Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2007 11:02 pm

The link worked fine for me.

The loudness war sucks!

Posted: Thu Dec 13, 2007 4:57 pm

Musicians, Artist, Bands, what ever have lots of different reasons for wanting their stuff to sound good BUT and it is a big BUT
they have to compete in the market place and today that means LOUD and or LOUDEST. The problem is when everything is maxed out there is no place else to go. If your car would ever get to the top of the RPM curve and max out even if you could somehow put your pedal though the floor the car could not go any faster. You have reached the limits of the machine. Audio is the same way you cannot exceed 0 dBFS no matter how much you would like to. When everything is all "1s" it has reached its loudness potential. There are ways of psycho acoustically tricking the ear into thinking that things "sound" louder when it fact they have to obey the same laws of physics and the same 0 dBFS that everyone else is obliged to adhere to. This is where you get into clipping and downright distortion of the wave form to made it appear that it is louder.

If we take the same analogy that we used a minute ago, that of a car you could get a bigger engine, you could change the transmission ratios, you could do a host of other things but it would still have limits and those limits are the limits of the automobile as an entity. In audio we have a brick wall called 0 dBFS which we cannot raise or crash though (no bigger engine - no transmission rebuilds) it is what it is and that is all you have to work with.

I think we may eventually look back on this period of time and say "what were we thinking" but maybe the next big thing in music will make this period look like the "classical" period and we maybe in for other enhancements to awful to contemplate.

I do my part and inform my clients that we need to get back to sane levels but they are afraid that there stuff will not be a loud as the next guys and so they ask me to push the music until it has no dynamic range, no breathing room and it is overdone to the nth degree.

I hope this whole madness subsides but I have a sneaking hunch that it will not until everyone agrees to "STOP THE NOISE" which is what a lot of music that is over loud has become.

Best of luck and lets all do our part....

Posted: Wed Dec 19, 2007 2:52 pm

fourone3 wrote:

I saw your post about this before, but I can't seem to find it now ...

What then, would be ideal for you to receive a mix? The obvious would be nothing on the stereo bus, yes?

Where do you prefer the levels to be?

It is a good question. Generally is possible to say, that very low (f. e. under -20dB/RMS) mix level could have lower “bit-depth” and such mix is not “full-value”.
For me is optimal mix-level for mastering at least -5dB(normalized) and, of course, “nothing on the bus”.
Wink

Posted: Wed Dec 19, 2007 5:01 pm

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

See it.

Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2007 9:20 am

We can only hope that some day the general public will wake up and ask for a better product.

My money is on this: Someday, perhaps not too far off in the future, there will be a trend to re-release all this ruined material WITHOUT the crushing and compressing and finalizing. Some market-savvy guy will invent a catchphrase for it, and we'll see a product like: "Pre-Loudness Mastered CDs" or the like.

They repackaged everything when they went from vinyl to digital, maybe someone will think of something similar when they move from CDs to whatever the next medium will be...solid state memory and instant access from downloads? Wireless chip implants to ear buds? Adjustable dynamic range?

Yeah, I can dream, can't I? Rolling Eyes

Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2007 10:20 am

Absolutely agree, but I mean, that "Pre-Loudness Mastered CDs" is generally custom request. I don´t know any respectable mastering-engineer who make this brutality voluntarily. Rolling Eyes

Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2007 10:28 am

Quote:

I don´t know any respectable mastering-engineer who make this brutality voluntarily.

The brutality doesn't come from some guys basement in Montana...

Edit> It comes out of my studio, it comes from the guy down the street, it happens here at WDW. We don't do it voluntarily (I am be no means a "respectable mastering engineer", so maybe I shouldn't count myself 'in'), but we do what we're asked to do. If we don't do it, someone else will.

Posted: Fri Dec 21, 2007 7:12 am

Mastering engineers are people. They have likes and dislikes just like everyone else. I know of NO mastering engineer who "likes" making everything "extra loud". They are doing it because it is being asked for by their clientèle or the A&R/Marketing people from the record company or by the higher management of the record companies. Everyone today seems to want their material "louder than everything else on the planet" and since mastering engineers are also business people they do what people want them to do or will very soon find themselves out of business.

I, like most of my professional colleagues, suggest to our clientèle the obvious and that is "lets make this sound good and not just loud" and many clients listen and say sure...but those same clients come back a week later saying that they need their stuff louder because when they put it in the 5 disk CD changer and put it on random with other CDs their CD did "not sound as loud",

If you want to place the blame on the whole industry's need for maximum loudness don't blame the mastering engineer as we are only doing what we are told to do and cannot really do what we think is right or know is right since the clients are the ones paying the bills and without them there is no need for our services.

Posted: Fri Dec 21, 2007 9:57 am

Quote:

we are only doing what we are told to do, the clients are the ones paying the bills

I've said the same in similar posts.

Was my post above taken out of context?
I did gloss over the last word in Nacron's post.

Either way, I feel it should be edited...

Posted: Fri Dec 21, 2007 7:11 pm

Quote:

If you want to place the blame on the whole industry's need for maximum loudness don't blame the mastering engineer as we are only doing what we are told to do

It took someone that knew their way around the board in the first place, right? Brings ya back to the whole chicken and egg thing:0

edit:
I imagine at the beginning in the pre "loudness" war days, this was just another "effect". Loudness as an effect:)

Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2007 11:10 pm

Hi guys, I saw the article and it´s really mind blowing, although, I´ve taken mixes to 10db RMS and they didn´t spike square waves in the bass drum like that, is it because I was using a multiband compressor instead of a single band? I´ve heard that many mastering engineers don´t like multiband compressors in they´re tracks, why?

What´s actually worked for me best is analog tape compression in mastering at high IPS rates, takes dynamics out but doesn´t numb the low end and keeps a lot of the punch in the drum tracks, then limit in the digital domain

great post BTW

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