The Loudness Wars May Be Ending 294
Hugh Pickens writes "Mike Barthel reports on a technique called brick-wall limiting, where songs are engineered to seem louder by bringing the quiet parts to the same level as the loud parts and pushing the volume level of the entire song to the highest point possible. 'Because of the need to stand out on radio and other platforms, there's a strategic advantage to having a new song sound just a little louder than every other song. As a result, for a period, each new release came out a little louder than the last, and the average level of loudness on CDs crept up (YouTube) to such a degree that albums actually sounded distorted, as if they were being played through broken speakers.' But the loudness wars may be coming to an end. Taking advantage of the trend towards listening to music online — via services like Pandora, Spotify, and Apple's forthcoming iCloud — a proposal by audio engineer Thomas Lund, already adopted as a universal standard (PDF) by the International Telecommunications Union, would institute a volume limit on any songs downloaded from the cloud, effectively removing the strategic advantage of loudness. Lund's proposal would do the same thing for any music you could buy. 'Once a piece of music is ingested into this system, there is no longer any value in trying to make a recording louder just to stand out,' says legendary engineer Bob Ludwig, who has been working with Lund. 'There will be nothing to gain from a musical point of view. Louder will no longer be better!'"
Re:Would a standard for loudness help? (Score:5, Informative)
that's one aspect (the static part).
you miss the compression (active) that they do in order to 'fit' the envelope 'up higher'.
changing the 'higher' point helps but there are other things going on, too.
its a shame, too. cd has about 90db of dyn range (and modern amps and preamps and easily do that, too) and yet they use a fraction of that. you have a spectrum of 'bit space' to use and you use very little. how sad! how wasteful.
shifting volume (replay gain) is doable. undoing compression is not and that is the real issue.
Re:Eleven (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Would a standard for loudness help? (Score:4, Informative)
Effectively the maximum level is set by the format and is generally define as 0 dB. A format also has a dynamic range, which measures how much quieter a sound the format can capture compared to the maximum. For audio CDs this is -96 dB. The loudness wars refer to taking advantage of the fact the volume the human ear perceives is proportional to the mean level and that music would be recorded with the same maximum level but lower levels mapped higher (e.g. a -40 dB sound is compressed to -20 dB) will sound louder.
This proposal, presumably, addresses this by measuring the volume of a track by measuring the something similar to the mean level. It a little more complicated than that, but I think that's the thumbnail.
Re:Would a standard for loudness help? (Score:4, Informative)
ReplayGain fixes average differences in volume between different tracks. It doesn't help when a single track was compressed/normalized so that is has no dynamic range. There's really no post-processing that can fix that.
No kidding (Score:5, Informative)
Almost every song, including ones that aren't "loud" are normalized to 0dBFS. The thing is that they have large dynamic range, so their average signal level might be -30dBFS thus making them "quiet" when played back at a given volume. If you limit the shit out of dynamics, it makes the whole thing louder at a given setting on the volume dial.
That is what people mean when they complain about the "loudness wars." Modern music can't force your system to be loud, I can set my receiver to -80dBref and no sound will be louder than 35dB since that is how it works. The song can't override the volume setting. The problem is that they have no dynamic range, and thus don't sound as good.
A song that has dynamic range you actually turn the volume dial up on. As the "ref" part implies my system is calibrated to a reference point, in particular the THX cinema reference of 105dBSPL for mains, 115dBSPL for the sub. So when I set my dial to 0dB, that is the limit. That is what I set it to for movies, and get a theater experience. However I don't blow out my ears since the average level in movies is usually 30-40dB below reference. So despite the limit being 105dBSPL, I am usually listening to things in the 65-75dBSPL range. That dynamic range is what makes it sound good, and is what lets big hits, well, hit.
Music is squashed down, so I have to listen to it at like -30dBref on the dial. ends up being about the same normal volume level, it just means there's no headroom, that everything is the same volume.
The solution is NOT a volume limit, the solution is to have dynamic range in the files themselves, and put a limiter in the playback device. That way if someone wants it limited, they can turn that on, but you can get full range when you wish.
Re:I hope... (Score:2, Informative)
I work in TV. The last station I worked at we had one advertiser that used to send us REALLY loud commercials. We had to dial them back about 10db to put them into the system at normal levels. The next batch of commercials they sent us were another 10db louder, so we had to dial them back 20db. The next batch was so recorded so hot they were distorted from the start so we rejected the tapes and sent them back to the ad agency. They couldn't get the hint that we couldn't air such loud content without overmodulating the transmitter, no to mention pissing off all the viewers.
That said, what makes the ads seem even louder is their average levels are very high - rarely is there anything quiet about a commercial.
Re:Would a standard for loudness help? (Score:4, Informative)
The format doesn't matter when you're discussing loudness, compression, and "brickwall limiting" as is discussed. The audio engineers (and sometimes the musicians) are distorting the signal somewhere along the path to the final master. Thus, what you have in your lossless audio is lossless garbage, and what you have in your lossey audio is lossey garbage.
For example, poke around the Internet for Muse's "Knights of Cydonia". The tracks used in Guitar Hero are cleaner than the mix used for the CD, so someone went through and actually remixed the song from the GH tracks and got a pleasant-sounding result. As a counterpoint, listen to pretty much anything from Foo Fighters' "Wasting Light". They have mp3-quality audio available on their website, and it is not difficult to hear the impact of a good recording/mastering process.
I wish Muse would release a properly-mastered version of Black Holes and Revelations. I think I would even pay for a SACD version of it, just knowing that the intended audience has a higher listening standard. It's sad that the CD just doesn't play well outside of a car stereo, and it paradoxically makes the CD rock less because it's unbearable to crank the volume.