Music Into Noise: The Destructive Use Of Dynamic Range Compression

Weezer.

K-ROXOR!!!

"deluded into thinking it sounds acceptable"

Arf! Arf!

"Recently, a prominent individual in the recording industry was asked to serve on a panel that would judge the best engineered CD for the Grammy's. After listening to over 200 CD's, they couldn't find a single CD worthy of a Grammy based on the criteria they were given. Everything they listened to was squashed to death with heavy amounts compression. What they wound up doing was selecting the CD that had the least amount of engineering. In reality, the winner didn't win because of great engineering, he won simply because he had messed with the signal the least. What a way to win a Grammy."

All Weezer stuff fatigues me quickly. I like their music, but can't stand the engineering...

How does that win "Best Engineered"? Whether I agree or not all these quotes are so dumb and useless.

When the Grammy committee talk of 'engineering' how are they able to distinguish what happens in the recording studio from what happens to the final stereo mix in the mastering suite, or does it not matter? Who gets the little trophy?

Someone asked for differences between 'good' and 'bad' engineered music...well, pick up some AudioQuest CDs... whose engineer prefers recording live onto 2 track...yup- 2 track... THEN listen to the over-engineered CDs of most record engineers...

Or check out other audiophile labels... compare the recordings (not on a 200 sony system either).... then come to a conclusion on your own...

In purely electronic music, well, it's difficult to compare - we're not talking about attempting to preserve some sense of people playing instruments in a real space in a real time (or *suggest* that through overdubbing and panning). Things can be squashed to buggery for creative purposes, or have ludicruous dynamic leaps (silence to full-scale in 1/100th of a second); I imagine mastering Ryoji Ikeda CDs simply involves duplicating whatever he supplies.

I think this is exactly it.. but I think it extends further than commerical pop... I think it is endemic to digital recording in general....

Hmmm, can you think of a DDD classical or jazz release which features hard-limiting and no dynamic range? You might be right in the sense that it's a digital-specific thing, simply because trying to do this with tape and an analogue desk would be (I imagine) impossible without obvious saturation effects.

The funny thing is that a lot of folks who record entirely in the digital domain, like to bounce back out to analogue tape (2" to mix, or 1/4" to master) precisely for the saturation/compression effects of tape.

The one record I have which is flat-out in the top 1-2dB throughout its length is Ninotchka's "I've Got Wings" (even Destiny's Child can't match it). But it's a very deliberate act of production and it sounds great!

'No dynamic range' - I dont know how to quantify this...but I can easily think of NEW classical recordings that are shamed to death by earlier recordings in terms of dynamic range.... Im not a large jazz fan.. so I will not comment on that...

However, I think your point is well taken- it is definitely more visible in rock music, but then again compared to classical overall the average DB level is going to be higher by nature of the genre..

The funny thing is that a lot of folks who record entirely in the digital domain, like to bounce back out to analogue tape (2" to mix, or 1/4" to master) precisely for the saturation/compression effects of tape.

Hmm, well I would most definitely argue that it has nothing to do with analogue that caused the saturation/compression but instead the recorders lack of knowledge using analogue that caused it (which was to their advantage in this case)....

oh and are you saying that there arent recordings that average in the 1-2 db range? or that there arent many records that average there? anyway... I have read about many recent CDs that average around 5 dB....

http://www.tcelectronic.com/static.asp?page=bob_katz

Ok, change that to 'severely compromised DR'.

but I can easily think of NEW classical recordings that are shamed to death by earlier recordings in terms of dynamic range....

Could that be down to recording techniques? A multi-mic derived mix vs simple stereo array above the orchestra? I can think of a few small-ensemble digital recordings of mid-90s or later vintage with dynamic range in excess of which was actually physically possible with pre-Dolby SR tape.

However, I think your point is well taken- it is definitely more visible in rock music, but then again compared to classical overall the average DB level is going to be higher by nature of the genre..

True.

Hmm, well I would most definitely argue that it has nothing to do with analogue that caused the saturation/compression but instead the recorders lack of knowledge using analogue that caused it (which was to their advantage in this case)....

Well, not quite - I mean, the euphonic effects of slightly overdriving tape (and the soft limiting effects thus attained) are well known and some artists/engineers like to very deliberately make use of this phenomenon. It might be quicker than trying to achieve the same feel in the digital domain with T-Racks or some VST plug-in.

oh and are you saying that there arent recordings that average in the 1-2 db range? or that there arent many records that average there? anyway... I have read about many recent CDs that average around 5 dB....

Oh, I'm sure there are loads of records brick-walled in this way; I just mentioned the Ninotchka tune as one which is just one block of colour under CoolEdit analysis (hilariously, this is mastered in HDCD where available on compact disc; originally vinyl only, I think), but isn't actually an example of this squashed-to-death fad, but more an act of bloody-mindedness on the part of the producer.

Looking at stuff knocking around my hard drive, I see "Bootylicious" has an average RMS power value (50ms window) of around -6dB; a B&S track more like -13dB; the meaty part of a 1970s Jarrett/Garbarek/Danielsson/Christensen track around -19dB; an Andrews Sisters recording from the mid-50s about the same (that's mono). My own recordings (and those I receive from other people) tend to hover between -11 and -15dB average RMS. Plenty of compression at source in those tracks, but still some sense of dynamics.

Thanks for the Katz link; the TC Finalizer is, I think, rather demonised amongst the anti-limiting brigade - it'll be interesting to see what Katz has to say in his spiel for the product.

Dynamic range compression and OGG/MP3 file size compression are completely different things that happen to have the same word in their name. Hopefully you understand that at least.

I don't think MP3 file compression has any discernible effect on the dynamic range of a sound, unless you get into really low quality.

As for the dynamic profile of an MP3 file being different to the WAV file from which it was rendered well, erm, maybe - you're ditching all manner of temporally masked content to squeeze the file size down, so I guess it's possible that the dynamics may change *slightly*. As Graham says, with super-low rates it's telephone-line quality anyway, most of the HF content has gone and with it a lot of transient peaks. But if all the transients have been flattened in mastering, MP3ing won't make any difference there. It's not like MP3 raises the noisefloor or anything.

Anyway, Shellac (and other albini prods.) might be an example of rock w/o compression.

i suspect the real answer was that albini wanted to hang with page -- i realised albini's grainy sound was very similar to led zeps -- bonham's was the loudest kick drum in the business and jones has commented that their whole bottom-end was different from anyone else's for that reason, but maybe not only that reason -- both page and albini make rock bands sound raw but clean, yet they're not compressing

maybe it's because the triangular relationship between bass, rhythm and lead guitar is a lost art, with stupid unison rhythmic bass'n'riff being all todays bands can do -- bass playing in particular is not the complimentary quieter element it was for AM music

i believe that there is a small bandwidth that all FM radios can re-compress (loudness button) into a marketably heavy sound -- since FM receivers now come in all shapes and all sizes, music that sells must fit into the bandwidth acceptably common and heavy to sound ok with any receiver, definitely a subset of the led zep dynamic

As one of the links from the original URL posted at the top of thread mentions, FM radio is already massively compressed (Optimod and the like), so the compression at the mastering stage to make it radio-friendly is a bit of a waste, and maybe even self-defeating (compressors fighting against each other = pumping).

Wasn't Pete Waterman's trick to roll-off everything below the lower-mid, so he could get a higher average level broadcast on radio? Get rid of the bass energy. Sting would be followed on late-80s R1 by Sonia and *bang*, it had a couple of dB more impact. (Arguably, Sonia has always had more impact than Sting anyway).

Is there a technique for cleaning out some of the overcompression on a WAV file ripped from a CD?

i am grateful for this trend in CD mastering because it means more things are listenable on it.

in other words: mixing things to sound as good as possible on radio play ISN'T INHERENTLY BAD YOU FOOLS

Non-technop0rn answer: No.

Once those transients have been squashed flat there's no way to restore them because there's no information in the signal to tell you what they were and when they were - it's irreversible.

*However*, one of the clever tricks Pacific Microsonics developed for their HDCD system (20-bit resolution on a 16-bit CD, goes the spiel) was just such an embedded code - HDCDs played back on a regular CD player had slightly compromised dynamics (but supposedly great sound due to careful mastering) due to low-level compression and soft-limiting. Played back on a HDCD-capable machine (the HDCD decoder being part of the reconstruction filter in the DAC chipset), this compression would be undone, and the transients unpacked.

I'm not sure how well this works; there was a lot of fuss recently on one of the audio newsgroups about a Roxy Music re-issue. It was proposed as a shining example of the improvements in digital technology: the 1999 HDCD version allegedly sounding miles better than the original late-80s CD issue. Someone then pointed out that the new version had actually been compressed to all hell (in the modern manner), which led to moments of stickiness wherein it was kinda implied that maybe a few audiophiles had fallen for the 'louder = better' trick. Ah, but HDCD *restores* these squashed peaks, yes? Looking at a ripped WAV isn't going to tell you the whole story - you've got to record the thing in the analogue domain to capture what the HDCD decoder is doing. Well, I had a go and it didn't look much different to the digital rip. Inconclusive. By this time everyone had moved on to arguing over cables again.

(Oh, and if yr thinking "20 bits resolution on CD? We can do that in critical narrow-bands with dither and noise-shaping from higher-res master". Well, yes you can. But HDCDs make the little green light on my CD player come on!)

We've had record labels sending us both radio cuts and 'normal' versions of singles, with the only difference being that the radio one would sound flat and horrible. As for getting our own releases on the radio... well, 'not compressed enough' was a handy excuse occasionally trotted out.

A feeble one. That's what radio stations have compressors for, surely.

Your definition of 'listenable', then, seems to approach my definition of shite.

in other words: mixing things to sound as good as possible on radio play ISN'T INHERENTLY BAD YOU FOOLS

It is when what you are doing is compressing a record to the point that you are compromising its quality- in this case its dynamic range... (the range from the 'lowest' to the 'highest' sound)..The music for your radio is going to sound like shite whether it is produced for a high end audio system OR for radio... since the output is shite.

But the trend continues because for the most part, the public listens to shite, on a shite system or in the car.. while talking on their cell phone, making reservations for their Tai Bo class....

Oh and related to another post.. the term 'compression' as it is used here has nothing in common with the way that MP3s are 'compressed"-

(I'm lazy)

http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windle_c/e_index.html
.. such as "Warning: Pink can be dangerous for health!"

Thanks for the synopsis ....

----

LOUD AS POSSIBLE AT ALL TIMES

The exciting crescendoes get flattened out...the drums lose their impact and punch...nothing "jumps out of the mix" anymore...nothing can build up to a climax because there is nowhere left to go...isn't this crazy?!?!

It is a pity that in the past few years this race to have the loudest CD possible - sacrificing dynamics and rich sound - is spreading even to artists whose CDs will never be played on the radio nor ever have to "compete" with loud-as-possible commercial products...not to mention that more compression on a CD doesn't make it "louder on the radio" anyway, but that's a different story...

The technology used to make our standard 16 bit, 44.1 CD continues to improve: better A/D converters, better bit rate and sample rate converters, quantum leaps in recording software quality etc... thus making it possible to produce better sounding CDs than ever before. The trend for hypercompressing the final master in order to make it as loud as it can possibly get means that most of these sonic advantages - which can give us better sounding CDs - are simply thrown out the window in favor of LOUDness. (Yes there are some kinds of music which do work best when the whole mix is flattened out dynamically, and I am a big fan of lo-fi and wrecked sounds...but that's done for musical reasons, not simply out of fear that your CD won't be the loudest in the CD changer. )

Compression is a great thing. It can be used to create very cool sounds and can help make the sound more "electrified" and exciting, it can make an ordinary sound into something completely new and strange. The problem today is overdoing the compression of the final mix for the "unmusical" reason of making it as loud as possible...only so it can "compete" with other CDs which have sacrificed sonic quality for sheer loudness. Artists, recording engineers, mastering engineers and producers have to start standing up for better sound as opposed to running the sonic equivalent of a steamroller over the music in order to flatten it out simply to make it as loud as _______(fill in the blank loud CD).

I could go on and on about this problem and why I think it is stupid and sad, but mastering engineer Bob Katz has already written some excellent articles on the subject:
Digital Domain (click on "Articles", then "Compression".)
Here is another good article by Rip Rowan on the same subject:
Over the Limit. This guy is obviously a very big Rush fan, so put up with his glowing comments about them because he uses their albums to clearly demonstrate the increasing problem to very good effect.

Bob Drake, December 2002

Like the Jazz/Classical section in your Virgin megastores?

Because itd be funny to compare that to like, the new Bon Jovi if Bon Jovi actually was LOUDER.

Flicked thru Uncut in the newsagents and their's an article on this issue. SOUTHALL TAKES THE DAD ROCK MARKET!

Where I lead, IPC follows. TOOK THEM A YEAR.

wow i fucked up there and their there.

You certainly did.

It'd be better if you'd fucked up they're and their there, tough.

What a cunt I am.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article1878724.ece

Whole lines of that are lifted from Imperfect Sound Forever.

There's also this - http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/news/newsbeat/galleries/1593/1/#gallery1593

article is slightly more telegraphed & technically incomprehensible, but it gets it's main point across

also good to see the times cover that story about the consumer's personal data getting watermarked in those 'non-DRM' files

fig 1

pavement - summer babe (winter version) 1992

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1125/530522654_2611bab03f_o.jpg

fig 2.1

the hold steady - stuck between stations 2006

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1089/530522686_8b81c63f4c_o.jpg

fig 2.2

the hold steady - chips ahoy! 2006

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1013/530522668_b28cfe6cc2_o.jpg

fig 3

ame - fiori

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1062/530536134_4f59fb4151_o.jpg

To what extent do the complaints about loudness/compression apply with vinyl releases of albums in the past decade or so? How often are different mixes used for vinyl? Do vinyl releases seem to have better dynamics than their CD counterparts (despite the limitations of the medium), or are they just not as loud overall (since they can't be)?

I'm trying to think of examples I know of. The Fall's Marshall Suite, pretty darned loud on CD (in a pleasing way, to me at least) is actually also quite loud on vinyl. But since vinyl isn't generally made for commercial radio stations to play from and since it is in some ways an audiophile format these days (heavy vinyl pressings never used to be so ubiquitous, anyway), one would expect LPs to be as well-mastered as possible.

Apologies if this has been addressed elsewhere.

i have personally noticed from doing transfers from vinyl that a lot of vinyl is fairly heavily compressed. not quite to the levels of many cds nowadays, but way way louder than most 80s and early 90s compact discs. compression is a lot more important for vinyl mastering to help keep the audible surface noise relatively low.

the guardians take on all this

today on the current our local public station which plays mostly indie rock, they played some band called the Fratellis (sp?)

it struck me just how horrible it sounded. It's really bizarre, especially when I turned up the car stereo, everything gets this very unpleasant quality...really hissy...the symbols and the vocals are audibly hitting this weird "ceiling" (sorry I don't know the technical terms)...also I've been involved in mixing a few records and we always think about "Front to Back" depth, the idea of not just right-to-left stereo panning but a depth to the mix, and there is NONE here...everything is on this same flat plane...then when i got to work i listened to an old Stax Delaney & Bonnie record w/booker t and the gang as the band....it's amazing just how much BETTER, more human and pleasing to the ear everything sounded....songs aside, just the quality of the sound was better to listen to...

also, i'm not surprised to see that hold steady record on there, that new one sounds atrocious. same w/the third strokes record in comparison to the first and second.

That Guardian blog piece really upsets me.

it upsets me too (over-compressed CDs don't seem to bother those people at that live concert!) but it's got a point

recorded music is traditionally engineered to sound best on the most popular playback system of its day. 78's sound horrible on a Technics turntable, but play them on a horn and it sounds pretty great. 60's 7" singles have no bass and a shrill top end, but play them on one of those portable 7" turntables with a built-in speaker and they just belt right out. 70's album rock sounds incredible on hi-fi systems, 90's CDs sound pretty great, and... hyper-compressed music sounds better on an iPod (at the expense of those masters sounding good on a home stereo, but... who cares)

it's worth mentioning again -- anyone presented with a louder signal in an A/B 30-second listening test will choose the louder signal, even if it's incredibly distorted -- in fact usually the distortion sounds like pure energy and is preferable, and many of today's engineers are not being _forced_ to compress or limit, they are intentionally introducing that energy into their songs. to them it is irrelevant that most people over 20 can't listen to more than 11 minutes of it without burning out -- people who want to listen to albums these days are in the minority, and they're going to be told they're old if they try to speak up

I'm surprised this pushback didn't come sooner actually

I accept that, but, for instance, the new Electrelane sounds a damn site better even on cheapo headphones and an iPod than The Good The Bad & The Queen; the LCD Soundsystem similarly sounds better, more exciting, moe involving, than the Simian Mobile Disco; the Electrelane and LCD aren't quiet, they're just more natural, more preicse, more detailed.

I dunno. Sometimes I feel like I'm fighting for a cause no one else even knows exists, let alone cares about. Which is the case...

I do almost all my listening from my ipod through Grado SR60s with most files ripped at 192. All these sonic issues definitely still exist in this scenario. Though maybe not so much if I was using the comes-with earbuds.

Just off Portapros the issues exists. Bundled earbuds, maybe not...

Was in an HMV recently, new Arctic Monkeys album being played - sounded atrocious, as if the music (which I like) was being immersed forcibly in a bucket of water; would that be an already heavily compressed signal being further compressed courtesy of the in-house DJ systems ... ?

Possibly, but just as likely a really shitty in-house Bose system that sounds shitty anyway and is probably fucked from over-use at loud volumes. The system in our local Virgin Megastore used to be utterly intolerable at anything above 'quiet' volume, such was the atrocious state of the speakers.

Wow that Guardian blogger is a complete ignoramus & blatantly misses the point.

and... hyper-compressed music sounds better on an iPod (at the expense of those masters sounding good on a home stereo, but... who cares

yeah i disagree totally...the delaney & bonnie album i just mentioned i was listening to on ipod/earbuds and the fratelli's track was in the car...it's the quality of how the instruments sound, the character of the song, not a volume thing...

yeah that guardian thing was horrific.

i have a friend who masters records professionally, and he says there is a lot of pressure from some accounts to master louder, which he resists as much as he can.

her main point is 'music sounds fine to me, and you guys sound old complaining about this'

slightly unrelated anecdote -- when missy's 'under construction' came out, I brought it over to my step-nephew's house who was a huge fan and I mean a huge fan. he asked if he could rip it, I said 'oh sure'. he put it in iTunes and pre-screened the album, listening to the first ten seconds of each track, and if a track didn't grab him in ten seconds, he unchecked it -- didn't even rip it. each track had _ten seconds_ to make an impression or else he didn't even want to come across it again later.

that's how important the first ten seconds of a track has become for these KIDS these days

and part of me sympathizes, the flood of free music coming in is so vast part of me understands the urge towards pre-screening before the thing even reaches your iPod -- make your quick decision now. but these listening habits are precisely what over-compression is attempting to overcome. you're definitely not alone and I really appreciated your article, Nick, it was the first one coming from a music-listener standpoint and not an audio-engineering magazine editorial or message board -- I think you should continue to state the importance of how people who like to listen to albums, or listen to _anything_ for more than 30 minutes are getting shafted. but you are going to sound old if you don't anticipate the counter-arguments, which range from very well thought out to 'you sound like an old man'

That's one of the recurring problems with this issue: people don't actually follow the description of what's happening, so they just pretend to understand by turning it into some other issue they know how to feel about. The comments box for Nick's Stylus article on this was occupied by at least one person who kept framing this as an analog vs. digital debate; plenty of people who comment on it seem to think it's just a strict and simple issue of loudness (or, worse, an "old people don't like loud music" issue). It's actually equally ridiculous for people to say "oh well, the kids these days don't seem to mind it," because the adults don't follow its existence enough to mind it, either. But what you do find is that anyone who actually pays attention to these things and understands the complaint -- in all age ranges, in all styles of music, just anyone with some knowledge of the topic at all -- sees the problem, even if they don't think it's a huge one yet.

I am young & I support your cause completely Nick. Records sound horrible these days.

And Milton your step-nephew is mental. Why couldn't he just rip the songs, listen to them later, and delete them (or just not listen to them) later if he didn't like them? I say this as a "kid these days."

I listened to the new Shellac today, and the lack of compression was very noticeable. Too bad they didn't write any songs.

obv. downloading has a lot to do with it, but i think this type of mastering is a big reason music is so "disposable" now...it's so harsh sounding that it wears you out after a few listens...

i've been thinking about this a lot, esp. as someone who works in the video game industry, and music is odd that it's the only major entertainment media that's run headlong into technically WORSE presentation. Like, for example, video games now have a lot of thing - like texturing, sound design, hi-res displays, that are just BETTER than the previous generation of console's games...same with movies - DVDs are just BETTER than VHS as a home playback form...whereas music is running towards MP3, which is just - on a base level - a less representational, worse playback format than LP or even CD...I sometimes wonder if that's a hidden cause of at least some of the industry's woes....it devalues the product, where video games have made a big effort to improve the presentation of their art form in a number of ways.

(actually maybe the cassette format was a precursor to that - a portable, easily to copy format that was much lower in fidelity)

The number of errors in the first two paragraphs of that Guardian thing is kind of dizzying. You don't really know where to start.

As to devaluation of the format, I think cd played a role as well--small size kept cds from taking on the fetish value vinyl records had.

But music as an art form is more fluid and varied than video games in general. There are more people making music than making video games. These days the creation of music is practically as accessible and immediate as the consumption of music, whereas creating video games takes much more effort and is primarily a capitalist/corporate endeavour rather than just doodz hangin out jammin. Obv. there is a market for DIY video games but it's much more obscure than DIY music.

I guess "fluid and varied" is the wrong term, I mean more like "democratic"

and re: movies and television: you forgot Youtube, which I think follows the same trends that you're describing about CD->mp3

Eh, posted a reply to the Guardian piece ("ColleenMoore"), much good it'll do, probably.

Why couldn't he just rip the songs, listen to them later, and delete them (or just not listen to them) later if he didn't like them?

I asked him that, and he basically said "if something I hate comes up in shuffle on my ipod I have to reconnect it to get the mp3 off again so why not just save time?" I tried to explain that there's a lot of music you don't like the first time you hear, and he said 'this isn't art music, you like pop or you don't'. He considers himself a real music-head as well, I was shocked at how little having an intact copy of the album seemed to mean to him.

funny thing is all the songs he unchecked are the ones I usually skip as well

anyway sorry to digress but for all the talk of engineers being forced to overdrive, I've also heard a few records where the final mastering's overcompression was absolutely a part of the aesthetic of the entire record, it wasn't inflicted. it's exhausting to listen to these records all the way through, but the quality of the distortion is unlike any music I've heard before -- as modern as it gets (as one engineer put it once, "who cares if the mix sounds good, does it sound new?"). so though there is a trend here, it's just as dangerous to speak in critical absolutes when there are a few people doing creative (if brutal) work with this sound.

make no mistake, I think what's being done to records with mastering these days is mostly a crime, that's why it's important to fine tune the argument especially now that conversation seems ready to break on a wider level

and re: movies and television: you forgot Youtube, which I think follows the same trends that you're describing about CD->mp3

-- Curt1s Stephens, Tuesday, June 5, 2007 11:09 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

yeah that's a good point, but at least most people i know tend you use youtube more for dicking around at work, watching funny videos, etc, or maybe using it as a last resort for something they couldn't find otherwise....like i watched the office finale on there because i missed it, forgot to record it, and then realized NBC didn't have full episodes...most people i know are still upgrading to hi-def TVs and everything w/good surround sound systems, it's not like youtube is replacing that...

great reply Pashmina!

a few thoughts. 1. this issue needs some of that ole Frank Luntz magic, i think. the term "loudness" - however accurate it is from an engineer perspective - is infelicitous, inviting mental images of old codgers bemoaning the rambunctious music of the youth. maybe "flatness" would do the trick? 2. why is it always 30+ writers who bring up the "you're just old and grumpy: the kids looove this stuff"-argument? 3. i totally disagree with those of you who claim that heavily compressed music sounds comparatively better through headphones. i have the exact contrary experience.

The Guardian is the worst.

I think "flatness" is the perfect term Jeb - it captures people's instinctive understanding of the problem. "Loudness" is more techincally accurate, given that the main issue is the reduction of headroom and the squashing of transients, but flatness makes more sense to frame it. And - as you say - it doesn't let the problem get confused with other stupid shit.

As far as Milton's nephew - I do that too when I'm in a record store going through vinyl at the listening station. I'll skip through, giving each track a few seconds in it's middle, and if it doesn't grab me it's history. There's just so much to get through to narrow it down to the few excellent things.

PS: also, yes, that Guardian blogger is fail

great illustrative video here:

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

That Guardian article was crap. Nick, your article was getting passed around on the Tape Op message board recently. The video that Johnny links to was posted there as well, and I agree that it's good.

But I would caution folks against being too quick to blame everything on the mastering enginners. I know a lot of mastering guys these days get handed projects that have already been heavily compressed during tracking and mixing. And once something has been compressed, there isn't much you can do with it. It's sometimes possible to uncompress, but it's difficult. And lots of times the band are the ones asking for it, too. The idea that something doesn't "sound like a record" until it's been squashed flat is going to be difficult to shed completely.

But I think awareness is building, little by little...

Aye, one of the things I was keen to point out in my article, and that I mentioned on my blog (titled after this thread, in a backwards manner) recently and in the 65dos interview, is that it's not evil mastering engineers or even evil record company people - it's stupid musicians doing this, a lot of the time.

Also, the over-riding effect of over-compression, beyond things like clarity and spatial placing of instruments and that 'serious audiophile' stuff, the real deal-breaker (or maker, depending on your angle) is the fact that it makes music boring and monotonous - a big part of the reason Coldplay are boring is because their songs don't change, for instance. Same with Keane. It's the reason the latest Bloc Party album is so fucking dull.

nick's article is interesting - i can't say i've noticed this at all, certainly not to the blanket extent nick has; i do get annoyed at poor sound quality but this is usually either a) crap mp3s or b) ironically enough, old cds which aren't loud enough. and though i'd like to be one of the ADD-riddled kids who makes decisions based on 10 seconds alone - this strikes me as a rigorous and entirely admirable approach to music - the fact is that i DO listen to albums (cos that's the format stuff gets sent to me on), and to music generally for hours at a time, and i don't feel any of the nausea described.

i have noticed the 'flatness' you describe at times obv but assumed it was down to me not liking the music - stars, for instance. and yr point about coldplay songs being dull because they don't change - they would be dull even if they were mastered like you want! but the point about wine buffs hit home.

this, however:

I think music journalists have a responsibility to listen to records on at least half-decent equipment

would you like to buy me a top-of-the-range hi-fi system, some expensive speakers and headphones then? i dunno, i think that's a fairly obnoxious thing to say.

also, i think it was eppy who said somewhere that a lot of modern hip-hop and r&b sounds great precisely because of blocky compression, which makes the spare beats and vocal out front sound even better.

and really, i do suspect that this is a problem you'd only notice on expensive equipment. i - and MOST PEOPLE - don't own expensive audio equipment, and nor am i likely to in the foreseeable future. maybe a better solution would be for you audiophiles to listen through computer speakers more?

and i think the grau piece is perfectly fair because my immediate reaction was also "well, i can't hear this at all", and it still is to an extent.

I think most of what you've just written is pretty obnoxious, but there you go, Alex. This, for instance, just boggles my mind - i'd like to be one of the ADD-riddled kids who makes decisions based on 10 seconds alone - this strikes me as a rigorous and entirely admirable approach to music.

You don't need 'scary expensive equipment', either, that's a myth. A pair of Koss Portapros will set you back probably less than £30 and are absolutely terrific headphones. This isn't just an audiophile issue; like I said above, the main concern isn't so mcuh loss of clarity (although that is a conern too, obv, for me), it's loss of movement, of dynamic, of excitement. In the original piece when I said 'half-decent equipment' I'm not talking about £10k's worth of hi-fi; I'm talking about a £300 Denon mini system or a £60 pair of headphones. Once you tune in to what compression sounds like you'll notice it everywhere on almost any equipment.

Film critics, as I said, would be laughed out of the building if they reviewed films based on Youtube viewings.

x-post - you can't hear it cos you don't know what you're listening for yet. You quite like Electrelane, yes Alex? They're a fucking tremendous example of an uncompressed sound (or a 'not-over-compressed' sound). Play some Electrelane back-to-back with some Coldplay, as distasteful as you find Coldplay, and the difference is in the quiet bits, the loud bits, the fact that you can hear the instruments.

i do think electrelane are 'well-produced' (though sadly it doesn't stop their new album from being unlistenable) but most things i like are also well-produced - this is why minimal techno and r&b appeal to me so much, because so much care has been taken over the production in comparison to people like coldplay or simian mobile disco.

re ADD-riddled kids - there is too much new music to take in otherwise and too limited hard drive space, as it is i still feel honour-bound to listen to the entire track before making the delete/keep decision. 10 seconds would make it all so much more efficient.

also i am not spending £300 on a hi-fi

You terrify me, Alex, and I mean that with utter sincerity.

actually look upthread i posted a waveform of a track by ame, who i think lex likes. anyway, look how much space there is compared to the indie rock tracks.

ame are fucking incredible

I mean, I can't fathom the ten-seconds thing because' it turns music into Burger King, but that's beside the point almost. I cannot fathom why anyone who 'loves' music would find it objectionable to spend £300 on a stereo to play it on, why anyoine who loves music wouldn't want to experience music as well as possible; it's a really exciting, sensual, indulgent thing to do and it's wonderful! Unless it's not listening to music you're into but rather 'having listened'; casting judgement. Which I'd think goes against your ethos?

Double X.

From a technical point, the more minimal music is, the more you can compress it without losing much clarity or space or excitement - I'll draw a diagram on MSPaint later to show what I mean, but I have to go out of the office now for a bit.

also i am not spending £300 on a hi-fi

-- lex pretend, Wednesday, June 6, 2007 8:48 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

really? ffs you're a music critic! i spent that much when i was fucking 16 years old! i'm no way near as much of an audiogeek as southall but you really don't have a clue what you're missing.

£300 isn't very much.

today on the current our local public station which plays mostly indie rock, they played some band called the Fratellis (sp?)

it struck me just how horrible it sounded.

possibly the most obvious set-up of all time.

well decent headphones would do the job, no?

how on earth did you have £300 when you were 16?! this is like when students in my year spent all year whining about how broke they were, then buggered off in the summer to go travelling. i can afford £300 easily now but all the years of that being a ridiculous sum to spend on anything are far too ingrained now - i have a workable and decent hi-fi, it's not a shitty plastic all-in-one thing, as long as it works i'm not replacing it.

and really i'm not even at home enough to justify it, i review most things off headphones-listening.

how on earth did you have £300 when you were 16?!

paper rounds, childminding, weekend work... i had more disposable then than since rly :/

well decent headphones would do the job, no?

-- 696, Wednesday, June 6, 2007 9:16 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

not w. dance music & so on surely?

The comment-box beatdown in that Graun space-filler is encouragingly righteous.

There's headphones, and there's headphones...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/Headphones%20and%20hi-fi/IMG_6751.jpg

i have no idea what headphones i even have. there is no point in me getting expensive ones b/c i will inevitably break or lose or tread on them within three months anyway. i do know someone who absent-mindedly cut his headphones in half with scissors, though, i have never done that.

The ones on the left cost me £28 and come with a lifetime guarantee; you have to send them to America, but they'll repair or replace. They've also got the kind of bass response that I imagine would tickle your fancy muchly.

it's not about the quality of the headphones -- i just don't think you can feel music properly through them. i say this as someone who atm only listens through headphones, via a computer.

I'm split 50/50 between whether I prefer headphones or speakers; they're very different experiences.

tbh the music listening i most value is on headphones because it's then, when i'm commuting, that i give my undivided attention to the song - i notice and realise a lot more about the music then, as opposed to on my better speakers at home when i'm usually doing something else while listening.

I've almost given up listening to music on the train for the opposite reason - I can't concentrate on it. Sometimes it's OK, on an Intercity with some damping, but on a local sprinter train there's no point unless I use my Shures and I've gone off them. I prefer to read or, at the moment, play Animal Crossing on Nintendo DS...

you can play computer games on trains???

i have a convenient 45mins/1hr unbroken commute which would be unbearable without music. there's nothing else i would want to concentrate on!

1hr! i didnt know you lived so far out! thats the same time as my commute

books

Animal Crossing hardly constitutes 'playing a computer game'. Wander around, steal some apples, talk to an anthropomorphised duck so that it cries and stamps its feet, pay your mortgage. It's not like you need reflexes.

My train journey's only twenty minutes, but door-to-door my commutes between 45mins and an hour.

It could be that much of what Lex likes...I would hesitate to say "benefits from"...but isn't perhaps quite so ill-served by hard-limiting and heavy multi-band compression as the sort of stuff Nick likes.

I'm thinking of guitar-bass-drums combos, for whom the recording techniques were honed in the late '60s/'70s and for whom hyper-compression and flat dynamics don't really work. If you take away the space and contrast from recordings of guitar-rock you tend to eliminate the illusion of liveness, which I think is part of its appeal.

The different listening environments is another factor too, of course.

True. And the dance / electronic stuff I'm into is mostly of a more maximalist than minimalist bent - Orbital being the starting point. Basically, the more elements, the more space is needed; less elements = less space = hard limiting not so bad. Also the idea of the 'psychedelic', climbing inside music, needs space and dynamism, and again that's what I'm into.

ha, well, my favourite dance music is minimal, and my favourite r&b is minimal! one of my favourite songs this year = 1x808 bleep + r&b babydiva singing 1x note + bare ghost of beat. and that's it.

1hr! i didnt know you lived so far out! thats the same time as my commute

your commute is about 10mins shorter.

I like lots of elements, lots of texture and timbre, and lots of little sounds. I like to hear horsehair, fingers on strings, rattling wires in a snare drum, the hum of the electricity in a sequencer.

(I find I'm shelling out an extra £6/week just to enjoy the sleek, quiet new Southern trains and avoid the noisy air-con/engine cooling system/whatever on the bus so I can listen to music on my MP3 player [£60 + £30 headphones]. The £I-can't-bear-to-say-how-much stereo doesn't get the use it deserves these days. Bloody kids.)

ha, well, my favourite dance music is minimal, and my favourite r&b is minimal! one of my favourite songs this year = 1x808 bleep + r&b babydiva singing 1x note + bare ghost of beat. and that's it.

You should still hear it through Chord amplification and a pair of ATC monitors before you die, Lex.

Whoever said the new Bloc Party is a good example of the current trend of over-compressed, badly- mixed albums is OTM. It's unlistenable - everything forced into a loud, flat plane where all the details are lost.

Why can't people let records breath a bit - why be afraid of having a bit of space in the mix. Right after I listened to Bloc Party I listened to the Rezillos ' Can't Stand The Rezillos' from 1978. It's a bare, functional production - just the band playing pretty much live with few overdubs, but it LEAPS out of the stereo and grabs you by the nuts whereas the Bloc Party just drones on unengagingly.

And that leads me into another issue - why can no-one record guitars any more? On the Rezillos album you can hear every nuance of Jo Callis's playing, you can tell it's a Telecaster from the first note. Just listen to a Generation X or Televison or Rain Parade record, or Led Zep II - that's how to do it. Today something like the Artic Monkeys is just an over-compressed sludge-wall with too much gain to allow any kind of articulation to come through. Partly it's production and partly is the guitarists' choice of sound, but together the combination is pretty hard to listen to.

Similar comments apply for drums - I want to hear wood, not a fucking crispy crackle.

The last New Order album had great material, great arrangements, but sounds distorted on every device I've played it back on. There is too little dynamic range - I'd love to hear what Martin Hannett would have made of that material.

^^ isnt it you that disapproves of hannetts production on bummed?

Yes gareth it was me, but by 86/87 Hannett was pretty fucked - everything sounded like it was recorded in an aircraft hanger e.g Bummed, the Stone Roses stuff he did.

I still kind of feel though that the problem with Bummed is actually with me and that I'm still missing something. It's been nearly 20 years though, so it ought to have worked its magic by now! Maybe I'll have a listen this afternoon.

http://i13.tinypic.com/5zf8pw9.jpg

(not mine, found somewhere else)

that jpg just about nails it

I think lex's comments are, as usual, not only terrifying but very succinct and dead on. you don't notice what's being done to the dynamic range if you don't have a halfway decent stereo or quality headphones, and most people don't! the audiophiles are in the minority here, and the argument needs to be very carefully put so's to not sound all moonbat. lex's comment "i have noticed the 'flatness' you describe at times obv but assumed it was down to me not liking the music" is about as close to a sympathetic response as you can expect from most music fans who've only owned basic level consumer gear and literally take offense when you tell them they should spend more money if they really love music

I don't know, I think the notion that you need to be a super-audiophile or have really fancy equipment to notice overcompression is false.

Sure, lots of people (most people, probably) don't consciously notice it now, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't if they were made aware (as many people seem to be doing, for example in the comments section of any of the various articles on this subject). I think it's more likely that people don't know how to listen for these things rather than that they're simply unable to hear them.

And I was also just thinking that it's kind of a shame the way "audiophile" gets used to mean people who are obsessive about their audio gear and want to have the biggest baddest stereo on the block or whatever. I think we should all be audiophiles, as in people who love good-sounding things and care about sound quality. As above, I believe that lots of folks may be latent or subconscious audiophiles; I think people respond to sound quality on a visceral level, whether or not they know what it is they're responding to.

But that's just an unscientific theory of mine, I guess, based on my own observations and such.

In my experience, everyone I've played music too through a 'big hi-fi' has really enjoyed it, noticed the difference, and, in several cases, gone out and invested themselves.

the quality of the average pair of speakers or headphones has actually gone up a lot compared to past decades; the problem is sound isolation is impossible in a world where everywhere you go has the ambient sound pressure of yr average urban streetcorner, we have TVs blaring in the office, computer fans humming away, people playing video games or whatnot plus their OWN music leaking out of their headphones, every store and pub in sight has speakers blasting tunes on top of PA systems calling for so and so and this and that plus everybody just yells all the time now so they can be heard above said racket.

dynamic range leads "important parts" of the music to become inaudible when trying to "enjoy" a recording in any modern environment besides your own home, assuming you have thick enough walls and keep the windows shut.

also people who listen to lots of different types of music, esp old jazz or any classical stuff ever, are probably a little more likely to notice this as they're now forced to adjust the volume a lot more than they used to

CF even just listening to 1990s IDM vs listening to any of that garbage lately BRANG BRANG BRANG

good version of the divine comedy there, nick.

Are there some good examples of recently remastered/reissued albums which suffer from this over-compression? Other than Raw Power, where it seemed to be the whole point of the exercise.

xp
yeh, newer classical discs, paricuarly of symphonic repertoire, can really piss me off with loud climaxes

I think lex's comments are, as usual, not only terrifying but very succinct and dead on. you don't notice what's being done to the dynamic range if you don't have a halfway decent stereo or quality headphones

This isn't really true. Hot Fuss sounds flat to me played through my tinny computer speakers or my shitty iPod earbuds or my car stereo w/busted right speaker. It sounds just as flat through good speakers or headphones. I think it does partially boil down to the music the lex listens to because minimal hip-hop doesn't sound terrible through hypercompression (though I can't say the same abt the pop and R&B he's into -- that would probably benefit from improved dynamics).

i notice it even in rap, the clipse last album was tiring as hell to the ears.

Yeah, well I know that a difference between me and some of my peers is that listening to music is its own activity for me. I try to avoid "background music," but that's what compression does, really - it makes everything into background music.

I've heard lots of people say that they don't mind compressed music for listening in the car, because they need to drown out the road noise or whatever. But all you have to do is turn it up loud enough so you can still hear the quiet bits over the road noise. Now the consequence of that is that the loud parts become really loud, meaning you can't have a conversation with someone in the car. That's fine with me - I'd often rather listen to music than converse on a car trip. But I know not everyone feels that way. (He Poos Clouds is not very good road trip music)

er, multiple xposts there

I think the music is compressed by frequency range to some extent as well -- that's probably why it seems more convenient for car listening, b/c just cranking up an uncompressed record means that you're getting a lot more unwanted piercing treble. (Or something, I'm just talking out of my ass on this one.)

I like lots of elements, lots of texture and timbre, and lots of little sounds. I like to hear horsehair, fingers on strings, rattling wires in a snare drum, the hum of the electricity in a sequencer.

Let's not go overboard here, I think what you're talking about maybe has more to do with recording (and mixing) techniques than mastering compression.

he's not saying that it has anything to do with mastering compression -- he's just saying the kind of music he likes is the kind of music that is harmed most by hypercompression

Are there some good examples of recently remastered/reissued albums which suffer from this over-compression? Other than Raw Power, where it seemed to be the whole point of the exercise.

-- everything, Wednesday, 6 June 2007 19:45 (10 minutes ago) Link

There's a whole audiophile-ish subculture based around comparing different generations of CD reissue, which has a tendency to get very anal, tends to automatically decry any new reissues, or so it seems to me, and it's a bit snake oil-ish/follow the guru-ish as well. I believe the last lot of Roxy Music remasters were pretty bad, but I didn't buy them, so can't report 1st hand.

I'd be interested to hear from anyone who purchased the new versions of Pulp's mid-90s albums or something of that nature. That seems to be the kind of music that suffers from this. Also, "This Is Hardcore" was the first album I remember thinking sounded terrible.

Some of the Cocteau Twins remasters were pretty horrendous.

Re: Pulp-- Rest assured their final album isn't compressed much, since Scott Walker was the first person I ever read decrying compression. It was in some article around '97 or '98 where he was asked what he thought about Radiohead, and he replied something like "I think they're really good, but they use too much compression just like everybody else."

I can't get a handle on Pulp's last album, soundwise. Sometimes I think it's great, othertimes I think it's shit.

fig 4 Rihanna ft. Jay-Z - Umbrella

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1119/533686637_55de8ef108_o.jpg

fig 5 mims - this is why im hot 2007

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1173/533592022_a4267f218b_o.jpg

You should probably annotate those. What do they illustrate.

I don't think the Roxy Music remasters were particularly compressed, and I don't think they clip, but there is some dispute as to whether they are better or worse than the original. They are HDCD and probably sound best on a compatible player.

Oh, though actually I don't know if that was teh "last lot" of RM remasters--they were from the mid-90s.

er, late 90s. That's all.

he's just saying the kind of music he likes is the kind of music that is harmed most by hypercompression

Okay, that makes sense.

Compression doesn't really matter for a lot of the music I listen to (rap, electronic music, etc. where it's all programming and synths with not a whole lot of dynamics anyway) but it would be a problem with jazz, brass band, etc. Esp. because it can make cymbals and horns sound like shit.

well the vertical is volume. sort of. when i make recordings that how i see it. i could be wrong though. the thing about the hip hop pop stuff i posted is they seem to have a fair bit of space between the beats whilst the indie stuff up thread is all cramped up into one block. still too loud though. some else may explain better.

the only roxy i've ever known are from the early 00s. i love them. i wonder what they ought to sound like.

Play Autoditacker back-to-back with Radical Connector and say that compression doens't effect electronic music.

Hmmm? I'm intrigued. (Not intrigued enough to buy Radical Connector after what's been said about it, though).

MoM use loads of elements, loads of layers, loads of textures, etcetera; not dissimilar from, say, Guillemots, except that one is electronic and one is acoustic in predominant source. Turn each of those individual elements up and instead of occupying distinct space they start competing and overlapping, blurring with each other. Sure, a MoM song may not have the same, let's call it 'narrative dyanmic' in terms of quiet-loud-quiet-loud 'song structure', but the integrity of the individual sonic layers can suffer from over-compression, it can be clipped just as much as anything else.

Autoditacker is a more organic sounding album, though?

I do remember RC sounding kind of harsh and busy, but I think it would still sound harsh and busy if it wasn't really compressed.

xpost

The harshness and busyness is what compression does! There's, I'd wager, less going on in Radical Connector in terms of number of elements. The Von Sudenfed, while ace, is a touch too loud, loses some definition. Go back to Orbital Brown, Artificial Intelligence, etcetera.

no you can play basically any old 80s-90s idm/detroit stuff vs. post-2002 whatever and the same thing is going on. electrohouse etc. gets so hammered to the wall through multiband comps it's really really punishing on some sound systems IMO

I know their stuff up to and incl. Idiology. Maintaining space among clutter does seem to be the knife edge they're required to walk. By Idiology, I'm starting to feel like it's tipping too far into the antic.

Cos by Idiology they're too compressed. Tombot's totally OTM here.

xposts

I think the music is compressed by frequency range to some extent as well -- that's probably why it seems more convenient for car listening, b/c just cranking up an uncompressed record means that you're getting a lot more unwanted piercing treble.

Mastering compression doesn't (in theory) have anything to do with that. It operates strictly on dynamics. mp3 compression affects frequency range, though.

The images acrobat posted are graphs of volume vs. time in the left and right channel of a stereo audio file. I'm a little confused about this, though - audacity has two waveform views. acrobat's images come from the default view, called "waveform." I feel like the second view, called "waveform (dB)" is what I'm used to seeing in audio applications. The documentation doesn't do much to clarify the difference:

Waveform Traditional display of audio material. It displays the amplitude of the audio over time. This is the default display mode.
Waveform (dB) Like Waveform, but logarithmic instead of linear vertical units . It displays the amplitude in dB of the audio over time.

Reasons this isn't so much of a problem with rap/r&b hits:

- synths, programming, and short samples tend to have a smooth, constant level to begin with
- rap/r&b hits don't have a lot of internal dynamics
- the whole style and architecture of the genre are already built around this kind of treatment (and it could be argued that other genres are getting louder partly in a wrongheaded effort to compete with that)
- something like a Rihanna single is built for this kind of bursting assaultive energy, more so than for album-length close-listening

It's not an issue with SOME electronic music, but I think it's a huge issue with a lot of it, both the stuff that pumps super-loud (Goldfrappy-type -- haha xpost TOMBOT) and the stuff that actually wants you to be listening to its organization in the sound spectrum and whatnot -- electronic music has delivered some amazing organizations of sound and space available in few other formats, and loudness-maximizing kills a lot of the options for that! I mean, erasing the front-to-back part of the sonic field is possibly even worse than if you just erased the side-to-side part (i.e., went mono).

And of course the worst examples of this come along when music that wants to be sedate and comfortable and open to close listening -- whether its folk, classical, deep-and-warm indie, or Norah Jones -- pegs its levels to the norm and winds up flat and undynamic.

I'm increasingly chafing at the feel of modern masters, which are just flat and claustrophobic -- they have no air, no space, no depth -- but it's one of those things you wind up just having to bracket in order to follow music. It's strange to think that I used to be able to go to sleep comfortably when listening to music, and not because of overwhelming ear fatigue (when I wanted to be knocked to sleep by overwhelming ear fatigue I'd just put on too-dense shoegazer bands or Melt-Banana or something!) -- these days I'd be driven nuts by even the more sedate and cozy superloud records I own.

But where this really nags at me is with a lot of modern rock that goes really over the top with it, which might actually be pushing old-man buttons for me: maybe it sounds good to some kids when the snare drum makes everything in the mix squish and duck under it because there's no extra space in the mix -- maybe it makes it sound to some like the band is just TOO AWESOME AND ENERGETIC to fit in conventional sound standards -- but that'll just always be a "mistake" to me, and an ugly one. (Cf that "Tea Leaf Dancers" song by Flying Lotus that makes intentional use of Extreme Ridiculous Ducking Compression, which I find painful to listen to but some people find interesting.) Any music that even half wants to sound "natural" or like something that might really happen simply CANNOT accept a mix where the loudness of each part is constantly squishing around to add up to 100% peak level, because no guitar in the world rises and falls in presence/volume according to whether a tom has been struck in the past half-second.

This is a total side note, but it occurred to me a while back that certain mixing and stomp-pedal antics of 90s rock might have set the stage for people not taking note of certain things -- I kept thinking of the opening of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," which appears to use some fading and the channel change to do the whole compression thing where a single instrument might be louder than when the others come in. (CLEAN CHANNEL CLEAN CHANNEL okay here's the whole band)

But of course the average listener isn't going to notice plain ear-fatigue compression issues -- like Lex says, you're just gonna go "eh, this music's kinda tiring and uncomfortable-sounding" -- especially since the ear-fatiguing qualities of this sound remarkably similar to the qualities of a small, crappy speaker, like the ones on a cheap TV. The worst rock offenders seriously just sound like you've turned your TV up too loud and it's kinda blaring and assaultive.

xpost to Steve: mastering compression is TOTALLY frequency-band based -- that's one of the "advantages" of the digital software for this stuff, that people can work with the compression and EQ at the same time. All this stuff is getting multi-band compression.

Was it Nick who introduced the metaphor of a normal face vs. a face squished up against the glass? Cause that really is the perfect way of describing what this does.

Yeah, I know what multi-band compression is. But that just allows different frequency bands to be dynamically compressed with different settings. It doesn't, as Curt1s seemed to be implying, mean that the frequency range gets lessened.

But mp3 compression, if not taken down too far, doesn't necessarily squash the soundspace in the main way we're addressing here... is that right?

Face into glass wasn't me, I'm afraid!

oh steve g i just changed the view hmmm yeh now it all looks a lot messier

xp

No, any kind of lossy audio data compression shouldn't have a big effect on dynamic range (although depending on the material and the algorithm and the amount of data compression any number of weird artifacts can be created). Although I guess it kind of does in the sense that you lose resolution on quiet sounds, like reverb tails and cymbal decays and stuff.

The multiple common meanings of the word "compression" certainly don't help to make this issue clear.

no it doesn't...

dynamic range compression simply squashes peak volume, leaving the frequency range intact. mp3 compression actually does omit certain frequency ranges on the principle that the louder signals are more important than the quieter ones, and the listener won't miss the quieter ones -- so it subtracts out bass & harmonic frequencies, simplifying the signal -- that's why certain music sounds 'thinner' on mp3 -- there's actually less there. also you get raspy aliasing artifacts at lower kbps rates.

Autoditacker & Radical Connector are two great examples by the way -- Autoditacker is a fantastic headphone album with dozens of quiet details bouncing around and lots of creative use of dynamic range, and Radical Connector is just a huge monster truck

but I think it was meant to be that way, that was their intent. same with that Flaming Lips album you lead your article with, which was produced and mastered by the same person -- you may not like the aesthetic, but it was pretty clearly chosen. a lot of electronic & hip-hop music does not suffer from this approach because they are going for sounds that haven't been heard yet, and you have to admit, the sound is new. the problem is when other genres have to compete and albums are destroyed by mastering them to the same volume levels.

There's also a principle, the name of which escapes me, that puts a ceiling on the maximum frequency you can represent digitally - I believe the it's equal to half of the sample rate. So if the sample rate is 44.1 kHz (standard CD quality), you can represent frequencies up to 22 kHz, which is fine for almost all purposes, as the upper limit of human hearing is 20 kHz.

But a funny illustration of this principle is the dog whistle at the end of Sgt. Pepper's. I grew up listening to the CD version, and the sound was always clearly perceptible. But I'm told that on the vinyl version it's much less audible to human ears, and that due to the above principle the sound on the CD actually consists of subharmonics of the original sound.

I'm not quite sure at what point or in exactly what manner mp3 compression further limits potential frequency range.

You know, I dunno if it would be legal to do such a thing on Stylus or wherever, but Nick or someone should post a DLable mix (high bitrate by necessity of the subject) of tracks exemplifying the different points to be made.

There's also a principle, the name of which escapes me

Nyquist Frequency - http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NyquistFrequency.html

as for something that makes what we're talking about audible, this post from upthread (already rolled into concealed messages) is perfect -- listen to what happens to the drum intro when you squash the track, the reverb on the drum tail suddenly becomes huge, and the 1989 production suddenly sounds like a 2007 production, and it's entirely due to the mastering

great illustrative video here:

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

-- Johnny Hotcox, Wednesday, June 6, 2007 12:39 AM (21 hours ago) Bookmark Link

well as lots of people who know about audio are on one thread, a question: i made the mistake of recording an interview in a pub. halfway through the interview the bass of the background music starts getting in the way of the voices, what is the best technique, using audacity hopefully, to turn down the bass? isolating speach would be great but i think that's a bit of a pipe dream. this is a WAV file btw.

acrobat, that's what equalizers are for. Try using a highpass filter around 100 or 120 Hz (i.e., cutting everything below those frequencies) and see if that helps. Although I think the audacity EQ is pretty awful.

is there any other freeware that would do the job better?

I was just talking to my dad about the Olympics logo and the epileptic thing, and logos in general and why the Olympic one had to be 'evolving', etcetera, and he said "it's because people are so obsessed with technology that they forget what they're meant to be doing". And I thought, that's what's happening here.

acrobat: well, I'm thinking of the default EQ plugin that comes with Audacity. There are links to other Audacity-compatible plugins here. I can't recommend one specifically, but I'm sure there are some good freeware EQ plugs out there.

this was mentioned on another thread, but since it hasn't been mentioned here yet, the logical solution is: car stereos and iPods with built-in compression algorhythms which the user can switch on & adjust themselves, so you can listen in your car to classical or jazz or chamber pop records that normally you'd only be able to listen to at home

the algorhythms are already out there (Volume Logic was initially called Octiv -- company was way ahead of their time, founded by people who used to work at Orban, who invented the sound of FM Radio compression in the 70's/80's with the Optimod, but Octiv was too ahead of their time so the company keeps getting sold off, but their time could still come).

It doesn't, as Curt1s seemed to be implying, mean that the frequency range gets lessened.

this isn't what I was implying, but I didn't word my post very well at all.

The Best of Fad Gadget, or at least the copy I have, clips horribly. I'm not even sure it's compression that's the problem, they just got careless with the volume!

This article in IEEE Spectrum is a good overview of compression abuse -- its history in the recording industry, vinyl vs. CD, and implications for non-CD digital formats.

those three MoM albums are like apples & oranges in many, many ways and trying to squeeze their differences into being all about compression seems rather unhelpful....

Those waveforms examples are extremely misleading as well. Trying to make a point by comparing random waveforms from "the late 80s/90s" with "a waveform from now" is pointless. I've been using programs like Audacity to mix songs sets for radio broadcast for years and there is a huge range of waveforms from every decade. Without knowing details like how long each of those tracks are it's impossible to compare them meaningfully. They are obviously very dissimilar songs though. Having said that, a lot of guitar bands from nowadays look like the second example. But so do the Buzzcocks.

Is this what is going on with Justice/Ed Banger etc? If so, then I might actually be really into it.

Yeah, it's a knee-jerk reaction to assume it's all bad. I don't give a fuck about Green Day anyway - it's unlistenable garbage to me as it is. I've put the Simian Mobile Disco tracks on Audacity and it's obviously compressed in this way. Plus you can just tell by listening to it. Still sounds good to me though. Why even compare something like that with Dark Side Of The Moon?

I suspect the number of GOOD albums that have been negatively affected in this way is pretty miniscule actually.

you're both wrong

explain?

Considering that, like, 90% of albums are affected this way, my guess would be that the proportion of good albums affected is about the same as the proportion of good albums to total albums (no matter what your definition of good is).

UNLESS your definition of "good" is "highly compressed, lacking in dynamic range, lightly dusted with digital clipping, and a bit tiring to listen to for more than a minute and a half."

Upthread someone posted a waveform of "Umbrella" which clearly shows what we're all talking about here. Bearing in mind this song is probably the most loved song on ILM this year, what, exactly is the problem? "highly compressed, lacking in dynamic range, lightly dusted with digital clipping, and a bit tiring to listen to for more than a minute and a half" just doesn't really describe it.

(a) "Umbrella" is not the only song in the universe
(b) Folk records should probably not be mastered like "Umbrella"
(c) So long as you're looking upthread, please read extensive discussion of why this kind of mastering can work for short radio singles with small numbers of moving details, but is a very poor technique for giving people the opportunity to comfortably enjoy albums
(d) The fact that people like a song does not mean that every single thing about its production and mastering are necessarily good ideas, even for the song itself, much less for the entirety of recorded sound
(e) "Umbrella" IS highly compressed and somewhat lacking in dynamic range -- it's just lucky that, like a lot of similar singles, it's built for that, that's the intent from the beginning (I have not noticed any digital clipping on it, but again, please read discussion upthread of why a song like "Umbrella" is not going to clip the way a modern-rock song might)

Fair enough. But I do think that the amount of good tracks that have been negatively affected by this is fairly small. I recognise the phenomenon but it's just not that big of a deal to me because the bad side seems pretty rare, plus the fact that good songs like "Umbrella" are "built for that" is great. They probably sound best on laptop speakers or headphones. It's the current way of producing music, just like Brian Wilson trying to make records that sound good on monophonic car radios, or Pink Floyd making records that sound good on stereophonic record players. It defines our times.

http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/2581958/2/istockphoto_2581958_exasperation.jpg

you guys aren't getting it. Mastering isn't the music, its what happens after the music has been recorded.

if you were in germany in world war ii, nazism defines your times but it doesn't make it good

lol nazi reference in internet argument

I don't mean this in a mean way, but I'm skeptical that you recognize the phenomenon if "Umbrella" doesn't sound compressed to you! It's a "current way of producing music," yes, and it suits some types of productions, but it's also a "current way of producing music" that a massive number of the people involved don't want to have to do, one that intensely diminishes the quality of huge chunks of recorded music, one that in most cases everyone will admit means trading the best treatment of the music for the demands of marketing and iPod volume settings. Even your timeline underlines a problem with it: Brian Wilson recording for mono car radios, Pink Floyd recording for stereos, and those same people today optimizing their recordings to ... sound loud on shitty laptop speakers? To keep up with everyone else by making music loud enough that you don't have to go through the inhuman ordeal of turning a volume knob? This is not just audophile bullshit: the standard level of mastering today blares and pounds to an extent that it can be rough and tiring even to listen to music you enjoy, whereas I can pull out a quieter 90s mastering job, turn the volume WAY up, and be drawn into the sense of space and definition and clarity even in music I don't particularly like. It's not some arcane, subtle thing -- there's a world of difference.

I love nabisco.

I've probably only heard "Umbrella" two or three times ever actually - in a mall or something like that, so I've not really listened to it close enough to hear what it sounds like. I'm just judging that waveform upthread and I've had tons of experience looking at these waveforms and know what the sound on the tracks will probably sound like. I am very familiar with the sound of modern over-compressed recordings. I hear it clearly on things like the Fratellis (who make music I dislike anyway). The thing is that their audience don't give a damn. They listen to it blaring out of their laptop speakers and like it. Stuff like that is very popular (though weirdly no-one on ILM dares defend it).

There's an enormous great meme, on here and elsewhere, that says 'song is all', and within that, that it doesn't matter what you do to a song, there's some kind of platonic essence of the song's greatness that will withstand it. Now the popist and rockist might disagree slightly as to quite what comprises that 'song' (popist says production, hook, vocal performance, rockist says chord progression, guitar solo, whatever), but they're both broadly in agreement that a good song is a good song, and you can bend it, compress it, limit it, overdub it, reduce it to an acoustic strum, whatever, and as long as the basic essence is still there, the song is still good. Well that may be the case, but I'm increasingly of the attitude that there's a LOT of songs, and for most of them, in terms of the platonic essence of how good they are, there's not that much in it, to be honest. So the key thing for me becomes how well I can listen to it. The form of it. The physical form. Sod the platonic. To a degree. And if that means that... the difference in qualitative terms between Radical Connector and Andorra is that Andorra is easier to listen to, and I listen to it more, and enjoy it more, as a consequence, then to me it is better. Likewise Electrelane and Queens Of The Stone Age or LCD Soundsystem and Simian Mobile Disco or Guillemots and Keane or 65daysofstatic and Muse.

xpost

I think this issue has been particularly nagging to me in part because of the type of music I was listening to during the 90s period of really dynamic mastering* (though I wonder, often, whether the types of music popular then might have had a lot to do with the possibilities of mastering). A lot of the indie stuff at that point had a hell of a lot to do with sound. There were the height and the tail end of shoegazing, and endless attention to perfectly blurred guitars. There was the point where efficient, rough-and-tumble rave music spawned home-listening stuff that was really interested in the sonic field, making strange noises and textures dance around each other. (Not just IDM, but the sound of proper dance stuff, turned up nice and loud, could be amazing.) There were all kinds of comfy, drawly slow-ass bands, and others who used recording to create precise, dreamy pop worlds (like late Stereolab or Pizzicato 5). Most of these things put a lot of attention into sounding great. The mixes would be clear and tactile and full of space and definition, to the point where the elements of it seemed to have a distinct spatial arrangement in front of you. I can remember hearing a Spring Heel Jack EP turned up loud on a good hi-fi -- possibly the first time I encountered anything coming out of the jungle or d&b lineage -- and feeling physically amazed by the sound, which was this distinct, complicated presence in the room, airy and deep and crisp and solid where it counted. A lot of what I got out of listening to music was listening deep into mixes like that, being amazed by the organization of them, the way it felt like you could step into them and look around their depth.

I rarely get that from any record these days. I like good songs and interesting ideas, but it's rare to hear a recording I'm actually drawn into that way. And it's because they're not about drawing in -- they're about bursting out, loud and flat. I'm not begrudging the loud, flat burst to exciting radio singles (they often sound fantastic), or brash modern rock bands (that can capture an energy, too), but as a industry standard it's acutely painful -- even the records that want to sound natural, that have poured thousands of dollars into studio time to make their music rich and deep and inviting, wind up shouting you back to arm's length, all flat surfaces and squeezed-together messes.

(* = also because I record music -- I'm not great at it, but I do -- and that makes you interested in the possibilities of how things sound, and familiar with the tools that get them that way, and I'd bet nearly anything that if you had the knobs in your hand you would never choose for the music you're working on to get squished, I swear it!)

You've got me there. I completely identify and agree with what you're are saying in the first paragraph. I still hear that in newer recordings but really only in more house music or some electronic things. Guitar music is pretty much dead for me, partly because of what you're talking about, maybe?

I record music too and never, ever use any kind of compression. But the music I'm recording doesn't lend itself to that kind of thing. Maybe if I was making techno music I'd use it.

There are occasional new records that do it, that have space that you can climb around inside of. But not enough. I blame Tony Blair. And Noel Gallagher.

Compression's great and indispensable during the recording and mixing processes -- it's when you're brick-walling it to pump up the mix that it starts to seem like a really lousy plan.

But ha, yeah, Everything, I'm glad we can agree on that thing that's been a little lost there. I'm just hoping the kinds of acts that want to make That Kind of Album will just get comfortable with fighting for their music to be mastered a lot quieter than, you know, "Umbrella" -- I mean, if you're a laptop folk act, or something, and aren't planning on breaking Clear Channel, there's just no good reason to be chart-loud anyway! So maybe people will get annoyed with iPod volume readjustment and take you off shuffle -- you'll still have made the album that sounds head-and-shoulders above the others when they're listening at home.

Face into glass wasn't me, I'm afraid!

-- Scik Mouthy

The face-on-the-glass analogy, which is good for explaining compression to people who can't conceptualise it easily, is engineer Steve Hoffman's:

"Finally, think of compression visually like this. You are standing on one side of a sliding glass door. Someone is on the other side, and as you watch, starts pushing their face against the glass. The face doesn't get any closer to you, it just starts to look squashed, like a good 90mm camera lens will do. You don't want the person's nose to look really long and unnatural, see? You want the perspective to be "flattened" so it flatters the person's face. Well, same with music."

I think Tim didn't like the analogy much, but it is a good place to start, in the sense of directing attention towards the effect in a piece of music.

how does this impact on playing music in clubs?

Depends what kind of club. If you're playing shiny vocal pop/r&b/hip-hop singles, it works out fine, because they blare out really hot over club PAs, and they hit you very viscerally and make the whole place feel loud and chaotic and bursting with energy, which is not a bad thing in a club playing pop/r&b/hip-hop singles. Very "serious"-type dance music, on the other hand, has held back a little on the loudness, at least in spots, because it's still interested in the music being tactile and filling space in interesting ways, and having some rises and falls -- plus if you're talking about an 8-hour night out, the music can't blare at you too much. (There are also some differences involved w/r/t vinyl mastering.) But maybe someone who spends time in Berlin and such could say more about how that one works.

Keep in mind that overcompression works somewhat differently with "artificial" sounds like synths and samples, because there's not a lot of extraneous natural sound information to get flattened out. (The producers also have control over all the sound they're using, so they can work with a loud sound in mind from the beginning.) The place where you notice the hell out of this is when it comes to familiar instruments -- say, when an acoustic guitar or a natural-sounding drum recording has been all squished up to the point of sounding just ... off.

If you're playing shiny vocal pop/r&b/hip-hop singles, it works out fine, because they blare out really hot over club PAs, and they hit you very viscerally and make the whole place feel loud and chaotic and bursting with energy

i dont know that i necessarily agree ... a lot of times it prevents them from impacting as viscerally as they should

Well, I'd usually prefer them airier, but just saying: if you're playing three-minute pop singles in a loud, crowded bar, people are a whole lot less likely to mind if they come out brash and blaring. (Though you may in fact give them the impression that your pricey club sound system is actually really crappy.)

This isn't really about dynamic range compression but Nick's penultimate post seems rather disingenuous. For a start there is a lot more than the song to I think the majority of listeners, I think both the popist and rockist positions are both based on abstracts rather than actual musical content. I mean your one time peer Dom Passantino has made a career of never talking about an artist's actual music. And just saying it's about "how well you can listen to it" well to a degree, sure it works in the present but it seems like this stuff is the only thing affecting your choices. I came across an old thread where you were saying you didn't see the appeal of The Velvet Underground which struck me as odd as to me they are one of the best sounding bands ever: that beautiful distortion that make it sound like your speakers are collapsing in on themselves, the vocals on the 3rd album that seem to be a couple of feet away from you, the crispness of the fourth album. Digression much. You know I agree with you on this, but you seem to be suggesting it's the only factor dictating what you listen to. Which seems odd, odd, odd.

I perhaps didn't balance myself enough in that post. The physical sound of something isn't the ONLY factor, far from it, or I'd be listening to Diana Krall all the time.

What I mean is that where there are two things that are similar in terms of quality of song-content and composition, and I don't mean the order of the notes or such, I'm not musicianly enough to discern that level of content, but in style, in aesthetic, in emotional impact, in cultural niché, in reception, then I'm going to side with the one I can listen to better.

Like... there's not much difference, to me, in terms of the quality of songs on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga vs Girls Can Tell, but Girls Can tell is easier to listen to, so I'm gonna choose it above Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.

Am I making more sense?

The way I listen compared to the way Dom listens is probabyl very different. Our tastes only cross over very slightly, and that's because we want different things from the experience of music. Hence we write about it in different ways.

I'm... not bored, but... well, I am bored, but it's... I'm not arsed by image and cultural baggage much these days. In fact if they're of considerable import to an artist, I find it intensely off-putting. I have very little interest in an artist's personality these days, unless I really like the music, and then my interest is only very very small and tangential. I doubt I'm going to be sucked into being really interested in and really liking an artist's music because of their persona or image or such these days. Of course this might change. I don't watch, and never have watched, music TV. I don't really listen to music radio.

Of course, saying I doubt I'm going to be sucked into being really interested in and really liking an artist's music because of their persona or image or such these days is disingenuous because a non-image is as much a marketable, target-demographic factor of appeal as a heavily stylised image, and I'm not trying to be pious and "you're all duped by the media" about this - I'm just not interested in it at the moment.

The way I listen to music is, I think, more conciously at least linked in with the artists personality. Well, the personality the construct or something. Anyway it may sound like I'm having a go but I think this is so important in how the Dynamic Range stuff is argued. We've already had that idiotic Guardian article and that thread were Lex agreed with it. It's happening on this thread! The thing is it's not an audiophie thing really and when it starts to look like the thing that only affects a certain type of listener's experience then BAD.

The Killers sounded amazing in indie clubs in 2004 though. WOOOOMPH WOOOMPH WOOOOOMPH.

I do wish that more bands would take an interest in how their records are mastered. Brick-wall compression can be a valid aesthetic choice (for instance on Velocity of Sound Apples in Stereo went with an ultra-hot compressed sound which suited well the distorted fuzz-pop sound they were going for) but too often it seems to be just the default choice, and it doesn't always serve the music well. Music with very little variation in volume can be nice for listening in the car or on an Ipod - to cut through ambient noise - but it comes out sounding flat and monochromatic on a nice stereo at home when you're listening for detail and nuance. The emotion communicated by the sound can be stifled.

I heard ZZ Top's "Sharp Dressed Man" on the radio this morning. HAW HAW

Remasterers can also be guilty of this. For instance, I was surprised how different my old vinyl copy of Steely Dan's Can't Buy a Thrill sounded from the recent CD remaster version. Besides punching up the bass end and making the drums louder, they have flattened out the dynamics a bit. On the one hand, the new remaster sounds less dated, on the other, it lacks that airy, open, early-'70s sound of the vinyl.

I sometimes wish the discourse about this phenomenon used the term "limiting" more in place of "compression."

From one of the Mondeo Pop threads:

Gonna get all Sick Mouthy here but was Mondeo Pop the first casualty of Dynamic Range Compression? Mondeo Pop was on the whole rather light but when you compress that sort of sound it doesn't quite work. Way back in 2002 a woman who I knew who had produced records for 911 (?!) pointed out to me that the acoustics guitars on contempoary records by Mark Owen and Darius had been compressed to such a degree you couldn't hear the actual strumming. I guess it just took a few years to filter into mainstream rock by which point it had taken it's first scalp with Mondeo Pop.

-- acrobat, Wednesday, 5 September 2007 15:28 (37 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

If you compress an acoustic guitar the right way it can enhance the sound of the strumming.

see T Rex

it's all the iPod's fault (again) !

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118953936892024096.html

St3ve Go1db3rg are you familar with the Darius ouvre?

I spent last night with my mate and his band at a studio in Newton Abbott where M@lcolm T0ft, who engineered Hey Jude and Space Oddity and stuff, was mixing their record. It was very interesting hearing a compressor being applied to just one instrument (the bass) as the guys and the engineer debated which was better. They went without the compressor in the end; it sounded more like someone playing an actual bass guitar, whereas with the compressor on it just sounded like a low bass emission, with no sense of fingers on strings, or of Dan (my mate) playing harder into the bridge and drum breakdown. Very interesting.

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/616MZB1YE5L._SS500_.jpg

too hot mastering, as 'artistic statement'.

re: compression in clubs, the thing i have experienced has generally been a nauseating use of over-compression, but this has stemmed from running the signal from the source into the red on the mixer, before sending to the power amps, which results in a harsh and unlistenable sound that would be so much easier to listen to if they'd just take it out of the red before sending to the PA, and just turning the PA up a little.

i have heard that this is a more british club thing than a US one--US clubs apparently largely do the latter.

one exception was the bongo club (?) in edinburgh, which had one of the nicest sounding setups i've heard for a long time--the ability to actually make out the nuance of the songs i was dancing along to increased the enjoyment of said songs one hundred fold.

That is a very different thing, Nick, and not something I have a problem with. Either way it's an aesthetic choice and depends on a lot ofthings - how the bass was originally played, amplified, mic-ed up, eq-ed and so on - as well as the desired end result. Generally, a little bit of compression makes it sound tighter. Obviusly it also depends massively on the compressor, whether it's hardware or a software one lovingly simulating some ancient thing.

I think you're getting dangerously close to the reductive version of high fidelity that sees the whole recording and reproduction process as just aiming for the exact sound of an acoustic instrument.

I totally agree with your general point, though.

Tissp - go to Plastic People near Old Street in London - best-sounding club I've ever been to. I couldn't agree more, though. Your ears just get tired and you can't hear anything any more after a while.

Jamie OTM - I think worrying about the use of compression at the individual instrument level isn't really what you should be worried about. Use of compression at the gross level in the mix is what you're quibbling with, surely?

I use moderate compression on the guitar quite a lot, both live and in the studio. I just think of it as an effect that I choose to modify the sound of the guitar (more focused/more sustain on some guitars/increased volume of single note work when mixed in with chords) and which has no real knock-on effect in the mix.

individual track compression is u&k for decent mixes; over-compressing the master bus is the big evil here

Oh I'm not positing it as the same thing, although obv. it's related - this thread just got an oddly timely revive and I thought it was an interesting observation, is all. John Bonham wouldn't be as revered as he is without a compressor, I'm fully aware.

too hot mastering, as 'artistic statement'.

OTM. What could have been their best album was ruined by the mastering. No dynamic range whatsoever. None of the, ahem, drama I've been craving.

St3ve Go1db3rg are you familar with the Darius ouvre?

Nope. Fill me in?

I think worrying about the use of compression at the individual instrument level isn't really what you should be worried about.

Well, bad things can certainly happen there, too. But also good things. There are many variables which interact with compression (all of the compressor settings, i.e. attack, release, ratio, threshold; the specific compressor's characteristics; the attributes of the track being processed), and sometimes it gets even more complex with parallel compression (mixing a compressed an an uncompressed version of a track) or serial compression (using multiple compressors on a track). Lots of things can happen. Some of them are sounds we know and love, some of them are more unfortunate.

If i have my ipod on shuffle and a Sleater Kinney track plays, a little bit of wee comes out of me

I kind of wish that someone with audiophile-ish tendencies would write regularly about new releases with an eye for this kind of stuff. It seems like the kind of thing a normal reviewer wouldn't want to mess with unless it seemed glaringly important, but I find it interesting enough that I'd read something focused on it.

merely beam the shadow of a waveform into the night sky above Exeter, and the SCIKMOBILE will fly to your aid

There have been several times where I've wanted to comment on this in reviews, but it's still not entirely possible -- you can't waste your word count explaining the issue, and anyway I'm pretty sure my editor would send back an email that said "OKAY, SOUTHALL."

But you can still get it in there: plenty of reviews will point out that something's "very dense" or "blaring" or "tiring" or whatever, which is a perfectly everyday way of pointing out the issue. And you can go into it directly with re-issues, obviously: I've put short paragraphs in reissue reviews basically saying "they've had to raise the levels to modern standards, and it's made this sound (a lot worse) / (not too much worse) / (just fine)."

bob weston from volcano suns/shellac has opened a new mastering studio in chicago...this thing from their website gives people that don't want to read this whole big thread a good summary of the whole debate:

http://www.chicagomasteringservice.com/loudness.html

If i have my ipod on shuffle and a Sleater Kinney track plays, a little bit of wee comes out of me

I agree with the idea that iPods, car stereos and such should just have built-in compressors. But I do sometimes like the sheer (well, apparent) bigness of that compressed sound; a lot of the time I probably miss the special frequencies, the sense of air, etc. on a well-mastered CD. While from an audiophile perspective something like ZE's Mutant Disco reissue is probably way over-compressed, I prefer its sound to the more modest remastering of the Kid Creole and the Coconuts reissues (the Universal ones).

On the other hand: the reissue of Laurie Anderson's Big Science seems inappropriately loud to me — not that it has no dynamics at all, but recalling the vinyl version it seems like it was, for the most part, a relatively quiet record; there was something modest about its electronics, which now seem in-your face. Maybe the older CD is really better.

The fact that I got acquainted with Big Science on vinyl and Mutant Disco on CD probably has something to do with these perceptions, of course.

Tissp - go to Plastic People near Old Street in London - best-sounding club I've ever been to.

Better than Room 1 in Fabric?

My ears are usually in better condition when I'm there.

I've never been blown away by the sound at Fabric, but I've usually been somewhere else first, and I always seem to end up in room 3 anyway 'cos I can't take the crowds after a while.

I'll have to go entirely sober one time, and check it out properly.

Well, bad things can certainly happen there, too. But also good things. There are many variables which interact with compression (all of the compressor settings, i.e. attack, release, ratio, threshold; the specific compressor's characteristics; the attributes of the track being processed), and sometimes it gets even more complex with parallel compression (mixing a compressed an an uncompressed version of a track) or serial compression (using multiple compressors on a track). Lots of things can happen

Yes, obv there are all the variables you mentioned. But, why are any choices 'good' or 'bad' if they give you a sound that you want (for that individual instrument).

Vinyl to make a comeback and kill the CD?

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/commentary/listeningpost/2007/10/listeningpost_1029

Oh, it's on Slashdot too. Sorry about that.

Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove, Nyquist's theorem to the contrary.

Aaargh. Still this nonsense persists. That's not why vinyl sounds different/better!

exactly. vinyl is lowpassed weeeeeell below 22k

high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present

Yeah, how is this even possible if the sound was recorded digitally initially?

Before or since, labels will slow down their tendency to use compression.

But then, first of all, portable CD producers need to stop "protecting" the customers hearing and let them pump up the volume again.

And those who prefer vinyl does so because it does not sound perfect. They are usually the same people who tend to favour live music instead of studio recorded music, and prefer "soulful" playing ahead of more skilled playing.

Master digital recordings often use a faster bit rate and higher-precision resolution than the cd redbook standard.

xxp

sampling rate, i mean

All Scandinavians are baby-raping fascists.

Oops, did I make a gross and unfounded generalisation there?

Master digital recordings often use a faster bit rate and higher-precision resolution than the cd redbook standard.

Yes, and you can noise-shape and dither down to 16/44.1k and preserve much of the extra detail where the ear can actually perceive it.

I love vinyl but I get a bit miffed when the old audiophile mantra about "sampling missing stuff out" gets bandied about as fact and an underlying reason for vinyl's apparently unquestioned superiority. I think it's more to do with vinyl's shortcomings in a fidelity (or information) sense and how those technical failings manifest themselves (mostly) euphonically that explains a lot of the medium's sonic specialness. Not all of it, but a lot of it.

I've probably said this before but I absolutely adore the way ATRAC (minidisc) compression makes things sound. It's like everything's been slightly brightened, thickened, and then coated in a barely visible translucent candy shell. Vinyl recorded to minidisc is my favorite sound.

(Unless it's a Sean Kingston 12" of course)

I'm not sure anyone completely understands how the senses and the brain process sound. Signal processing theory is a useful starting point, but only gets you so far. It could certainly be true that the problem with digital is information overload. My experience argues otherwise -- my limited exposure to SACDs, which contain more info, has been positive, and mp3s, which have less info, sound like crap. Admittedly that's all anecdotal. It's hard to understand , though, why sound engineers would go to the bother of improving on 16/44.1k if all that extra information makes for a less enjoyable listening experience.

Haha they cited Shakey Mo.

i have a flying saucer attack cd single where he apologises that it isn't available on vinyl because they physically couldn't cut it due to some problem with the bass frequencies. take that vinyl lovers, up yours nyquist... 8)

It's hard to understand , though, why sound engineers would go to the bother of improving on 16/44.1k if all that extra information makes for a less enjoyable listening experience.

Who says it does? As you say, it's not just about data volume but many things intrinsic to the replay/coding process; vinyl has this warm, front-to-back depth thing going on (that CD can actually emulate, if tailored to do so), SACD's smoothness and openness could well be down to its lack of decimation filter (it's high-speed 1-bit delta-sigma rather than pulse-code modulation), CD's oft-cited coldness and sterility may down to filter ringing or just the lack of analogue euphonics that a certain listener may expect. I certainly don't have a problem with CD "sound"; I don't think there really is a CD sound, which could be the problem for some people.

I've always felt there's slightly more going on with vinyl - not necessarily "content", but some confluence of ever-present background noise and the physicality of the playback ritual. Neil Young once said something about (paraphrasing from memory) "you play a CD, you hear everything - you have no reason to go back to it; with vinyl you keep hearing new things". Which is a bit fanciful and not really my experience but could be literally true (vinyl deteriorates with each play, things are masked and unmasked).

Koogs: yeah, most vinyl is summed to mono below about 80Hz and then rolled off pretty sharpish below that; if you get out-of-phase low frequency content, then you can't guarantee keeping the needle in the groove. You do hear stories of d'n'b producers insisting that cutting engineers bypass the filters to get that sub-bass down, risking their £20k Neumann lathes in the process. I think of Scotty in Star Trek for some reason.

I'm v hazy on the technicalities, but isn't there, in least in theory, detail missing at 16 bits that you could get with analogue?

So if you mix digitally at 24 bits and then cut to vinyl you will preserve more information than if you put it on a 16-bit CD?

(In addition to the "warm" way in which you lose some of the information.)

We're off-topic, but also what about upsampling CD players, that go back to 24 bit - is that just snake oil?

A friend has one and claims that although he sees the absurdity (you can't bring that information back) it means that the digital-analogue converters can do their stuff better. I'm sceptical.

Well, first of all, you wouldn't simply truncate from 24-bit to 16-bit - you'd use noise-shaped dither and actually retain a lot of that additional info so it's perceptible below the regular -96dB noisefloor of redbook CD. (Sounds a bit counterintuitive and I'm not the best at explaining it - have a Google!)

If you were going to a theoretically perfect analogue medium then, yes, you're obviously retaining more info than if you dumb down to a shallower bit depth/lower sampling rate. But you're not - you're going to a medium which has its own physical limitations on just how much master-derived info it can bear. In vinyl's case, the theoretical 24-bit dynamic range of 140dB+ is crammed into about 65-70dB (at best) and a 96k master's flat 48kHz bandwidth is rolled off at both ends so that we're left with, perhaps, 60-15k. In pure data terms, that's like a 12-bit/32k digital system.

Before anyone jumps down my throat, I KNOW there's more to it than that but Jamie did say "in theory".

xpost - upsampling, in information theory terms, is related to sampling rate and has nothing to do with bit-depth; CD players using 24-bit chipsets are not unusual and it's just a case of doing the maths with more headroom.

Filter ringing -- I sometimes wonder if maybe that's what's going on, that some of that filtered data is folding back into some maybe not precisely audible but still somehow perceptible zone and causing the much-cited listening "fatigue."

OK, I'm struggling here, and I should just go and read some stuff, but that's what ILM is for, eh?

So the limits of vinyl are in the dynamic range (the volume) and the higher and lower frequencies. But, given that, is what's left still not higher resolution than CD (as it's sampling rate is, in theory, infinite)?

xpost

No - infinite sampling rate would mean infinite bandwidth, i.e. no upper frequency limit at all. In sampling theory, that's what the sampling rate determines - you can theoretically capture everything as long as you sample at at least twice the highest frequency contained in the music. So, with CD, you filter out everything above 22.05kHz (which has its own problems - you need to design a very abrupt low-pass filter) and then sample at 44.1kHz and you capture everything that's left.

Vinyl is a continuously-varying system, not a discrete-sample system, so it's probably not very useful to talk of sampling rates with vinyl. It remains true though, that CD's hard 0-22k limit is typically wider than what you get on most LPs (even if you get cartridges with 40-50k upper limits).

It's kinda hard to grasp the sampling theory thing, I know - people often say, "but what about the gaps?" There are no gaps - what you lose when you sample is everything above a certain frequency limit and nothing below it.

Again, in theory.

Ha, yes "what about the gaps" was exactly how I was conceptualising this.

I was also confused by bit depth and sampling rate, but I think I've got it now.

Have you got into all this theory just through being into hi-fi or do/did you work/study in this area?

Well, I did a physics degree and then I got into hi-fi in my mid-20s. I've barely used my graduate study in my working life but it's handy for hobbies... Something similar has happened recently with photography - quite keen to retrieve the optics textbooks from my mum's house!

(I could quite easily be found out if a proper electrical engineer wandered into this thread).

where is shakey mo qutoe

I've just been googling this a bit, and came across these dudes:
http://studio-central.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=10705&highlight=24bit+16bit "> http://studio-central.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=10705&highlight=24bit+16bit

They get on to the theoretical maximum volume of any sound ever, on Mars, and using sound as a weapon, and to cool ice cream. Nerds!

Actually they just linked to his band's myspace page, Jon.

over on my audiophile LP thread I found a neat interview with cutting engineer Stan Ricker if anyone wants to really get into DETAIL...

http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue1/ricker1.htm

he talks a lot about frequency limitations while cutting vinyl.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17777619/the_death_of_high_fidelity

Let's bump this one, too, just cos it's the bigger thread overall.

It's about time to impose a ban on all mp3 players.

Also, about time Sony et al start producing headphones that bring a volume loud enough to damage your ears again, or those CDs that do not use that awful compression will sound way too tame.

Another thing: I guess in 10-20 years there will be a bunch of remasters of 00s albums released, to make the listener able to hear all the nuances that were lost in compression on the original release.

Good to see my stance vindicated.

I'm sick of having to knock down the reproduction level of MP3s just so they won't distort when I play them. Not that that fixes the clipping/buggered waveforms in the originals, but it's a start.

This has actually become way worse since 2002, when this thread was started. No?

of course it has.

Another thing: I guess in 10-20 years there will be a bunch of remasters of 00s albums released, to make the listener able to hear all the nuances that were lost in compression on the original release.

maybe. but the remasters will be from mp3s

Definitely worse. Even my wife complains about it now: 'you stuffed up the new (blahblah) album on my ipod, what did you do to it' etc.

"I guess in 10-20 years there will be a bunch of remasters of 00s albums released, to make the listener able to hear all the nuances that were lost in compression on the original release."

yep, there'll be a remaster of the arctic monkeys debut 'as heard on the masters'.

"I'm sick of having to knock down the reproduction level of MP3s"

how dyou do this? can it be done on itunes?

http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/

MP3s have an internal setting that instructs the player at what volume to reproduce the content. You can change this without re-encoding. If you have an ipod, you NEED to use this thing.

I wonder how much of the compression on 00's albums was added BEFORE the mastering process?

that's not the kind of compression that's the issue

Yeah, it's about ramming the levels of every component up so high that it all just mashes together, and mastering the final mix beyond saturation point. In order to have some of this stuff sounding reasonable, it'd have to be re-engineered.

ah gotcha, I think I already knew that but forgot (xpost)

yeah it seems like a total ground-up remix from the original tracks is the only way you could fix this kinda thing.

Not at all -- I've seen plenty of bitching from people who finalized mixes they were happy with, and then had the mastering engineer squash it all too loud. It'd be incredibly simple to just master them again. To, umm, "re-master" them, as it were.

They're all different.

interesting point buried in this ipds are making ppl deaf!! report:

Professor Christian Huggonet has told France's Le Figaro newspaper that 10 to 20% of adolescents surveyed had poor hearing.

He also said the use of "compressed" sound in modern media — in which weak signals are boosted to the level of stronger ones — is changing the way people speak.

"Once the ear has got accustomed to this kind of sound, it finds it very hard to return to sounds of weak intensity," Professor Huggonet said.

"Young children used to watching cartoons with compressed sound can end up speaking in the same loud, monotone way."

this thread isn't very funny ;_;

serious custos is serious

IN A WAY, ABUSE OF DYNAMIC RANGE COMPRESSION MAY BE COMPARED TO WRITING AN ENTIRE POST ON, SAY, ILM, USING ALL-CAPS-LOCK. I THINK THIS SUMS UP BETTER THAN ANYTHING ELSE WHAT THE LOUDNESS WAR IS ABOUT.

How does range compression affect the way people speak? Do they start to sound like an ELO record?

If something using range compression is playing in the background, people will start to sound like James Hetfield. To be heard.

Anything that makes people sound like an ELO record should be encouraged!

I wonder how much of the compression on 00's albums was added BEFORE the mastering process?

-- sleeve, Thursday, 3 January 2008 20:41 (6 days ago) Link

that's not the kind of compression that's the issue

-- Jordan, Thursday, 3 January 2008 20:45 (6 days ago) Link

Well, it's part of the issue. Most of the time people are compressing individual tracks and then compressing the master again. The loudness war tends to refer to mastering compression, but too much mixing compression can produce bad effects too.

the right sorts of mix compression can drastically reduce the need to overlimit tracks just for reasons of volume.

I recently made a driving mix for CD and was frustrated by the huge range of levels. My remastered version of The Who's "Out In The Street" sounds great, especially in the car, on a shitty boombox, not so much on headphones. I loaded it into Audacity and had a look at it, and it had such extreme clipping, it looked like a solid block. Given the originally distorted sound of that particular song, it kind of worked. I went ahead and compressed and clipped the hell out of most of the other songs on the mix to try to match those levels. I couldn't bring myself to go to that extreme, but at least the rest are just about as audible in comparison. Kind of micro-model of how the compression trend snowballed I'm sure.

If in doubt, just download the free software and look at the waves to compare different music:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

My hope would be that as more stuff becomes available for download, they'd start to introduce decent masters of uncompressed .wav and lossless codecs along with the .mp3 and .aac for mass market. However, I don't know that the "audiophile market" (those who listen to music at home on decent speakers rather than on noisy trains and in their cars) will ever be big enough to be catered to overall.

there are some classical companies that are offering uncompressed downloads in .wav form...huge files obviously but i think the market is starting to develop.

I've been trying to get most of the stuff on my ipod normalized, so that I can listen on shuffle at whatever volume I want, without massive shifts from track to track blasting my ears off. In doing this, I've been opening more or less everything in a wave editor. So fucking appalled by the clipping/compression on a lot of stuff I've downloaded/ripped, that I'm just basically trashing everything that looks like a solid block. Shit sounds hellish shrill, anyways.

there are some classical companies that are offering uncompressed downloads in .wav form

There are rationally mastered CDs being sold. They just aren't in the US mainstream pop rock market. Most of my import remasters of classic rock are OK. Plus there are still a lot of undermastered CDs from the early Nineties still floating around, particularly at budget price.

In contrast, everything that comes out of Nashville is set to blare at any volume. I always have to remember to turn the stereo down when I go from the former to the latter, say, like Sugarland's new one.

I don't listen at all on earbuds. MP3's sound noticeably inferior to me. Most of my stuff still comes out of a nice but not extravagant stereo, only about one percent sitting at the computer, a terrible way to listen to the music I like.

I don't know that the "audiophile market"

Incidentally, I'm hardly an audiophile. Since the standards have been lowered (or twisted, perhaps) so much, it would seem anyone who doesn't listen on iPod or computer is deemed an audiophile.

MP3s seem to be decent at maintaining the dynamic range of the source recording, at least at reasonable bitrates (192 or so).

Incidentally, I'm hardly an audiophile. Since the standards have been lowered (or twisted, perhaps) so much, it would seem anyone who doesn't listen on iPod or computer is deemed an audiophile.

Yeah, that's why I put the quotes in. I'm audiophile by mainstream standards, but real audiophiles would laugh at my rig. I've enjoyed upgrading my speakers, but can't yet bring myself to buy pre/pro and amp that costs as much as a car.

I'm hardly an audiophile either, though for listening at home through decent speakers, I'd rather have a better source than MP3. Though for listening in the car, I think MP3s are fine, since the road noise drowns out the fine detail anyway.

High bitrate MP3s don't sound atrocious to me. In a quiet room, on a nice system, you notice the loss, but even then, it's not so profound as some make out. Then again, maybe I don't have the ears/gear. Either way, I don't like the sound of hypercompressed audio. Cuts through the chatter, but so does a car alarm.

No, they're not terrible by any means. Sometimes the MP3 actually sounds better than the original - depending on the recording. They tend to round off the upper treble a bit, which can improve some harsh trebly CDs. Sometimes reducing the density of detail helps the ear pick out the important elements more easily - so I think they can actually be more pleasant to listen to for certain types of music. You do lose small subtleties of texture and detail though.

let's not confuse compression in mixing & mastering with audio format compression (mp3s)

Yeah, maybe the mp3 discussion belongs on a different thread.

Yeah, though I was referring to MP3s, I was talking about dynamic range compression & clipping in mastering (at least I presume it's in the mastering, and that these things weren't actually mixed for bricklike sound).

http://www.nme.com/news/metallica/39816

nme website readers comments don't see what the fuss is about

MASTERER of puppets LOL

DEAF magnetic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

now it makes a lot more sense to me (though i could hear the problem with certain releases, i couldn't really figure out what was going on in regards to the mastering process)

no doubt you'll tell me this aint the crux of the issue, but hey ..

Coo - Jarvis Cocker just quoted a bit of Nick's Stylus essay on Radio 6.

Someone else told me this; what was the context, which bit did he quote?

i genuinely have still never noticed this

though i know someone who swears down he can't tell the difference between a 320kbps and 128kbps mp3, which is just completely o_0 to me, so maybe it's like that

I think he was reading a bit that was quoted in Perfecting Sound Forever?

It's about an hour and 10 mins from the end of the show if you look it up on iplayer anyway.

How very bizarre to hear Jarvis speak my name on the radio. My mum will be thrilled; she's from Sheffield and knows who Jarvis is!

I can't say I've ever consciously had a big problem with this but that Iggy experiment is pretty blatantly obvious.

Link?

http://web.archive.org/web/20060612221324/http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/imperfect-sound-forever.htm

Oh, thanks! :-)

I've read the article more than once; I have the issue of Best New Music it's in. Just looking for the Jarvis bit. I'm going to go searching.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00qhrx6/Jarvis_Cockers_Sunday_Service_31_01_2010/

55 minutes in

The Loudness Wars: Is Music's Noisy Arms Race Over?

For genres like pop and rap that already used heavily-processed sounds, this wasn't a big problem, and some say limiting has been a productive tool. For music that uses live recordings of drums, guitars, and piano, however, such processing arguably ruins the experience of listening to music made by humans. The biggest furor surrounding loudness centered on Metallica's 2008 album Death Magnetic, a piece of music so loud that some fans called it "barely listenable" and prompted one person to complain that "to hear this much pure damage done to what was obviously originally a decent recording, in the mistaken belief that it sounds good, is hard to stomach." At the time, the outlook seemed bleak. If there was no impetus to get quieter but every advantage to pushing volume to the maximum level technology could achieve, why wouldn't the trend toward increased loudness continue forever?

To counter this seeming economic inevitability, some critics of loudness turned to legal remedies. Audio engineer Thomas Lund has been working in Europe to lobby for governmental regulations on a standard loudness limit on all CDs and digital music. (The limit has so far been adopted as a universal standard by the International Telecommunications Union, which describes itself as "the UN agency for information and communication technologies.") You already have something like this at home if you use iTunes: Just check the box that says "Sound Check" in the preferences menu and the volume level on all of your songs will be equalized. Lund's proposal would do the same thing for any music you could buy.

Taking advantage of the trend towards listening to music from the digital "cloud"—via services like Pandora, Spotify, and Apple's forthcoming iCloud—the proposal would institute a volume limit on any songs downloaded from the cloud, effectively removing the strategic advantage of loudness. "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," said legendary engineer Bob Ludwig, who has been working with Lund, in an email. "There will be nothing to gain from a musical point of view. Louder will no longer be better!"

But while the proposal has seen some success in the EU, it seems unlikely that audiophiles could rely on the US government to take a similar stand, in large part because it isn't a matter of public concern. "I don't see it happening," wrote Greg Milner, author of Perfecting Sound Forever: The Aural History of Recorded Music, in an email. "I think the general increase in awareness regarding the issue is more than counter-balanced by the fact that, by and large, nobody (in a sweeping, generalized sense) cares about music sounding 'good' in some sort of rarefied way. It's more important that it be heard above the noise of everyday life, since we hear so much of our music on the go."

Indie songwriter Owen Pallett went so far as to record all of the vocals for his 2006 Polaris Prize-winning album He Poos Clouds without compression, a step not taken since the early days of sound recording.

this is a weird and out-of-place detail. I'm no expert on sound recording technology, but surely recording without compression and mastering without compression are two completely different processes. and applying dynamic range compression to individual vocal tracks is different from applying a uniform level of compression to the final mix (vocals, instruments, and all). the loudness wars brouhaha is only really concerned with the latter practice.

besides, it's not even true, according to Owen:

He Poos Clouds is uncompressed, except for one note. (The timpani hit right after "I'm just made" on the title track).

― Owen Pallett (Owen Pallett), Tuesday, August 1, 2006 12:06 AM (4 years ago)

Whoop. I lied. We did compress the vocals. But everybody compresses the vocals, it sounds weird without it.

― Owen Pallett (Owen Pallett), Tuesday, August 1, 2006 2:24 PM (4 years ago)

yeah, vocal compression is almost necessary.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/02/mastered-for-itunes-how-audio-engineers-tweak-tunes-for-the-ipod-age.ars

That's one for the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" files.

Format conversion, dithering and compression are different beasts than "dynamic range compression". Still, an interesting article.

I had a WTF moment when I ripped Youtube audio for a DJ set and decided to tweak the EQ in Logic. I was surprised at how muffled the track sounded compared to the other songs. Flipping on the frequency analyzer, it seems that Youtube audio contains NO audio information above 15 kHz.

ha, i did the same thing recently. did you use it? i overdubbed some tambourine and lasers.

Smart! No, nothing as cool as that, I used a gentle plug-in called Vintage Warmer, which simulates tape saturation. It didn't *really* do the trick, but I went with it.

Then I e-mailed the friend who'd played the track for me originally and asked him for a copy of the CD version.

(The track was "Jon E Storm" by Dog Ruff. Good track! I don't even know where it came from, some German electroclash compilation.)

here's the one i used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzQ_xGsxgvs

but since the mix isn't yet, you inspired me to get a legit copy, so thanks!

WHOA! Sounds muddy as anything, what a mess. (20% suspicious that the problem might be in the mix entire.)

I mean, his ssss's are all there but Magnolia sounds like she's shouting in the basement; the drum machine and high end on the sawtooths are non-existant, etc. Youtube audio! Fuggedaboutit.

i think it might be a radio rip too - i downloaded an mp3 that sounds waaaay better.

https://gist.github.com/kylemcdonald/1fab024c9878106b486deb1a26bc2079

http://i.imgur.com/UoQIzG8.png

the tempo plot is super interesting btw

http://i.imgur.com/0wNMcw9.png