
The loudness wars: Why music sounds worse (2009) - aycangulez
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122114058
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pixdamix
If you want to test the average loudness of your files you can use libebur128.
I found amazing differences between same album re-editions. I'm not an
audiophile, I just have a High-Enough-Fi systems.

    
    
        # cd /tmp
        # wget http://www-public.tu- bs.de:8080/\~y0035293/libebur128-0.1.11-Source.tar.gz
        # tar -zxvf libebur128-0.1.11-Source.tar.gz
        # cd libebur128-0.1.11-Source
        # cmake .
        # make -j 10
        # gcc minimal_example.c -I../include -L../ -lebur128 -lsndfile -o r128-test
    
        # r128-test "t/Yann Tiersen/1999 - Black Session/03 - Life on Mars (feat. Neil Hannon).flac"
        global loudness: -17.2 LUFS

~~~
CrazedGeek
<http://www.dr.loudness-war.info/> is good for a large amount of albums, too.

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tumult
The loudness war is actually pretty much over. Lots of the newest dance music
from popular artists (deadmau5, Justice, etc.) have lower RMS than mid-2000s
rock, which is the genre and time when lookahead loudness maximizers were
seeing the most abuse.

(The article is full of technical inaccuracies. Compressors, depending on how
they are set, do not reduce the attack transients of a sound like a snare
drum, they _exaggerate_ it. Also, it's from 2009.)

~~~
sp332
I still hate what Clear Channel does to classic rock, though. Should be
criminal to treat music that way. Ever heard Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" with
no dynamic range? * shivers _

~~~
cynicalkane
Ever heard Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", unaltered, while driving a car? Unless
you turn up the volume pretty loud, you won't hear about 2/3 of the song. This
is why radio stations process all tracks they play.

~~~
qjz
That's why playback devices should have a "compression" knob, instead of
hardcoding it into the media itself. It would be useful in the living room
(for television dialog) as well as in noisy environments like the car.

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zwieback
Related and also somewhat dated: Apparently youngsters are starting to prefer
the artifacts of MP3 sound in general:

[http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-
music...](http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music.html)

~~~
aycangulez
Not really. It is actually the opposite. See: "Harman debunks youthful music
myths" <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2427217>

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drdaeman
The "Digital Compression" section feels misleading. Maybe that's my
misunderstanding, though.

As I understand it, when we compress audio file, so from a 100s MiB of raw
wave data it'll become a several-MiB file, we perform a (discrete) Fourier
transform, get rid of less significant frequencies (thus compressing the
data), and record the coefficients. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.

So I don't get the "rough edges you end up with in the digital recording"
part. It is applicable to pre-compressed data, but that's another topic.

~~~
gabrielroth
You're confusing dynamic range compression with digital file compression.
Totally different things. The only thing they have in common is that they make
something smaller.

~~~
mambodog
Did you read the article? There is a section entitled "Digital Compression"
which actually seems to be just describing the nature of digital
representation of sound, and what happens when you reduce the resolution of
that representation ie. bit depth/sample rate. Then it awkwardly jumps into
talking about MP3 compression. None of this is relevant to the "Loudness Wars"
topic, which as you've rightly pointed out deals with dynamic range
compression, yet all these things are referred to in the article. GP is
confused by the inclusion of the unrelated material. The article is sloppy and
unfocused.

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mambodog
Shit like this makes me wish HN had downvotes for articles.

~~~
gabrielroth
Good thing it has them for comments!

