
Why Do All Records Sound the Same? - wsdan
https://medium.com/cuepoint/why-do-all-records-sound-the-same-830ba863203
======
sparkzilla
So many problems with this article. I recently started recording music after a
long break and I love that everything is in the computer now. I had one of the
very first Pro tools systems and it cost $12,000 (25MB hard drive). Gear that
used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars is now available with a click. I
had always wanted to use great compressors and they are almost all available
now as plug-ins. I also took some old tracks and ran them through the Waves
maximizers - what a difference. What this means is that anyone with some
musical and recording skills can compete against record companies.

It seems to me that the writer of the article just doesn't like pop music, and
doesn't understand the business of pop music. Pop music, and especially pop
music on the radio, has its own rules. It's no use getting upset about them.
There's a lot of skill in engineering recordings that work on the radio. And
Autotune is great. It's like getting upset that a movie director uses special
effects. Good music always transcends the technology. Do you care that Gravity
wasn't actually filmed in space?

If you want your music to sound like it was recorded in the sixties you can do
so either by getting the vintage equipment or using vintage-style plug ins.
But if the Beatles were around today they would be using all of the latest
techniques, just like they were at the forefront of recording technology back
then.

Meanwhile, my ten-year-old daughter just bought a record player and Taylor
Swift on vinyl.

~~~
TomWhitwell
Hi, Thanks for reading! I think we agree more than you think. What I wanted to
do with the article was explain why music sounds like it does, explaining why
the 'rules' are the way they are. I hate it when people imply producers are
stupid or lazy or unskilled or uncreative because they're making pop - if it
was easy to craft a radio hit that will cut through in 7 seconds in a
listening session, we'd all be doing it and living in mansions. What I thought
was interesting about the Maroon 5 stuff at the start wasn't that it was lazy,
but that it was really hard, boring work that they didn't seem to enjoy very
much. That wasn't how I perceived the process of making pop hits. Re: the
Beatles today; of course they'd use the latest technology, but they might
still have a hard time cutting through in a seven second listening session.
Now, as then, there are other ways to be successful beyond pop radio. When I'm
talking about Neil Young & Rick Rubin/Johnny Cash, I'm looking at the way
studio recording has changed. It's certainly not better or worse, but it is
interestingly different.

~~~
sparkzilla
Thanks for writing the article. I'm in the middle of rediscovering the tools
of recording so it made me think about many things.

------
dankoss
Nitpicks: "A great deal of quality is lost as those huge files are squished to
the CD format, before being further squished into MP3s on your iPod." Not
true, AAC files at high bitrates are proven to be indistinguishable from the
original. [http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-
young.html](http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html)

"Every part of the signal chain—from earbuds to digital/audio converters—is
improving and getting cheaper." Like other technologies, digital audio had
rapid improvements in the first 10 years but has mostly leveled off as we have
reached the limits of physics, signals and sampling. Good audio equipment is
still expensive and power hungry in every part of the chain.

Technology won't save what are fundamentally psychological issues. We respond
emotionally to louder signals. We like songs that sound similar but not
identical to things we've heard before. We listen to things that our friends
like. All of this points to why top 40 songs sound the same, but "all records"
is pretty broad. There has never been a better time to create something new in
music, and yet we lean heavily on what has worked before -- in songwriting, in
arrangement, in production -- so that others will like and identify with the
creative output.

~~~
sp332
The format is not the limitation, but audio engineers (for major studios
anyway) tend to crank the volume up on CDs more often than vinyl releases.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war)

~~~
splawn
I was once told that when mastering for vinyl you have to be careful with
extremes because it can cause the needle to jump off the record.

~~~
louthy
That's frequency extremes. So the high and low ends of the frequency range are
rolled off. Also wide stereo in the bass region can cause the needle to jump,
so either the bass needs to be reduced in volume or made mono/as-close-to-mono
as possible.

Dynamic range is less of a problem.

------
api
Stuff like this reminds me a lot of sugary simple-carb-laden junk food. The
holy grail of popular marketing is to find a way to tap into some kind of
simple and probably very evolutionarily ancient "craving" or "desire" pathway
in the brain. Seems like they've learned a whole collection of hacks to do
this with music, and are now just cranking out manufactured pop music full of
those hacks. Combined with repetition in the radio (familiarity, another
cognitive bias), they can churn out predictable hits.

The question is whether people will ever get smarter and start being picky.
We've seen a bit of this in food. The whole/natural/craft/whatever foods
movement contains a fair amount of superstitious nonsense, but at its core
it's ultimately about consumers being a lot pickier about what they eat. I
think the overall effect is good -- people eating healthier food and
deliberately turning down addictive nutritionally devoid junk. Maybe we'll
eventually get an equivalent movement in music.

~~~
wvenable
> The question is whether people will ever get smarter and start being picky.

The market for music is typically youth. So people probably do get smarter,
start being picky, and stop being youth. But there's always another generation
right behind.

~~~
agumonkey
At the same time other factors kicks in. As you get older you have less free
time, you may or may not want to discover new things, you just listen to some
easy songs on your way to work, and start to like them because they're part of
your daily routine.

~~~
davidgerard
On the other hand, there's the factor of the hip music (not the top 100)
getting box sets twenty years later ... because that's when the music fans
have jobs and money.

------
101914
"Rick Rubin's recordings of Johnny Cash are extraordinarily intimate and
affecting. But they don't sound anything like Johnny Cash sitting in your
living room playing some songs. They sound like you're perched on Johnny
Cash's lap with one ear in his mouth and a stethoscope on his guitar."

------
chromaton
This reminds me of this recent popular YouTube mashup:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vapt5C3yDeY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vapt5C3yDeY)

6 recent hit country songs combined into one. They blend into each other
perfectly.

~~~
Jgrubb
That's hilarious, but it sounds like those tunes were pitch shifted into the
same key. Nashville producers have more skill than that. Oh, and FL/GA line is
frigging awful.

~~~
baddox
The pitch and tempos are shifted, but more nefariously, the pieces of the
songs which don't fit the VI-I-V progression are removed and replaced by
pieces of other songs which do fit. It's deliberate and meticulous cherry-
picking. The only thing _all_ the songs have in common is that they're in 4/4
and the verses and choruses all start on the VI chord. I should make a table
showing the actual chord progressions from each song and how the creator
deliberately masked out the parts of each song which are different from the
baseline the creator chose.

~~~
Jgrubb
That would require you to listen to and chart out these 6 mediocre songs. I
wouldn't ask you to do that. You've got a music background, I take it?

~~~
baddox
And now I've done it:
[http://baddox.github.io/six_country_songs.html](http://baddox.github.io/six_country_songs.html)

------
k-mcgrady
>> "In a very few years, we’ll have 1 terabyte iPods, easily capable of
handling thousands of recordings in their original high-definition form."

I doubt it. I think we'll be lucky if Apple has increased the maximum
configuration to 256GB in a few years. The other issue is that people have
moved to streaming and the connections aren't good enough to stream high-
quality audio. I signed up for Tidal (lossless Spotify) and even on a decent
internet connection it had to buffer and the experience wasn't good enough for
me to stick around.

~~~
krallja
> This article originally appeared in the March, 2008 edition of Word
> Magazine.

------
S_A_P
In my flirtation with being a musician I've learned a fair bit about how to
record in a home studio. I think he has simplified a lot of this but
considering the audience of this article I get it. The one point I do agree
with is that technology isn't the problem.

I use Logic, Sonar, Reason and FL Studio quite extensively depending on the
project and really have very little problem sounding like it was recorded in
the 1960s or 70s. Technology is good enough that all but the most trained ear
won't notice whether you used a real Fairchild compressor or the UAD dsp
version.(or substitute your favorite vintage compressor/effect/synthesizer/amp
vs software) However most people don't want the whole record to sound that
way. It's great for setting a mood, but the average pop listener wants loud
repetitive and catchy hooks. Experimenting is for the established "wealthy"
and "bored" artists that need to find long term relevance.

In general the labels don't subsidize the breadth of records that they used
to. One of the best ways to make the point that the industry is the problem is
to thumb through my dads collection of vinyl. Some notable records he owns
that would _never_ be produced today are "Big Sounds of the drags"
[http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pEdfuX1ni9E](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pEdfuX1ni9E)
The Zodiac:cosmic sounds
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zodiac:_Cosmic_Sounds](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zodiac:_Cosmic_Sounds)
I have a ton of old vinyl from people who are not attractive enough to make a
record today. Like it or not the recording industry is about image, marketing
and recipes more than music. I don't think this is a revelation to anyone and
it may not even be wrong. I think what many musicians get wrong is that they
think they can try to latch on to the old business model and "make it"\-
becoming rich in a few years. These days that is .01% of artists. However if
you think of a record _as_ marketing and look for other ways to monetize your
band and its brand you can get by in the middle class. Even in the hey day it
wasn't a golden ticket for most artists. Really there has _always_ been a
problem with the record industry in some form or fashion, but since power is
shifting towards artists and home studios labels are much more risk averse. No
matter how good you are, it's a risky profession.

------
kokey
I often recommend people read the little book "The Manual" by the KLF.
[http://freshonthenet.co.uk/the-manual-by-the-
klf/](http://freshonthenet.co.uk/the-manual-by-the-klf/)

It was written by them after they made their first number 1 hit single, back
in 1988. They went ahead and had a few number ones since. That was over 25
years ago. It's a good overview of the chart music industry and much of the
book is still relevant even now, and they were even able to predict that a lot
of the studio work should be possible to do in the bedroom in the future.

------
Gracana
> Worse still, the technology behind systems like Waves Ultramaximizer could
> easily be built into an iPod, automatically remastering all those dull old
> Neil Young records into BIG LOUD IN-YOUR-FACE BANGERS.

I believe Museum of Techno has done some work on this problem.

[http://archive.museumoftechno.org/exhibition_detail.php?id=5](http://archive.museumoftechno.org/exhibition_detail.php?id=5)

~~~
davidgerard
:-D

Loudness wars is the sound of the genre, to be fair. But not everything is
ear-bashing techno.

------
graycat
I like music, really like music, but haven't been able to listen to _pop_
music since I discovered Beethoven late one night on a radio while going to
sleep.

Now I like, say

[http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Cello+Suite+No+1+Bach/3seBIM?src...](http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Cello+Suite+No+1+Bach/3seBIM?src=5)

~~~
edejong
It has been mentioned on HN before, but you might still be interested in
[http://allofbach.com/nl/bwv/bwv-1007/detail/](http://allofbach.com/nl/bwv/bwv-1007/detail/)

It's relevant to the discussion, since the masterful recording of these pieces
is itself a work of art.

~~~
graycat
Gee, it can be played that way, too! Well, the _interpretation_ is consistent
across the parts!

The cello sound is gorgeous beyond belief: I can't believe it's just
performer, rosin, strings, bow, and room and also has to be one totally
gorgeous cello. Beyond belief sound! Don't dare move the sound post or change
the bridge!

Thanks!

------
enos_feedler
“Musicians are inherently lazy,” says John. “If there’s an easier way of doing
something than actually playing, they’ll do that"

Musicians sound a lot like developers

------
sideshowb
We are already starting to win the loudness war now thanks to iTunes
SoundCheck. I'm not an iTunes user but as far as I understand it, it causes
iTunes to adjust all tunes in a mix to the same perceptual loudness. If
everyone adopted this or a similar technology (such as the open ReplayGain)
there would be no incentive to master loud any more, for albums at least,
because the player will only turn it down again meaning the net result is only
loss of quality. Hopefully iTunes support for this tech is a turning point in
the loudness war.

~~~
SwellJoe
That can't actually account for perceived loudness, which modern mastering
processes _do_ account for. The absolute amplitude of a song has always been
fixed, by the technology delivering the audio. Radio, the primary medium for
music discovery throughout most of our lives, has a very hard upper bound (set
by both the technology and the FCC), thus a compressor/limiter is employed at
the final stage before sending the audio out of the radio station to go up the
tower and out over the waves. There has always been _that_ sort of leveling
going on.

Modern tools provide an entirely new dimension in the form of multi-band
compression, digital phase alignment, etc. It is now possible (and being done
in nearly every genre) to make a recording perceptively louder than other
recordings by maximizing amplitude in specific bands (those humans are most
sensitive to), reduce phase cancellation between speakers, and hype the sound
(boosting high and low frequencies, which tricks the ear into hearing it in
the same way as louder music...but also causes listener fatigue faster), often
all at once.

Amplitude compression, even when it's smart enough to recognize that there's
more activity across a broader spectrum as provided by SoundCheck, does
nothing to restore the damage to dynamic range, natural frequency response
curves, and "real" sounding recorded music. The music is broken by these
processes...the listener has no power to fix it, other than to not buy it, and
choose music that hasn't been mutilated in such a way.

~~~
sideshowb
The main weapons in raising perceived loudness are brickwall limiters such as
Waves L3 which raise RMS (root mean square) amplitude while keeping peak
levels constant. I think soundcheck is based on RMS, please correct me if I'm
wrong - if it were based on peak levels then as you say it would indeed be
useless.

I don't know how much or whether the other technologies you mention really
help to boost perceived loudness much beyond what is measured by RMS.
Multiband compression raises RMS. Boosting high and low frequencies (aka "bare
fat bass and mad amounts of high end" [1] - beyond what is wanted for a good
sound) could be defeated by measuring RMS based on equal loudness/frequency
curves. I've never really used the other things you mention but whatever they
are they can be defeated by technology that measures their effect in the
listener device. That's _if_ they can cheat RMS anyway - I'm not sure they can
but if you do have data on that I'd be interested to see it.

As you say, sound quality is still lost, but if normalization (over the album
length where necessary, of course) becomes the defacto standard in playback
technology then the _incentive_ for making bad quality/loudness tradeoffs in
album mastering is gone. The standard if adopted would restore the dynamic
range by taking away the engineers' incentive to compromise it. The engineers
would doubtless breathe a sigh of relief as most of them are more bothered
about this than we are.

Analog radio would still be mastered stupidly loud. I would assume final stage
compression in radio broadcast is keyed on peak not RMS level, again please
correct me if I'm wrong. But it's a dying medium anyway.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nlzwDfxVSg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nlzwDfxVSg)

~~~
SwellJoe
_That 's if they can cheat RMS anyway - I'm not sure they can but if you do
have data on that I'd be interested to see it._

RMS is a measure of power, not of perception. You don't have to defeat RMS to
defeat perceived loudness.

But, you're right that a playback device _could_ take measures to defeat the
perceived loudness baked in (though they'd get quite complex, as the tools for
baking it in are extremely complex these days, and I don't actually understand
half of them, despite having studied audio in college and worked in the
industry). I don't know if it would actually improve listener experience to do
so, though. Ending the "Oh shit that's loud!" and "Why is this song so quiet?"
problem would be positive for listeners, of course. But, at what cost?

 _" Analog radio would still be mastered stupidly loud. I would assume final
stage compression in radio broadcast is keyed on peak not RMS level, again
please correct me if I'm wrong. But it's a dying medium anyway."_

Analog radio (and digital broadcast radio, as they still compress, despite
some of the technical reasons for doing so being gone, inertia is strong in
broadcast; I have noticed that Pandora and Spotify do _not_ do any sort of
compression, however, which is nice...but also annoying when the playlist has
new and old music as the difference can be _massive_ and unnerving) was among
the earliest adopters of various technology to make music perceptively louder.
Aural Exciters (a very early salvo in the loudness war) were available in a
broadcast targeted version from very early on, etc.

I haven't been in the broadcast industry in a long time, and I worked in
television rather than radio (though the station I worked for shared a tower
with several radio stations and another TV station), but I'm reasonably
confident radio stations in major markets still tend to have the most modern
"make it loud!" devices available. Loudness=listeners in radio. That's _why_
the loudness wars are happening.

~~~
sideshowb
I agree with most of these points. I should have been clearer in what I meant,
RMS is a measure of power and a proxy for perception - according to you, a
worse proxy than I thought, so thanks for educating me on that point.

"I don't know if it would actually improve listener experience to do so,
though" \- except inasmuch as it would remove the incentive to master albums
too loud. And if it were the default in all playback devices (digital radio,
codecs) it would also remove the incentive in broadcast. The only catch is it
relies on the broadcaster not owning the means of playback, which with
internet radio they sometimes do. But if it's someone like Spotify they are in
a position to prioritize sound quality - are people really going to leave
Spotify because it's too quiet when the thing has a volume control you can
just turn up if you want? It's not like surfing analog radio channels used to
be.

------
mrbill
Even twenty years ago when I worked in radio (89-93), the song playlist was
determined 2-3 weeks in advance. The station had software that ran on a TRS-80
and I had a printout to follow every shirt.

------
evo_9
Mainstream music, sure, but there will always be bands like The Flaming Lips,
or My Bloody Valentine releasing records that are completely counter to this
approach.

I would argue that any 'true artist' \- aka one that is consumed with the
perfection of their art - is not going to be swayed to produce a 'hit' no
matter what the studio wants (they simply won't sign with a big label to begin
with, I know plenty of musicians that feel this way and are happy on an indie
label).

~~~
davidgerard
The mainstream is fragmenting now that people can get access to music without
it, per Steve Albini's recent update to "The Problem With Music":
[http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-
albinis-k...](http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-
keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full)

Per the article, the "mainstream" is literally music for people who _don 't
like music_.

~~~
sparkzilla
>Per the article, the "mainstream" is literally music for people who _don 't
like music_.

No doubt your parents thought the same about your music choices.

~~~
davidgerard
Did you read the article? Hence me saying "per the article". They specifically
look for people who aren't into music to test against.

~~~
sparkzilla
I see what you mean now. Although "don't like music" is not the same as
"aren't into music". This goes back to the definition of what "real" music is.
I'm fairly certain suburban moms (one of the suggested demographics in the
article) will know quite a lot about radio-friendly music through their kids.
In that sense they are an ideal demographic. I also don't see a problem with
testing the hooks of songs against the market before making a substantial
effort in promoting those songs -- that's common sense.

------
zaroth
I started up here, and I ended up here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOAowiF3y_8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOAowiF3y_8)

The lead up is a little long, but when the music finally starts it's bliss.

I say, lament all you want. That's fine, some of it is cheap entertainment.
But here's the thing, some artists will strive to create at that level,
because that level is there, and it's never been more accessible. My takeaway
is that the tools have never been greater. The level of access to other
people, to grow organically, if not virally, has never been better.

Has this resulted in us discovering greater artists and getting better music
created? That would be an interesting article.

@sparkzilla - 'What this means is that anyone with some musical and recording
skills can compete against record companies.'

Yes. It's not about being a 'fair fight' but there is a fight there.

@dankoss - 'There has never been a better time to create something new in
music'

Totally agree. Let's hear it. Seriously, the response is, bring it. Great
music will always draw an audience.

------
chiph
This is why I enjoy listening to records that people like Alan Parsons have
engineered ( _Dark Side of the Moon_ , Al Stewart's _Year of the Cat_ , as
well as his work with The Alan Parsons Project).

Also good are those remasters reissued by Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs.
www.mofi.com

I'd probably enjoy modern pop music (even teen hits like Meghan Trainor) if it
didn't all sound the same.

------
bobstobener
Live mics. Live guitars, bass & drums. One take. Play loud.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iaINsgFHVs&spfreload=10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iaINsgFHVs&spfreload=10)

~~~
agumonkey
Reminds me of
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXzFCS72QIA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXzFCS72QIA)
intro piano glitch. 4 guys in a small room, 4 track recorder, no edit.

~~~
bobstobener
Nice!

------
swills
Found this video

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPQiHyJj7Wk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPQiHyJj7Wk)

introducing the Google Radio Automation suite which seems to be what came
after the SS32 thing mentioned in the article. Seems like Google got out of
that business in 2009:

[http://www.wideorbit.com/wideorbit-acquires-google-radio-
aut...](http://www.wideorbit.com/wideorbit-acquires-google-radio-automation/)

------
mproy
Hard to pick the best nugget to use as I email this to friends, but I like
this: "The Strokes recorded Is This It on an old Apple Mac in Gordon Raphael’s
basement studio. But it was mastered by Greg Calbi, who also did Born To Run
and Graceland."

Great essay. Really sums up modern commercially recorded music.

------
simonh
You think pop is homogenous, try Country:

[http://kbia.org/post/you-know-exactly-what-
these-6-country-s...](http://kbia.org/post/you-know-exactly-what-
these-6-country-songs-have-
common&ei=Izq1VOS-F4mpogTrt4HoBQ&usg=AFQjCNG58rzCHZqBOLGaZRv70TfXIUxy4A)

~~~
soylentcola
This was referenced in earlier posts here but these are also chopped up and
edited to fit.

And besides, this is also pop. The original article mostly discusses pop rock
(compared to rock music generally created for other markets than top 40 pop)
but country follows the same industry trends. There's country music that's
meant to get on the radio and sell hit records and there's country music that
is going for something different.

Just as you have a Maroon 5 for every White Stripes, you have an Old 97's or
Eddie Spaghetti for every band on this list of 6 nearly identical songs.

------
SixSigma
Records? What are records daddy ?

~~~
davidgerard
"They used to sell YouTube video soundtracks on big pieces of plastic. I have
some in boxes in the attic."

