
YouTube puts the final nail in the loudness wars' coffin - anigbrowl
http://productionadvice.co.uk/youtube-loudness/
======
polshaw
>[on YT] Everything plays at a similar loudness, regardless of how it was
mastered. And no-one has noticed.

None of _us_ noticed; it seems like the labels and sound engineers may have;
take this image comparing the dynamic range of the CD and youtube releases of
Pharrell's "Happy"[1]- I thought at the time it might just have been a mishap
or random occurance, but now it looks like it was a very deliberate move.

So, rather than ending the loudness wars on CDs and radio, we might end up
long-term with the ludicrous situation where CD's sound worse than technically
inferior Youtube videos. _Youtube_ is the new vinyl.

-

E: I added links to the YT release[2] and (presumaby) a CD-sourced video[3]
for anyone who wants to listen to the difference. Pay attention to the claps
and drums (but I think it's obvious even on my laptop speakers).

1\. [https://imgur.com/KRj5DDS](https://imgur.com/KRj5DDS)

2\. [https://youtu.be/ZbZSe6N_BXs](https://youtu.be/ZbZSe6N_BXs)

3\. [https://youtu.be/nVH6RcLHqMo](https://youtu.be/nVH6RcLHqMo)

~~~
72deluxe
I noticed! I am a bass player who now happens to write software in the audio
industry (I work for a company that makes hardware). But I noticed before
coming here.

Some of the worst CDs in my record collection are: 1\. Paul McCartney - Memory
Almost Full (this is the worst album I own - considering Sir Paul left The
Beatles over the mix of The Long and Winding Road, he should leave his own
band over his master of this album.... I wonder if Phil Spector bribed Bob
Ludwig to do that in time-delayed revenge???)

2\. Rush - Vapor Trails (not helped by distortion during recording; it's one
BIG square wave)

3\. The Fratellis - Costello Music (distortion all the way through the album)

4\. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Stadium Arcadium (there's no possible way to make
the first track sound quiet, try it!); apparently the vinyl has a different
master and sounds infinitely better.

5\. Foo Fighters - One By One (boxy drum sound and non-compliant CD format
aside [chock full of copy protection so you won't see "Compact Disc" on the CD
at all....], it's loud loud loud).

I could go on.

Considering the effort musicians go to get the best sound engineers, recording
equipment, A to D converters, studio time and instruments, to throw it all
away on a LOUD CD seems stupid to me. It means the album won't stand the test
of time, and will sound as abysmal in the future as the day it was released;
it is very short-sighted to release a LOUD CD for commercial gain (radio???
does anyone master just for radio still?) in the short term.

~~~
StavrosK
Try System of a Down's Holy Mountain, where the damn CD _clips_! I can't
imagine who would let a CD track clip.

~~~
boomskats
Pretty sure that first MGMT album clips all over the place. And yeah I agree.

That first SOAD album is an impressive piece of mastering though.

~~~
morganvachon
> Pretty sure that first MGMT album clips all over the place.

I haven't heard their first album but I'm surprised at this. In my experience,
most indie acts have greater creative control over mastering and just about
every indie act I listen to (with the exception of some of the heavier stuff)
is very light on the "loudness". By contrast, some of the more "pop" stuff I
like, even songs that should be clean and distortion free, are unnecessarily
jacked up way past the redline. A great example is John Mayer's "Heavier
Things" album, with clipping and distortion on the lightest, cleanest tracks,
and it gets worse with each of his albums after. It's frustrating because I
know he's a brilliant musician who knows better, but I imagine it's the label
who has the final creative control over what sound is heard on the CD.

~~~
rev_null
It was produced by Dave Fridmann, who is pretty notorious for mastering albums
way too loud.

------
Joona
Good. I absolutely hate videos that are so low volume that I have to turn
Youtube up to 100%, and then adjust volume in Windows too, to hear anything.
And then imagine finding one of the louder videos next.

I've tried to give people advice on volume levels, but it feels like no one is
willing to do it. Hopefully Twitch will do something similar soon, too.

~~~
vanderZwan
I think that is exactly the motivation: avoiding the random shifts in volume
between videos. Pushing back against the loudness war was probably just a
bonus.

It's like watching a series on TV and then getting blasted with EXTREMELY LOUD
COMMERCIAL BREAKS (and they do that shit on purpose too).

~~~
Cthulhu_
Re the commercials, over here in NL they (finally!) introduced a law that
prohibits that behaviour.

~~~
rada
They passed a similar law here in the US
([http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/loud-
commercials](http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/loud-commercials)) but
unfortunately, it did not help very much because sound engineers use tricks
that make the commercials meet the technical requirements while still being
loud to the human ear. For example, they mix a loud opening and a quieter
closing so the overall decibel level averages out but you still get startled
when the commercial starts.

~~~
blktiger
Just one more reason not to watch normal television.

------
ferongr
I don't get it. Loudness normalization past the mastering stage (i.e. at the
audio track uploaded by the label) will only make all audio louder or quiter,
it can't increase the actual dynamic range of the track. Furthermore, the DR
meter can easily produce bogus results if the equalization changes or with
non-lossless joint-stereo encoding algorithms.

I'd be cautious before celebrating.

~~~
tormeh
Humans like loud music, so louder music sounds better and sell more. So, how
do you make your music MAXIMUM LOUD? Well, our digital formats have a setting
for how loud any given sound is, but you can't just set it to the maximum
value because then all sounds in your track will be equally loud. Or can you?
Not all parts of a cymbal "phish" is equally loud, so setting it all to max
will distort the sound (sacrifice dynamic range), but will consumers really
care?

Youtube, by adjusting all tracks to have the same average loudness, is
basically saying "to those of you who would give up essential dynamic range,
to purchase a little temporary loudness, you deserve neither dynamic range nor
loudness"

The hope is that eventually labels will quit sacrificing dynamic range for
loudness if all our digital music sources set the average loudness to be the
same for all tracks.

~~~
pz7e
Although the tracks have been normalised to have the same average loudness,
the more aggressively compressed tracks that have less dynamic range will
still sound louder at this lower level. I don't see how what YouTube is doing
is going to help.

~~~
mrob
If the lower dynamic range tracks sound louder even after normalization then
the normalization algorithm is flawed. ReplayGain weights the energy by
frequency to better match perceived loudness, and it does a reasonably good
job. Other algorithms might do an even better job at matching human
perception.

~~~
throwmeunder
>If the lower dynamic range tracks sound louder even after normalization then
the normalization algorithm is flawed.

That's not quite true. Listen to this:
[https://soundcloud.com/amp-33/sets/uncompressed-vs-
compresse...](https://soundcloud.com/amp-33/sets/uncompressed-vs-compressed)

Those two things have a pretty similar loudness(A-weighted RMS) and yet the
compressed one sounds louder than the measured difference - ~3dB A-weighted
which is not obvious to perceive untrained.

As a test - download them both, amplify the Uncompressed one at -2.7dB and
listen to them again. They have the same A-weighted RMS yet the Uncompressed
one sounds louder.

A-weighting -
[http://www.diracdelta.co.uk/science/source/a/w/aweighting/so...](http://www.diracdelta.co.uk/science/source/a/w/aweighting/source.html)
RMS -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_mean_square](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_mean_square)
Measurements done with Audacity, wave stats:
[http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?p=248505#p248505](http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?p=248505#p248505)

edit:to add the quote

------
kevincennis
The loudness war isn't dead until people stop brick-walling their mixes at the
mastering stage.

You can adjust playback volume between tracks all you want, but if they all
have like 6dB of dynamic range, they're going to sound like garbage.

You're not really eliminating the loudness wars unless you find a way to
Command-Z all of that ridiculous limiting (or convince people not to do it in
the first place).

~~~
anentropic
people will stop doing it though, if they can't get any advantage out of it.
see also "Mastered for iTunes"

~~~
kevincennis
I totally get your point, but I would argue that they've _never_ gotten any
real advantage out of it. They just think they do.

I'm not sure that's going to stop. It's just the way that people think they
have to do things. Cargo cult mastering techniques, basically.

------
tobr
I wonder if this is about ending the "loudness war", or if it's more about
helping amateur content with nearly inaudible levels.

All the good reasons for compressing music or audio in general certainly apply
to YouTube. The average viewer will probably listen through laptop speakers in
a noisy environment, and a large dynamic range is not helpful to them.

Also, does this mean they actually lower the volume of high RMS/LUFS videos?

~~~
rodgerd
> The average viewer will probably listen through laptop speakers in a noisy
> environment, and a large dynamic range is not helpful to them.

If you use compression on the assumption that a chunk of your audience will be
listening on shitty speakers you ensure that anyone not listening on shitty
speakers also gets a shitty experience. Perhaps Google would like YouTube to
be a non-shitty experience for people with nice speakers (or headphones or
whatever).

~~~
tobr
This is of course what the "war" is about at its core - do we prefer to to
sound OK everywhere, but not great anywhere, or do we prefer to sound great
for some people, but be inaudible to others.

The right answer depends on the content, context and audience. The choice is
with the content creator, not with YouTube, and for many content creators
optimizing for people with bad speakers is the right choice. Lowering the
volume is not going to make "shitty" compression unshitty.

~~~
jmilloy
If they can offer several different tiers of video quality, they could do the
same with the audio. Imagine a set of options that not only offers audio
versions optimized for great headphones or optimized for phone speakers in a
public space, but educates the (interested) user about the difference!

------
djloche
I don't mind the actual tracks having various mixing/mastering. I do mind when
a commercial is compressed/mastered with the intent to be perceived louder to
stand out from the actual music/video that you are watching.

~~~
smcl
I don't think we (the consumers\audience) are ever going to win _that_ war.

~~~
elarkin
Actually, it's already illegal in the US:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudne...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudness_Mitigation_Act)

~~~
Karunamon
In theory, yes, in practice, that just means the commercials are compressed to
the single loudest part of the TV show they accompany. Net effect: Nil. The
commercial still sounds louder than everything else.

~~~
timc3
Not for much longer, one of the highlights of the past couple of years of NAB
has been new algorithms and hardware to combat exactly this issue.

------
DocG
If they could only do it for the ads also.

The sole reason I started using adblock, was when I lived in Istanbul for
couple of months, their ads were out of hands. Imagine having to control the
volume, every time ad plays, in playlists or in front of videos.

~~~
pjc50
It's been suggested that this change guarantees that the ads can be louder
than the content. After all, from Google's point of view the ads are the
important thing that make money.

------
obsurveyor
Now if only they would add an option to do this to more than just music
videos. There's still millions upon millions of videos on Youtube with audio
volumes all over the place. It seems like iMovie produced content is
especially loud but that's probably anecdotal.

------
asgard1024
I am not sure it's the final nail. I think at some point they may start
playing the commercials louder. I had to skip a lot of Czech commercials
simply because they were too loud.

~~~
sooheon
I can say that Korean Youtube commercials are so loud and jarring that they
without fail inspire a keen and lasting hatred for the advertised product.

------
rlx0x
Doesn't the process of compression (to make it seem louder) destroy some of
the information? I always assumed this was a irreversible process?

~~~
ptaipale
Yes it does. That is (partly) why those who love music often hate (too much)
compression.

~~~
rlx0x
then the premise of the article is inherently flawed :(

~~~
pfunk
If YouTube compensates for this (lowers the volume of tracks that have been
mastered loud), then it removes the original motivation for doing so.

This is why the 'Happy' YouTube mix is _less loud_ than the CD version linked
to - the author asserts that the studio has done this because the incentive to
apply dynamic compression on YT is now gone...

------
pdx
This makes me happy. My daughter watches a lot of youtube and it's a pain to
constantly jump up to turn up the volume or turn down the volume after every
video change. Especially if you go to sleep to a video and the next video in
the playlist blows you out of your slumber because it's mix is hot compared to
the previous one.

This is a good move. Sorry music guys, but on the whole, this is a win.

------
spyder
Volume is one thing but quality should be also important for music videos, and
even HD VEVO videos has noticeable worse quality than a 256kbps MP3. Probably
due to the re-encoding, and the lower quality settings at YouTube. So YouTube
is still not good for music listening if you are sensitive to the quality.

------
impostervt
Cached version, since the page is down for me:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://productionadvice.co.uk/youtube-
loudness/)

------
shortkud
Does anyone actually have a source that shows YouTube has actually implemented
technology that is doing this? Contrary to popular belief music videos are
still encoded and mastered for delivery to VEVO by a few companies. Universal
Music also has one of the largest catalog of popular artists. VEVO transcodes
them and publishes to their platform. If they let Google transcode them or not
I do not know. Depends on the partnership.

[https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3079146?hl=en](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3079146?hl=en)

------
gadders
Semi-related: Has anyone else noticed how HD channels have their volume levels
set higher than non-HD? This is quite noticeable on the BSKYB service in the
UK. I wondered if it applied for other suppliers.

~~~
ilghiro
With Virgin Media I have to pretty much double the TV volume on HD channels to
get the same volume level.

~~~
glomph
Is this to do with multi channel audio?

------
allending
I know people perceive louder as sounding better, but is there any research
that addresses _why_ we perceive it that way?

~~~
CompanyLaser
Higher signal to noise ratio. Dr. Barry Blesser suggests that "raising the
loudness of music, like a double shot of whisky, elevates the intensity of the
experience". Listeners undergo significant, measurable changes in mind-body
states and Blesser reckons that "loud music is simply a stronger stimulant
than soft music".

Blesser - The Seductive (Yet Destructive) Appeal of Loud Music:
[http://www.blesser.net/downloads/eContact%20Loud%20Music.pdf](http://www.blesser.net/downloads/eContact%20Loud%20Music.pdf)

Psychoacoustic tricks such as compression and EQ allow us to increase
perceived loudness without crossing the threshold of pain.

3, 4, and 6 in this article explain this psychoacoustic phenomena pretty well:
[http://getthatprosound.com/hacking-your-listeners-
ears-9-psy...](http://getthatprosound.com/hacking-your-listeners-
ears-9-psychoacoustic-sound-design-tricks-to-improve-your-music/)

And this article argues in depth, that the relationship between
actual/perceived dynamic range is ultimately an artistic choice, yielding
different feels. What people who complain about loudness are really objecting
to is the improper use of these techniques:
[http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep11/articles/loudness.htm](http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep11/articles/loudness.htm)

------
vilhelm_s
On the other hand, Youtube plays commercials louder than the videos (this is
pretty jarring if you use Youtube playlists for background music, as many
people do). So I fear this is less due to an altruistic desire to improve the
music landscape, and more in order to give themselves headroom to outshout the
music...

------
rl3
> _And if you’ve spotted the big problem with the way it works, you know it
> needs to be discussed._

Anyone know what he's alluding to?

> _But the loudness won’t be lifted if clipping would be caused in the
> process_

That would have been my first guess, thankfully it isn't the case.

~~~
anigbrowl
I don't know what he's alluding to, even though I'm very familiar with the
issue and quite familiar with the ITU loudness standard. I posted mainly
because I had noticed the change myself over the last few months.

Maybe he means the fact that if you don't have an adblocker YouTube ads seem
to be as loud as the ones on TV used to be. It might be that this will now
fall under the aegis of the FCC :) but I'm not really sure about that. Video
ads on Youtube are a betrayal of the Google Adwords approach anyway, and the
people who gave them the green light should be shot, but with very small
calibre bullets so we can keep shooting them over and over until they get the
message about how annoying advertising in temporal media is.

~~~
JeremyBanks
So should they stop advertising, and take down YouTube?

~~~
anigbrowl
Did I say that? No.

------
PeanutNore
I got really lazy recently and uploaded a demo video of an amplifier I built
without adjusting the audio level, and it made for a very quiet video. I
wonder if it has been normalized for playback by youtube yet.

------
mark-r
I've never understood the point of the loudness war. Aren't the best-selling
albums of all time all reasonably uncompressed? If everybody's so afraid of
failure, why do they ignore success?

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Perhaps it is just that they are music _videos_ and not CD releases? They must
be mastered differently anyway as they often have extra sounds or a different
length, right?

------
Thiz
Interesting. Can they sell it to TV manufacturers so they can automatically
lower the volume level of commercials?

~~~
alephnil
Youtube can do this becuase they have the whole video before they transcode
it, and by then they know its average loudness. TV sets receive the content as
they play it, so they can only do this if they play the content with some
delay, since they otherwise can't know in advance what the average loudness is
going to be. They can of cause cap it at some maximal loudness, but that would
also cap the loudness of the loudest section of movies as well, and by that
reducing the dynamic range.

------
pearjuice
And as you would expect from any monopoly, they can do this without anyone
doing anything against it.

~~~
stolio
Not sure why this is downvoted and at the very bottom of the thread.

If the article is true, youtube/google is using their market power in one
sector to limit _artistic and creative_ decisions in another sector. If
mastering houses simply make a youtube mix next to their CD mix than the title
is wrong.

------
simonebrunozzi
I wish the airline industry could do the same (for in-flight announcements,
etc).

------
brockers
Now if they can just do the same thing with annotations...

------
Frye
Need this for porn

