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- Hacker News
- This makes sense as a huge part of the people who buy vinyl don't even own a record player. Or people buy special editions with colored vinyl, who would never play these records back anyway. If the main target demographic doesn't even notice bad mastering let alone have a clue what good mastering on any record would even sound like, what's the point? Vinyl has become a fashion accessory you buy as just another fan merch item.by emsign
- In electronic music we've been pressing the same DAT to vinyl and CD since the 90s. Subsequently replaced by .wav. Tracks come out of the DAW pretty loud these days, it's characteristic of the genre.by dintech
- Do you think the removal of technical limitations re: the number of tracks & voices has introduced "loudness" as well in terms of more distinct sounds competing for the same sonic space?
It's crazy watching some of the producer YT videos now and they open up these projects with 105 tracks, multi-layered/multi-voice drums, etc.
by steveBK123 - Are there any known ways to undo the compression? Assuming no clipping, the process should be reversible, right?by buo
- you can use an expander or something more advanced like Ozone 12's Unlimiter. you still lose signal when you compress even if you're not clipping so it won't be perfectby macmccann
- Even without clipping (which loud mixes almost invariably have), you lose resolution; for digital it should be obvious that if you start with M distinct values and remap them to N distinct values, you can't reverse it if M>N (which it will be for compression).
For analog there are similar limitations, but it's limited by other factors like noise.
by aidenn0 - Short answer, no not really. It won’t ever be as good as a proper uncompressed masteringby nighthawk454
- No, it's a destructive process. It's like trying to get back the original texture of wood after you've sanded it down. The best you're going to get is an approximation of what it might have been like.
- There are tools to mitigate clipping artifacts, and tools to generate new transients for overly compressed files, but they're not a silver-bullet and the new material that is generated is more of a best guess than a true replacement for not over-compressing a mix in the first place.
These tools are most useful when used earlier in the process. Like when you just tracked an amazing vocal take, but the gain was too hot on one or two notes. The tools can mitigate some of the distortion artifacts to make it more usable. Applying these tools to complex material like a full mix will have some improvements, but at that stage there's less guarantee for convincing restoration of the record.
What I think non-professionals don't understand is that a record that is characterized by heavy compression is not something that happened at the very end with the mastering stage. It is an aesthetic choice that was made dozens of times along the way while recording, arranging, and mixing. Heavy compression is not necessarily a bad thing. Lots of amazing-sounding records harness it well. It's an art AND a craft. It takes audio engineers and producers years to do it well and with taste.
by Slow_Hand - "Assuming no clipping" is the biggest problem there, because the loudness wars resulted in a ton of very lossy clipping and similar artifacts. Arguably that sort of distortion became part of the expected sound, though, so just because it isn't reversible doesn't necessarily mean it is a problem.
In the open metadata world there is ReplayGain which analyzes music peaks and tries to create a negative gain to equalize the dynamic range to a standard volume at both the individual track and full album level.
Apple Music, Spotify, and others have proprietary but similar systems.
(As someone who deeply loves to shuffle an entire library, having a music player that supports ReplayGain has long been a personal requirement.)
by WorldMaker - No, you need the original mix to remaster it yourself.
If you just amplify the whole track until its max amplitude reaches the medium's maximum, yes you could undo that.
But the loudness war aims to make the whole track even louder than that, by quietening those max peaks so they don't clip, then that gives you room to amplify the rest of the track even further. The dynamic range of the recording is permanently reduced.
by amiga386 - It's a weird social psychology quirk. For whatever reason, the entire music industry has been captured by the delusion that mixing all the sounds louder is good. No one likes it, except for those guys. For reasons I'll never understand, the movie industry has been captured by the opposite delusion; they're going to pump dynamic range so high that you can only understand about half the dialogue in the movie. And of course, no one likes this.by everdrive
- > No one likes it, except for those guys.
This is anecdotal at best; "those guys" will be using hard data just like tech bros with ecommerce sites do, and the data does not lie.
Compression sells better than high dynamic range else they would have stopped. This is true for every "nobody likes this" statement people make on the internet about things that are commercially successful nevertheless. Big phones (as someone else mentioned), mobile games, video game movie adaptations, AI music, Marvel franchise entries, funko pops, they're all running circles around people that don't personally like it and who are in circles of like-minded people.
by Cthulhu_ - You're false. Research has shown that if people like sound A, they will like it even better when you play sound A louder.
The change in mixing and mastering can be largely explained by people changing the way they consume it. Eg. people watch more movies on netflix than in a cinema. People used to sit in a room with a record player, now they listen in their car or headphones while doing other stuff.
by legacynl - remember when HN was saying "nobody wants big smartphones, why does the industry keep doing this? iPhone 4 size is the perfect size"
hint - the industry is doing EXACTLY what (most) consumers want. there is a big difference between what a consumer tells you they want, and what actually they pay for
by hurtigioll - The full dynamic range is nice if you actually want to experience it and have a system capable of reproducing it. A dedicated center channel with a few hundred watts of amplification behind it will cut through the ambient backdrop like a hot knife through butter. You can watch Transformers or MI3 at reference volume with crystal clear dialogue if you're willing to throw enough power at the problem.by bob1029
- I've taken to buying SACDs when possible. The format supports higher dynamic range, but that barely matters. The mix is the bigger issue and SACD mixes are often better. Note you need an SACD player. And also note this only applies for playing on a proper HiFi or with good headphones at least. In your car, etc you probably want the compressed mix.by pwarner
- If the mix is the bigger issue, why does the media format matter?by rglullis
- I vaguely recall reading about a double-blind test with the DSD stream from an SACD converted to 44.1kHz 16-bit PCM.
Even without proper dithering, listeners could not tell the difference between that and the SACD[1], but could tell the difference between that and the CD version of the same album.
by aidenn0 - I've been collecting physical music my whole life and there were times that I tried to get everything on CD, times I tried to get everything on vinyl, times I've tried to go fully digital, and the pattern I've fallen into now in my late 30s is buying music on whatever medium was popular when it came out.
I've now got a pretty mixed collection of records, tapes, CDs, digital music, and even a rockbox modded ipod. An added facet of fun for me when I find new music is to decide what the most thematically appropriate format to own it is.
For example I own the CD for Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay because there's a CD in the art, and it feels like a very 00s album, but for vaporwave I almost exclusively buy cassettes.
by ryanmcbride - I like this idea, it's a bit like retro gaming with the original games/consoles/controllers instead of emulating things.by threetonesun
- I thought the loudness war was over? This was a hot topic for many years in the music production community. Sad to see it still persists. Especially since the answer to any loudness problem is to simply for the user to turn up the volume.by H1Supreme
- The loudness war in the strict "we must compress and slam everything as much as possible to make our stuff sound good on the radio" sense is over thanks to Spotify et al doing loudness normalization, but there's still an open question of "how much compression does sound good?" which is extremely subjective. A lot of modern music is louder than peak loudness war stuff just because the creators want their music to be slammed to shit. I listen to/make aggressive bass music and -5, -4, -3 LUFS are common. (By comparison, some of the common examples of loudness war era CDs like Definitely Maybe and Californication sit between -8 and -6 LUFS.)
> Especially since the answer to any loudness problem is to simply for the user to turn up the volume.
This isn't quite true as compression addresses differences in volume. Unless you expect the listener to actively turn up the volume during the quiet parts and down during the loud parts of your song, or be listening in a completely quiet environment with nothing but the music so they can appreciate the dynamics--which is the way a lot of vinyl aficionados do listen to music.
by mjr00 - The main reason vinyl often sounds better is because it is better mastered, so this is concerning.by mdhen
- I'd say "rarely" instead of "often" though it depends on the genre I guess. There are also a lot of genres that can never sound as good on vinyl simply due to the lack of dynamic range/silence; mostly classical and electronic.
- That's just not true and vinyl doesn't sound better by any measure.by esikich
- I don't understand why they still release super compressed and loud masterings when most of the modern headphones are so good you don't really need to master for the old cheap stereo sets. And isn't headphones with Spotify the most common medium for music nowadays?by pimeys
- People consistently perceive louder music as better quality. That's why volume matching is critical in any audio equipment testing.
- There's still plenty of crappy headphones, as others have pointed out, but consider also listening from a phone's speaker, a cheap bluetooth speaker, with just one earbud/headphone on, etc.
Speaking of, I think the sound quality of modern-day bluetooth speakers is really good.
by Cthulhu_ - Most people listen to music in their car. More compressed audio means less fiddling with the volume knob as you drive, regardless of normalization done by Spotify et al.
Anyhow that's my theory