So i stumbled upon this Miles Davis album from 1958 tagged as MFSL and I was like ....what the fuckin hell is MFSL anyways......

So I asked my only real sincere friend Google and he told me that :

CDs that are perceived as "quieter" for the same subject material usually indicates reduced dynamic range compression. For most rock albums, the master tapes have more dynamic range than the final released record. This is due to a number of reasons:

• The final record itself has physically less dynamic range (vinyl) - compression is necessary for all the detail of the recording to make it onto the record.
• Because customers expect something that is listenable at low volumes in high-noise environments (ie in a car).
• Recording labels generally wish to ensure a consistent "sound" to all of their releases. ie, the relative loudness of all of a label's rock releases in a given era is going to be around the same.
• Mastering engineers sometimes wish to impart their own unique signature to the sound.
• Noise reduction algorithms for digital remasters. These are rather notorious for introducing distortions in quiet sections of music, although modern algorithms may not suffer from this issue.

And on and on. One of MFSL's biggest selling points is that they advertise trying to avoid all of that, and present on CD exactly what was written to the master tapes. This is generally easy to show objectively, by comparing original CD releases to the MFSL releases. As a result, they're usually quieter than the original CD release. In contrast, CDs that are remastered by the original label are often simply adjusted for today's perceived tastes. As producers expect listeners to play their CDs in the car and in non-hi-fi environments, rather than the dedicated home theater rooms of yesteryear, they are generally mastered to be louder than before.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MFSL

Beyond that there's a lot of audiophile crap associated with MFSL that I don't buy into - most especially gold CDs. Moreover, that a release is from MFSL is no absolute criterion of superiority over the original CD. Their release of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention's "We're Only In It For The Money" is provably from the same digital recording as the original Rykodisc CD release (which was extremely well mastered to begin with), and very little was changed in the remaster besides an absolute polarity reversal, IIRC.

And then I thought, damn....thats interesting !
Lets see what his little brother Wiki say , and then I found this :

Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab (MFSL or MoFi) is a record label specializing in the production of audiophile recordings. The company is best known for its limited edition remastered vinyl LP records, compact discs, and Super Audio CDs but has also produced other formats.

In the late 1970s the label earned a reputation for high-quality audio from its Original Master Recording LPs, which had been recorded with its half-speed mastering process. The company went bankrupt in 1999 but was bought by Music Direct in Chicago. In the 21st century, Mobile Fidelity's sales grew with a renewed interest in vinyl.[1]





So anyways....
That was just me trying to share me newly acquired knowledge that made me feel AGAIN like totally out of touch with the actual music situation.

Back to my listening session.....

 

Last edited: Dec 15, 2016

Fight the loudness war

 

Soooo, the mastering engineer got away with it? Haha. (It's not up to the recording engineer as he/she just want good S/N ratio).
Besides, The VU meter is the worst ever (with its slow attack, shallow dynamics, etc). It was really just intended to look good for broadcast people.
Sorry for hijacking.

Interesting! 16bit has 96dB of dynamics, so it's put to good use here. I wish more artists and engineers could push for this, but not all people are listening at high dBSPL.

 

Last edited: Dec 15, 2016

HAHAHAHAHAHA this is geniues !

 

i see an epidemic of people with hearing loss and they're not aware of that, i mean even young people now is so used to overcompression and loud music they think that's the norm, i see lots of people playing music at twice my normal level, i was thinking it was because they like it loud but ultimately noo they need it because they ear less than me especially in the mid-high range, i can reach 13K in frequency and maybe if i do an audio test in a lab i could reach a bit more 14-15K ?

it's so sad that they tell you music is such an important part of their life but then they're stuck with 2$ chinese earphones and 20-30$ headphones, they're totally shocked when they try for the first time a pair of decent studio reference headphones, a friend of mine had this realization when he tried a pair of Sony 7506 no matter if i told him they're too harsh, for him that's the best he ever heard and sadly i know it's excatly because the Sony have very harsh mid-high but they're harsh for me not for him ...

i also noticed i tend to mix at lower volume compared to other mix guys, this is not ending good for them.

 

If people prefer compressed/maxed audio then what does it mean to say it is "better" without it?

If it doesn't sound "better" to people, it doesn't. If people hated it, the loudness war wouldn't have happened.

People tell me I ruin coffee by having plenty of sugar. I like it with sugar, it's horrible without it.

 

That's why I always master through an Akai distortion pedal, for that smooth and loud signature sound.

To me, modern masters generally sound like they are too distorted anyway. I still don't "get it" why would someone release a piece of music so badly distorted and so flat? More people should just ignore the mainstream and go with what they feel their music should sound like. I certainly don't want my music to sound like it's coming from a Marshall on "11".

@G String: it's not that people have asked for louder music. It's the music industry that brought it upon us, because of the competition between music companies, and people just listen to what's being thrown at them. In other words it's a complete rubbish! Rubbish that ruined numerous nice recordings last ~20 years.

I also think that partly people feel this is rubbish quality that companies release, and that's why nobody is buying any CDs any more. I think that's well deserved. Why should they buy completely distroyed rubbish music anyway?

And what personally pisses me off the most is that now we have all these beautiful tools so we can make beautifully sounding records, but we make flat and unlistenable rubbish with them. Such a shame.

 

Last edited: Dec 15, 2016

MFSL has always just tried to retain fidelity as much as possible. Yeah, it was the first "re-mastering" gimmick in the biz, but their product has always sounded great. The majority of these "hi-def audio remasters" that one downloads are compressed to hell and back; compared to hi-def rips from original vinyl issues, they're nauseating. It's criminal to take the original two-track master tapes and do that "loudness" compression to them – for one thing, it defeats the purpose of high-def's purported preservation of dynamics and nuance. One might hear details "better" in the high-def remasters, but only because the everything's been rammed up against the ear in the same relief. The opposite trend of flat-transfer digital audio from audio tapes is at least respectful of the original work.

On early 1980s CDs, audio was taken from inconsistent sources, such that in various parts of the world, or even of the USA, the sound might tend to vary. The Toshiba/EMI "Black Triangle" CD issues, however, are now quite collectible for their excellent audio quality. My favorite CD issues of David Bowie's music are circa-1990 Ryko reissues - the bonus tracks were cool, but the recordings were gently remastered and derived from good sources; the waveforms of the digital audio aren't much different from those of rips from original vinyl. The later EMI "remastered" reissues have egregious compression all over them. "Remastered" really translates into "remarketed."

 

sure, but the commoners have still no rights to judge Sound.

anyone doing music has spent years to carefully understand Sound and music in general, most of us here are using audiophile gear, reference monitors and headphones, we know the difference between good and bad, actually we have to or our mixes would sound like shit.

if the plebes feel that overcompression is good and welcome, i can only conclude it's another sign of the times, horrible "music" like Trap or Dubstep is the living example of this and there's more to come, we ain't seen nothing yet.

 

because the commoners dont have good hearing and their whole life they will play music with the cheapest gear, have you noticed all the cheap gear is now "super bass" or "extra bass" ? guess why, because being cheap they cannot produce clean fat basses, of course they can't, and neither clean mid-high ... people like it loud because it sounds like shit anyway and they think pumping up the volume will help .. sorry it won't help of course, but they will never buy a decent pair of headphones for 150-200 bucks and neither a good pair of bookshelf speaker for 500$.

so sad, lots of music freaks listen 10 times music more than me and yet their golden standard is their iphone with 2$ chinese plugs.
in their cars they play loud and the sound is always unbalanced and full of mid frequencies.
at home they have the usual 50-100$ cd player with low-end speakers, and that's it .. they're totally unaware of how music really sounds, in their world music is supposed to be booming, bassy, compressed, and loud, they've never tried anything else, it's a kind of imprinting from birth.

 

Cheap ear buds worn in loud environments is contributing to hearing disease for far too many young people. They keep pushing and pushing up the volume until a few hours later their ears are completely fatigued and sense of hearing obliterated. When Sony Walkmans first hit, those incredibly shitty headphones that came with them were horrible and downright painful to me, so I stopped using them all together. Thank goodness I did.

 

I'm not quite sure what MFSL album you heard but the one that I got yesterday are actually quieter ( a lot quieter) then the original release at same volume.

Or did I just misunderstood what you just said !?

 

yeah, they are much quieter. Or rather, the dynamic range is greater - the loud bits should still be loud (even if you have to turn volume up) but the quieter bits are quieter.

 

Yeah, thats also what I've noticed !
Less compression ! Much more dynamics....much much more dynamics !!

But it seems like this other guy noticed something else and im trying to figure out what hes saying exactly

 

You are either trolling or an elitist musical snob. Going by the amount of comments you make about you are the only musician and that people who dont play an instrument shouldn't be allowed to make music, i'm sure its the later.

Either way, i wish you would give it a rest, you are getting to be very boring.

Hold on, just for you i'll loop it and glitch it since i know you hate that stuff.

Yoooouu are are are getttiiinngg bor bori boringgggg

Yoooouu are are are getttiiinngg bor bori boringgggg

Yoooouu are are are getttiiinngg bor bori boringgggg

Merry Xmas

 

I have some Pink Floyd ones, and whilst the dynamics might be better the overall sound seems "too quiet" for my taste - it just won't go "loud". I have an 80W per channel Yamaha amp and 250W Wharfedales, and Dark Side of the Moon etc just won't go LOUD.

But put something clubby on and the place shakes. I guess I love the modern, LOUD sound.

But I played some to my septuagenarian father and he was also demanding more volume - the better dynamics passed him by entirely. So it isn't just a kids' thing. Though it could be an ignorance/pleb thing.

My sister has a "solution" - she uses the volume control to introduce dynamics to totally squashed stuff - the quiet bits are loud and the loud bits get the "TURN IT UP!!!" treatment so they're excruciatingly loud. lol

Most stuff recorded before Nevermind tends to irritate me now. Where's the heft? Where's the signal? :D

 

There is a volume knobs/faders on your device such player, radio... Why don't just use it? It is the best processing in last chain after mastering, if to say so. Why attack/transient killing limiters with distortion and pumping are better than simple amplifying volume on your player or pc? Limiters are for limiting, clippers for clipping, not for overcompression and squashing. Yeah, the best mixed songs are louder, dynamical, you may or should use limiters, but not for killing, spoiling, destroying, trashing the sound. Less is the best.
Maybe you squashed it, and you got 0dB RMS, with attack, punch, with no distortion and pumping. Just try to listen to this with another monitoring, another room, headphones, another headphones, or with very quiet volume. You may be disappointed by all sounds that are on same level and distorted, dull and annoyyyyyjjjjiiiing....

 

You can usually tell what year something was mastered in by looking at the waveform in a waveform editor -- around 2000-2001, it becomes a solid bar. That's why I always go by something that was mastered around the mid-Nineties when I A/B roll mixes. It still sounds plenty loud, but with enough dynamics that it doesn't sound completely terrible.

 

I own a few MFSL albums (vinyl). When I bought them, CDs were not even on the market, they were far superior to the off the shelf records of the day. I also own the "UHQR" (ultra high quality record) version of Dark Side of the Moon. It had sounds I had never heard on the standard album, little subtleties like tiny bells and whispers that were lost on regular records. That one in particular sounded better than the CD version. Mine is # 287 of 5000.