Hello,
I've made a little research on this forum and this topic apparently was never discussed in depth.

A long time ago I've purchased a CD from my favourite German band and the first HUGE disappointment was compressed dynamic range (though not very surprising). I didn't have to look at the waveform, it could be clearly heard through "hi-fi" equipment. The whole idea behind "loudness war" is A HUNCH that loud music would have better sales than not-loud music. Unfortunately it ultimately destroys dynamic range and MUSIC itself. And by the way that hunch is not true at all. So I promised to myself that any album produced by me will never ever be compressed in terms of dynamic range (applied to the final mix) unless I'll be instructed by the artist.

Sure the compression thing is useful even necessary in various situation, for example to keep equal amplitude for vocals. However applying dynamic compression and limiter to the final mix is a pure nonsense to me. Of course my favourite genres are Neo-orchestra, Classics, New-Age and Country - this is something different than DnB, Hip Hop or Techno where DR compression might be appropriate.

Here are some links in case you don't know anything about loudness war:
DynamicRange.de
Video
"You own the volume knob, not the record producer"

So what are your ideas on this topic? Do you compress DR in your recordings?

PS: Another thing to think about is that why the vinyls or MP3s that are much more limited in dynamic range aren't always compressed as the CD releases...

 

Everytime same discussion... maybe not here yet...

In electronic music a smart compression is necessary, otherwise you'd be blown away from the speakers when heavy peaks appears.

Overcompression (when waveform looks like a bavarian sausage) will prevent a good sound, because too much transients are gone.

 

Probably because its been discussed to death everywhere else.. Its been this way for years, nothing new here. The sad thing is we have a whole generation of people making music who think mastering is for to make shit loud! Commercially, things arn't going to be changing in the near future, same in the edm scene, its the norm.

I myself are guilty of this

If your interested...

 

Well maybe not. iTunes recently released some albums in 24bit quality that are free of DR compression (I don't quite remember which ones). Unfortunately they're making bussiness on this. These albums were twice the price of the original.

 

The lower quality is now the accepted norm and therefore you have to pay a premium for "better quality" stuff. This is business and it sucks but thats the big corps for you.

The masses who buy stuff off itunes don't care on quality, well not enough to pay double for it anyway. Even your club dj will be playing mp3 after mp3. As for the edm scene, who ever signs your track, they will master it, and in that process will squeeze as much as they can out of it just to make it loud.

 

I do a lot of mastering and one of the problems is that bands don't want to be "the quiet band/song" on iTunes that makes you have to turn up the volume on the stereo or iPod only to have the next bands volume almost make you deaf or blow up your speakers.

-Dude

 

make love not war!

 

in todays electronic music heavy compression is often part of the sound.
another thing is that you have to use it your own productions to keep up with the others. when you play your own track as a dj in a club and suddenly the intensity drops...
in my opinion its ok unless you dont overdo it.

 

Because i'm not producing any deliverables for CD/radio, etc, I can often have some headroom. eg, on stereo i aim for peaking at -1dB, average around -3dB. For surround , the front speakers should be peaking -3 -6dB, but downmixing might clip.

If i'm doing fixup work for a client, I try to match it to whatever it sounded like before or what the delivery convention is. Ie, youtube around -6dB.

If you want to undo DRC, try some transient enhancers like Voxengo Transgainer 1.2

 

I stopped posting about it when I discovered that people just don't listen, and lots and lots of people lack audio knowledge, and they don't care about acquiring some, too. Ego to the Moon... and back. Everything being said falls on deaf ears. Nobody cares about the audio quality of their work, which is kinda weird, don't you think? What if a painter said "IDGF how it looks like, just want to sell it". That's the death of art. It's only commercialism that's left. So are you a commercialist, a salesman, or a musician, an artist? This loudness war will help us distinct from one another, I think. Nobody forces you to squash your tracks, and they will sell if they're worth it. People do buy old records, and old CDs, and lots of them say "they sound better". What it really came down to in this century is essentially music put through a guitar amplifier and sold to the listeners. It's so full of distortion it's annoying to listen to. *No matter* what you do to your track, it will still sound like crap when you give it only 3dB to breathe! You can just put it through a guitar amp, and get it over with more simply, in the first place... Why gpoing through all that trouble and use two, three even four limiters at all? That's one of the reasons I now don't follow or listen to any commercial tracks, since I just can't listen to it. It's unbearable, for me at least, on my equipment which doubles as mixing and mastering equipment, too, so it is high quality. I also use three different pairs of speakers, and three different headphones. You can't tell the difference so easily, and solely, on your 10$ PC speakers, of course. Btw. I find it more pleasurable to listen to the shit on shitty speakers, too, because of that, and I just happen to have a pair of 50 euro PC speakers just for comparison purposes. ;)

How I work my tunes is: I mix them at -18dB VU-RMS like they used to do it for decades in the past century. I don't have to worry about peaks, just sound, because no peaks come to 0 dBFS at that level *ever*. When it sounds good, it is good. Then I normalise the loudness of the tracks to K-14 specs [-14dB low RMS to -10dB highest RMS on choruses], and if there are some peaks that go past the 0dBFS, gently limit them. It sounds great this way, love it, and I get so much nice dB headroom to play with. What every listener will do when they hear the sound is too low, is - turn it up, at least if they like what they hear. ;) In the 80s and 90s some artists and mixers even used to play with that fact... starting the album quietly, the listener would turn this part up, and then leading the listener into more and more loudness. It's like *classical music*. Try listening to the original Jean Michel Jarre "Oxygene I" or "Magnetic Fields I", or "Equinoxe I"... it sounds great, doesn't it? And you are compelled to turn it up at the beginning, no? The art of playing with the dynamic range that gives the excitement to a track, or even more to an album, is practically dead these days since they all start with 0 dBFS peaks, and -3dBFS RMS.. and everything sounds the same loud and distorted to the end. Flat, unexciting and a complete rubbish. It all came down to, for me personally, that I not just *don't want to buy* new CDs, I wouldn't take them *for free*, either! It's just not even worth a listen!!! I rather listen to old recordings... and some rare people who still make and prefer dynamic electronic music [yes there are some, even on SoundCloud!], and my tracks. I do tend to spend a lot of time just fiddling with the synths and playing with them live, so that's where my need to enjoy music gets rather fulfilled.

I do hope things will change. If just everybody accepted the K-14 as a standard it would be so much better. But now most of you will ask "what's K-14?". Google it up. It should be a part of general musician's, mixer's and mastering knowledge. And about mixing at -18dB RMS. This gives you so much freedom when mixing, and the mixes sound better in the end.

Just for the record, a K-14 mastered dance track will sound quite a bit better, and more "jumpy" and "dancable" to, in a club, than a squashed track. No shit. ;)

Cheers!

 

I'm using Relife 1.42 - I think the best VST for dynamic restoration. And it's free.

In elecronic music it has its place but there are more genres than this one. In recent years, even classical music (which has lot of requirements on DR) is compressed. Not to mention more "acoustic" genres where compression is not necessary and often only make things worse.

In live situations, hard limiter may be option to prevent peaks reaching digital maximum, however it should not activate more than 3 times during recording.

If you want to be as loud as other bands, it's always better to implement ReplayGain in your tracks to match certain volume than altering the waveform itself and thus destroying the original. Unfortunately this applies only to MP3/FLAC/OGG, such metadata cannot be written to CD.

What about a band that "stand-out" because it's intentionally quiet?

 

Yes, the sad thing is, a well known band, or just about any band, doing a "quiet" album these days, would certainly stand out, indeed.

The big problem with squashed tracks, loops, and sounds is that the limiting process introduces lots of bad digital distortion and digital aliasing in it, and *that* no "ReLife" can repair or get rid of. All you can do is recreate the transients to an extent, like the DA converters actually do, so there's no need for a "ReLife" plugin since DA converters do it in a similar way, but the distortion created by limiting is what sounds the most terrible. Watch the Bob Katz video carefully when he talks about it.

So what you essentially get after applying ReLife, to a sqaushed track is a more dynamic sound with all the distortion still in it. Not much of an enhancement, but it is a little bit better, yes.

 

Yes that's pretty much what I wanted to say. It's still squashed but at least listenable.

 

How to get that squashed sound? I usually start out at -18 db too, but in some situations I like that squashed to death sound, like in 'Trap' music.
Google "Chief Keef - Don't Like", it clips all the way but it's so 'bangin'. Y'all fill me in on how to get that sound please?

 

Dynamics are a part of music composition, performance, and part of a quality listening experience. There are not many true audiophiles left who actually sit down and listen to large works. (Whole albums beginning to end, symphonies). A lot of people never sit down in front of a nice system anymore and truly listen. If the best reproduction you hear is on car audio speakers or ear buds, you have no reference to what good recordings are supposed to sound like. Part of the power of a rock band or symphony orchestra is they can go from a whisper to thunder. That part of the music experience seems to be not appreciated anymore. Compression, limiting, and all the other digital short cuts available now are tools best applied sparingly, when you just can't help it. I would rather automate my mix, or maybe use vocal rider and bass rider to get notes back in there that get lost, or get the singer or player to alter their technique. But a lot of people don't have the ears and experience to create a good mix, and a compressor becomes an easy crutch. Record a cymbal crash live, then run it through any compression and listen. Some serious coloration, phase distortion/cancelling going on. I like the way some compressors make bass guitar sound, but on everything else I try to keep original dynamics whenever possible.

 

+1

That's exactly the kind of experience that cannot be easily achieved through compressed/limited/clipped music. Just sit in front of your system, stop your mind and just listen to entire piece without headaches. The musical flow seems to be missing in such tracks. And I must say that the reason why most people don't LISTEN to music is unknown to me. I don't think that great system for enjoying music must be expensive. You can just get a pair of AKG headphones, lossless portable player (around $240 total) and you're good to go.

Fortunately not every "band" is for DR compression/limiting.

 

thanks a lot for these useful information... much appreciated!

would you please tell us the name of this german band? would be nice to know..

 

Sure thing. Gregorian
It's new-age band so one would assume that their albums may not be compressed. Well some of them really don't. The album was The Dark Side of the Chant. Well now that I think about it, it was 2 years ago, so apparently not a "long time" .

It's quite interesting though that their iTunes releases are not compressed at all in terms of DR. Too bad they're compressed in size...

 

ah, I know ... and I remember the tv advertisings for this album. it seemed to be a bit more "modern" than the former stuff ... the loudness thing seems to be an inevitable side effect..?
you better switch back to Wagner, Bach or (Klaus) Schulze..

edit: ..or Bersarin Quartett if you are interested in good german ambient music with a neoclassical touch..

 

i've experienced this firsthand with my recordings, at first i was obsessed with making my music the loudest it could be so it would sound like other stuff i heard, i thought if my music was quieter that theirs i was doing something wrong!

eventually i realized if i just took the time to mix correctly in the first place and not just slap on limiters i could actually turn up the final product much louder than the compressed product!! (i mean to say the compressed track would be loud at lower volumes, but if i turned it up really loud, it would sound like poo- as opposed to the correctly mixed version, in which i could turn it up really loud and still get the crisp and correct dynamic range)

i also realized that when making ambient music, the quiet moments were lost when over compressed and limited, it added too much "white noise" air when the music was supposed to be quiet!..


so i guess i mean to say, some compression is usually needed, but just don't over do it!!! In my recent song i posted here i was guilty of just this~ the limiter i placed on the master track made the track TOO loud, i lost some of the more delicate parts of the song and made some bass distort a bit!

thankfully one of our fine members pointed it out to me!!