Comment by pimeys
3 days ago
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?
As a mixing engineer:
1. Compressed sound can be an integral (wanted) part of different genre aesthetics. I personally love dynamic mixes, but if you let your customers A/B mixes they will often chose the more compressed/louder one. If your song sounds weak after another bands song, that is an issue.
2. For reasons of health/liability there are maximum levels on headphones and mobile playback devices. That means if my mix has a high dynamic range the bulk of it may really just be too low when played back on the majority of headphones. If I mix my own music this is a bargain I can make if I mix other peoples music I would try to be a little more on the cautious side if the musicians didn't demand a highly dynamic mix.
3. Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music. 90% of people who listen to music do not listen to it actively, they just let it run in the background or are passively exposed to it. Try listening to a good dynamic recording of Beethovens fith in your car with the window rolled down. You will hear some strong phrases then inbetween nothing as it is below the ambient noise floor.
Vinyl has the benefit, that I as the mixing engineer can assume that the listener will be much more likely actively involved with the music than say in a radio mix.
And just wait until they find out that compressor/limiters came about for reasons other than shaping the dynamics of music. If you're not slammed against the wall, your AM broadcast signal isn't going far.
Why the snark? Who expects high quality audio from AM radio?
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Vinyl has the benefit that you can largely assume that it will NOT be listened to at all, cf. the studies showing that half of all vinyl buyers don’t even own a turntable.
Excuse my ignorance on the subject but… what? why would people buy vinyl records if not to listen to them?
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> 1 … they will often chose the more compressed/louder one
I’ve always been curious - but presumably that’s true even after volume matching?
> 3 Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music
I’ve heard this is also why film and video game soundtracks are often very compressed, even when orchestral, because they have to fit in the background with dialog/sfx
> I've always been curious - but presumably that’s true even after volume matching?
Yes. Many musicians want their stuff to sound like the music of their heroes they grew up with, and that music is often compressed to a block as well. So compression isn't just about making things sound louder, it also has its own aesthetical value. Whether that is good or bad aesthetics can be argued about, but some people also like to distort their instruments which was also a thing people frowned upon in the past.
> I’ve heard this is also why film and video game soundtracks are often very compressed, even when orchestral, because they have to fit in the background with dialog/sfx
The official themes often are quite compact, but there is often also highly dynamic orchestral work used that is way less recognizable and used with more dynamics (think about te soon creating orchestral atmospheres). Cinema mixes are a thing btw. where many consumers complain about too high dynamic ranges. They complain that the dialog is low and the explosion loud. Cinemas being among the few spaces we mixing engineers have where we have a bit more control over the presumed levels, especially if we are talking about Dolby certified venues.
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It's much less of a problem than it used to be because streaming platforms normalize the tracks anyway so it's been fading away for a while now.
I don't know where you're getting this. For rock/pop music, it's as bad as it's ever been.
Yep many current pop songs are commonly mastered at around -8 LUFS even peaking at -5 LUFS which is quite loud.
All things being equal, the compressed tracks will still sound louder even after normalisation, unfortunately. I haven't seen any sign of dynamics returning to pop music since Spotify/YouTube.
Most headphones people actually use are crap. Yes you can buy studio monitors from sony. That isn't what people are listening to. They are using airpods which sound like earpods have always sounded: crap, absent lows, terrible separation. So you compress the hell out of the audio and make it loud so you can actually hear something with those headphones.
What AirPods are you talking about? The wired AirPods that sound pretty bad have been overtaken by wireless Bluetooth AirPods for many years now. The AirPod Pro 2 sound quality is a world of difference from the wired earbud style AirPods. In fact, most of the most popular TWS Bluetooth Earbuds have fantastic sound quality. The main issue with them is that they have a V shaped tuning, with various levels of bad. However, Apple and Samsung tunings are quite decent.
All of them, compared to over ear monitors. You can't out engineer physics advantages of a larger speaker. Airpods fall short of other in ear monitors too fwiw, so they are a poor choice in class.
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AirPods Pro sound good but most regular people use shitty wired headphones.
And you can buy replacement ear pads - breathing new life in to $150 Sony Studio Monitor phones I bought 30 years ago...
Those things you can tear open and re wire yourself if you really needed. Ship of Theseus mdr7506 is possible. Meanwhile how long do those airpod batteries last before you need to pay apples pizzo for replacement you can't do yourself? Some people say only like what 2 years or so. Rich coming from the company that no longer ships chargers due to ewaste concerns.
This is an absurd comment. Maybe you are just too young and ignorant to know what the average gear use to sound like.
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
Yep.
Most people aren't in a quiet environment when they listen to music these days. Compression helps significantly with this.
What would be neat would be to have a compression metadata 'guide' that would allow a compressor on-device to perform the compression, rather than baked into the audio track.
This would allow the user to tune 'severity' of compression. In a car / fancy headphones, you could sample the ambient noise level and adjust accordingly.
You are very off here. People have been playing music in their cars and in clubs for decades, and a lot of them play tracks that predate the loudness wars. If anything, people are more isolated than ever and have much better headphones and speakers than even 10 years ago.
You're conflating regular compression with the insanely over the top mastering people started doing. This goes way beyond keeping people off the volume knob. You do not need that much compression to keep your volume in a listenable range, and you certainly don't have to slam the entire master bus through a limiter. The loudness wars really was just about having a louder track than everyone else. So much so that the whole process of mastering became how to make it sound as loud as possible without sounding compressed. If it were just about keeping volume consistent, they would not do it through the master bus. There are so many interviews with mastering engineers who are frustrated with the pointless chase for volume.
Arguably, listeners have heard it so long that they've gotten used to the exaggerated compression, and they just like it now stylistically. Some of my favorite records are very loud.
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Or just have the default to be some level of acceptable compression turned on and then an advanced mode to turn it off (or tune it)
> Most people listen to music in their car.
Most people don't have cars
In the US, they do.
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Compression can definitely help with that, but so can automating the volume knob. If it were just about keeping volume consistent, they would compress different tracks differently (which they do).
They overly compress the master channel specifically to make it very loud, and there's dozens of interviews with engineers that are frustrated with it.
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.
> I think the sound quality of modern-day bluetooth speakers is really good.
The sound quality out of the speakers of some Apple products seems borderline impossible to me. The MacBook in particular makes me feel like I missed an important DSP lecture at university.
People consistently perceive louder music as better quality. That's why volume matching is critical in any audio equipment testing.