Why records all sound the same

[Mostess]

LA-based JJ Puig has mixed records for Black Eyed Peas, U2, Snow Patrol, Green Day and Mary J Blige. His work is taken so seriously that he’s often paid royalties rather than a fixed fee.

(boing!)

Royalties? The audio engineer is now technically a band member. Holy moly.

I thought the article was refreshing in that it didn't focus on the loudness wars. The author argued that Motown producers intentionally used tamborine for the same effect in the 60s/70s, and even explicitly said complaining about digital processing was a red herring.

(S)he pointed more at how the musicians are no longer in charge of how they sound, and that the engineers are no longer interested in recording the sound of a group of musicians. Basically it's a too many cooks problem, mixed with a mass market mentality. A pretty good argument, and a really good article.

Why anonymous, though? One wonders who this dark shadowy truth teller is afraid of...?

[EmbersOfAutumn]

Why anonymous, though? One wonders who this dark shadowy truth teller is afraid of...?

Sounds like the plot to a good ol' cheesy 90's Seagal action movie:

The music industry has the country's... nay--the world's musicians under it's thumb. Underhanded tactics, cheap knock-offs, ripped and stolen wavs, they defile and basically pollute the good name of music, making the world at large numb to what good music is anymore. In-steps ex-government agent-turned-rock star Axl McAwesome (Seagal) who, during the course of 90 minutes, will kill, maim, and act poorly through the deaths of dozens of incompetant suits and faux-musicians to once again purify all that is rock.

Thank you, I'm selling the script starting at $1 million dollars.

[Hoblit]

Now that radio stations are entirely digital, they can go much further. Commercial stations now routinely edit songs themselves, trimming intros, chopping out boring bits, editing in station idents and – I’m not making this up – speeding up songs which they think are too slow or boring for their demographic. Some stations routinely play every track at +3%.

That surprised me.

It shouldn't, by the end of next year all TV stations will also be digital. We're just lucky radio stations don't have to broadcast digitally, yet. Then Satellite radio will become more popular and you may find yourself listening to the radio through your TV.

Most all TV operations are digital already. What will change in Feb 2009 is that terrestrial TV will be broadcast digitally rather than analog. This will only affect people who use antennas to receive the signal, not cable, satellite or IPTV which is already (with very few exceptions) sent digitally. To address this congress has created a coupon program for people to get a set-top box that allows their analog TV to receive the new digital signals. It's estimated that ~30 million people in the US do not have digital-ready TVs today.

Some of the bandwidth savings will be used by emergency response systems.

Which means its a good idea to hang onto old TV sets! They will eventually become scanners! (I knew all about this stuff for years, if I remember correctly, they had to set the date back because of broadcasters not being able to make the deadline)

[jb]

I personally wouldn't have a problem with all these anti-loudness war rants, if the people writing them could at least keep their terms straight. They rail on and on about the evils of "compression", but the negative effect they're usually describing is distortion. Calling distortion "compression" in an article aimed at laymen is doubly confounding, as most people think of lossy data compression (ie MP3) when they hear the term. "Distortion" is a term that's much easier for people to understand.

Say what? When people hear "distortion" they think a corruption of the sound-- turning a nice clear note into something scratchy, dirty, edgy. Not the process of equalizing the loudness of all frequencies in a signal.

The articles that *I* have read complain about a "sameness" of the apparent volume within a song, diminishing its interest and appeal. And that's almost always a result of compression.

I don't think the super-hot recordings these days are being distorted are they? They ride the edge of distortion to achieve maximum clarity and volume without distorting. That's why Iggy's remaster of Raw Power sucked-- he pushed the loudness to the point where it *did* distort probably through too much volume and not *enough* compression to keep that volume from distorting. That's what compression is for!

Adam, you know what you're doing more than I do, so I'm prepared to accept your terminology and explanations-- but if you tell me that all along we've been having discussions about distortion and not compression, my brain is going to explode.

And I'll tell you guys from working for an ISP and writing its help files for 10 years-- most people don't know what file compression is either, whether ZIP or MP3 or OGG or DOOWAHDIDDY.

[Hoblit]

And I'll tell you guys from working for an ISP and writing its help files for 10 years-- most people don't know what file compression is either, whether ZIP or MP3 or OGG or DOOWAHDIDDY.

...or the basics of emailing said compress files in regards to email encoding and decoding with Simple Mail Transfer Protocol...

{/off topic}

[fluffy]

Now that radio stations are entirely digital, they can go much further. Commercial stations now routinely edit songs themselves, trimming intros, chopping out boring bits, editing in station idents and – I’m not making this up – speeding up songs which they think are too slow or boring for their demographic. Some stations routinely play every track at +3%.

:shock: That surprised me.

It shouldn't, by the end of next year all TV stations will also be digital. We're just lucky radio stations don't have to broadcast digitally, yet. Then Satellite radio will become more popular and you may find yourself listening to the radio through your TV.

Most all TV operations are digital already. What will change in Feb 2009 is that terrestrial TV will be broadcast digitally rather than analog. This will only affect people who use antennas to receive the signal, not cable, satellite or IPTV which is already (with very few exceptions) sent digitally. To address this congress has created a coupon program for people to get a set-top box that allows their analog TV to receive the new digital signals. It's estimated that ~30 million people in the US do not have digital-ready TVs today.

In both cases (TV and Radio) the bandwidth savings mean they can either transmit more channels, or more content such as advertising, metadata or interactive applications. Plus, they can play around with compression techniques more easily and thus the noticeable difference between the quality of news vs sports vs feature films. Some of the bandwidth savings will be used by emergency response systems.

Yeah, I don't think that's what the article meant by digital radio. I'm pretty sure they were referring to the fact that radio stations (even the ones broadcasting in analog, which is the vast majority) are using digital storage and retrieval for their music, rather than putting on CDs or vinyl or whatever. The DJ doesn't do anything to the media anymore, they just push a button to talk when the computer tells them to.

Digital broadcast is a very different thing than digital media management, and it'll be a long time before digital radio broadcasts become common (and I doubt we'll see a hard switchover in our lifetimes). Also, the digital radio broadcast standard is designed to work as a sideband which complements the analog signal, so it doesn't take any additional bandwidth. (It's a lot easier to pull that off with audio than with video, simply because the bandwidth used by audio is way lower, by about a factor of 50.)

[Hoblit]

Yeah Fluffy, I don't believe thats lost on anybody. The analog waves of the radio are still floating in the air for your car stereo to pick up.

My point was originally was that broadcasting media content is being managed mostly by digital means now and that TV will be taking that to the next logical step soon. Radio managing its content on servers instead of more fallible types of storage such as record, tape, and compact disk should be no surprise given the current climate.

I doubt that local radio broadcasting will be going digital all that soon. Though it may somehow do so in the future. Right now you should still be able to pick up 'Slow Ride' while cruising route 66 in your unmodified '86 Camero.

[Mostess]

Thank you, I'm selling the script starting at $1 million dollars.

Please, please call it "Hard Limit!"

My more indie version (substitute Eric Stolz for Stephen Seagal, substitute $50,000 for $5,000,000, and substitute lots of nervous smoking for lots of punching bad people) will be called "Softknee."

Shh! The RIAA may be listening!

[fluffy]

Yeah Fluffy, I don't believe thats lost on anybody. The analog waves of the radio are still floating in the air for your car stereo to pick up. ;)

My point was originally was that broadcasting media content is being managed mostly by digital means now and that TV will be taking that to the next logical step soon. Radio managing its content on servers instead of more fallible types of storage such as record, tape, and compact disk should be no surprise given the current climate.

I doubt that local radio broadcasting will be going digital all that soon. Though it may somehow do so in the future. Right now you should still be able to pick up 'Slow Ride' while cruising route 66 in your unmodified '86 Camero.

Well, then there was some discussion about the DTV changeover which is why I thought there was some confusion which needed clarifying.

[roymond]

This is what I was responding to: "by the end of next year all TV stations will also be digital."

Building digital, tapeless TV production and distribution systems is what I do. Playout servers in the industry are still mostly fed by tape, but it's digital content on that tape since AVID and FCP produce most of the material. The switch to tapeless play-out is happening rather quickly. But much production will still be delivered via tape, then staged on the playout server's disk 24 hours before air. This is where the scheduling systems coordinate the program, advertising and graphics that we see on our TVs. Eventually, the playout systems will pull directly from the library, rather from tape.

In any case, clipping show segments and playing with playout speed is common place and yes, will only become more common. Already you have advertising and branding during the rolling credits, by squeezing the box or overlaying it. Unfortunately this will only get worse since apparently we can't sit there unless there are multiple sources of distraction screaming for our attention.

I love building this stuff, but hate how commercial stations abuse content.

[fluffy]

At this point, Fox doesn't even bother making proper closing titles for most of their shows - they pre-bake the closing titles as a bottom-of-the-screen inset with no sound, so that they can just overlay it over whatever retarded thing they're shilling. You can see this for yourself by watching Kitchen Nightmares or the like at hulu.com.

[Hoblit]

This is what I was responding to: "by the end of next year all TV stations will also be digital."

But much production will still be delivered via tape, then staged on the playout server's disk 24 hours before air. This is where the scheduling systems coordinate the program, advertising and graphics that we see on our TVs. Eventually, the playout systems will pull directly from the library, rather from tape.

Yeah, and I believe that process is called ingest. That staged content is staged in a very timely manner down to the frame. (I have a friend in TV) The exception is 'live' tv where there is still time slots and timely ran ads.

[fluffy]

Incidentally, Amazon's digital delivery services also refer to their act of content acquisition as "ingestion." I always thought that was a pretty cool term. Of course that also leads to calling the delivery of said content to customers "excretion." (Management wasn't terribly happy with people who made that observation.)

[Adam!]

I personally wouldn't have a problem with all these anti-loudness war rants, if the people writing them could at least keep their terms straight. They rail on and on about the evils of "compression", but the negative effect they're usually (emphasis added for clarity) describing is distortion.

Say what?

To keep the terms straight, there are generally four detrimental things that mix and mastering engineers do to material with the aim of increase its apparent loudness, or at least the overall RMS. I'll summarize them, along with their side-effects:

Over Compression - loss of dynamic range, "pumping"
Over Limiting - Softening of transients, loss of "punchyness", bass distortion
Over Clipping/Saturation - pops, cracks, clicks, audible buzzing
Over Boosting High-Mids - instant headache, seriously

The articles that *I* have read complain about a "sameness" of the apparent volume within a song, diminishing its interest and appeal. And that's almost always a result of compression.

Yep, that's right. That often-tedious "sameness" is achieved by professionals using a very specific type of mastering compressor (a "leveler"). And yeah, most articles I've read too seem to have the goal of explaining the evils of reduced dynamic range (which they, for better or for worse, equate with compression). But when the articles start citing examples of overly "compressed" records, they tend to go off into the weeds. Frequent examples are, as you mentioned (and kudos to the article for using the word "distortion" to describe it), Iggy's Raw Power re-issue, Californication, the recent System of a Down discs, most Flaming Lips cds, The Killers' Sam's Town, Sleater-Kinney's The Woods, etc. But, the trouble is, most of those cd's (not counting Raw Power, which, seriously, must be a joke) have a larger dynamic range than your average charting album. Although they have all been compressed pretty damn heavily, most likely during mixing, the much more obvious problem is that they have been extremely distorted or limited to increase the apparent volume without reducing the dynamic range. Check out Parallel Universe on Californication, or Radio/Video on Mesmerize: large dynamic range, but horrendous distortion. There are lots of Flaming Lips and The Killers tracks with decent enough dynamic range (certainly better than the pop-punk flavour of the week you'll hear the next time you turn on the radio), but I dare you to find a punchy transient in any of their songs: they've all been turned to mush by brickwall limiting.

I mean, there are some appropriate examples of over-compression being used to reduce dynamic range that get cited, like What's the Story Morning Glory, and that first Arctic Monkey's CD gets mentioned a lot (although, truthfully, that is a pretty subtle example if you ask me). But, I would wager that most of the examples given are describing converter-clipping or limiter distortion, and calling it compression. This article in particular talks about the Waves L1/L3, which is not a compressor but a limiter. My objections may seem overly-pedantic, but I hang out in the mastering forum over on Gearslutz a fair bit, and I see a LOT of people (artists and music enthusiasts) who come in and start threads about "over compressed" albums when they really mean overly-distorted albums. I really think the use of the term "compression" as a catch-all term for the side effects of hot mastering has caused a further disconnect between mastering engineers and clients.

I don't think the super-hot recordings these days are being distorted are they?

I guarantee that, between the intentional distortion done during the mastering process and the unintentional distortion introduced by most mp3 decoders, >99% of recent professional albums you hear have distortion. It can be pretty subtle, but it's getting less-so.

[Paco Del Stinko]

So you want to pump up the volume, OK. But doesn't anybody check these albums beore they go out? Like quality assurance or a proof reader? I love the Woods by Sleater Kinney, but was shocked at the blatant distortion on a couple of tracks. Not from an amp distortion, and it may be from overcompressed unlimited limiting or whatever, but doesn't anybody check to see if it's as loud as possible (right or wrong) but without crumbling into gravel? I have Raw Power on vinyl and it's an awful production job (Bowie?) but can't imagine why someone wouldn't take a break during remastering, go have a sandwich and come back and go "My - that sounds like shit. Better fix it!"

[Lunkhead]

Man, check out the waveform for this single off Alice In Chain's 2009 album:



That is messed up! I mean, I want my tracks to "seem" loud but that is ridiculous.

[Billy's Little Trip]

Yeah, it should never be a block of sound like that.

This is the song. It doesn't sound like it looks. I can hear distortion from extreme limiting I'm guessing.