elisha wiesner wrote:chris walla wrote:

"I really feel I'm on an island a lot of time"

so do i.


-e

har har.

This is the piece I wrote on it in 2006.
.
http://www.austin360.com/music/content/ ... cover.html

otisroom wrote:

Adam I wrote:

otisroom wrote:

Dr. Venkman wrote:He's dead on about the TV commercials, too. They're WAY loud.

Also, music and action scenes in movies need to be turned down. I have to ride the volume on my remote throughout all these new movies. Actors now whisper when they talk, then a song or action sequence comes on and all hell breaks loose. CRAP.

I second everything you said.

This happens to me all the time. I hate it.

Um, what you describe is dynamic sound in action. In terms of the 'loudness wars', you're the enemy!



*winky face*

Well then I guess I wish they'd use more compression on their hollywood blockbuster 5.1 bus.

Why is it that action movies can have really quiet parts and really loud parts but rock records can't?

I think it's pretty straightforward. The reason the film has such big dynamic range is because it's intended for a movie theatre. It's a (generally) quiet, acoustically-minded space with a badass sound system. The quiet whispery parts are audible in a theatre. And the explosions shake the room. Kinda like a real explosion would.

The music on the radio is intended for people driving their cars. LOTS of ambient noise, sometimes white-ish in nature, noise that would easily dominate and mask the quiet parts of songs. So compression is a good solution for that.

Compressing the record excessively is just stupid. The radio station is applying its own compression on everything that goes out. The album doesn't need it, beyond a certain point. I personally find that soft-limiting the top 1dB to maybe 2dB or *maybe* 3dB off of recordings does the trick. That's after mixing for as close to 0dB as I can get without clipping, without no compression.

I've used the Steinberg Loudness Maximizer plugin a few times, to reasonable effect. It's pretty easy to use right. Just about as easy as it is to use it wrong, I'd guess.

In the Rolling Stone article someone said everyone makes the CD's the way they sound good (loud) after music goes to an Ipod, so why CD's are not being sell with a code which allows downloading the mp3's from the side, and those mp3's could be as well compressed and made as loud as possible so they sound good on ipod? In times of p2p sofware it would be possible to do that without spending tons of cash on bandwith, like you download a really small (less than 1MB) p2p program off the site and download music from other regular folks. If that's impossible for some reason, would throwing an additional, unmarked cd with mp3 raise the costs that much? Same mp3's could be played on the radio. Would additional time needed to compress and raise the volume before encoding mp3's is so long it's impossible from financial point of view? Cause it is a pretty simple job on sound editors, but I don't know how pro-stuff works.
This is so obvious someone must have thought about it and reject it, but why?

scott wrote:

otisroom wrote:

Adam I wrote:

otisroom wrote:

Dr. Venkman wrote:He's dead on about the TV commercials, too. They're WAY loud.

Also, music and action scenes in movies need to be turned down. I have to ride the volume on my remote throughout all these new movies. Actors now whisper when they talk, then a song or action sequence comes on and all hell breaks loose. CRAP.

I second everything you said.

This happens to me all the time. I hate it.

Um, what you describe is dynamic sound in action. In terms of the 'loudness wars', you're the enemy!



*winky face*

Well then I guess I wish they'd use more compression on their hollywood blockbuster 5.1 bus.

Why is it that action movies can have really quiet parts and really loud parts but rock records can't?

I think it's pretty straightforward. The reason the film has such big dynamic range is because it's intended for a movie theatre. It's a (generally) quiet, acoustically-minded space with a badass sound system. The quiet whispery parts are audible in a theatre. And the explosions shake the room. Kinda like a real explosion would.

I have to admit I've never thought of this and it seems a good theory. I've wondered in the past if it has something to do with surround encoding. All big films these days are mixed primarily for surround and the stereo mix is an after thought. So I was thinking that a 5.1 mix collapsed into stereo might create some more drastic dynamic bumps. But I have no way to test this theory. I guess I could just go ask a few film mixers. After all there are a bunch in my neighborhood. One thing is for sure movies have definitely gotten louder over the years.

[/quote]



The music on the radio is intended for people driving their cars. LOTS of ambient noise, sometimes white-ish in nature, noise that would easily dominate and mask the quiet parts of songs. So compression is a good solution for that.

[/quote]

If some punk mastering engineer maximized all the quiet parts out of a record I slaved over just so some duchebag bro could hear it while driving on the hiway in his lifted and customized Ford F250 pickup with the tinted windows down, well, then, I'd punch said punk mastering engineer in the throat.

Radio broadcast compression is mandated by the FCC. I'm pretty sure of that.

Death Cab for Cutie's lead douche is championing 'sucking hard'. I mean, for christ sake, is he able to champion anything else?

stephensolo wrote:There was a time in the music business when the people with the money let the songwriters write the songs and the engineers make the records without too much interference.

The music industry today operates like a sports league where the owners decide that instead of funding the teams and profiting from their successes they’ll coach the players themselves, because after all, they can do a better job. They’re businessmen.

i don't buy that at all -- there were always music businessmen interfering in the art. taking copyrights, bossing people around, "i don't hear a single", edit it down, fade it out, have a producer coach everyone blah blah.

it's a classic fallacy to think that everything was better in the days of yesteryore.

that's one thing i love in no country for old men movie was the part when, after tommy lee jones and another cop are all like "if you told me 20 years ago that there would be people with green hair and bones in their noses! it's horrible", the wheelchair guy tells the story about ruthless sadistic murder in 1906 or whenever. things have always sucked -- it's not new.

which brings me to the loud movies topic:

the gunshots in no country were veeeeeeeeeeery loud.

world of pee wrote:
it's a classic fallacy to think that everything was better in the days of yesteryore.

This is very true. I bet there's a name for it. If there isn't then there should be.

otisroom wrote:

world of pee wrote:
it's a classic fallacy to think that everything was better in the days of yesteryore.

This is very true. I bet there's a name for it. If there isn't then there should be.

Oh yeah, the shrinks call it:

Euphoric recall.