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" Loudness wars"

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



Memory isn't necessary. If you listen to songs recorded X number of years ago and compare the levels of compression and limiting with levels in most songs recorded today, it's pretty clear what's happened.

I'm not claiming a past Utopian existence between record labels/radio programmers and musicians. I'm saying there was once a delicate balance between them, where the inherent business interests of one could go hand in hand with the aspirations of the other.

If the day ever came when the business people could find a way to make their record-business money without relying on the artistic element, they would drop it in favor of more easily controlled variables, like boy bands or acts that would sound like whatever the industry wants them to sound like.

Yeah, it's always happened. It just wasn't always the rule. It's the rule now. The music business wasn't a broken thing 30 years ago. It was never a great or wonderful thing, but it was a working thing.
http://myspace.com/lifeofpi

www.fridayextra.com/couchpotatoes

" Loudness wars"

22 by scott_Archive
stephensolo wrote:The music business wasn't a broken thing 30 years ago. It was never a great or wonderful thing, but it was a working thing.


It was broken enough that Malcolm Chisholm (a premier engineer from the true "golden days") opted to basically get out of the business then. 30 years ago.

Maybe you've forgotten disco? Followed by the 80's, with the ongoing trend toward things not sounding real like they used to...

Maybe 40 years ago? Although back then the recording mentality may have been right, even still, the business side of it was shitty. That's a totally different topic for discussion, but I'd feel good about saying that 30 years ago every aspect of the music business was already in or headed sharply into the shitter, while 40 years ago they at least had the right approach to the engineering/production side of things, even if the business side was lame.



Mixing for the best-sounding MP3 and mixing for the best-sounding .wav file and mixing for the best sounding vinyl, are these things at least slightly different? Mastering for the different formats certainly is. The world today *is* all about the MP3, unfortunately. And the fact of the matter is, if you try and use a wide dynamic range when making an MP3, it doesn't work so great.

That doesn't mean it makes sense to compress the hell out of an album when mastering it. That just means that the software that folks use to rip from CD to MP3 should apply intelligent compression where required.

Why would the people in the big-money music biz start doing things the right way? If they actually did, that would devalue the whole DIY thing a little. Let them keep being r-tards!! It only makes all us folks more special.
"The bastards have landed"

www.myspace.com/thechromerobes - now has a couple songs from the new album

" Loudness wars"

23 by otisroom_Archive
Rick Reuben wrote:
scott wrote: The world today *is* all about the MP3, unfortunately.
The sales numbers bear you out:
Sales of all U.S. albums, both physical CDs and digital downloads, were down again in 2007 despite the continued upward momentum in the digital realm. Sales plummeted 15 percent last year to 500.5 million from the 588.2 million sold in 2006, marking the seventh consecutive year of decline.

I think there is untapped demand for wide dynamic range music, though. I wonder if, back in 1980, people thought that $2+ a cup premium coffee would sweep America and become our national addiction. Untapped demand was unleashed. Is there dormant demand for high fidelity music, or has the cumulative ear fatigue of the loudness wars permanently wrecked the quality recognition skills of the biggest music buyers, the sub-30 year olds?

The technology to do this is dirt cheap right now, even with the slumping dollar. Some huge hardware manufacturer needs to produce a $99 home CD player that plays 24bit 192kHz files, and then they need to get the major labels to have trained humans go back to the vaults and remaster the best music in that format, with *wide* dynamic range, huge signal-to-noise ratio, and the intended frequency curves. Better than vinyl ever sounded. Even the more recent recordings that were entirely produced in the digital domain must have some shaved dynamic range available in their pre-masters, right?

Then, at least you will have a big step up from the sound quality of even a 320kbps .mp3 to a 24/192 .wav- the jump from .mp3 to a 16/44 .wav is not so great at all, so when the shitty 16 bit .wavs are turned into .mp3's, people don't see a major loss.

Of course, people will get codecs that produce 24bit .mp3's and filesharing will still impact the music business, but I think premium music can earn back its investment plus a lot. Not as much as premium coffee, but it will make money, if the labels can contain their greed and ask no more than maybe $9 a disc for the new re-packaged old music in XDR ( X-treme Dynamic Range ).

( This entire idea might have been suggested earlier on this forum but I was too lazy to look. )


That's not a bad idea. The only problem is you'd have to talk Sony or some other huge corporation into creating a new format. And format birthing is a hard sell. My Betamax mechine and minidisc system are very dusty.
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