I found this short video on "The Loudness War" interesting because when I home record I'm always fighting the balance between making it as 'loud as possible' without clipping it or compromising it...but it needs to be heard too...

Have a look here (it goes for 1.53 min) I'd be very interested in your experiences with this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

(I found this link on Jim Moginie's MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/jimmoginieandthefamilydog)

Tim O
oestmann guitar

tunes

clips

Tim,
First, there is no reason for you to get anywhere near clipping during the recording stage. That "loudness-war" stuff happens during mastering.
I have to admit is pretty depressing for me when I have submitted a PDM track for a compilation and it is so quiet compared to other songs. We always master with plenty of headroom, if you want to hear it louder, turn it up. But, now, if we submit a track for a comp, we remaster it a bit "louder", though it pains me to do so.
Didn't everybody slam Metallica's new album for being over-mastered?
Ferenc

Buy Speed of Dark @ Bandcamp
Buy Spin the Bottle @ Bandcamp
My Blog- Euro Tour Blog
Pool Boys on Spotify
INSTAGRAM
Frankie & The Pool Boys on FB
Pollo Del Mar on FB
DJ Frankie Pool Boy on North Sea Surf Radio

The over-mastered sound does get on my nerves. I haven't heard the Metallica album, but anything from recent Red Hot Chilli Peppers albums is compressed so much that the wave looks like a housebrick. The result is initially impressive but quickly tiring. They are not in the minority here, but it isn't a game that everyone plays: the Robert Plant/ Alison Krauss album wasn't like it for example.

What I find most surprising about it, is that people record something and then master it this way which actually completely changes the sound-choices they made during that recording. The snare sound in that video clip is a perfect example: the mastering has suppressed the attack and then turned up the ambience on it to such a point that it's a totally different sound. This means that a lot of the sounds on records end up being the accidental result of the mastering rather than a consciously selected sound.

It's a symptom of a wider malaise though: no-one cares about sound quality any more. This is the age of the mp3 and the 'X-tra bass' boost button. To buy anything with a hi-fi sound requires a trip to a specialist shop with a lot of cash. Blu Ray can deliver totally uncompressed wav files at 24/96 and nobody gives a toss - whereas at one time folk would have been ecstatic about such a significant improvement over CD.

That's the way it is, attitudes to music and the way its 'consumed' have changed. Also, don't forget that even if you ignore the trend when you record your CD, if it's played on a sizeable radio station it will be passed through a device called an Optimod - an expensive computerised device that is cleverly designed to make all the records they play sound the same. If multi-band compression and aural excitation is missing from your recording it will be supplied for you anyway ....

http://www.myspace.com/thepashuns

Youth and enthusiasm are no match for age and treachery.

estreet
...
It's a symptom of a wider malaise though: no-one cares about sound quality any more. This is the age of the mp3 ....

Estreet, you might appreciate Jim Moginies blog about this. He was one of the guitarist/keyboard/genuises from Australian band "Midnight Oil". He writes about the "file" and what it means for music HERE

Tim O
oestmann guitar

tunes

clips

As a rule of thumb I delete all music that makes me reach for the volume knob to turn down. If I want to turn it up that’s a good sign.

The Exotic Guitar of Kahuna Kawentzmann

You can get the boy out of the Keynes era, but you can’t get the Keynes era out of the boy.

JakeDobner

Kawentzmann
As a rule of thumb I delete all music that makes me reach for the volume knob to turn down. If I want to turn it up that’s a good sign.

What if it is good music?

Then don’t destroy it. If music is good it will make use of dynamics. If it once did so and then was over-compressed - thats it. You can’t go back.

But that is because I listen to music a lot and grew very sensitive.

The Exotic Guitar of Kahuna Kawentzmann

You can get the boy out of the Keynes era, but you can’t get the Keynes era out of the boy.

I think it’s short term psycho acoustics versus long term psycho acoustics. When exposed to overcompressed music for 40 or 50 years you will eventually lose interest, but these results are still in the making. Funnily many amateurs think a loud track is a better one at first impression. I was like that in the CD era too, I thought the loud bits are the good, content rich ones and the quiet ones are approximations.

The Exotic Guitar of Kahuna Kawentzmann

You can get the boy out of the Keynes era, but you can’t get the Keynes era out of the boy.

I'm a big quality guy, but for my favorite albums/songs I am more than willing to listen to them at 96kbps or even lower just because it is great music. This is assuming I had no access to higher quality recordings of those albums. Point being, you can't create great music by having high fidelity. More enjoyable to listen to? Absolutely, but great music is great music. Granted anything ripped at less than 128kbs and with modern compression is very very rare, I'd still listen to it.

I posted a recent Wall Street Journal article on this very issue in this thread.

Ivan
Lords of Atlantis on Facebook
The Madeira Official Website
The Madeira on Facebook
The Blair-Pongracic Band on Facebook
The Space Cossacks on Facebook
The Madeira Channel on YouTube

JakeDobner

Kawentzmann
The loudness war is about the y-axis of the audio wave, not the file compression.

I know, I was just saying I'd rather listen to a terrible sounding audio file than not listen to great songs.

I understand this completely. Like phone lines with certain subjects this has an aura of “realness”.

In my mind the molecular levels of production and mastering are songwriting as well, or at least part of the whole thing whatever you call it. It‘s all pitches, levels, frequencies, rhythms.

The traditional songwriter starts with a broad view of the tune he has in mind and fills this with chords and main melodies. Sometime during recording he hands this over to the producer and he in turn hands it over to the mastering engineer.

Today there are alternative ways of creating a finished rendition of a tune, and all the steps can be under artistic considerations of song creation, or writing. The Beatles and Stones conquered the studio for bands, the mastering suite is next.

For this reason I can listen to the 1000th version of a tune if it is produced and mastered in a great way. To me it’s half new.

So an annoyingly recorded (regardless at what stage) is not necessary today and some tunes deserve better, but who’s got the time for them? I mainly listen to 50s and 60s music and grow more intolerant towards “modern” production standards the more great recordings of old I find. They don’t mix anymore.

The Exotic Guitar of Kahuna Kawentzmann

You can get the boy out of the Keynes era, but you can’t get the Keynes era out of the boy.