Recorded music doesn’t sound as good as it used to. The recordings sound muddy, clipped and lack punch. This is due to the ‘loudness war’ that has been taking place in recording studios. To make a track stand out from the rest of the pack, recording engineers have been turning up the volume on recorded music by introducing dynamic range compression. No I am not referring to lossy or loss-less compression (MP3, AAC, FLAC).
DRC is been continuously used since past decade , a growing number of CDs have been mastered that way too. Louder tracks grab the listener’s attention, and in this crowded music market, attention is important. To the casual listener compression can sound “good,” mostly because it makes the music seem louder and punchier. Once music’s natural soft-loud dynamic shifts are squashed flat music is easier to hear in noisy environments like Car or over i Pods. Compression reduces the need to adjust playback volume–because it’s always nearly the same volume–loud. However listening for longer duration can cause fatigue and even pain.
So what’s the need for DRC in music. DRC was dictated by the playback limitations of analog equipment, including Car audio and CD players. It basically reduces the difference between the loudest and softest sounds in a song. Music Artists in recording studios work at Sound pressure level -85 dB. Sound level is very high at this stage. When Music is mastered and played on CD, the playback equipments are not that capable at reproducing the accurate details. Also most mp3 & audio players when played in noisy environment are not capable of reproducing low sound details. Thus the need to introduce compression has arrived.
Evolution of compression as shown in picture above
A little bit of compression is fine, but over-compression can sound downright ugly. If you still have any sensitivity in your ears, your immediate response is most likely to turn the sound down, or hit the mute button. Highly compressed sound is offensively “in your face” and bearable for about 45 seconds. It’s extremely tiring: it leads to “listening fatigue”. But suppose you had to listen to 63 minutes of this sort of crap? The louds are louds and the softs are loud, with little difference. The result is that our music seems strained, there is little emotional range, and listening to loud all the time becomes tedious and tiring.
Sound Engineers worry that if they don’t compress their recordings the music would seem too soft and low. That is, if a music listener went from really loud, compressed music to quieter, uncompressed music they probably wouldn’t like uncompressed music–unless they turned it up! That way they would hear the music’s natural soft-loud dynamics.”You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static” -Bob Dylan.
Picture shows difference between Guitar hero and CD audio of metallica death magnetic.
Metallica’s latest Album has received much criticism against its CD counterpart. According to mastering engineer Ian Shepherd, Metallica’s new Death Magnetic album has a serious sonic problem: it has been compressed (in the audio sense of the word, not the file size sense) just about as much as it’s possible to compress audio.
Part of the “loudness war,” this type of compression is designed to make music sound as loud as possible at the expense of dynamic range (the difference between loud and softer sounds). Television advertisers use similar technology to get the most bang for their buck volume-wise, which is why ads often sound so much louder than television programs. Death Magnetic seems to be the biggest violator, with fans both demanding the band re-mix the album and threatening to perfectly-execute GH’s in-house version and send that to fans clamoring for a proper mix.
This video demonstrates of how DRC affects sound quality.
Shepherd links to a Metallica forum claim that the band was not present during the mixing or mastering of Death Magnetic. James Hetfield: “I think things came out really good. They’re going to be mixing it while we’re away in Europe. Yeah, and that will be… well,we haven’t done that in a while. We’ve usually been around for the mixes.”
Fans have signed a petition asking that the album be re-mixed (as opposed to remixed) and/or remastered. Failing that, someone will eventually record themselves playing the song perfectly within the game and distribute it via bit torrent, and then Metallica’s label will have another thing to get upset about. Ian Shepherd, the mastering engineer at SRT, appears to have pinpointed and analyzed the problem first. He credits Metallica fans with the idea of checking the compressed CD version with the Guitar Hero version. “There’s no analysis needed, you can hear it plain as day,” he said via email. “The real credit lies with the fans on the Metallica forums who spotted this and pointed it out.”
