IEEE Spectrum on overcompression of today's music

[ashok]

Hi everyone,

We have seen other articles deal with this topic. Here is the Spectrum's Suhas Sreedhar reporting on it. http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/aug07/5429. Sorry if it is a repost.

Regards,

Ashok

 

[Zeromancer]

thanks for the link

 

[Whitehall]

Very good link - thanks.

It does point to the consumer's use of music as the driver. If you just want some music to screen the background of your life, then compression and iPods work.

Recording quality matters only for quality music appreciated.

That's why I'm moving more and more to vinyl.

 

[melofelo]

an informative article :thmbsp:...
i especially agree with the quote..
"If record companies aren't making use of the full dynamic capability of CDs, then why bother moving to another format with even more potentially unused capability?"

it explains why my cd player has been gathering dust since 1994 and why sacd doesn't interest me in the least..

i'll settle for a little analog surface noise over gross digital compression anyday...:thmbsp:

 

[the-real-mandak]

It's a funny thing, what he writes is already in some degree outdated.

What has happened since is the brick wall mix; it simply means that the RMS level is 0dB digital, the meter never moves. This has been going on for some time especially in the dance scene, so what they have come up with now is boosting the low frequency’s all the way down in the sub sonic area. This makes the equipment at the radio stations distort when playing back the tune (as well as home), the trick here is that you reach the absolute maximum of level obtainable in the broadcast signal and on top of this the human ear responds quite well to distortion. The distorted signal obtains you're attention and the tune stands out compared to the rest, welcome to year 2007.

What we can hope is that they go back to making radio mastered releases like in the good old vinyl days.

Last I disagree with Suhas Sreedhar in one thing; the reason for the loudness war was not the jukebox but the radio.