i knew it! I mean i'm not surprised. I mean the government. I mean wtf. I knew... I mean god must love stupid people... i relearn this everyday!

this is why jesus was crucified, for trying to make songs the same volume on his ipod.

man i used to like metallica. used to

Reason #445 to not pay for music created by large record companies.

Agreed.

Not sure if this is the best choice of genre for a discussion of subtlety and dynamics, but it's a good point. There is another video somewhere on the sift that makes the same point. There are other factors to take into account, like production and medium. A poorly produced recording will sound like shit regardless of compression/dynamic range, and when we transitioned to mp3s, it was the first time in history that a new format has actually taken a step back as far as detail and quality goes.

There are all kinds of new, higher quality formats competing at the moment, and one of them is bound to be crowned champ within a few years. Maybe this will inspire artists and their sound engineers to rediscover the beauty of subtlety and dynamics in order to take advantage of technology. Probably not though, especially among macho hardcore bands who may fear putting out an album that isn't as loud as their peers. Heaven forbid their fans should have to manually adjust the volume knob.

This is really sad, I remember in '93 I could hear every instrument on a song on a CD and it was amazing. Over time, the listening experience has gotten less and less rewarding. I used to blame my ears but I'm glad to see it's not always my fault.

This is yet another example of the music industry shooting itself in the foot.

I thought this would be about the degeneration of political reporting into the shouting matches you see these days. I suspect that would make for a revealing, if depressing little video.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
Agreed.
Not sure if this is the best choice of genre for a discussion of subtlety and dynamics, but it's a good point. There is another video somewhere on the sift that makes the same point. There are other factors to take into account, like production and medium. A poorly produced recording will sound like shit regardless of compression/dynamic range, and when we transitioned to mp3s, it was the first time in history that a new format has actually taken a step back as far as detail and quality goes.
There are all kinds of new, higher quality formats competing at the moment, and one of them is bound to be crowned champ within a few years. Maybe this will inspire artists and their sound engineers to rediscover the beauty of subtlety and dynamics in order to take advantage of technology. Probably not though, especially among macho hardcore bands who may fear putting out an album that isn't as loud as their peers. Heaven forbid their fans should have to manually adjust the volume knob.


It's not just through audio compression from CD that audio has taken a step back. A lot of portable audio players in recent times, have sacrificed on hardware audio components for slimness and ended up sounding resoundingly worse than the CD players of the last generation. Not to mention that most people nowadays find it acceptable to listen from mobile phones, which comparatively have even cheaper chips in them.

To be honest though, compression doesn't really worry me. I've got a pretty decent headphone/DAC setup, and as much as I try I can't hear the difference between V0 and CD audio.

What annoys me more is that most people are willing to settle for iBuds. I guess it's to be expected though, most modern music is heavily synthesized, containing few if any non-electronic instruments, including voice of course which with Auto-Tune is perfectly in tune, removing just about all subtlety or uniqueness from the singer. In that sense, heavy compression and cheap equipment in modern music probably doesn't lose you much in detail. If there's no texture or imperfection to be heard from a string instrument because the whole song is composed of virtually mono-tonal looped beats generated from a keyboard, then compression and cheap equipment isn't going to make the song sound any less natural because it wasn't attempting to in the first place.

See http://www.videosift.com/video/The-Loudness-War for the original video, but shorter.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
when we transitioned to mp3s, it was the first time in history that a new format has actually taken a step back as far as detail and quality goes.

Hopefully as technology continues to advance we will be able to move away from the necessity of compressing our music. The main purpose of the mp3 format was/is to reduce the file size. This came about at a time when a 3gb HD was standard in PCs and the idea of a portable mp3 player was only just being imagined. Early mp3 players too were severely limited by the size of HDs and the amount of space available. Now that HD space is so cheap and physically small perhaps it is time to scrap the mp3 in favor of a non-compressed format.

There is a further problem though. The average listener (especially of modern pop music) has no understanding of the musical file formats on their computer/player let alone of pure audio characteristics. Many couldn't even begin to describe what makes for better audio quality or why their mp3s aren't perfect.

The people in the know need to lead the way and the studios who have forced the loudness war onto us need to be destroyed. Then we can start producing and listening to real music again.