True. But if engineers of the past had digital capabilities, the same would have occurred way back when. Some analog recording that became US Top 40 hits, had extreme audio mastering. When the same album was (multi-track) remixed, the sound became bland, people complained (see Amazon). That group, Lighthouse, One Fine Morning (70's) song. The best person to judge music, without fancy waveforms, is to just ask yourself.
Actually, Foobar2000 ReplayGain now (since v1.0.6) employs the libeubr128 for it's calculations, and thus is using EBU-R128 gating to generate ReplayGain tags, for adjusting the playback volume/gain to make the song meet a target of -18 LUFS (not the -23 LUFS broadcast target).
ReplayGain has tried to do what iTunes is trying to do now. I think it's a semi-weighted curve with a level of -89 dB SPL ? set as a target, no gating or *intelligent* measurements though. I have employed it, running Foobar with 32bit float, trying to avoid dithering distortions etc. It is not always accurate, and the R128 standard measurement looks very promising. Another good presentation. Thanks for the upload video's these are great!
Interesting video. Being a fan of stereophonic reproduction, I had to answer my own question why I enjoyed it. I prefer it due to less masking of sounds. Why I can understand and relate to those who enjoy surround sound with four (or more) discrete channels. Sound masking comes in handy, such as when George Martin mixed The Beatles, such to "conceal" what he and others had done to Ringo's drumming. :)
thank god for people like this, I discovered mid/side years ago and heard those space monkeys on many mp3's even in normal mode,and decided I would never pay for them, also at 128 and even slightly higher rates, frequency response drops to 16kHz or lower
The loudness war has reduced mastering engineers to such a level that they just submit. You either fall in line or are replaced. What else should they do? As a music producer/performing artist I wonder what the hell I should do about this. Currently I just share the info that I can.
and another album mastered by Bob Katz, was quieter than my pre-master exported files, he didn't want to make it louder because of perceived distortion and artifacts and i said, bob, not everyone is listening in a perfect million dollar room! it just has to be as loud as the previous track on the iPod dock!
In fact clipping in digital sample domain, it's like loosing some data on a compressed video file, making some horrible scrambled mess of pixel and in audio artefact, in Analog domain you can distord, reasonably it's also left the harshness, i love using some VHS hifi tape or old cassette to make the sound softer, i think we also need to go back with analog mixing desk, i have a lot of exemple of good DDD and ADD , CD the first edtion of Supertramp or Kate Bush are very good exemple.
I'm thinking it's because there's less of a push to grab consumer attention with the sound, and more through flashy effects and "radical" cinematography. Which incidentally is exactly where you see the decay occur in film. On the technical side of things I think this frees up mastering producers for video to 'sperg out and just do it as good as they can. Although there has been a push for sharpening and high contrast in terms of the picture, the sound must be a bit of a safe haven from producers
The ITU-R BS.1770 and EBU R128 -23 LUFS level is certainly lower than need be for modern/popular music, where in my families opinion, were adjust tracks to around -16/-18 LUFS. Dire Strait's "Brother's in Arms" original 1980's Vertigo pressing is one dynamic and quiet-ish (relative music industry speaking) CD, sitting around that level of even -20 LUFS. -23dB would be fine, as classical stuff would work more seemlessly with popular genres.
go ahead and fight the volume war folks, but if you're mastering an independent band's album, please know that it has to be competitively loud so that it is perceived as being as loud, and by extension, as good as all the other overly loud albums that come on their iPod shuffle! I had Chris Geringer master an album and he totally gave us the small name from a foreign country approach, i.e. select preset, go for coffee, charge $3000 and don't care for a second that your work was sub-par!
Well, even the worst encodes usually preserves the "main" sound to some degree. The devil is in the details so most people don't notice it. They just hear that the vocal or guitar riff or whatever sound is dominant is almost the same and conclude it's perfect.
Surround is more of a gimmick honestly. Stereo should technically be more than enough for most things. It's just that I find most stereo records barely qualify as fancy mono. The best you tend to find is panning effects. Where my holophonics at?
I heard the iTunes encoded distortions of the S/M playbacks. It explains the strange timbre of certain passages in songs I was noticing in my Amazon mp3's and is why I only buy pressed at the factory CD's now. Wouldn't want those distortions amplified in the source file, but is it OK for factory stamped CD's? I like the big and loud distorted bass line of Flaming Lips' "It Overtakes Me"-(recorded loud) which doesn't clip my back dash 6x8's. It's the scratchy highs I have to EQ most often.
Well, for streaming that's true. Streaming movies are disgusting in both picture and sound. But blu-ray is quite something else. Home movies have never sounded this good ever before. The closest you might get is some of the better laserdiscs. Lossless, cinema quality stuff we get nowadays.
I completely understand what all these engineers are saying. I really do. But here is a question. Are'nt the engineers the final stop of the audio.? This is what I mean., If someone has their audio too loud in a production and hands it over to an engineer to master, the mastering engineer should just bluntly say, "go back and lower those damn levels you fool". because in the end, its the mastering engineers responsibility & fault if all these sounds are distorting. because they let it happen.
Distortion in the pumped edgy pop songs is not easy to identify, and it seems not objectionable. Solo vocals with reverb is where clipping is most apparent. Overs from lossy codecs are also audible in recordings of speech, where typically low bitrates are used (audio books and similar), if they were normalized to full scale beforehand. Modern Pop/RnB with voices across the entire stereo width I often find hard to listen to, if they clip and click in one channel at a time, which is not correlated to where the singers are. Experts have said that it is acceptable to clip drums to some extent, as long as the duration of the clipping is kept short. However, that short duration is still audible on clean tonal content. Why is it that audio professionals often refer to Apple Itunes and Sound Check, and never comment about ReplayGain, which predates SC and R128?
Inter-sample peak distortion is something interesting. CD's produced and pressed in the 1980's seemed to have a chunk of free headroom above the highest peak (sometimes a couple of dB from 0 dBFS, sometimes a little less), and I thought that the reason why they were not peak normalised to 0 dBS was because of ISP distortion. Some recent stuff has max peak at 0.1 dBFS but that can't be saving ISP distortion at all. So the CD's *ARE* faulty and we can demand money back! Boycott crap material!
Nope. Sure 24bit is technically better than 16bit, and it should sound better, but most releases don't even utilise the quality of 16bit/44.1KHz. So stating that 24bit DVDA should be standard would be even more of a waste of media capability. Music should be produced and released with more respect to it's integrity - standard!
i also love working in 24 bit at 96khz, i can have the full frequencie response up to 30 khz in real analog domain, if only DSD was more affordable we could make very cool album. people should never abused of Normaliser and Side chain compression, it's so extreme.
Surprise, surprise, lossy isn't lossless. I think anyone who care's anything about audio quality knows this, MP3 sucks, other's suck potentially less, but lossless is the only sensible route to keeping your music high quality for playback on decent equipment. Sure lossy is fine for portable players with crappy ear buds, but who is *really* listening on those? ...next issue... >>>
And this is where its their fault. (They Submit) and let it happen. So we are all going to go through this year long, year after year into and beyond the next generation. because (We just let it happen). Mastering Plants and Mastering Engineers have a huge responsibility, and this is the first in line. If they cant handle this, they we are all just doomed, and makes no sense on making this video because it will fall to deaf ears in every generation. Co. must back up their mastering engineers.
Support Indy artists and enlighten music fans! ANIMATED hipster/geek SUPERHERO * HOMERECORDINGMAN * will be flying around the net helping Indy artists & recording engineers get paid more for their work. How can those who create the songs you want to hear keep making music if they don’t get anything in return? Watch our headphone wearing Bro make his case and convince dedicated music fans to buy some music and keep it ALIVE! Spread the word! CLICK THYRDEYE
I swear, why do you people make such a fuss, a bit of distortion never hurt anyone, in fact, the human ear itself isn't linear, distortion is quite natural. Also, spacemonkey is just the price you pay for smaller file sizes. I had like 100mb per month back when this video came out, even with the compression I could only download like a couple of songs a month, not everyone has the luxury of infinite mobile internet. Intersample peaks being a problem you should care about is mostly a myth. Just because YOU finetuned your ears to hear any ammount of dystortion as a problem doesn't mean everyone does, most just percieve it as some extra edge to the music just dont overdo it and it's fine transient peaks can easyly clip by 3db and it still sounds just fine.
I think anyone who's into production be it music or for broadcast work should watch this video.
True. But if engineers of the past had digital capabilities, the same would have occurred way back when. Some analog recording that became US Top 40 hits, had extreme audio mastering. When the same album was (multi-track) remixed, the sound became bland, people complained (see Amazon). That group, Lighthouse, One Fine Morning (70's) song. The best person to judge music, without fancy waveforms, is to just ask yourself.
Actually, Foobar2000 ReplayGain now (since v1.0.6) employs the libeubr128 for it's calculations, and thus is using EBU-R128 gating to generate ReplayGain tags, for adjusting the playback volume/gain to make the song meet a target of -18 LUFS (not the -23 LUFS broadcast target).
Brilliant stuff, with some good jokes on the side! Thanks for this vid, a pleasure to watch.
ReplayGain has tried to do what iTunes is trying to do now. I think it's a semi-weighted curve with a level of -89 dB SPL ? set as a target, no gating or *intelligent* measurements though. I have employed it, running Foobar with 32bit float, trying to avoid dithering distortions etc. It is not always accurate, and the R128 standard measurement looks very promising.
Another good presentation. Thanks for the upload video's these are great!
Thank you so much for posting these videos! It's so helpful to have such valuable lectures available, so thank you for your generosity.
Interesting video. Being a fan of stereophonic reproduction, I had to answer my own question why I enjoyed it. I prefer it due to less masking of sounds. Why I can understand and relate to those who enjoy surround sound with four (or more) discrete channels. Sound masking comes in handy, such as when George Martin mixed The Beatles, such to "conceal" what he and others had done to Ringo's drumming. :)
Highly useful information. Thank you!
thank god for people like this, I discovered mid/side years ago and heard those space monkeys on many mp3's even in normal mode,and decided I would never pay for them, also at 128 and even slightly higher rates, frequency response drops to 16kHz or lower
Awesome presentation. Tak!
I may not understand all of this but thanks a lot for uploading this interesting video!
Thanks for this, very informative!
16bit is enough for all forms of media if your Speaker system can do 96dB above ambient noise you would be deaf in about 5mins.
to clarify, it was es posthumus, and the streaming demo tracks from their website were better sounding.
Yes! Yes, yes! Please!
The loudness war has reduced mastering engineers to such a level that they just submit. You either fall in line or are replaced. What else should they do? As a music producer/performing artist I wonder what the hell I should do about this. Currently I just share the info that I can.
and another album mastered by Bob Katz, was quieter than my pre-master exported files, he didn't want to make it louder because of perceived distortion and artifacts and i said, bob, not everyone is listening in a perfect million dollar room! it just has to be as loud as the previous track on the iPod dock!
In fact clipping in digital sample domain, it's like loosing some data on a compressed video file, making some horrible scrambled mess of pixel and in audio artefact, in Analog domain you can distord, reasonably it's also left the harshness, i love using some VHS hifi tape or old cassette to make the sound softer, i think we also need to go back with analog mixing desk, i have a lot of exemple of good DDD and ADD , CD the first edtion of Supertramp or Kate Bush are very good exemple.
I'm thinking it's because there's less of a push to grab consumer attention with the sound, and more through flashy effects and "radical" cinematography. Which incidentally is exactly where you see the decay occur in film. On the technical side of things I think this frees up mastering producers for video to 'sperg out and just do it as good as they can. Although there has been a push for sharpening and high contrast in terms of the picture, the sound must be a bit of a safe haven from producers
The ITU-R BS.1770 and EBU R128 -23 LUFS level is certainly lower than need be for modern/popular music, where in my families opinion, were adjust tracks to around -16/-18 LUFS. Dire Strait's "Brother's in Arms" original 1980's Vertigo pressing is one dynamic and quiet-ish (relative music industry speaking) CD, sitting around that level of even -20 LUFS.
-23dB would be fine, as classical stuff would work more seemlessly with popular genres.
go ahead and fight the volume war folks, but if you're mastering an independent band's album, please know that it has to be competitively loud so that it is perceived as being as loud, and by extension, as good as all the other overly loud albums that come on their iPod shuffle!
I had Chris Geringer master an album and he totally gave us the small name from a foreign country approach, i.e. select preset, go for coffee, charge $3000 and don't care for a second that your work was sub-par!
Apparantly yes, I tried buying a track from iTunes once, the quality is so low it's basically a ripoff.
Well, even the worst encodes usually preserves the "main" sound to some degree. The devil is in the details so most people don't notice it. They just hear that the vocal or guitar riff or whatever sound is dominant is almost the same and conclude it's perfect.
Surround is more of a gimmick honestly. Stereo should technically be more than enough for most things. It's just that I find most stereo records barely qualify as fancy mono. The best you tend to find is panning effects.
Where my holophonics at?
I heard the iTunes encoded distortions of the S/M playbacks. It explains the strange timbre of certain passages in songs I was noticing in my Amazon mp3's and is why I only buy pressed at the factory CD's now. Wouldn't want those distortions amplified in the source file, but is it OK for factory stamped CD's?
I like the big and loud distorted bass line of Flaming Lips' "It Overtakes Me"-(recorded loud) which doesn't clip my back dash 6x8's. It's the scratchy highs I have to EQ most often.
Well, for streaming that's true. Streaming movies are disgusting in both picture and sound. But blu-ray is quite something else. Home movies have never sounded this good ever before. The closest you might get is some of the better laserdiscs. Lossless, cinema quality stuff we get nowadays.
I completely understand what all these engineers are saying. I really do. But here is a question. Are'nt the engineers the final stop of the audio.? This is what I mean., If someone has their audio too loud in a production and hands it over to an engineer to master, the mastering engineer should just bluntly say, "go back and lower those damn levels you fool". because in the end, its the mastering engineers responsibility & fault if all these sounds are distorting. because they let it happen.
Question, why would engineers push the peak level towards 0 in the first place?
Any chance you want to do a TED talk?
Distortion in the pumped edgy pop songs is not easy to identify, and it seems not objectionable. Solo vocals with reverb is where clipping is most apparent. Overs from lossy codecs are also audible in recordings of speech, where typically low bitrates are used (audio books and similar), if they were normalized to full scale beforehand. Modern Pop/RnB with voices across the entire stereo width I often find hard to listen to, if they clip and click in one channel at a time, which is not correlated to where the singers are.
Experts have said that it is acceptable to clip drums to some extent, as long as the duration of the clipping is kept short. However, that short duration is still audible on clean tonal content.
Why is it that audio professionals often refer to Apple Itunes and Sound Check, and never comment about ReplayGain, which predates SC and R128?
Inter-sample peak distortion is something interesting. CD's produced and pressed in the 1980's seemed to have a chunk of free headroom above the highest peak (sometimes a couple of dB from 0 dBFS, sometimes a little less), and I thought that the reason why they were not peak normalised to 0 dBS was because of ISP distortion. Some recent stuff has max peak at 0.1 dBFS but that can't be saving ISP distortion at all.
So the CD's *ARE* faulty and we can demand money back! Boycott crap material!
Oh I thought you meant that movies only got better in picture.
Best part 38:36
The mastering-engineer is hired to serve a client. If the client is not happy, client finds another engineer.
He has a really danish accent! :D Is he from Denmark?
It makes no sense to have loudness wars anymore because 99% of people who own CD's have a stereo system at home.
Pink noise sounds like crap on youtube haha :) wonder how many codecs it went through to get to me.
Nope. Sure 24bit is technically better than 16bit, and it should sound better, but most releases don't even utilise the quality of 16bit/44.1KHz. So stating that 24bit DVDA should be standard would be even more of a waste of media capability. Music should be produced and released with more respect to it's integrity - standard!
i also love working in 24 bit at 96khz, i can have the full frequencie response up to 30 khz in real analog domain, if only DSD was more affordable we could make very cool album. people should never abused of Normaliser and Side chain compression, it's so extreme.
Surprise, surprise, lossy isn't lossless. I think anyone who care's anything about audio quality knows this, MP3 sucks, other's suck potentially less, but lossless is the only sensible route to keeping your music high quality for playback on decent equipment. Sure lossy is fine for portable players with crappy ear buds, but who is *really* listening on those?
...next issue... >>>
nice presentation verry clear, and yeah 256 lossless.... haha
The Beatles had 4 track and the music was superb. No we have 48 track, the best technology and now music is shizen!
So.. conclusion.. pink noise wins? :D
Conclusion is that if even pink noise sounds better, then wtf is happening with music nowadays ? Recording companies really should stop compressing.
And this is where its their fault. (They Submit) and let it happen. So we are all going to go through this year long, year after year into and beyond the next generation. because (We just let it happen). Mastering Plants and Mastering Engineers have a huge responsibility, and this is the first in line. If they cant handle this, they we are all just doomed, and makes no sense on making this video because it will fall to deaf ears in every generation. Co. must back up their mastering engineers.
Support Indy artists and enlighten music fans!
ANIMATED hipster/geek SUPERHERO * HOMERECORDINGMAN * will be flying around the net helping Indy artists & recording engineers get paid more for their work. How can those who create the songs you want to hear keep making music if they don’t get anything in return? Watch our headphone wearing Bro make his case and convince dedicated music fans to buy some music and keep it ALIVE! Spread the word!
CLICK THYRDEYE
22:42 Ha ha! So true...utter shite
I swear, why do you people make such a fuss, a bit of distortion never hurt anyone, in fact, the human ear itself isn't linear, distortion is quite natural. Also, spacemonkey is just the price you pay for smaller file sizes. I had like 100mb per month back when this video came out, even with the compression I could only download like a couple of songs a month, not everyone has the luxury of infinite mobile internet. Intersample peaks being a problem you should care about is mostly a myth. Just because YOU finetuned your ears to hear any ammount of dystortion as a problem doesn't mean everyone does, most just percieve it as some extra edge to the music just dont overdo it and it's fine transient peaks can easyly clip by 3db and it still sounds just fine.
thanks :) 24bit dvd audio should be standard. rest are garbage!!!