Loudness War ... how loud is your music?
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Category: Other music related lounges
Forum Name: Tech Talk
Forum Description: Discuss musical instruments, equipment, hi-fi, speakers, vinyl, gadgets,etc.
URL: http://www.progarchives.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=49209
Printed Date: November 29 2024 at 02:00
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Topic: Loudness War ... how loud is your music?
Posted By: MikeEnRegalia
Subject: Loudness War ... how loud is your music?
Date Posted: June 05 2008 at 16:06
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Most of you will know about the so called "Loudness War" ... you can look it up here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war I was wondering how loud the music in my collection is ... so I looked for a way to calculate the average loudness of a recording - preferably an CD or mp3 (conversion to mp3 doesn't affect the calculation). As it turned out I had been calculating it all along - it directly shows in the replay gain value: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replay_Gain - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replay_Gain Replay Gain comes with many audio players, as listed on the wikipedia page. If you have Winamp you can calculate the replay gain by right-clicking any list of tracks (preferably entire albums) in the media library and choose "Send To -> Calculate Replay Gain". The resulting values are stored as meta tags in the mp3 files, and you can list them in the media library as columns - you can also sort by these columns ... and find out which of your recordings are most affected by the loudness war, and which were mastered in a more audiophile fashion. The replay gain value is the difference in loudness to a reference level (89dB if I remember correctly) - a negative value means that the music is louder than the reference level and needs to be attenuated, a positive value means that the music is less loud than the reference level (preferable/audiophile) and has to be turned up on playback to achieve equal loudness. A pretty technical post - but I hope it is of value for someone!  ------------- https://awesomeprog.com/users/Mike" rel="nofollow">Recently listened to: 
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Posted By: micky
Date Posted: June 05 2008 at 17:27
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hahahha... that ranks about a 10 on the sh*ts and giggles scale Mike... think my loudness quotient would be pretty high up.
------------- The Pedro and Micky Experience - When one no longer requires psychotropics to trip |
Posted By: MikeEnRegalia
Date Posted: June 05 2008 at 17:41
 you mean that the topic is too geeky? Maybe ... but in Tech Talk a topic *has* to be like that.
------------- https://awesomeprog.com/users/Mike" rel="nofollow">Recently listened to:
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Posted By: micky
Date Posted: June 05 2008 at 17:46
oh no... I wasn't trying to say it was 'geeky' at all ... I meant I think they would be sort of interesting to look at ...------------- The Pedro and Micky Experience - When one no longer requires psychotropics to trip |
MikeEnRegalia wrote:Posted By: MikeEnRegalia
Date Posted: June 05 2008 at 17:52
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^ so far I've found out that the classical music (from CDs) has an album replay gain of about 0dB ... some even +2dB. The bulk of the collection is around -5dB, and some albums max out at -14dB.
------------- https://awesomeprog.com/users/Mike" rel="nofollow">Recently listened to:
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Posted By: micky
Date Posted: June 05 2008 at 17:59
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I had read that somewhere about the classical stuff... I think I'll do some fiddling with this later and see how Barbs or Willie stack up vs. Opeth or Mastodon against Rachmaninoff or Debussy Always seeking creative ways to pass the evenings alone here hhahah ------------- The Pedro and Micky Experience - When one no longer requires psychotropics to trip |
Posted By: Dean
Date Posted: June 05 2008 at 18:07
 That's pretty neat... and as I suspected Love Metal by HIM comes out pretty poorly, not only with a poor album gain, but also little variation across the tracks. (I had to try this first as it is the album that irks me the most )
Of course what it doesn't show is the degree of clipping and damaged peaks that occured to achieve the high loudness levels, and ReplayGain correction will never recover that. ------------- What? |
Posted By: MikeEnRegalia
Date Posted: June 06 2008 at 02:30
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^ true, but if an album is mastered to be really loud and contains aggressive drumming, you can be sure that there's heavy compression or even clipping in the drum sounds. But it doesn't have to sound bad - it's actually possible to emulate analog compression and then run the result of that through a brick wall limiter. That way, the result will be heavily compressed but there won't be any "cut-off" waveforms. But of course no matter how you do it, artificially increasing the loudness will always introduce distortion. ------------- https://awesomeprog.com/users/Mike" rel="nofollow">Recently listened to:
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Posted By: BaldJean
Date Posted: June 06 2008 at 07:31
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I'll repeat what I said in another thread:
modern production sucks! as a recent study showed, the dynamic range of
modern CD-productions no longer is used, and even older productions are
now "adjusted" to modern standards. a CD should be able to reproduce
sounds down to 30 decibels, but no modern CD goes below 60 (at least
not in rock music; classical standards are different), and even on
newer releases of older albums the more quiet sounds are made louder in
remix. so much for "modern production"! -------------  A shot of me as High Priestess of Gaia during our fall festival. Ceterum censeo principiis obsta |
Posted By: MikeEnRegalia
Date Posted: June 06 2008 at 07:36
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Calculating the replay gain is a convenient way of finding out how loud a track is - it calculates the root mean square of the loudness (dBFS). I agree that modern productions tend to be louder, but of course there are many exceptions. ------------- https://awesomeprog.com/users/Mike" rel="nofollow">Recently listened to:
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Posted By: BaldJean
Date Posted: June 06 2008 at 08:23
they are not louder in general, they are simply less dynamic. the loud sounds still are as loud as they used to be, but the quiet sounds have been made louder, though this is totally unnecessary. one album this was tested with was the latest reissue of "Sergeant Pepper's", by the way. it was compared to older versions which were more dynamic ------------- A shot of me as High Priestess of Gaia during our fall festival. Ceterum censeo principiis obsta |
Posted By: MikeEnRegalia
Date Posted: June 06 2008 at 09:28
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in fact the loud sounds have also become louder. The signal is more compressed - there's less "distance" between quiet and loud sound - and the average loudness is also increasing. If you ripped both the first CD release and the latest reissue of the album to your hard drive (mp3) and calculated the replay gain of both albums, the latter one would probably have a more negative value, meaning that you would have to attenuate volume to achieve equal loudness.
------------- https://awesomeprog.com/users/Mike" rel="nofollow">Recently listened to:
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Posted By: BaldJean
Date Posted: June 06 2008 at 09:39
not according to the study, Mike. maybe it is your impression, but the study says a clear "no" to that ------------- A shot of me as High Priestess of Gaia during our fall festival. Ceterum censeo principiis obsta |
Posted By: oliverstoned
Date Posted: June 06 2008 at 09:41
Another issue which shows the disaster that digital is for music reproduction. Most of the recent remasters are crap. |
Posted By: Peter
Date Posted: June 06 2008 at 09:45
What?
Mike, I guess you didn't hear my last PM....  ------------- "And, has thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!' He chortled in his joy. |
Posted By: MikeEnRegalia
Date Posted: June 06 2008 at 09:58
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@BaldJean: Which study? All the other studies and wikipedia pages I read say that the loudness is increasing ... this is what the terms "loudness war" and "loudness race" are all about. But perhaps we mean the same thing ... by moving the silent sounds closer to the loud sounds (decreasing the dynamic range) the whole signal becomes louder, because the louder parts are boosted too. @oliverstoned: On the contrary. It is digital recording technology which has increased the possible dynamic range of recordings to as much as 144dB (DVD-Audio). The music industry is to blame, because they're not using the technology to create better sounding music, but to cater it for low quality playback devices instead. ------------- https://awesomeprog.com/users/Mike" rel="nofollow">Recently listened to:
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Posted By: Dean
Date Posted: June 06 2008 at 11:56
Mike is correct - the compression algorythms that boost the quiet passages also limit the loud impulses, so that the overall loudness can be increased, so for example if a loud passage has lots of percussive hits these are clipped so the rest of the music can be increased. The net effect of this is not only a decrease in dynamic range, but an overall increase in average loudness.
------------- What? |
Posted By: MikeEnRegalia
Date Posted: June 06 2008 at 12:02
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This movie is a good demonstration of what the loudness war is about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ ------------- https://awesomeprog.com/users/Mike" rel="nofollow">Recently listened to:
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Posted By: BaldJean
Date Posted: June 06 2008 at 12:52
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this is NOT about compression
------------- A shot of me as High Priestess of Gaia during our fall festival. Ceterum censeo principiis obsta |
Posted By: Dean
Date Posted: June 06 2008 at 13:26
How/why isn't it? ------------- What? |
Posted By: MikeEnRegalia
Date Posted: June 06 2008 at 15:32
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Jean, you said "the dynamic range of
modern CD-productions no longer is used". Doesn't reducing the dynamic range imply compression? Or do you mean that modern albums are simply mixed so that the silent parts are not as silent as they could be? ------------- https://awesomeprog.com/users/Mike" rel="nofollow">Recently listened to:
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Posted By: BaldJean
Date Posted: June 06 2008 at 16:09
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I meant the second. and this is only done for the silent parts, not for the loud ones, so this has nothing to do with compression at all. I do not have the study here; I only heard about it in the radio. if you are interested in it then you will have to write to the radio station WDR 3 and ask about it; the topic was talked about in a program called "Resonanzen". I am pretty sure they could give you more detailed information there about how to get at the results of the study ------------- A shot of me as High Priestess of Gaia during our fall festival. Ceterum censeo principiis obsta |
Posted By: MikeEnRegalia
Date Posted: June 06 2008 at 16:22
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^ maybe you can identify the right day here: http://www.wdr.de/radio/wdr3/sendung_archiv.phtml?sendung=Resonanzen - http://www.wdr.de/radio/wdr3/sendung_archiv.phtml?sendung=Resonanzen I don't think that musicians should be forced to use the entire dynamic range that the CD offers ... like King Crimson put it: "It doesn't mean you should ... just because you can". I think they should try to find a suitable middle ground between extreme dynamics and uniform loudness. Right now I'm listening to Tool - Lateralus ... The Patient is just starting and it's quite silent. I wouldn't change a thing about it! ------------- https://awesomeprog.com/users/Mike" rel="nofollow">Recently listened to:
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Posted By: BaldJean
Date Posted: June 06 2008 at 16:23
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it was only yesterday. that's why it is so present in my mind ------------- A shot of me as High Priestess of Gaia during our fall festival. Ceterum censeo principiis obsta |
Posted By: MikeEnRegalia
Date Posted: June 06 2008 at 16:27
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^ the website doesn't seem to feature any details about the study ... but nevermind. As the loudness war indicates: There is a trend towards louder albums. You can make them louder by using compression, but of course it also helps to make all the sections of a track equally loud. Again, I think that although this is a general trend, there are many exceptions. ------------- https://awesomeprog.com/users/Mike" rel="nofollow">Recently listened to:
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Posted By: BaldJean
Date Posted: June 06 2008 at 16:33
you should be able to download a podcast of the program, Mike ------------- A shot of me as High Priestess of Gaia during our fall festival. Ceterum censeo principiis obsta |
Posted By: MikeEnRegalia
Date Posted: June 06 2008 at 16:34
Maybe I will ... the GEZ fees I'm paying must be of some use!
------------- https://awesomeprog.com/users/Mike" rel="nofollow">Recently listened to:
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