Wilbert
Well-Known Member
GrRrrrR said:
You're joking, right?
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Mastering Madness 2 - The IRISH dimension (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter RED(tape)MENACE
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You're joking, right?
- Thread starter
- #22
Yeah, kinda.
Wilbert
Well-Known Member
GrRrrrR said:
Thats a relief.
Go on Mr. GrRrrrR, name names. People won't mind. You are only talking technical stuff.
It would be a big help to people if they knew the songs you were talking about. Otherwise it's like that saying, "dancing about architecture".
zebra heart attack
Well-Known Member
image names.
c'est tout.
c'est tout.
desertedvillage
Well-Known Member
[font=Arial, sans-serif]This is a cool article.[/font]
I've mastered a few things in my time and you've shown some pitfalls.
I never knew about the clip-then-reduce shennannigans. Anyone who does that is fuckin' bollix or just incompetant.
I've mastered a few things in my time and you've shown some pitfalls.
I never knew about the clip-then-reduce shennannigans. Anyone who does that is fuckin' bollix or just incompetant.
D
Deleted member 3435
Guest
hugh said:
pssssst....y'know if you right click on the waveform image and go to proerties there may be some clues there as to who the artist is......!zed
D
Deleted member 3435
Guest
das nugs said:
oh stacey's kinda onto that.
Dude no.7
New Member
I find through some limited experience using the sound forge tools that the biggest culprit for the clipping sort of sound , more like a shakiness is when using rms normalisation... listening back to a couple of my amateur attempts, this defintely mucked up the quality of the sound....
there is an option to limit so clipping does not occur... but this often results in the shakiness i speak off....
in my opinion, the less normalisation (esp. rms) and compression that has to be done the better.... relative levels should be addressed in mixing and only slightly compensated for in mastering...
perhaps some masterers have a magic button they think works for everything, i dunno...
remember i speak as a total amateur but i think it makes sense....
there is an option to limit so clipping does not occur... but this often results in the shakiness i speak off....
in my opinion, the less normalisation (esp. rms) and compression that has to be done the better.... relative levels should be addressed in mixing and only slightly compensated for in mastering...
perhaps some masterers have a magic button they think works for everything, i dunno...
remember i speak as a total amateur but i think it makes sense....
The demand for this kind of ultra limited kind of stuff is driven by the industry. When CD first came out engineers were very cautious in their use of headroom. Then bit by bit the record companies demanded that their cd be louder than everyone elses. This was also helped along by the advent of portable music players where limiting and bringing up the rms value of the music countered the effects of ambient noise. Hence driving up the rms value as close to zero as possible.
CD has to be and is a very tolerant format. Apart from clipped samples the CD has to deal with low grade media, misaligned cutting lasers, server errors etc. etc. but with the aid of error correction and over-sampling it makes a fairly decent fist of reproducing the Music.
Clipping samples itself isn't the end of the world if that's the sound you're going for. On the Soft Bulletin by the Flaming lips the drums were recorded by sending the Overheads through a Tascam Dat Machine flat out. The all bits on approach generates white noise and a clangorous sound but as I said before it's a matter of taste rather than a blanket rule.
This kind of limiting isn't a modern phenomenon either. In the 70's and further back a lot of records were mixed to half-inch with the console overloaded, tape machine overloaded(not just saturated) and red lights everywhere. This resulted in square waves everywhere and the generation of level dependant 5th order harmonics ie. noise. Analogue or digital noise is noise.
I think it imprudent and unfair to judge recorded material by looking at waveforms or analyzing samples. Music has to sound good rather than look good and by inference if the songs referred to look crap they sound crap. Again it's a matter of opinion. I personally think that crap Music will sound crap long before a mastering engineer gets anywhere near it and I'm not going to stop listening to music becaue it has a few clipped samples.
CD has to be and is a very tolerant format. Apart from clipped samples the CD has to deal with low grade media, misaligned cutting lasers, server errors etc. etc. but with the aid of error correction and over-sampling it makes a fairly decent fist of reproducing the Music.
Clipping samples itself isn't the end of the world if that's the sound you're going for. On the Soft Bulletin by the Flaming lips the drums were recorded by sending the Overheads through a Tascam Dat Machine flat out. The all bits on approach generates white noise and a clangorous sound but as I said before it's a matter of taste rather than a blanket rule.
This kind of limiting isn't a modern phenomenon either. In the 70's and further back a lot of records were mixed to half-inch with the console overloaded, tape machine overloaded(not just saturated) and red lights everywhere. This resulted in square waves everywhere and the generation of level dependant 5th order harmonics ie. noise. Analogue or digital noise is noise.
I think it imprudent and unfair to judge recorded material by looking at waveforms or analyzing samples. Music has to sound good rather than look good and by inference if the songs referred to look crap they sound crap. Again it's a matter of opinion. I personally think that crap Music will sound crap long before a mastering engineer gets anywhere near it and I'm not going to stop listening to music becaue it has a few clipped samples.
- Thread starter
- #31
I think you're misjudging the point of this article.
I'm not saying that a song with a few clipped samples sounds bad. A song with +100,000 samples per channel DOES. I don't think you can argue that too far.
As far as individual components of a mix being clipped, that's fair enough.
My problem is with people driving masters into digital clipping, not as an effect, not for a 'sound', but simply to get their shit louder. It's a shitty and pointless exercise.
As far as people smashing shit in the 70's, I'm not sure that I've heard any of the records you're talking about, but I'd be interested to.
I'm not saying that a song with a few clipped samples sounds bad. A song with +100,000 samples per channel DOES. I don't think you can argue that too far.
As far as individual components of a mix being clipped, that's fair enough.
My problem is with people driving masters into digital clipping, not as an effect, not for a 'sound', but simply to get their shit louder. It's a shitty and pointless exercise.
As far as people smashing shit in the 70's, I'm not sure that I've heard any of the records you're talking about, but I'd be interested to.
GrRrrrR said:
And I think you're misunderstanding my point. I'm saying that your analysis of the masters is based entirely on a visual representation and not an aural analysis. This stuff may look all wrong but to most people they won't hear the difference. Only one may appear louder. It may alarm you but the fatiguing high end and lack of dynamic range are what most people are used to now and if something's mastered with tons of headroom the net effect will be that it seems quieter when compared to other stuff. I outlined in my previous posts to why this is the case. The days of getting a recording and hearing it on any decent delivery system are gone unless you want to punch a hole in your bank account and splash out on a Linn or Bang & Olufsen system.
If anything modern sound systems will further push thing by having internal compressors and bass boosts etc. etc. So we're stuck with it. I know a good few mastering engineers and it's the artist themselves that push the limiting and the most frequent complaint they get is that it's too quiet. Letting thousands of samples go over is careless I agree. But people demand that their stuff be as loud as it can be and until that changes we're stuck with the brickwall.
As for the seventies stuff it was common practise particularly among punk bands to hammer everything through desks and tape machines in order to get as loud a signal as possible. As a lot of these recordings were mixed for vinyl distortion wasn't a problem. The masters themselves may fall well below digital clipping levels but the program material was completely saturated.
- Thread starter
- #33
People keep pointing out how ridiculous it is to analyze music with pictures and statistics. This I fucking know.
Here's the thing ; I keep hearing musicians who have a vague idea of what this whole 'loudness war' is about. A lot of people know there's something going on, but don't have a grasp of the reasons, effects or consequences.
The reason I wrote this whole shitty thing down was in an attempt to educate or enlighten some folks out there. From some of the responses I've gotten, I think I've done at least a little of that. Chances are a bunch of people think I'm a fuckhead now, too.
Using pictures and stats was the only reasonable way I could think to do it. I gave examples in the first thread of commercially released CD's that people can go fucking listen to and decide for themselves. Like I said there, I never thought 'Doolittle' or 'Nervermind' were too quiet. Maybe they can go listen to 'Relationship of Command' and use their imaginations to form an idea of how a singer-songwriter's album at that RMS would sound. Maybe not. I don't know.
Above all, this shit pisses me off. I don't enjoy sticking on the Bloc Party album and having to turn it off after 8 songs because my ears are burning. Whatever about shitty mp3 players and what people are 'used' to hearing, eventually the public will start to notice this. It may be subconscious, but they'll notice. Maybe people will start buying less music. Hang on... isn't that what's happening now?
I can stick up links to technical papers about consumer CD players and how they start generating silly levels of distortion at levels below 0dbfs because they're made with cheap components. Or how FM radio processing exaggerates the nastiness of hyper-compressed material. People WILL start to notice.
Above all, I think taking the attitude that there's nothing anyone can do about it is shitty. Like you said, it's the artists/labels rather than the mastering engineers that are driving this for the most part. Not exclusively, but for the most part. I think the reason the artists are driving it is ignorance. They don't know that pushing something so that it's as loud as x release by b artist makes it sound shitty. If you level match a dynamic mix of a song with a smashed mix, people will choose the dynamic mix more often than not, I'd bet. The volume as a means to and end is nonsense. Do you know anyone who doesn't ever touch the volume on their stereo?
Anyway, we're talking about IRELAND here, not London or LA. It's not like anyone here is trying to compete with Gwen Stefani or Audioslave.
Look, I'm not trying to get shitty or personal with anyone.
What the fuck do I know.
I'm just stupid/idealistic enough to stick my neck out over this shitty trend in music. I know guys have to make a living, and you're not going to tell a client to take his money elsewhere for a few db here an there. I don't want anyone to. I just wish that musicians could make an educated choice about this aspect of their recordings. If they still choose to L2 everything, more power to 'em.
So, despite the unavoidable flaws in my method, and disclaimer that this is all my lame-brained opinion and highly subjective either way, do you think I haven't made a worthwhile contribution with this crap?
That's really all I'm aiming for here, and I hope I haven't pissed anyone off. That was not my intention.
Peace.
Here's the thing ; I keep hearing musicians who have a vague idea of what this whole 'loudness war' is about. A lot of people know there's something going on, but don't have a grasp of the reasons, effects or consequences.
The reason I wrote this whole shitty thing down was in an attempt to educate or enlighten some folks out there. From some of the responses I've gotten, I think I've done at least a little of that. Chances are a bunch of people think I'm a fuckhead now, too.
Using pictures and stats was the only reasonable way I could think to do it. I gave examples in the first thread of commercially released CD's that people can go fucking listen to and decide for themselves. Like I said there, I never thought 'Doolittle' or 'Nervermind' were too quiet. Maybe they can go listen to 'Relationship of Command' and use their imaginations to form an idea of how a singer-songwriter's album at that RMS would sound. Maybe not. I don't know.
Above all, this shit pisses me off. I don't enjoy sticking on the Bloc Party album and having to turn it off after 8 songs because my ears are burning. Whatever about shitty mp3 players and what people are 'used' to hearing, eventually the public will start to notice this. It may be subconscious, but they'll notice. Maybe people will start buying less music. Hang on... isn't that what's happening now?
I can stick up links to technical papers about consumer CD players and how they start generating silly levels of distortion at levels below 0dbfs because they're made with cheap components. Or how FM radio processing exaggerates the nastiness of hyper-compressed material. People WILL start to notice.
Above all, I think taking the attitude that there's nothing anyone can do about it is shitty. Like you said, it's the artists/labels rather than the mastering engineers that are driving this for the most part. Not exclusively, but for the most part. I think the reason the artists are driving it is ignorance. They don't know that pushing something so that it's as loud as x release by b artist makes it sound shitty. If you level match a dynamic mix of a song with a smashed mix, people will choose the dynamic mix more often than not, I'd bet. The volume as a means to and end is nonsense. Do you know anyone who doesn't ever touch the volume on their stereo?
Anyway, we're talking about IRELAND here, not London or LA. It's not like anyone here is trying to compete with Gwen Stefani or Audioslave.
Look, I'm not trying to get shitty or personal with anyone.
What the fuck do I know.
I'm just stupid/idealistic enough to stick my neck out over this shitty trend in music. I know guys have to make a living, and you're not going to tell a client to take his money elsewhere for a few db here an there. I don't want anyone to. I just wish that musicians could make an educated choice about this aspect of their recordings. If they still choose to L2 everything, more power to 'em.
So, despite the unavoidable flaws in my method, and disclaimer that this is all my lame-brained opinion and highly subjective either way, do you think I haven't made a worthwhile contribution with this crap?
That's really all I'm aiming for here, and I hope I haven't pissed anyone off. That was not my intention.
Peace.
Fair enough, but in this particular thread people don't have a chance to hear to what you're referring to.
Look this trend has been accelarating rapidly over the past ten years and is showing no signs of abating. This is the sound of our times driven by compressed audio formats. Quiet stuff doesn't sound good on portable music players because of the crappy signal to noise ratio and by their use in places that have high ambient noise. Just turn on your radio and even poor ol' Frank Sinatra is being mashed to a pulp.
I'm sorry but this is where we're at.
Look I like to use the volume control as much as you do if I want something louder. But a lot of people like the sonic assault of dodgy mastering. The Razor blade high end of the Bloc Party album is shocking but doesn't seem to put many other people off.
There are people (not me) that want their stuff to sound like this. I know you think it's pointless, and from an engineer's point of view it's a fucking tragedy, but the great public, artists and the bold boys at the record companies and radio stations don't see it your way and couldn't give a flying fuck about signal integrity.
I am not having a go at you or your points on mastering. It just seems that the listening public have a bigger tolerance for crap than you have.
Karl.
Look this trend has been accelarating rapidly over the past ten years and is showing no signs of abating. This is the sound of our times driven by compressed audio formats. Quiet stuff doesn't sound good on portable music players because of the crappy signal to noise ratio and by their use in places that have high ambient noise. Just turn on your radio and even poor ol' Frank Sinatra is being mashed to a pulp.
I'm sorry but this is where we're at.
Look I like to use the volume control as much as you do if I want something louder. But a lot of people like the sonic assault of dodgy mastering. The Razor blade high end of the Bloc Party album is shocking but doesn't seem to put many other people off.
There are people (not me) that want their stuff to sound like this. I know you think it's pointless, and from an engineer's point of view it's a fucking tragedy, but the great public, artists and the bold boys at the record companies and radio stations don't see it your way and couldn't give a flying fuck about signal integrity.
I am not having a go at you or your points on mastering. It just seems that the listening public have a bigger tolerance for crap than you have.
Karl.
GrRrrrR said:
GrRrrrR said:
These two statements would seem mutually exclusive to me. What's with the "There's a new sherriff in town" approach.
Yes the mastering issue IS a completely subjective issue, no amount of looking at waveforms can tell you how something sounds. And the atricle does point out that in the race for louder and louder commercial media the audio can suffer, but whether it's 10 or 100,000 clipped samples in a master it really doesn't matter as long as it sounds good. I think where a lot of mastering engineers make a mess is when they change mixes audibly through overuse of compression and/or eq - but things can sound truly very loud and be clipped to shit and still just sound like a louder version of the original mix.
People I have worked with are rarley disappointed with a master based on the volume being too loud... the opposite has been an issue on a number of occasions, most disappointment tends to stem from getting their mastered version back and it sounding completely different to the mix. I think educating musicians should concentrate on the issue of sonics ie. tone rather than on power/volume. For sure if a ME crucifies the sound in an effort to just purely make it louder he/she is doing the job badly but I do think that pretty much every musician is going to want to be able to put their music on along-side any other artist and feel that it stands up on every level... especially level!!
I do agree that the competetive nature of mastering is probably out of control... It seems that, for a lot of people, the L2 route is just the easy option and they go there without considering the audio but most professional MEs will actually use their ears and will pay no heed to clips as long as it sounds good. It's a debate that will rage and rage and I also think that there is no going back. CD, SACD, DVD-A, all have the ability to reproduce in a way that tape and vinyl couldn't, and as that oppertunity is there you will always find some musician who will want to exploit the technology to make super loud masters, and when one does the the next will want theirs as lous as the first and so on til it spirals out of control again..
- Thread starter
- #36
Alright, I was having a bad day. Actually, I kinda forgot about that part.. too many Eastwood movies that week.
Well, I'm guessing you do at least some mastering work, so what do you do if a band come to you looking for crazy level for no 'artistic' or 'sonic' good reason? Do you point out to them the possible pitfalls?
Well, I'm guessing you do at least some mastering work, so what do you do if a band come to you looking for crazy level for no 'artistic' or 'sonic' good reason? Do you point out to them the possible pitfalls?
- Thread starter
- #37
And Karl... Yeah. Basically it's all fucked. And FM radio has been smashing Frank since the late 70's. Here we are in 2005, using a format with dynamic range up around 100db, and people are using about 4db of that. Bah. I dunno.
Anyway, I'll buy yiz both a pint and we'll go listen to some records. Howzat?
Anyway, I'll buy yiz both a pint and we'll go listen to some records. Howzat?
Dude no.7
New Member
F**k the industry.... aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrgggggghhhhhhhhh!!!!!
independent music for independent minded people who should make their music to sound good (whatever that means) and not to become like advert music.....
doesn't it piss you off when the adds come on tv or radio and you have to turn your tv/radio down coz it's too loud
and then turn it back up again after the adds are over....
my two cents that trying to get something homemade to sound like it's made by sony is a recipe for disaster....
digital recording is cheap and should free us not make us slaves.... now to dig up my four-track
props to Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr (too many R's?) for giving the massif of home music makers some insight in to something that is kind of confusing and very misunderstood
independent music for independent minded people who should make their music to sound good (whatever that means) and not to become like advert music.....
doesn't it piss you off when the adds come on tv or radio and you have to turn your tv/radio down coz it's too loud
and then turn it back up again after the adds are over....
my two cents that trying to get something homemade to sound like it's made by sony is a recipe for disaster....
digital recording is cheap and should free us not make us slaves.... now to dig up my four-track
props to Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr (too many R's?) for giving the massif of home music makers some insight in to something that is kind of confusing and very misunderstood
echidnacrossing
New Member
GrRrrrR said:
Plus digital clipping will cook your tweeters.
ralph waldo
New Member
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2005
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GrRrrrR said:
did this joker guy ever get named? i'm intrigued
Ralph Waldo
"Every hero becomes a bore at last"
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