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Discussion: can mixing & mastering still improve? (pg. 2)
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| palm |
| it can nothing but improve beacuse todays music sounds ing worse than ever thanks to commercials, radio, mp3, cellphones and all other medium needing to scream for attention. |
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| Subtle |
| quote: | Originally posted by palm
it can nothing but improve beacuse todays music sounds ing worse than ever thanks to commercials, radio, mp3, cellphones and all other medium needing to scream for attention. |
Yes! The loudness war. Ironically the mixing and mastering can be improved by actually LOWERING the volume. |
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| cryophonik |
^ what Palm said.
| quote: | Originally posted by Domesticated
Again, if you’re prejudiced against the heavily compressed sounds of today, please keep it to yourself.
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Um...no thanks, I prefer to exercise my right to express my opinion, but thanks for the suggestion anyway. There are many people (myself included to some extent) who would argue that music sounds worse now than it has in the past few decades precisely because it is so heavily compressed and that the current trends of excessively squashing the dynamic range and overlimiting is ruining the expressiveness of many good tracks. So, yeah, there's a lot of room for improvement in both mixing and mastering IMO. Try googling "loudness wars" and you'll see that I'm not alone in my opinion. |
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| EddieZilker |
| quote: | Originally posted by Subtle
Yes! The loudness war. Ironically the mixing and mastering can be improved by actually LOWERING the volume. |
+1 |
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| Subtle |
| quote: | Originally posted by cryophonik
^ what Palm said.
Um...no thanks, I prefer to exercise my right to express my opinion, but thanks for the suggestion anyway. There are many people (myself included to some extent) who would argue that music sounds worse now than it has in the past few decades precisely because it is so heavily compressed and that the current trends of excessively squashing the dynamic range and overlimiting is ruining the expressiveness of many good tracks. So, yeah, there's a lot of room for improvement in both mixing and mastering IMO. Try googling "loudness wars" and you'll see that I'm not alone in my opinion. |
Yeah for the home listener this really sucks, we have volume knobs and want to control the volume of a track ourselves.
It does however probably work in clubs etc, and get more sales on download portals, but the end product will be forgotten pretty fast. |
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| Beatflux |
| It doesn't matter how much compression you put a track through; if it blows nobody is going to listen to it. On the other hand, if it's good then people will turn it up! |
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| RichieV |
| I don't think the loudness war really applies to dance music. Dance music is meant to be really loud on a consistent basis. |
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| EddieZilker |
| quote: | Originally posted by RichieV
I don't think the loudness war really applies to dance music. Dance music is meant to be really loud on a consistent basis. |
Hence it is played on a large PA system capable of amplifying to a desired volume. Does it really require a track to be mastered to maximum dB with that being the case? |
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| RichieV |
| quote: | Originally posted by EddieZilker
Hence it is played on a large PA system capable of amplifying to a desired volume. Does it really require a track to be mastered to maximum dB with that being the case? |
The whole turn it up philosophy implies that you can turn it up when it is soft or down when it is loud. It allows the listener to control the dynamics, not the engineer. How would this work in a club ? You going to pay a gay to turn it up and down ? And how will you know when it is too loud or too soft. Are you going to take a survey ?
maximum dB is irrelevant. the maximum rms level is what is important. The criticism of loudmusic is that it was tiresome on the ears but clubs are so loud that this argument doesn't really matter so much. People are drunk or high... , and what really makes people want to dance is that full wall of sound that is unrelentless. People aren't there to really listen to music and all its beautifull dynamics. They are there to feel the actual vibrations.
I'm not advocating killing dynamics in every music . I work in a field where the average engineer mix is - 18 db rms but the point is that for dance music, the loudness war is reallty irrelevant. |
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| cryophonik |
| quote: | Originally posted by RichieV
You going to pay a gay to turn it up and down ? And how will you know when it is...too soft.
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Sorry, but I'm not going to pay a gay to do anything, especially not to turn it up and down and let me know when it's too soft. :p :D |
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| EddieZilker |
| quote: | Originally posted by RichieV
The whole turn it up philosophy implies that you can turn it up when it is soft or down when it is loud. It allows the listener to control the dynamics, not the engineer. How would this work in a club ? You going to pay a gay to turn it up and down ? And how will you know when it is too loud or too soft. Are you going to take a survey ?
maximum dB is irrelevant. the maximum rms level is what is important. The criticism of loudmusic is that it was tiresome on the ears but clubs are so loud that this argument doesn't really matter so much. People are drunk or high... , and what really makes people want to dance is that full wall of sound that is unrelentless. People aren't there to really listen to music and all its beautifull dynamics. They are there to feel the actual vibrations.
I'm not advocating killing dynamics in every music . I work in a field where the average engineer mix is - 18 db rms but the point is that for dance music, the loudness war is reallty irrelevant. |
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that it's really up to the DJ, in a club, to determine how loud the music is going to be played.
At some point, I think you're correct, however, in that the media that's being played by DJ whoever, has to have a respectable peak level. It's not going to do to have an improperly mastered track on whatever device they're using.
I think, where the loudness war comes into play is that, from what I've heard and observed, there is a tendency to make the entire track as loud as possible - so much so that at whatever level a song is played out any semblance of detail or finesse becomes completely obliterated.
Don't get me wrong, I like loud music, but I want to be able to hear little (and big) psycho-acoustic nuances. |
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| Domesticated |
| quote: | Originally posted by Wendell Frost
Yeah you started the thread by saying:
Give us your opinion, but not your opinion. |
No, I asked you to withhold your bias. There's a difference.
| quote: | Originally posted by RichieV
until recorded audio can sound exactly like it was being played live, there is room for improvement. |
Good point, however I was talking about electronically created sounds, not live instrumentation. I should have said this but I assumed it would be a given.
| quote: | Originally posted by EddieZilker
Will mastering improve?
One of my long-term studio goals is to be able to record from hardware summing into a Korg MR-1000. It's simply optimal for high-resolution recording, in order to capture detail and clarity that might otherwise be ignored. Programs like Sonar are capable of developing 64-bit resolution to audio recording but I don't think the day is too far away when individual tracks in a DAW will be capable of delivering one bit resolution.
I think, in-so-far as the question Domesticated posed, that such a "level" is still entirely subject, albeit generally, to Moore's Law. The higher the resolution that may be obtained, as the result of general technological development, the better recordings will become. Innovations, in both music hardware and software, will be developed to take advantage of the ever expanding ability of technology. |
I wasn't so much talking about bit-depth (though that's important too) as I was talking improving the relative levels and clarity within tracks.
| quote: | Originally posted by cryophonik
Um...no thanks, I prefer to exercise my right to express my opinion, but thanks for the suggestion anyway. There are many people (myself included to some extent) who would argue that music sounds worse now than it has in the past few decades precisely because it is so heavily compressed and that the current trends of excessively squashing the dynamic range and overlimiting is ruining the expressiveness of many good tracks. So, yeah, there's a lot of room for improvement in both mixing and mastering IMO. Try googling "loudness wars" and you'll see that I'm not alone in my opinion. |
I'm well aware of "loudness wars". Why do you think I asked people to withhold their bias as one of the first points in this thread? I don't want it to degenerate into a conflict between those who prefer heavy compression to those who don't.
However, whether or not you like this heavily squashed sound that destroys track dynamics is irrelevant; we can all agree that compression has greatly increased the clarity with which individual elements in a track can be heard. My question concerned this. Will the clarity and "thickness" of tracks have improved markedly in another decade (or ten)? The title of the thread is perhaps misleading in this respect.
Interestingly, with loudness wars, I wrote a small article a while back proposing that human hearing may evolving to be worse. While iPods, clubs, movie theatres and loud industrial noise in general bombard us, our ears may adapt so that we are unable to hear softer sounds and tend to speak louder. As a result, music devices would be manufactured to have even louder outputs, which would start the cycle all over again. I think it's entirely conceivable that in 100 or 200 years, western hearing will be much less sensitive than it is now, but that will be the norm for society. |
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