Very interesting article on Spotify’s recent changes to volume levelling. Could this mark the end of sound brickwalling?
Will this put and end to the Loudness Wars?
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
*parp*
*arf*
I’m just soooo grateful we can’t see what’s going on there.
Coloured bulbs!
COLOURED BULBS!!!
Mr B purchased this just after I snapped it.
You snapped his todger? Wow! Kudos to you.
Hegemonic Loudness – three more from them later.
Ehh?
Between the normalisation being applied by the major streaming services and the growth of vinly, loudness-war mastered records are starting to stick out like sore thumbs. That’s great, IMO. Overly heavy compression is nasty.
Brickwalling isn’t necessarily always a villain, though – you need it, especially on the vinlies, to tame wild peaks that ironically are more likely to occur in a well-mastered, dynamic record. Without it, you’d get nasty clipping distortions on CDs and potential needle skips on vinyl. It’s just that it’s been wildly overused. If you limit in such a way that nothing can peak over 0db (though the mastering engineer Ian Shepherd, who co-developed the Dynameter software mentioned in the article, recommends -1db), you make the record sound much nicer without squashing the main body of the waveform. Poor old brickwall limiters. They get a right pasting these days, but they’re super useful tools.
“Overly heavy compression is nasty” – Mrs Moose has been talking about our sex life again.
Sounds like you could do with a dose of normalisation, young man!
Bit late for that, I suspect. Bad Moosie. In your bed. No, YOUR bed.
You’re no fun any more 🙁
Interestingly* I got an email this morning from the firm who are cutting our new record to vinyl saying that they prefer no limiting at all and to let the record peak at above 0db without worrying. They like the gain to be hovering around zero – it’s the high frequencies (especially sibilants around 6-12khz) that cause them the most issues.
So apparently you can’t find a true consensus on this stuff anywhere!
(*not interestingly)
That could well banjax your 15 minute dub-poetry epic, “Save us from the Suffering Sausages of Sausalito!”
Fortunately I talk like Yosemite Sam which THHHLOFTENS the THHHLIBILANTLH quite conlthiderably.
I thought it was interesting, Bob.
But that isn’t much of a recommendation.
Haha! It’s the only one that matters to me, Steve 🙂