It’s around this time of year that I start my classes on audio mastering. One of the big issues for me is the abuse of limiting plug-ins, and so it was with some delight that I recently came across this useful little movie on YouTube:
There are places when limiting heavily may be appropriate: mastering tracks for club-bound 12″ vinyl, for example. But most of the time people are being seduced by the most superficial of signifiers—pure volume—when really anyone wanting it louder just has to turn it up for themselves.
This isn’t some esoteric geek issue, either: even The Guardian have written a very good little article about the “loudness wars” here. What’s interesting is that it obviously isn’t the mastering engineers who are doing it—in fact they’re complaining like crazy—but the record companies and, tragically, the artists themselves. Even Paul Simon is at it!!!!
This cult of loudness extends through to the finished product: Thomas Lund at TC Electronics has shown how modern CDs are simply recorded too ‘hot’. His research shows a 2002 Eminem CD generating around 25 instances of “obvious distortion” every 10 seconds! Read the full Distortion To The People paper here.
MP3 Player
I updated the MP3 player last night with a new (eclectic, exotic, extravagant) playlist. Regular or returning visitors may need to refresh this page. Watch out, Ionisation starts very quietly.
I’ve also switched MP3 encoder for this set of tracks. I was using iTunes, but I’ve found a little freeware programme called Switch that has an excellent range of conversion options and a very straightforward user interface. It’s made by an Australian company called NCH Swift Sound Software who make an interesting and unusual range of reasonably-priced audio programs for Mac, PC, and PDAs. Check ‘em out…
Anyway, I’ve started encoding now in stereo at 160kbps, assuming most people are on broadband. If anyone experiences problems please let me know. Which leads me on nicely to:
Audio Quality
Back in June—here in fact—I commented on the widening gap in audio quality experienced by music producers and music consumers. This weekThe Guardian ran an article by Jack Schofield that discussed this very issue, although mostly in terms of the small market for SACD and DVD-A. However, he does offer this pertinent summary that reinforces my own observations:
We have become the audio version of a fast food nation, consuming low-quality music on the run never sitting down to savour a higher-quality experience.
Quite. Thanks for coming, and please feel free to leave a comment.
This is Dan Pearce. He’s just finished doing a BSc (Hons) Music Technology degree at Swansea Metropolitan University. His Major Project was a very high quality piece of work on audio compression codecs.
Perhaps the most interesting part of his project was the listening tests carried out on a set of lossy codecs: MP3, Microsoft WMA, Apple’s AAC, and the open source Ogg Vorbis. Dan conducted a set of tests that compared the subjective quality on each of these based on a set of four criteria: bass response, treble response, clarity, and spaciousness. Each of these in turn was measured against four different types of source material: rock/pop, jazz, classical, and spoken voice. A standard bit rate of 64kbps was used. Here’s a graph showing the compiled results across all the tests:
We have a winner! His results clearly show the superiority of the Ogg Vorbis files in all categories except the classical! WMA and AAC are very closely matched, whilst MP3 consistently performs the worst. Dan puts this down to its age: originally released in 1993 it’s by far the oldest. Here’s a set of samples from Dan’s project which, I think, give a good indication of the relative performances of the codecs:
For me, the findings from this report beg a huge question: why are most people satisfied with the quality of MP3? It’s grainy, harsh, and has a poor stereo image. And yet it would seem that many people are now getting rid of their CD collections and switching entirely to MP3. Yes, of course I can understand the whole slew of benefits afforded by the digital files/downloads/iPod thing, but doesn’t anyone care how bad it all sounds?
And it’s not even as if “CD-quality” audio is all that good. 24-bit/96kHz digital audio is just so much better it’s unreal, and these days it’s pretty affordable too. We have this situation where—for music producers—audio quality has recently shot up, whilst music consumers now seem happy to settle for a substantially lower-quality product than they’ve been used to for the last 20-odd years. Odd, to say the least. Maybe, for most people MP3 is just good enough….
[Note: in order to get the audio examples streaming across the 'net without glitching I had to subject all the files to a further level of compression. However, they're all encoded equally at 160kbps stereo, and so the relative differences between them remain the same.]
