Overuse of compression in CDs May 17, 2006
Saw this recent article on how CD engineering sucks these days: What Happened to Dynamic Range? which reminded me of this older Rush article on the same topic: Over the Limit.
Seems like everyone is just trying to use compression to make their CDs sound louder instead of taking advantage of the huge dynamic range offered by digital recording.
Seems to me like the advent of sound normalization on mp3 players, iTunes, etc would make this useless. Even on the radio, they do the same thing to normalize volume, so what’s the point? Record industry people are stupid.
AMEN!!!!!
I loved reading these 2 articles a month ago when you posted them. That original one by Rip Rowan really changed the way I worked with the discs I burned at KDHX. I went back and reburned a bunch of them from the DAT’s to correct the sound.
The overcompression thing came into play last week when I acquired this mythical condition called, An Entire Dang Friday Night To Myself At Home. So I cued up some new stuff on my very meager home stereo and noticed that new Pearl Jam record, which is really really awesome sounded…differently…than it did in the car. Not once did I feel like I should turn the volume down a bit (an instinct I have with loud noises) nor did I lean in to listen for a particular fill. So, I looked at the waveform when ripping a couple of songs and found that each song, right down to the fade out, was manicured better than Heidi Klum. I pulled out one of my 3 copies of Ten and compared the waveform of Alive and got really ticked off.
You mean Ten was better or the new PJ was better? I’m not sure I understand enough about sound engineering to know what you mean exactly.
By the way, I bought the new one for Mary and she has been listening to it a lot. I’ve only listened a bit but I dig it.
[...] Ran across an additional interesting piece on loudness (as previously mentioned here). I was re-struck by this when listening to a lot of music on headphones while flying this week, shuffling over a wide range of old and new stuff. A lot of the new stuff was really boring dynamically and felt kind of blah, even the stuff I like. Older stuff sounded more interesting. [...]
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