Music Or Noise?
I used to think that there was little room for compression with the advent of the digital processing of music. After all, you could understand the need for compression in analogue formats to drown out the inherent noise, such as tape hiss and the crackle and pops of vinyl, but the silence of digital is dead silence, no?
It seems that people react to louder music, and since we tend to be too lazy to adjust our volume dial, any song that is recorded louder appears to be more dynamic and have more punch. As a result, sound engineers have been under pressure to record music and higher and higher levels.
So what is the use of the huge dynamic range that a compact disc is capable of reproducing, if the music that is recorded is only squashed into a dynamic range of 10 dB? The song will sound almost equally loud from start to end, without the ebb and flow that delivers part of the expression in music.
I decided to write about this, because I was actually ripping audio from Madonna's Sticky And Sweet Tour DVD. Yes, there is an accompanying compact disc, but it lacks all the tracks, including one of my favourites, the mash-up of Rain with the Eurythmics' Here Comes The Rain Again. To my horror, most tracks on the DVD were recorded at full throttle, with hardly any dynamic range.
To give you an idea of what it means, I uploaded two different recordings to illustrate.
The first two spectra belong to Borderline on Madonna's Sticky And Sweet Tour DVD, while the second set belong to the first movement of Hadyn's Trio in C major, Hob. XV/27 recorded by Trio Goya. As you can see, the first two spectra are saturated with sound, while the second set show healthy variation in sound intensity.
It probably does not help with resurgence in the popularity of mobile music through the iPod and lossy formats like AAC and mp3. I just hope that music does not just end up being a battle of who goes loudest.
It seems that people react to louder music, and since we tend to be too lazy to adjust our volume dial, any song that is recorded louder appears to be more dynamic and have more punch. As a result, sound engineers have been under pressure to record music and higher and higher levels.
So what is the use of the huge dynamic range that a compact disc is capable of reproducing, if the music that is recorded is only squashed into a dynamic range of 10 dB? The song will sound almost equally loud from start to end, without the ebb and flow that delivers part of the expression in music.
I decided to write about this, because I was actually ripping audio from Madonna's Sticky And Sweet Tour DVD. Yes, there is an accompanying compact disc, but it lacks all the tracks, including one of my favourites, the mash-up of Rain with the Eurythmics' Here Comes The Rain Again. To my horror, most tracks on the DVD were recorded at full throttle, with hardly any dynamic range.
To give you an idea of what it means, I uploaded two different recordings to illustrate.
The first two spectra belong to Borderline on Madonna's Sticky And Sweet Tour DVD, while the second set belong to the first movement of Hadyn's Trio in C major, Hob. XV/27 recorded by Trio Goya. As you can see, the first two spectra are saturated with sound, while the second set show healthy variation in sound intensity.
It probably does not help with resurgence in the popularity of mobile music through the iPod and lossy formats like AAC and mp3. I just hope that music does not just end up being a battle of who goes loudest.