Could products like the Sonos, which are now small, wireless, and relatively cheap cause a return to the standard house having a decent sound quality? I recently went to someones house that had a Sonos play 1 that surprisingly had very good sound quality. Obviously for a 200 dollar small module it wasn't phenomenal but it had decent clarity and very surprising bass extension. It was extremely easy to set up and worked on WiFi. It was good enough that I think someone with a general interest in music but not really in sound quality could hear one of these at a friends house and get interested in getting one, then they get one and a domino effect back to having good sound quality in the average home with these small compact modules that are so easy to make that even the cheap "affordable" by the standard household budget on audio units sound pretty good. And if so when people start to be able to hear the compression and sound quality degradation with even standard gear that enough people could cause recording studios to start investing better budgets for high quality production and stop compression and brickwalling. It seems to me that we've seen the start of a trend back into people caring about audio quality. Since 2008ish time it seems more people have better steroes and more people care about good sound. Maybe it is just hopeless dreams tho of sound quality of the average modern record returning to at least as good as the tech they had in the 70's for even low budget recordings...I'm sure it's easier and cheaper these days to make a similar quality recording
So to summarize my rant I'm just wondering if anyone thinks the music industry will return to making better quality recordings for popular music anytime in the near future?
So to summarize my rant I'm just wondering if anyone thinks the music industry will return to making better quality recordings for popular music anytime in the near future?
But for normalization to have this effect on things, won't it need to be enabled by default on new products? That's the part I'm still not very optimistic about.
-- glass-half-empty Jim
Streaming is the trend nowadays as I understand it. I think it was the Wiki entry that stated that Apple's service would normalize, and I would expect the others to follow suit. I don't know the status of Sirius and XM.
It wouldn't be pure fantasy to imagine new hardware with this convenience. In any case, it isn't a difficult task to perform, and one whose necessity is fairly obvious. Even due to non-compressed recording variations.
It wouldn't be pure fantasy to imagine new hardware with this convenience. In any case, it isn't a difficult task to perform, and one whose necessity is fairly obvious. Even due to non-compressed recording variations.
Ah, streaming, of course. They would almost have to implement something like this just to make it useable. Maybe there's hope there...
Yes, I love ReplayGain. Sure wouldn't want to do without it these days.
-- Jim
Believe it or not, the reasons for highly compressed music have nothing to do with hardware quality nowadays (like it did when phonograph record mastering required the RIAA encoding and decoding curves).
The biggest reason for the compression and clipping of music: the culture of the big music companies, and by imitation, the smaller music recording and producing labels. Eliminate all these "experts" and the problem will disappear overnight, now that basically all forms of playback perform automatic gain leveling anyway (i.e., iPods, smartphones, on-line streaming, radio stations, etc.).
The trend isn't really reversing as far as the data is concerned for media-based and online distribution... "Loudness War" Dynamic Range Compression & The DR Database - Observations - diyAudio
The fastest way that this will change is when people stop buying music because of Loudness War practices. Once the "experts" in the music industry (actually, they're salesmen and managers, NOT experts), the problem will correct itself overnight. Look at the Analoque Productions re-master of Norah Jones albums in 2012: Album list - Dynamic Range Database
Did sales take off on these SACDs? The format itself (SACD discs with DSD and DSF files on them) is designed to prevent buyers from ripping their music into other formats--by legal means.
This is the problem: people continue to buy and listen to really bad music releases. Until that stops, the music industry will continue to produce that crap. Neil Young tried to do an end run with Pono, but the problem is that the music giants still own the mixdown masters, and they aren't letting go. And Neil Young's solution still costs too much money and doesn't really solve the main issues.
Most people that I see that are trying to escape Loudness War music are mistakenly investing in vinyl releases (i.e., the poorest quality medium but typically the one with the greatest dynamic range intact on the released recordings due to the limitations of the medium itself to play back with loud music).
Until everyone wises up to what Big Music is doing--including enticing people into vinyl as a way to increase their profit margins--then the current Loudness War music releases will not change. Production of high quality music records has never been easier or cheaper to produce than now, but the worst recordings in over 60 years still are being sold--basically without alternative "hi fi" releases being made available.
Chris
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I would wager that if you listen to any commercially bought music produced in the last 50 years or so, you do have an issue with loudness compression - even classical music is compressed and "spectrally shaped" (i.e., EQed heavily to make the resulting track much louder).
Agreed. That is the real question, and I'm not holding my breath on the answer: I believe that I know what the current generation will pick already, and it's unfortunate. It will take yet another generation to push the fulcrum back toward the center, I believe.
Chris
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Sure, I have an issue with it. I've even encountered it comparing my FM radio recordings with the CD or digitized LP tracks.
Worst experience... I ripped a CD from the public library. Upon listening to the wav files, I heard some of the worst fidelity imaginable! I could have done better as an adolescent using '3 for 99¢' cassette tapes and a $30 recorder. I tried another rip; same thing. Loaded into Goldwave, it looked like a cross-section of a freshly cut lawn. Compressed and clipped to death.
I can't deny that at least part of the reason for new vinyl may be "let's weasel 'em out of some more cash." But I think a whole lot of people, given the choice, will prefer much less compression, even if they aren't audiophiles. Simply due to the more vibrant texture of the music.
Another generation is certainly a possibility. I can only hope that folks in charge, seeing that standout loudness is losing it's advantages, help speed the process. They won't spend the time and money if it doesn't pay back.
Worst experience... I ripped a CD from the public library. Upon listening to the wav files, I heard some of the worst fidelity imaginable! I could have done better as an adolescent using '3 for 99¢' cassette tapes and a $30 recorder. I tried another rip; same thing. Loaded into Goldwave, it looked like a cross-section of a freshly cut lawn. Compressed and clipped to death.
I can't deny that at least part of the reason for new vinyl may be "let's weasel 'em out of some more cash." But I think a whole lot of people, given the choice, will prefer much less compression, even if they aren't audiophiles. Simply due to the more vibrant texture of the music.
Another generation is certainly a possibility. I can only hope that folks in charge, seeing that standout loudness is losing it's advantages, help speed the process. They won't spend the time and money if it doesn't pay back.
People have stopped buying music in their millions since the '90s which roughly coincides with the beginning of the Loudness Wars but for the last 20 years the record companies insisted that the continuing slump in sales is due to piracy and not because of anything their product might be lacking.
Personally I think there are 3 reasons for the downward spiral of records sales:
First and foremost the kids don't care anymore. Music is not the uniting (or polarising) force it once was, it has been supplanted by games.
Comparing the sales figures of games and records bears this out: As games sales went up record sales dropped by a very similar amount.
Secondly the crap SQ due to the Loudness Wars and generally **** music (this might be a generational misconception on my part). I myself went from buying two to three albums to two or three per year.
And lastly piracy but there is still no clear evidence. Most surveys showed that those who pirated the most also bought the most cds.
Still I think No1 is the biggie and means that music sales will never again reach the heights of the '70s, '80s and early '90s.
New music is in a disappointing state these days, for sure. And it pains me to say this, but I blame technology for a lot of it.
I listened to a popular local college radio station well into middle age because I found it interesting & enjoyable to hear what the younger musicians were doing. But I can't anymore. When I tune in these days, all I seem to hear is funky-classic-tube-distortion vocal plugins, quirky analog synth bleeps and blorps, combined with a bunch of repeating loops that are basically just falling out of a computer. What I don't hear are good songs! Seems like all this tech has become a distraction - style replacing substance. And yes, there are exceptions, but they seem fewer & further between.
Gotta go, those damn kids are on my lawn again...
-- Jim
What data do you have on this? I have some classical recordings of the last 12 months with very high dynamic range, but interested to know how much higher the original performance was. Certainly a lot of these releases would be unplayable in a car, which is fine by me.
Try a different station.
What we've been doing for some years is asking musicians we like what they've discovered. That hasn't worked 100%, but it's worked 90%.
I look at the last dozen or so albums we've bought, and there's some damn interesting new talent there- Brett Newski, John Statz, Dana Falconberry, Nona Invie, Matt Lorenz, Mark Erelli, Josh Harty, to name a few- and interesting and creative stuff from folks that have been around a while, but haven't stagnated- Roky Erickson, Randy Sabien, Willy Porter, Lee Barber, Jeffrey Foucault, Robert Ellis. Just some examples of recent releases that have delighted us. Not a computer in the lot.
Something that everyone over a certain age has been saying about new music since the 50s. Just face you are getting older
With streaming audio, listeners won't need to buy music the way they might have in the past. It's "stored in the cloud."
New music promotion is targeted, to a great extent, towards a young audience. And let's face it - it never has been or will be targeted toward any kind of audiophile*. I actually think access to a wide variety of new music is greater today than it's been, but paradoxically a little more effort is required to find the good stuff.
*I think this sentence speaks directly to the topic. If there is a loudness war cease fire, it won't be to make peace with the audiophile demographic.
New music promotion is targeted, to a great extent, towards a young audience. And let's face it - it never has been or will be targeted toward any kind of audiophile*. I actually think access to a wide variety of new music is greater today than it's been, but paradoxically a little more effort is required to find the good stuff.
*I think this sentence speaks directly to the topic. If there is a loudness war cease fire, it won't be to make peace with the audiophile demographic.
I've got a lot of data. I've been remastering all my recordings to "undo" the mastering that distorts the original performance, such as their "spectral shaping" (a.k.a., really bad EQ curves applied to the mixdown tracks), "limiting" (otherwise known as hard clipping), and the oversights of the mixing and mastering guys to remove droning track noise (50/60 Hz, 100/120 Hz, 25/30 Hz (yes...subharmonics are bad on some recordings) and many others that show up at weird frequencies).
In most instances, when you open a classical music track, you'll see a big spectral peak between 240-900 Hz, and drooping spectra on either side of that peak - sometimes greater than 24 dB, and especially in the LF octaves--which are severely attenuated down to 30 Hz (tympani and bass drum frequencies), and string bass frequencies below ~60 Hz, making their contribution to the orchestra indistinguishable from the cellos.
Popular music (i.e., any non-classical music of any variety) usually has even more outrageous EQ correction curves, but usually not greater in terms of peak-trough magnitude--which is about 24 dB in most cases. I typically see attenuation of pipe organ recordings that exceed 42 dB on the LF end down to 16.5 Hz.
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Interesting. I don't feel compelled to do this to my entire collection, but I have tinkered with a few of the more blatant offenders. For example I've got one pop/rock album from the 90s that I dearly love, but is so heavily compressed that on a couple of songs, the acoustic verses sound louder than the electric choruses (and the song was clearly intended to sound the other way round.)
You seem to have some pretty specific data regarding EQ curves. Can you describe how you arrive at these figures?
-- curious Jim
Anything in last 2-3 years on a label that puts quality first? Or pointers at what I could download for free to look at some of my CDs in comparison. Not sure I trust the spectral analysis on foobar.
BTW I thought Timpani were around 60Hz fundamental?
Even better, it works on SonosNet, which provides very robust, dropout-free wireless streaming to as many as 32 nodes. None of the other multi-room systems can come close to that.
Their upcoming Trueplay room correction (now in beta) can improve the in-room performance substantially, depending on the room. It made a dramatic improvement to the Play:1 in my kitchen.
Their new Play:5 should be their best-ever, and may well be good enough for most.
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