Small correction on manipulation
I reread my notes on this recording and I saw that noise reduction has been applied.
More precisely, the soundcard noise has been removed. This of course explains the very low Minimum RMS power figures.
PMA, I’ll look into this interesting material when time permits and post my findings.
/Hugo
I reread my notes on this recording and I saw that noise reduction has been applied.
More precisely, the soundcard noise has been removed. This of course explains the very low Minimum RMS power figures.
PMA, I’ll look into this interesting material when time permits and post my findings.
/Hugo
Well, looks to me like your soundcard offers an actual dynamic range of 100 dB, of which your LP player uses about 50-55dB. That's not too bad for an analog record player indeed, but it's just not comparable to what a good digital recording can offer you in dynamics.
Chris
Chris
PolishedSteel said:
Excuse me butting in; there appears to be a little confusion over the terms "dynamic range" and "signal-to-noise".
In regard to vinyl, signal-to-noise varies widely from disc to disc and also between players. This noise is mostly (putting aside impulse noise - i.e. clicks) in the LF region (rumble) and mid-range ('vinyl roar' - actual stylus/groove friction noise). Best-case is probably a little below -70dB
Rumble (LF) at -70dB it's to all intents inaudible even at high listening levels, 'vinyl roar' just audible, but not necesssarily obtrusive. Upper mid and HF, though, are quite easily audible at these and much lower levels, and as it happens they can be, and are, reproduced by LP. In fact, down to nearly -90dB.
What this means is that the dynamic-range of vinyl is considerably greater than it's signal-to-noise when approriate 'weighting' curves are used. A simple real-world demonstration of this is to listen to very long fade. The music (specifcally, it's HF content) remains distinctly audible well after levels have dropped below the noise-floor.
LP is capable of a dynamic range approaching 90dB.
BTW, 50-55dB is about the signal-to-noise of 1-7/8 ips cassette without NR, but again, even cassette has rather greater dynamic range - nearer 65dB, and approaching 80dB with NR.
ciao,
A.
To make my case short, do any of you know of any Metal CD's not guilty of over compression?
Surely there are some? I'd like to check them out.
Thanks,
Surely there are some? I'd like to check them out.
Thanks,
Hi!
Just want to let out steam here! Bought Muse latest cd yesterday.
Put it in the car player when going from work. Sounded quite ok and good music too. Started it at home... AAAARRGGHHHHH!!😡
Even my wife said QUOTE: What the F*&K is that!!
Drums sound like cement bags dropped on thin wood flooring. Flat and totally dead. Dynamics? A chainsaw at full throttle have more of that!
Probably the producer have run the recording in a food mixer and spewed it out on a magnet wire which was used 100 years ago!
Simply not listenable at home, I had to make a sanity test and put on a CD with Extreme. AHHH, nothing wrong with the equipment at least.
Cheers
Peter
Just want to let out steam here! Bought Muse latest cd yesterday.
Put it in the car player when going from work. Sounded quite ok and good music too. Started it at home... AAAARRGGHHHHH!!😡
Even my wife said QUOTE: What the F*&K is that!!
Drums sound like cement bags dropped on thin wood flooring. Flat and totally dead. Dynamics? A chainsaw at full throttle have more of that!
Probably the producer have run the recording in a food mixer and spewed it out on a magnet wire which was used 100 years ago!
Simply not listenable at home, I had to make a sanity test and put on a CD with Extreme. AHHH, nothing wrong with the equipment at least.
Cheers
Peter
peterbrorsson said:
I agree that the Muse CD could have been mastered/recorded better. Their style suits the 'Lo-Fi' approach, however, the songs are complex arrangements and overlays and it would be nice to follow it!! I'd especially like to hear the rather excellent drumming and the synth arpeggios. Shame.
I have Amy winehouse 'Back to black'. Great C.D. Really nails the 'Motown with a twist' sound that I love but it just seems so distorted and overcompressed. Darn.
Why do I have to listen to Norah Jones or Jazz to hear the true potential of my system?
Martin.
Exactly! I built a fine system to listen to rock but, am becoming more and more a Jazz fan. The recordings are so much more realistic and musical sounding. A much better genre to test and show off the qualities of your system. No challenge to reproduce Metal. Any system can be loud.
I loan out Norah Jones' "Fly away with Me" CD to my metal freinds. When they bring it back and hear the staging and imaging, thier jaws drop.
PolishedSteel said:
Theoretically the DVD-A has a dynamic range of 144db. That's of little comfort when vinyl has better real-world dynamics.
The world went astray when it decided the Aristotelian concepts were more important than the Platonic ones. Who needs the real world when we have the abstract one?
For those who like blues and rock that is played with dynamics and recorded with clarity try "Couldn't stand the wheather" by Stevie Ray Vaughan.
I don't have any idea about any hardrock or heavy that is recorded well though.
The last time I bought a CD of this genre was when I purchased "Train of Thought" by Dream Theater. There is a ballad that is recorded quite well. The hard tracks however are also compressed too much although they would be fun to listen to with lots of dynamics - even when they couldn't be played loudly on average systems that way.
Regards
Charles
I don't have any idea about any hardrock or heavy that is recorded well though.
The last time I bought a CD of this genre was when I purchased "Train of Thought" by Dream Theater. There is a ballad that is recorded quite well. The hard tracks however are also compressed too much although they would be fun to listen to with lots of dynamics - even when they couldn't be played loudly on average systems that way.
Regards
Charles
posted by AndrewT
Don´t dismay, Andrew. And don´t let substandard recordings stand in your way.
Brian Eno said something interesting aboutthe issue in this (very recommended) article (audio review, ca 1993):
http://www.enoweb.co.uk/
Check out ¨interviews¨, year 1993, ¨The Audio Interview: Brian Eno, music for listeners¨
An excerpt:
Eno: But distortion is a negative word for a very interesting situation. Distortion is really the, production of the harmonics, strange harmonics. If you forget the idea that the medium is in some way connected with realism, with reproduction, then these aren't problems. That's still a good argument for having good-quality audio equipment.
Journalist: So you can hear the distortion better.
Eno : Because you can hear the distortion better, yes, exactly. That's the value of good-quality recording equipment. That you can really reproduce distortion well.
Don´t dismay, Andrew. And don´t let substandard recordings stand in your way.
Brian Eno said something interesting aboutthe issue in this (very recommended) article (audio review, ca 1993):
http://www.enoweb.co.uk/
Check out ¨interviews¨, year 1993, ¨The Audio Interview: Brian Eno, music for listeners¨
An excerpt:
Eno: But distortion is a negative word for a very interesting situation. Distortion is really the, production of the harmonics, strange harmonics. If you forget the idea that the medium is in some way connected with realism, with reproduction, then these aren't problems. That's still a good argument for having good-quality audio equipment.
Journalist: So you can hear the distortion better.
Eno : Because you can hear the distortion better, yes, exactly. That's the value of good-quality recording equipment. That you can really reproduce distortion well.
Re: Re: Modern cd's - over compression
This is absolutely a problem, and I've seen it all over the place. I've been extremely disappointed with some of the recent releases. My girlfriend likes some of that catchy pop music on the radio, and I'd love to give it a try- but it sounds horrible on my stereo.
Take this as an example:
The above image represents a direct digital rip of two tracks. Their scale is identical, and there was no manipulation other than copying the one stereo track from each and copying into a blank file as a comparison.
The top track is Know Your Enemy, by Rage Against the Machine, 1992. The bottom track is Maneater, by Nelly Furtado, 2006. I think that this is a fairly typical representation of where the recording industry has gone in the last 15 years. It was no mistake that the Sound Forge capture of the vinyl and CD songs made the CD look terrible by comparison.
If anybody out there knows of a list of well recorded CDs, I'd love to hear about it. I can keep buying and hoping, but it would be nice to pick up some more CDs that actually let the music come through.
4fun said:
This is absolutely a problem, and I've seen it all over the place. I've been extremely disappointed with some of the recent releases. My girlfriend likes some of that catchy pop music on the radio, and I'd love to give it a try- but it sounds horrible on my stereo.
Take this as an example:
The above image represents a direct digital rip of two tracks. Their scale is identical, and there was no manipulation other than copying the one stereo track from each and copying into a blank file as a comparison.
The top track is Know Your Enemy, by Rage Against the Machine, 1992. The bottom track is Maneater, by Nelly Furtado, 2006. I think that this is a fairly typical representation of where the recording industry has gone in the last 15 years. It was no mistake that the Sound Forge capture of the vinyl and CD songs made the CD look terrible by comparison.
If anybody out there knows of a list of well recorded CDs, I'd love to hear about it. I can keep buying and hoping, but it would be nice to pick up some more CDs that actually let the music come through.
I have been raving about the Beastie Boys: Ill Communication CD. Not only is it one of the best albums ever made, it's perhaps the best sounding/produced CD I have ever heard. The Beastie Boys were apparently not only aware of what format they were working with, they seem to have been very self-conscious about it and what they were doing. It couldn't have been released on vinyl. Or, rather, it would have been a different album if it had been a vinyl album. This is how CDs should be mastered--as a format completely alien to vinyl.
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Funny, I was going to say not all metal is overcompressed. Now, I don't care much for metal. I only have two CDs. (I don't consider Motörhead metal. I consider Motörhead Motörhead and Lemmy a god. D-beat kills.) I love the Leviathan: Tentacles of Whorror CD. It's to metal what early SPK is to everything. It's like no metal I have ever heard. It's been called post-black metal, progressive black metal and things like that. I was sure it wasn't as compressed as the usual metal. So while doing Beastie Boys, I did this CD. Man, the compression is nasty. But it sure sounds good. Perhaps because of the excessive distortion and Wrest's "singing," which sounds like no sound a human would make.
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The posted recording levels show an odd co-incidence where all those peaks just happen to be the same level.phn said:
If I hadn't been told I would have suspected over-recording had chopped the majority of the peaks off at the same digital level.
Phn,
Please tell us it really sounds better than it looks.
Extreme's "Three sides to every story" is quite good recorded. Compressed of course but still sound clear and dynamic. Hmm, the last part seem contradictive but still.. Darn good smack of bass drum at least.
Funny when people say CD sound better than vinyl.
I have both the LP and CD of Supertramp's "Crime of the century"
When played at the same time and switching between them, me and my friends prefer the LP. Now some religious people would tell me that I'm deaf, dumb'n'blind. Who cares!
Wax player is a cheap Dual with the Grand name of "Audiophile Concept"😀 CD player is a Naim CD3. Price difference 1200 EURO!!! AND the CD is from Mobile Fidelity sound lab. Original master recording.
I've got some other records with opposite result also.
Me thinks it's not possible to compare without recordings coming from same master tape and producer.
Cheers
Peter
Funny when people say CD sound better than vinyl.
I have both the LP and CD of Supertramp's "Crime of the century"
When played at the same time and switching between them, me and my friends prefer the LP. Now some religious people would tell me that I'm deaf, dumb'n'blind. Who cares!
Wax player is a cheap Dual with the Grand name of "Audiophile Concept"😀 CD player is a Naim CD3. Price difference 1200 EURO!!! AND the CD is from Mobile Fidelity sound lab. Original master recording.
I've got some other records with opposite result also.
Me thinks it's not possible to compare without recordings coming from same master tape and producer.
Cheers
Peter
In the possible defense of artists like Beastie Boys, it's possible for drum machines to produce a fairly constant stream of "just under clipping" peaks that really aren't clipped, and don't require the rest of the track to be compressed.
I've heard Beastie Boys on fairly good equipment, and while it's true that the main drum track doesn't usually display the type of expressive dynamics that a live drummer is capable of, there are definitely some subtle things going on quietly in the background. The sound has layers, and there are soft things along with the loud.
Digital is definitely a different medium than analog, and has a whole different set of tradeoffs. I personally think that it has the potential to produce even better sound since it gives the recording engineer more precise control of the finished product. Where analog would give you some limiting and compression as an inherent part of the medium, digital media requires the recording engineer to apply this explicitly. This explicit application of compression and limiting allows the engineer to make decisions about which details are lost, and which are preserved.
I definitely haven't put in the hours to be a seasoned recording engineer, but I did some learning the hard way, and see what can be done. I think that 24bit/96khz would have been better for CDs- but the really important thing is that the recordings are done at even better fidelity than that, so that the mixing engineer has plenty of choices available for how things are eventually mixed.
I've heard Beastie Boys on fairly good equipment, and while it's true that the main drum track doesn't usually display the type of expressive dynamics that a live drummer is capable of, there are definitely some subtle things going on quietly in the background. The sound has layers, and there are soft things along with the loud.
Digital is definitely a different medium than analog, and has a whole different set of tradeoffs. I personally think that it has the potential to produce even better sound since it gives the recording engineer more precise control of the finished product. Where analog would give you some limiting and compression as an inherent part of the medium, digital media requires the recording engineer to apply this explicitly. This explicit application of compression and limiting allows the engineer to make decisions about which details are lost, and which are preserved.
I definitely haven't put in the hours to be a seasoned recording engineer, but I did some learning the hard way, and see what can be done. I think that 24bit/96khz would have been better for CDs- but the really important thing is that the recordings are done at even better fidelity than that, so that the mixing engineer has plenty of choices available for how things are eventually mixed.
In the hard limiting process, one can tell the software to normalize tracks to a level just below 0dBFS.
When a limiter is used, the signals is prevented from reaching a specified threshold level so that the waveform is not clipped.
However, the original dynamics are lost if the treshold level is set too high.
The picture shows a just acceptable level of hard limiting/normalizing, which is -9dB.
/Hugo
When a limiter is used, the signals is prevented from reaching a specified threshold level so that the waveform is not clipped.
However, the original dynamics are lost if the treshold level is set too high.
The picture shows a just acceptable level of hard limiting/normalizing, which is -9dB.
/Hugo
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