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Looper's Delight
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there's a similar article in the archives of the "musicthing" blog site, with pictures of the offending waveforms, catastrophically deformed. what these articles touch on all to briefly, in my view, is the normal average listening experience. actually, if you have an i-pod or some other sort of walkman, & a reasonable pair of earbuds (like shures or similar) or even some "proper" enclosed headphones, you are often better equipped to listen to a decent dynamic range than if you are simply sitting at home with a full-on $5000 hifi rig. where I am, population density is the deciding factor. I can't play my ELP or yes albums in such a way as to hear the detail that I know is there, without having to keep one finger on the volume control for when they get loud again. otherwise the neighbours will call the fashion police, or just the regular variety, to shut me down. with radio & tv broadcasting, it's been a simple matter of balancing your punch-through power against this business of listener fatigue. doesn't matter whether the listener is in heavy traffic or not. I am personally responsible for achieving this balance at MTV Europe, with about two dozen tc-electronic dBmax devices. but here, we are showing music videos & programmes with a lot of music/shouting/random noises in amongst, well, commercials. so there's not really a lot of variety for the ear anyway. I have done the same for a couple of movie channels, though, so I know what the perils of over-compression are.... dolby labs have this thing that they use to track the dialogue level in movies, which works quite well but requires a total, end-to-end buy-in to dolby's world. while they've been quite forthcoming with their technology, there's still a license fee for it, & on top of that, there's a great deal of sniffy "not-invented-here" in the pro-audio world, especially when it comes to the movie industry. other broadcasters I have met with, who receive the same commercials from the same ad agencies, have a problem that's familiar to any british tv viewers & probably many in the US & europe; the commercials are competing with each other for your attention. if they come on in the ad-break of a particularly emotionally-complex movie, which has been cut so that there's an end-of-act "moment" for the viewer to ponder, it's like being whacked in the face with a shovel. I spoke to one broadcaster whose movie seasons were sponsored by a belgian beer company, & somehow managed to get them to reduce the audio level of the sponsorship "bumpers" in & out of the ad-breaks so that the transition was a little more user-friendly. the rest of the UK doesn't know it was me that achieved this, of course..... mastering one's own material is much more difficult because of this "everything louder than everything else" trend. your average engineer (& I am one) will, at some point, think "why am I bothering to preserve more than 30dB of dynamic across this album, when the radio station is just going to flatten it all out anyway?". if he's not worried about that, then it might occur to him in a similar way that his work is going to fetch up in an i-pod or on the internet or in some otherwise data-reduced form, & that the best hope for all the meticulously recorded detail, with this data reduction in prospect, is for it to be as loud as possible. or he might just be following some natural instinct & keeping everything as far away from the noise floor as possible. which is ironic, given that we're supposed to be so much better off in that respect these days. y'can't win. duncan.