![]() Until you are diagnosed as short or long sighted, and you put those glasses on for the first time, you simply believe that this is how the world looks. It’s a bit like needing glasses for years and not knowing about it. ![]() The reality is, that because this happened over the course of generations, many people are unaware of the issue they are simply used to records sound like this. Even worse, many executives simply dismiss the issue, claiming that consumers actually prefer brickwalled albums. It’s simple really, label executives concerns for commercial competition outweigh their concern for quality. Why are record labels happy to substitute quality for volume? Some notable examples, which gained public criticism for this are: The Red Hot Chili Peppers – Californication & Metalica’s Death Magnetic. Essentially, it has now become acceptable to release commercial material with substandard quality not to mention the loss of dynamics, and reduction of punch and clarity that comes from over compression. Slowly but surely, over the last 10-15 years, we have seen levels often pushed beyond the point of digital clipping. You would think the concept of digital distortion would be enough to keep record companies from pushing things any further, but sadly, this is not the case. 0dB is the absolute limit, and by pushing peak levels beyond this point you create clipping or digital distortion (not a good thing). Only this time, there really is nowhere else to go. The inevitable result of such competition between record labels to sound louder, is a continual pushing of the boundaries producing albums with increasing amounts of compression and pushing volume levels to extremes. But as you can expect, in the name of competition, all other record labels slowly followed suit, and the dynamics in modern records were greatly reduced. One of the first commercial releases to apply this technique was Oasis (What’s The Story) Morning Glory, and for a while, their record was louder than everyone else. This allowed mastering engineers to have greater control over the loudness of a track applying heavy amounts of compression to increase lower volumes and reduce louder peaks – essentially allowing them to raise the overall track volume, while never exceeding the 0 dB limit. Where things start to go wrong, is with the advent of the Digital Brickwall Limiter, which is capable of looking ahead to pull down peak levels before they happen. This in itself isn’t so much of an issue. Once they became the primary consumable medium in the 90’s, louder, hotter masters began to take advantage of the increased dynamic range with peak levels often hovering around the 0 dB limit and record companies pushing up levels to remain competitive. With the introduction of CD’s, the maximum peak level was no longer limited by the analogue equipment, but was instead encoded digitally with a clearly defined maximum peak amplitude. For this reason, the race for ever louder records never reached extremes during this era. Back then, however, the physical limitations of vinyl would naturally limit to how loud you could press a record before it would disturb the needle and render the medium un-playable. The jukebox would normally be set to a pre defined volume by the owner, and thus if your records were mastered “hotter” than the others, it would be louder, and subsequently gain more attention – in theory. The loudness war is a phenomenon dating back to the release of 7″ singles played on jukeboxes in pubs, clubs, & bars. However, I believe the quality difference between the two is less about the chosen format, and more a question of mastering technique. Saying this – and before any vinyl nuts bite my head off – there is a distinct character to vinyl, which some prefer (myself included). In reality, when making comparisons based purely on specification, modern analogue-to-digital converters coupled with a larger dynamic range in the digital realm means that CD’s are now capable of sounding just as good, if not better. Many audiophiles have long hailed vinyl for its warmth and character claiming that digital CD’s sound harsh in comparison to analogue vinyl records. I now want to explain exactly what I meant by the growing appeal of vinyl when taking the loudness war into consideration, and why I believe many people choose to buy vinyl over digital alternatives. In my previous post “ HMV & The Future of Music Retail?” I briefly highlighted the loudness war and the resurgence of vinyl.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |