Do you read the link with text from Steve Hoffman?
I am well aware of how most “popular” music for the last 25 years has used massive compression to get their music to play loud on the radio and various playback devices. It sounds like crap and is one of the reasons why I hate the music being put out by “popular” artists today. I would not say it is an “aesthetic choice” because it ruins the music. In high noise environments it may be easier to hear but, at home in a quiet room with a capable system, it just plain sucks.
Yup - read the link. Are you saying, now that you’ve found an article that proves the first posts you made above are untrue, that this also proves that any music that uses heavy compression for the sheer fun of it - and yes, for the way it distorts the sound - is invalid? Sorta like saying, dang those ee-lectric gui-tars! They is Unnatural!
I don’t care for overly compressed sound either. Just not sure what your point is. As Elk pointed out, certain genres simply would not be what they are without it. Don’t listen to it.
I’d say it’s a mixture of general vinyl characteristics and mastering. The one thing is that bass eq‘ing was done better during mastering with the good vinyl reissues.
Especially mids and highs are less flat and dry, which in the one hand is a general vinyl characteristic but also a characteristic of better mastering chains used.
Soundstage consists of bigger, more bodily parts.
Other typical vinyl characteristics as a more relaxed timing and a. more open top end and not that relevant in this music style.
I’d say the bigger part of superiority in those cases is related to the better mastering as I remember the Xmas boxset vinyl mastering sounding quite identical to the digital release except of each one’s general difference between his vinyl and digital playback equipment.
All pop music (rock of all types, alto with a piano (Diana Krall, Patricia Barber), etc.) uses compression when recording drums (for punch), bass guitar (to remove muddiness and for even volume, and especially vocals (closed mic’d vocals are exceedingly uneven and sound dreadful without a lot of compression). Sustain on electric guitar is compression. And more, including brass, etc.
Compression is also used on submixes, especially multi-band compression, such as on a drum kit submix.
Compression is a good thing.
All of the above is wholly unrelated to “compression” as complained above by audiophiles.
In any event, the overall dynamic range of a recording tells one little as to how good the recording actually sounds. I provided one example already of a recording which is compressed in every way, including while mastering, and which sounds incredible.
There is no easy rule “compression sounds bad.” Or “limiting sounds bad.” These are both nonsense.
Hardly. I have known about that article for several years. The compression and loudness I was talking are the extreme uses of in today’s popular music during the mastering process. You know, where the wave forms are almost all maxed to 0 dB and the dynamic range is like 2 to 4 dB. Not the gentle use of it as Steve describes during the mixing process and sometimes in the mastering process.
On a quality 2 channel system no genre needs to be as compressed and loud as what we see today with popular music. To say that a genre needs to have only 4 dB of DR is crazy. That is done to make sure everything is as loud as it can be on the radio.
What I know is that a recording with a large DR number has a much better chance of sounding good than a recording with a low DR. Keep in mind, I love Random Access Memories: sound is brilliant, it’s just more uncommon (the effort put into the sound of that recording was extreme). I’m pretty sure this is what most audiophiles are referring to when we talk about compressed recordings.
…it also holds, that in this “ridiculous” hobby, there’s multiple exceptions to every rule.
It would be interesting to make a complete comparison (I think I could do about 5 digital and 5 vinyl releases altogether…I remember the old MFSL to have the typical smiley eq…and I think at the end my 3 preferred versions will stay the Robert Ludwig Quiex II mastering, the WEA 180g mastered by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman (not Rhino, I was wrong) and with a bit distance the new one step MFSL 45RPM. Some digital releases have enough bass, but don’t approach the mids of the vinyl, which is more striking than usual in this case as Nightfly is general a quite dry digital recording.
Let’s get back to the sound of Windom so I do not have to spend the time of digging through the thread for Nightfly references, etc., to move them all.
It appears Nightfly could however justify its own thread however.
You wouldn’t want to know of which releases I have quite definitive versions
But it’s more in Jazz than Pop certainly…
It’s mainly because those mastering differences are often much more essential than HW differences we use to talk about. A TSS DAC won’t make a worse mastering sound considerably better in comparison…but fortunately there are enough great new digital recordings/releases which will be even more improved then. Most of the music is digital only now …and at the end it’s more important to access this in the best possible way.
The DR numbers are just an indicator. 4 or 5 dB of DR is an indicator that the music will be heavily compressed. But it’s not just that high level of compression. If you play the 2013 Acoustic Sounds 24/96 download mastering of “Thriller” and compare that to the 2006 SACD mastering, the difference is staggering. It’s not surprising when look at the DR numbers. The avg, min, max, numbers for the download are 7, 6, 8 while the SACD numbers are 14, 12, 17. If you don’t get that, well…
There’s also the debate between the commonly used Crest DR and R128. Roon claims R128 is more accurate, though it’s it widely adopted. The ratings are often very different between the two.
R128 is more for broadcasting as a measure of overall loudness. The Crest Factor algorithm is a much better number to use as an indicator of compression for music.
