Music To My Ears

[Jason Dunn]

This article was originally published in the <a href="http://channels.lockergnome.com/windows/backissues/20040225.phtml">February 25th issue of Lockergnome Windows Fanatics</a>, and with Brandon's permission, we're re-publishing it here. I thought it was a great article, and quite thought-provoking for those of us into audio.<br /><!><br />One of my biggest complaints with CDs isn't a fault in the media, it is the fault of the idiots who master them. It seems there is but one goal for them: to ruin my hearing. Great sound and great music require there to be several elements: punch, definition, and clarity.<br /><br />Think of some of the most identifiable natural sounds. The crack of lightning followed by the roll of thunder, the spring peepers croaking in the woods, the roar of the ocean; these sounds have a melodic quality, a rhythm and definition, and a definite change in decibels as the sounds are heard. Sounds that are considered pleasant most often mimic the qualities of these natural sounds.<br /><br />There is a class of guys who lay down soundtracks for movies that understand this. Music becomes part of the experience: booming and fast paced in action scenes, soft and subtle during romantic scenes, and so on. This is demonstrated in movies like Lord Of The Rings and Legend where the music is blended in so well you almost don't know it's there. There are, of course, exceptions to this - movies like Mystic River where the music track completely drowns out the voice track at times.<br /><br />Most music CDs don't seem to get the kind of attention they should. Music CDs are compressed, a term that has nothing to do with the amount of size a file takes up but rather the amount of range in the volume of a piece of content. By compressing audio you never end up with sounds that are too quiet to be audible or so loud as to be deafening. Instead, you end up with audio that is very monotone.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/column-musictomyears-image1.gif" /> <br /><br />This image shows four audio tracks. The first is an example of how audio should look. With a great deal of change in volume within the file: occasionally being truly silent, and occasionally being at its peak.<br /><br />Next is an acceptable example. While peak isn't reached at any point, there is a good amount of variation in the volume.<br /><br />Sample three suffers from severe compression. This is a piece that no longer has any diversity - it is all monotone. This piece also never reaches a peak level, so to make the song soft, it was compressed but not normalized.<br /><br />Sample four is very close to perfect. There's good variation in volume, though it is normalized to a bit beyond peak (which can cause distortion).<br /><br />In CDs you buy today, sample three is the most typical. The audio is compressed to the point where there is added distortion and all the "life" is gone. The music becomes severely ugly. This, of course, helps sell concert tickets because these days most everyone does sound better on stage. It also helps MTV as the Unplugged music sounds much more lifelike than the music that gets passed off on CD.<br /> <PAGEBREAK> <br />Going back to the thunder example, below is a wav of a thunder clap. The green is the wav before audio compression, and the red is after.(I used Adobe Audition's Radio Compression preset to ruin this beautiful sound.)<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/column-musictomyears-image2.gif" /> <br /><br /><a href="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/thunder-natural.mp3">ThunderNatural.mp3</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/thunder-compressed.mp3">ThunderCompressed.mp3</a><br /><br />Compare the two mp3s. This demonstration is quite dramatic because the roll of the thunder (in the compressed example) doesn't get softer the way it ought to. This isn't to say that compression has no purpose. It is great for interviews and spoken word content where you want to keep mumbles audible and shouts to a small roar. But compression takes a lot of the emotion out of the sound. It's like the difference between listening to NPR or listening to Martin Luther King Jr.: an audio compressor makes everyone sound like Lynn Neary and Robert Siegel.<br /><br />Because online music such as iTunes and Napster 2.0 use CDs as their source, the music I buy for my portable device sucks, too. Only it sucks more because instead of getting CD quality suck, I get near-CD quality suck. The distortion and loss of frequency response that results from a file being data compressed / encoded to 128 or even 192k stacks on top of the distortion added via audio compression.<br /><br />Because each format encodes slightly differently, some content will sound better from one online provider than from another. AAC tends to handle content that is audio compressed better than WMA does, but WMA tends to handle the softer and more subtle sounds found in uncompressed audio. Because so much of what is sold online is pop music, this puts AAC in a better light than WMA in the format wars. If you are, however, interested in preserving your RCA Red Label 1812 Overture or you're just transferring it to your portable media player, might I recommend WMA? You will find the cannons' rumbles to be crisper and the subtle sounds of the children's choir fading in and out to be much cleaner in WMA. Mp3 will lose some of the stereo separation that is much more important in orchestral music than it is in pop. If you look at the examples above you will notice that most of the music is practically monophonic; the audio in the left and right is almost identical, whereas the thunder is very different between channels. AAC has stereo separation equal to that of WMA but it tends to drop sounds below a certain db. Whether this was done as a noise reduction feature or if it is just a way to drop some of the bits that would never be heard by someone who has been to too many concerts, I don't know.<br /><br />I'm 24, so I don't remember tube amps or 8 tracks, but I often think maybe it would be better to roll back to those days. When I bought my home theater, the salesman was trying to push me into a model that included 20+ surround modes from living room to concert hall to cave. Sure, that is cool for my Audigy card when I'm playing games and the programmers don't have to presample all of those environments for each sound in the game, but like I would want to watch a movie in a cave, or hear Britney as though she were performing at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. (Okay, Britney in the bathroom surround mode crossed my mind briefly as I figured I could pretend she was in my shower... but that passed pretty quickly.) Perhaps I'm too much of a purist, or perhaps labels think their target audience is the guy with a 4000-watt, 42-inch subwoofer in his car. But for me, I'd like to hear the music the way you would in the studio - with all the subtlety and life still in it.<br /><br />Brandon N. Wirtz is the Chief Operations Officer of <a href="http://www.griffin-digital.com/">Griffin Digital</a>, and a<br />Microsoft MVP: Windows Server / Digital Media.

[bryhawks]

Amen to this! I'm a long-time musician (well, only 32 years old, but long enough) and I do audio editing as a hobby and for my church, where I digitally record the sermons, tweaking them and cutting CDs for purchase.

I read an article - shoot, I can't remember the site - where they tallked about Rush's latest albums, and they shows the waveforms as well - for the last few albums, the sound wasn't only highly compressed, but totally clipping almost all the way through - I don't know how anyone with ears left could listen to it, and that's pretty much what the reviewer said.

Of course, if the people who listen to those genres (sp?) don't care, and don't hear it anyway (not that they wouldn't appreciate a bit of dynamic range if they were educated on the topic), then who are we to care? As long as it never happens with the groups I listen to (modern jazz, etc.) I am curious, though - I know there's lots of dynamic range in most of my CDs, but I've never looked at the waveform to see. I'll have to inspect them now... Ignorance is bliss.

[that_kid]

Hmm.....where's my soapbox......This is one of my biggest complaints with music today that and the fact tht it's autotuned to hell and the artist can't hold a note with a D@MN. This topic is very very important to me as I do multitrack recording, mixing and mastering and it just gets to me when people say "Hey can you make that louder?" I have so many links of mix engineers and mastering engineers who talk about this very thing. The biggest thing is the blame mostly falls on the producers and artists. They want their record to be the loudest thing on the radio and they think that will make it a hit. I've had people tell me that they didn't think the music wasn't loud enough becuase the red lights on the board hadn't come on yet 8O. What many people don't realize is when you compress something into nothing then try to play it on the radio where they compress it to even more of a nothing that the end result is a song that is actually lower in volume because the compressors are too busy trying to keep everything down. Ok sorry Jason but this is something that I can just go on and on about.... ok now where's that ladder, i need to get off this soapbox.

[that_kid]

As long as it never happens with the groups I listen to (modern jazz, etc.)

It's happening in all genres, it's a shame too. We have this great technology but we are using it for dare I say...EVIL. Music doesn't sound good when it sounds like someone is yelling at you for 126 bars.

[Jason Dunn]

Hmm.....Ok sorry Jason but this is something that I can
just go on and on about.... ok now where's that ladder, i need to get off this soapbox.

Hey, don't apologize for ranting, that's what this site is for. ;-)

[klinux]

Believe it or not, I started listening to classical, opera, NPR because good recordings of good pop/rock artists were getting more and more scarce!

Mozart never goes out of style. :)

[Janak Parekh]

Hmm.....where's my soapbox......This is one of my biggest complaints with music today that and the fact tht it's autotuned to hell and the artist can't hold a note with a D@MN.
You're thinking of mainstream radio. There's lots of good music everywhere -- you just have to look for it. I find Internet streaming radio to be a great source, myself, in several different genres. :)

Mozart never goes out of style. :)
Absolutely. :way to go: I listened to Beethoven and Rachmaninov on my iPod during my two commutes today. AAC 160kbps sounds surprisingly decent, even for classical. Strings occasionally have artifacts, but it's actually quite rare. WMA might be better, but I have an iPod, so I'm not going to adopt it right now -- and it's probably too subtle for mass-transit commuting anyway.

--janak

[Gary Sheynkman]

I have been recently exposed to hifi equiment from 20+ years ago (records and reel-reel) and was blown away by how much everything else SUCKS! 8O It is very sad to see that businessmen have taken over art. :cry:

[that_kid]

You're thinking of mainstream radio. There's lots of good music everywhere -- you just have to look for it. I find Internet streaming radio to be a great source, myself, in several different genres. :)
--janak

You're right, I don't listen to the radio much at all now. I have a mp3 player in my car which has a 200 gig drive in it and I have about 22 days worth of continuous music on it(not even half filed using 254k bitrate) and I still have hundreds of records to convert over. I still buy records and enjoy listening to them. The one thing about records was the medium couldn't support the types of volumes cd's can so it's not too overly compressed but there are some disco records I've come acrossed that tried and succedded. Oh and I love internet radio, I'm listening to a stream as I type this. Mainstream radio is crazy with the compression, Janak you live in NY so I know you've come across this as well(can we say Hot 97)

[Janak Parekh]

Mainstream radio is crazy with the compression, Janak you live in NY so I know you've come across this as well(can we say Hot 97)
NY radio sucks, period. The only FM stations I listen to in NYC right now are 96.3 and 93.9 (classical radio owned by NY Times and NPR, respectively). I used to listen to Z100 until the advent of the latest crop of boy-bands, and then 92.3 until the advent of the latest crop of angst-boy-bands. Now all my rock/pop needs are served by my iPod and streaming radio. ;)

--janak

[Suhit Gupta]

NY radio sucks, period.
I concur, big time. I bought my iRiver which has an FM receiver built in thinking that I could start listening to the radio once in a while. But dear God!!! They are all crap. There is one Jazz station (88.something) which is decent, but the rest have far too many ads. They all have DJs that are just plain silly, all of whom have this incessant need to keep playing these random trivia games. I mean, there is little music and more fluff, much like MTV these days.

Suhit

[Janak Parekh]

There is one Jazz station (88.something) which is decent, but the rest have far too many ads.
Ah right -- 88.3 WBGO. That is one of the other decent stations, but it has lousy coverage out in the suburbs. :cry:

They all have DJs that are just plain silly, all of whom have this incessant need to keep playing these random trivia games. I mean, there is little music and more fluff, much like MTV these days.
That's the music-listening public nowadays. Clear Channel surveys the public, and has perfected the equation for generic, soulless pop and rock music and "DJs with personalities". Thank goodness for digital music players. The absolute ton of New Yorkers carrying iPods nowadays speaks volumes about our radio stations. I'm sure their listenership is steadily decreasing, and I don't cry one bit for its effect on Clear Channel's bottom line.

--janak

[Gary Sheynkman]

Chicago isnt that much better either. I think that ads get more air time than shows. It got to the point where I have stopped listening to the radio and have not looked back for 2 years now 8O

(unless my cousin is spinning on the russian radio station...)

[that_kid]

Yes WBGO is great but they do have bad coverage, good thing you can listen to them online. I think the radio industy is starting to see a decrase in thier listener base and have no idea how to fix it. The only time I know about new music now is if I hear it on the dss music channels. Now when I hear something I like, I go buy the cd rip it to mp3 put it on all my devices and put the cd away.