Well, it’s been a few years since I visited this topic, so here we go. I posted this at HN, and since people liked it there, here it is in a slightly edited form:
The loudness wars are the primary enemy of quality sound reproduction in most (not all) music recordings today.
This is about radio.
As you sit in your car, tune your radio to your local Top 40 station. You’ll notice that, even when you turn down the dial to the lowest audible setting, you perceive a constant drone of music/noise (depending on how you feel about pop music). Now, tune to the local classical station. Little spurts of noise can be heard, punctuated by… quiet spots. The average consumer thinks: “What’s wrong with this music?! I have to turn up and turn down my volume all the time!” Connoisseurs of classical music, however, encourage dealing with this high dynamic range, because dynamics are a critical part of classical music.
Here’s the sad part: POPMUSICDOESN’T NEEDTOHAVEITSDYNAMICRANGESMASHED! Doing so makes the music less interesting… it’s just at one level of loudness for the whole song, for the whole album, for every single artist that’s been popular over the past decade. Thing is, radio stations can easily take high dynamic range (big differences between the loud and soft parts) source material and run it through a compressor to limit the dynamic range, thus making their music more car compatible (solving the classical music ‘problem’). However, consumers expect to hear the same when they download an AAC/MP3 and play it outside their car. “What’s wrong with this old recording, it’s so quiet”, is a common complaint. Of course, when iTunes (and competing software) have features like automatic output leveling (Sound Check), compressing dynamic range at OUTPUT and not at MASTERING should be the choice producers make.
Yet, the industry persists, making the music louder at the expense of eliminating its dynamic range. They’re painting soundscape with a more limited palette (though, doing a surprisingly effective job, given the limitations).
No one knows, no one cares, yet our musical experiences suffer.
“The Someone You’re Not” in Esquire magazine is about a man wrongfully imprisoned for almost 30 years.
He loves work. He got out May 5 and started working June
21. Hell, I’ve been vacationing for thirty years. He
wears a smock and pushes a mail cart. He stops at all the
cubicles, greets everyone with his friendly smile. Ray
even loves commuting to work, especially now, in his new
car, a black Ford Focus. He’s like a sixteen-year-old who
can finally drive himself to school. It costs almost the
same to park as it does to take the train.
Ray Towler is the best kind of hero: quiet, unassuming, completely true to his ideals. Just as this article tears down your faith in the justice system, it builds up your faith in, well, people.
Merz has a great song called Moi et Mon Camion. It’s extremely lovely. He also does electronic stuff… but his guitar-driven folksy stuff is a bit more pleasant.
I have always found the cycle of the seasons reassuring.
One year at Cannes I was told by Tony Curtis, born in New
York, that the problem with living in Los Angeles was
that without seasons it was always the same year: “You go
to sleep by your pool one afternoon, and when you wake up
you’re 60.”
The title track of Radiohead’s 2000 album Kid A is incredible. There’s an ambient feel to it (echoing synth-marimbas), unique rhythm, electronic scratches and pops. Yet it’s more than the sum of those parts. Until recently, I’d never listened to it and I don’t know why. I mean, I loved “In Rainbows”, so I don’t know why I didn’t give Radiohead’s previous albums a better listen.
I once heard in some interview or review that Radiohead has the singular, prescient tendency to seize on a sound and develop an album around that sound 5-10 years before everyone else. I think the reference was to Pablo Honey in 1993 versus Coldplay in 2000. So:
… at a time when American higher education is facing a
crisis of accessibility and affordability, we have adopted
a de-facto standard of college quality that is
uninterested in both of those factors. And why? Because
a group of magazine analysts in an office building in
Washington, D.C., decided twenty years ago to value
selctivity over efficacy, to use proxies that scarcely
relate to what they’re meant to be proxies for, and to
pretend that they can compare a large, diverse, low-cost
land-grant university in rural Pennsylvania with a small,
expensive, private Jewish university on two campuses in
Manhattan.
I used to be disappointed that dental schools weren’t ranked. Now, I understand why.
We all had an impossibly difficult weekend because my Dad was diagnosed with Waldenström’s Macroglobulinemia (WM), a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Going into the weekend, we were expecting a cancer diagnosis on Monday, but were hoping for something else. We didn’t expect anything to develop over the weekend, but nurses told my Mom and Dad to watch out for exhaustion over the weekend… and when it was too much, they went in on Saturday.
The ER folks were surprised a transfusion hadn’t been initiated earlier. Suddenly, on Saturday, we got the diagnosis we thought we’d get on Monday.
Saturday hurt a lot: we had no handle on the prognosis. How long did we have? What should we be doing? Everyone was reading, reading, reading… trying to figure out what to expect. I was frantically pulling Robbins Basic Path off my shelf and refreshing my memory with Wikipedia. From there, I jumped into the primary literature. We were advised to look for clinical trials of drugs, because the disease is so rare and the treatment not necessarily straightforward. Everyone was down, but trying to put a good face on things.
Sunday, the oncologist talked with my parents and sister. He had relatively good news: WM tends to be indolent, and can be managed with chemotherapy (alkylating agents, purine analogs) and Rituximab. It sounds like we can expect relatively normal (though closely monitored) periods punctuated by treatment. Chemo could start as early as this week. The words we cling to: “This is something that can be managed.”
This whole thing has blown in like a blizzard through open windows.
I’m happy I live near my family. I’m relieved that my stupid late-adolescent mind has given way to a mature head that sought to rebuild whatever damage my previous college self caused… before something like this happened. Most of all, I’m thankful for the time.
Friday, I’ll be fitting a gold crown, a single tooth removable partial denture, and a multi-tooth maxillary removable partial denture. So tomorrow, I deliver over $2000 in dentistry.
“Facebook [brings out] our weakest traits as humans. We love to think of ourselves as something we want to be. We trade our true feelings to be included. We want to be popular. We want our taste in music and art to be [valued]. We crave for external success.”
— kunjaan