The Death Of High Fidelity Article - why Magic may sound so bad

As mentioned in a previous thread. Here is the article from Rolling
Stone that talks about how music is produced these days and how it is
soooo much different than it was 20 years ago in terms of the sound
volume. If you click on the link you will get the article AND links
to many others, as well as comments by producers.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17777619/the_death_of_high_fidelity/print

The Death of High Fidelity
In the age of MP3s, sound quality is worse than ever
ROBERT LEVINE

Posted Dec 26, 2007 1:27 PM

David Bendeth, a producer who works with rock bands like Hawthorne
Heights and Paramore, knows that the albums he makes are often played
through tiny computer speakers by fans who are busy surfing the
Internet. So he's not surprised when record labels ask the mastering
engineers who work on his CDs to crank up the sound levels so high
that even the soft parts sound loud.
Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology
has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered ? almost
always for the worse. "They make it loud to get [listeners']
attention," Bendeth says. Engineers do that by applying dynamic range
compression, which reduces the difference between the loudest and
softest sounds in a song. Like many of his peers, Bendeth believes
that relying too much on this effect can obscure sonic detail, rob
music of its emotional power and leave listeners with what engineers
call ear fatigue. "I think most everything is mastered a little too
loud," Bendeth says. "The industry decided that it's a volume
contest."

Producers and engineers call this "the loudness war," and it has
changed the way almost every new pop and rock album sounds. But volume
isn't the only issue. Computer programs like Pro Tools, which let
audio engineers manipulate sound the way a word processor edits text,
make musicians sound unnaturally perfect. And today's listeners
consume an increasing amount of music on MP3, which eliminates much of
the data from the original CD file and can leave music sounding tinny
or hollow. "With all the technical innovation, music sounds worse,"
says Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, who has made what are considered some
of the best-sounding records of all time. "God is in the details. But
there are no details anymore."

The idea that engineers make albums louder might seem strange: Isn't
volume controlled by that knob on the stereo? Yes, but every setting
on that dial delivers a range of loudness, from a hushed vocal to a
kick drum ? and pushing sounds toward the top of that range makes
music seem louder. It's the same technique used to make television
commercials stand out from shows. And it does grab listeners'
attention ? but at a price. Last year, Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone
that modern albums "have sound all over them. There's no definition of
nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like ? static."

In 2004, Jeff Buckley's mom, Mary Guibert, listened to the original
three-quarter-inch tape of her son's recordings as she was preparing
the tenth-anniversary reissue of Grace. "We were hearing instruments
you've never heard on that album, like finger cymbals and the sound of
viola strings being plucked," she remembers. "It blew me away because
it was exactly what he heard in the studio."

To Guibert's disappointment, the remastered 2004 version failed to
capture these details. So last year, when Guibert assembled the
best-of collection So Real: Songs From Jeff Buckley, she insisted on
an independent A&R consultant to oversee the reissue process and a
mastering engineer who would reproduce the sound Buckley made in the
studio. "You can hear the distinct instruments and the sound of the
room," she says of the new release. "Compression smudges things
together."

Too much compression can be heard as musical clutter; on the Arctic
Monkeys' debut, the band never seems to pause to catch its breath. By
maintaining constant intensity, the album flattens out the emotional
peaks that usually stand out in a song. "You lose the power of the
chorus, because it's not louder than the verses," Bendeth says. "You
lose emotion."

The inner ear automatically compresses blasts of high volume to
protect itself, so we associate compression with loudness, says Daniel
Levitin, a professor of music and neuroscience at McGill University
and author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human
Obsession. Human brains have evolved to pay particular attention to
loud noises, so compressed sounds initially seem more exciting. But
the effect doesn't last. "The excitement in music comes from variation
in rhythm, timbre, pitch and loudness," Levitin says. "If you hold one
of those constant, it can seem monotonous." After a few minutes,
research shows, constant loudness grows fatiguing to the brain. Though
few listeners realize this consciously, many feel an urge to skip to
another song.

"If you limit range, it's just an assault on the body," says Tom
Coyne, a mastering engineer who has worked with Mary J. Blige and Nas.
"When you're fifteen, it's the greatest thing ? you're being hammered.
But do you want that on a whole album?"

To an average listener, a wide dynamic range creates a sense of
spaciousness and makes it easier to pick out individual instruments ?
as you can hear on recent albums such as Dylan's Modern Times and
Norah Jones' Not Too Late. "When people have the courage and the
vision to do a record that way, it sets them apart," says Joe Boyd,
who produced albums by Richard Thompson and R.E.M.'s Fables of the
Reconstruction. "It sounds warm, it sounds three-dimensional, it
sounds different. Analog sound to me is more emotionally affecting."


Want to continue the sound quality conversation? Click here to discuss
this story in the comments section of our Rock & Roll Daily Blog.


Rock and pop producers have always used compression to balance the
sounds of different instruments and to make music sound more exciting,
and radio stations apply compression for technical reasons. In the
days of vinyl rec- ords, there was a physical limit to how high the
bass levels could go before the needle skipped a groove. CDs can
handle higher levels of loudness, although they, too, have a limit
that engineers call "digital zero dB," above which sounds begin to
distort. Pop albums rarely got close to the zero-dB mark until the
mid-1990s, when digital compressors and limiters, which cut off the
peaks of sound waves, made it easier to manipulate loudness levels.
Intensely compressed albums like Oasis' 1995 (What's the Story)
Morning Glory? set a new bar for loudness; the songs were well-suited
for bars, cars and other noisy environments. "In the Seventies and
Eighties, you were expected to pay attention," says Matt Serletic, the
former chief executive of Virgin Records USA, who also produced albums
by Matchbox Twenty and Collective Soul. "Modern music should be able
to get your attention." Adds Rob Cavallo, who produced Green Day's
American Idiot and My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade, "It's a
style that started post-grunge, to get that intensity. The idea was to
slam someone's face against the wall. You can set your CD to stun."
It's not just new music that's too loud. Many remastered recordings
suffer the same problem as engineers apply compression to bring them
into line with modern tastes. The new Led Zeppelin collection,
Mothership, is louder than the band's original albums, and Bendeth,
who mixed Elvis Presley's 30 #1 Hits, says that the album was mastered
too loud for his taste. "A lot of audiophiles hate that record," he
says, "but people can play it in the car and it's competitive with the
new Foo Fighters record."

Just as cds supplanted vinyl and cassettes, MP3 and other
digital-music formats are quickly replacing CDs as the most popular
way to listen to music. That means more conven- ience but worse sound.
To create an MP3, a computer samples the music on a CD and compresses
it into a smaller file by excluding the musical information that the
human ear is less likely to notice. Much of the information left out
is at the very high and low ends, which is why some MP3s sound flat.
Cavallo says that MP3s don't reproduce reverb well, and the lack of
high-end detail makes them sound brittle. Without enough low end, he
says, "you don't get the punch anymore. It decreases the punch of the
kick drum and how the speaker gets pushed when the guitarist plays a
power chord."

But not all digital-music files are created equal. Levitin says that
most people find MP3s ripped at a rate above 224 kbps virtually
indistinguishable from CDs. (iTunes sells music as either 128 or 256
kbps AAC files ? AAC is slightly superior to MP3 at an equivalent bit
rate. Amazon sells MP3s at 256 kbps.) Still, "it's like going to the
Louvre and instead of the Mona Lisa there's a 10-megapixel image of
it," he says. "I always want to listen to music the way the artists
wanted me to hear it. I wouldn't look at a Kandinsky painting with
sunglasses on."

Producers also now alter the way they mix albums to compensate for the
limitations of MP3 sound. "You have to be aware of how people will
hear music, and pretty much everyone is listening to MP3," says
producer Butch Vig, a member of Garbage and the producer of Nirvana's
Never- mind. "Some of the effects get lost. So you sometimes have to
over-exaggerate things." Other producers believe that intensely
compressed CDs make for better MP3s, since the loudness of the music
will compensate for the flatness of the digital format.

As technological shifts have changed the way sounds are recorded, they
have encouraged an artificial perfection in music itself. Analog tape
has been replaced in most studios by Pro Tools, making edits that once
required splicing tape together easily done with the click of a mouse.
Programs like Auto-Tune can make weak singers sound pitch-perfect, and
Beat Detective does the same thing for wobbly drummers.

"You can make anyone sound professional," says Mitchell Froom, a
producer who's worked with Elvis Costello and Los Lobos, among others.
"But the problem is that you have something that's professional, but
it's not distinctive. I was talking to a session drummer, and I said,
'When's the last time you could tell who the drummer is?' You can tell
Keith Moon or John Bonham, but now they all sound the same."

So is music doomed to keep sounding worse? Awareness of the problem is
growing. The South by Southwest music festival recently featured a
panel titled "Why Does Today's Music Sound Like ***?" In August, a
group of producers and engineers founded an organization called Turn
Me Up!, which proposes to put stickers on CDs that meet high sonic
standards.

But even most CD listeners have lost interest in high-end stereos as
surround-sound home theater systems have become more popular, and
superior-quality disc formats like DVD-Audio and SACD flopped. Bendeth
and other producers worry that young listeners have grown so used to
dynamically compressed music and the thin sound of MP3s that the
battle has already been lost. "CDs sound better, but no one's buying
them," he says. "The age of the audiophile is over."



Michael
(http://michaelschey.blogspot.com/)
.