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Are the loudness wars fake so record companies can destroy the music?

Sam here and if the music industry have implimented EBU R 128 for loudness normalisation how come the volume on most digital remastered albums leaving the studio is set to "11" lf the listening volume will be the same across the board for streaming services why bother? l’ll tell you why. By lowering the overall volume after the fact does not repair the damage that has already been done! The goal here is to destroy the sound quality of the music and it makes no difference what side your on because the end result is still the same the album is unlistenable. l remember listening to music before the digital age and you not only heard the music you felt it.Well nothing has changed only now you hear the music and feel pain? Draw your own conclusions friends.
guitarsam
thecarpathian's avatar
thecarpathian
4,990 posts
 
I got lost in a quiet passage in a monastery in Tuscany.
Started to feel compressed but eventually found my way out...
thecarpathian's avatar
thecarpathian
4,990 posts
 
So the music industry is in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry to destroy music's healing powers so the pharmaceutical companies can sell more antidepressants. Where did you discover this stunning bit of news, Sam?
n80
2,133 posts
 
@cleeds Please do not confuse me with facts.......;-)

But I am confused now. So help me out. Seriously, I'm trying to understand.

A piece of music gets DR compressed. That means the range of lowest to highest volume is narrowed. In general this leads to an overall increase in loudness.

This makes the quiet bits closer to the louder bits. This helps with low end devices and to overcome ambient noise.

But when played through most iPhones the volume is normalized which basically means the volume is decreased relative to non-compressed songs. So when it is normalized those quieter bits are made quieter.

That would seem to defeat to a large extent the desired effect of compression.

I understand that the compression makes the quiet bits louder _relative_ to the louder bits but if all of it is 'turned down' by normalization then the quieter bits are turned down too.

What have I got wrong here?
cleeds
6,064 posts
 
Normalization has nothing at all to do with this. A recording with very limited dynamic range will sound "louder" than one with a wide dynamic range. It will sound that way even when "normalized" because its average volume is higher.

If you’re on a noisy subway, its easy for quiet passages on a wide DR recording to get lost beneath the ambient noise level of the subway car. Whether that signal was normalized or not has absolutely no bearing on it.

Do you think AC/DC tends to sound louder than a string quartet?
uberwaltz's avatar
uberwaltz
13,381 posts
 
The quiet passages just get lost on phone/ earbuds so they boost it up, reduce the dynamics range so it all sounds nearly the same level.

WE KNOW it's wrong but to the average consumer it works for them.
From way back when in this thread..........
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