# Don't you think the dynamic range is too high on most CDs?



## kiwipolish

I have had many home audio systems over the past 35 years - some quite upmarket (Quad amps and Kef 105 loudspeakers) and some average. I have now a pair of 30 y.o. B&O S45 Beovox speakers (helped by a Dynavox subwoofer) with a 20 y.o. Technics amp.

Throughout my whole life, I have had the feeling that classical music, especially symphonic, is recorded with far too much dynamic range, making it sound unnatural. That feeling was confirmed to me by several musician friends who visited me at home and heard my audio.

Typically when you listen to a pianissimo with, for example, a flute solo, the flute sounds faaaar - faaaar away, sometimes hardly audible. Then, when the tutti fortissimo comes, it's an unpleasant explosion

The worst are some of the very early Deutsche Grammophon CDs from the early 1980ies; but almost all current CDs of all brands suffer from that excessive dynamic range, I think.

For the past 8 years, I have been using a Drawmer dynamic compressor (Made in England). It's quite an expensive piece of audio equipment that I fit between the CD player and the preamp. I can adjust the compression ratio from 1.2 to "infinite" (whatever that means). On most of my CDs, I set it on 1.5, which is almost towards the minimum, but does compress the sound dynamic a little and makes it more realistic, in my opinion. The compressor can be bypassed altogether, and that is usually necessary for organ music or some chamber music recordings.

What do you think? Do you experience the same problem?


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## Rachovsky

I think I understand all the jargon, haha. I believe classical music is quite a pain to listen to through headphones and sadly thats how I listen to it most of the time. Whether I'm around my parents or friends, I try to keep the volume as loud as I can without it bursting out of the headphones. When I'm in noisy crowds, I have to listen to a piece that's extremely loud so It doesn't suddenly change from p to f. I think my ears take quite a beating for doing this though, so hopefully I don't pull a Beethoven.. I always thought this was just a consequence of listening to classical...Sometimes you can hear it and sometimes you cant, lol. Anyways, I agree, maybe I should buy a dynamic compressor... whatever the hell that is...


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## World Violist

Every once in a while the dynamics get too excessive; these, however, are almost always on brand-new CD's, while those from, say, 1960's and '70's are not so much so. Anyway, I think for the most part that they're quite alright.


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## Frasier

I've often wondered why portable CD or Mp3 players don't include a switchable compression to raise the volume of the quieter bits and reduce the loudest bits so it's possible to listen while travelling without having to keep adjusting the volume. One of the great features of the CD is its capability to reproduce a huge dynamic range but when listening against background noise (particularly a varying one) this is a nuisance. 

However, I'm generally happy with the dynamic range of CD for home listening.

Rachovsky, there's a thread about headphones in the "hi-fi" sub-forum. Take care because once you damage your ears' ability with high frequency sounds, it's gone forever. I use Beyerdynamic at home and some little Sennheisers when travelling - not ideal but among the best as far as these things go!


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## kiwipolish

I see that many of you listen through headphones. The problem is that the music you are trying to reproduce does not originally come into you exclusively through your ears. In a real concert hall with real musicians, you perceive music through the ears, lungs, ribcage and your entire body. Limiting music only to the ears seriously limits the experience, and causes you to increase the volume excessively out of frustration. Good loudspeakers avoid that problem.


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## Frasier

kiwipolish said:


> I see that many of you listen through headphones. The problem is that the music you are trying to reproduce does not originally come into you exclusively through your ears. In a real concert hall with real musicians, you perceive music through the ears, lungs, ribcage and your entire body. Limiting music only to the ears seriously limits the experience, and causes you to increase the volume excessively out of frustration. Good loudspeakers avoid that problem.


Most classical music was never intended to be heard through either loudspeakers or headphones anyway. Both have good and bad points. At least with headphones you aren't wrestling with the room acoustics but as you say, listening is a different experience. There's no substitute for live audition; even getting a seat in an acoustically poor part of the auditorium has its compensations in live performance.


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## Badinerie

Live? You should try sitting behind the brass section during a concert of Russian Favourites! Russlan and Ludmilla followed by Night on a bare mountain.... ouch! !


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## Rachovsky

I'm going to Russian Favorites night but i'll be on the East Balcony with a faint view of the Pianist Joyce Yang playing Rach's Rhapsody ... ... . . . . . .. . Hopefully I'll get good acoustics.. Tchaikovsky's 5th should sound good though. I had never listened to Polovtsian Dances by Borodin so I bought it and its played at a rather fast tempo but then I looked at Seiji Ozawa on youtube and his is slow (and not as dancish IMO). What's the correct tempo? anyone know? Sorry for my bad grammar im too lazy to type well.. 

Now that I listen again, they sound like two completely different pieces -.-










 (They play it bad, but it shows the difference)


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## shsherm

I have had a hard time finding a CD of Mahler 5th with reasonable dynamic range. I really agree that the loud parts are too loud and the quiet parts are hard to hear without adjusting the volume. Even the CSO version with Solti has that problem and my old LPs never did.


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## YsayeOp.27#6

Badinerie said:


> Live? You should try sitting behind the brass section during a concert of Russian Favourites! Russlan and Ludmilla followed by Night on a bare mountain.... ouch! !


A professor at the university told me he attended once a London PO concert in which Shostakovich's Leningrad symphony was the centerpiece. As he was sitting very close to the percussionists he said he really suffered each and every time the guy knocked the timpani. Furthermore, he said that after the concert he had to wander for an hour by the streets of London until the echoes of the timpani would decide to abandon his shaken head.


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## kiwipolish

Frasier said:


> I've often wondered why portable CD or Mp3 players don't include a switchable compression to raise the volume of the quieter bits and reduce the loudest bits


Not CD or MP3 players, but cheap amplifiers or TV sets (especially old ones) do that job all the time.

I think this is the real origin of the problem here:

1) Sound engineers who make the recording assume it will be listened to on a cheap or old system

2) They artificially increase the dynamic range so that their recording sounds more or less realistic on a cheap / old system

3) If you use a more modern / top of the line system (such as a portable CD / MP3 player), the dynamic range is too high. The only way to get it real is to use a dynamic compressor.

There are several software dynamic compressors, but none of them works very well in my experience. I still much prefer the analog compressor (I am using a Drawmer, which you can buy from $300 on Ebay - just type [drawmer compressor] into Ebay's search box).

Still, it's a bit strange that we need to spend money to make our top-of-the range systems sound more like old / cheap systems, because sound engineers assume their recordings are going to be listened to on old / cheap systems.


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## Mark Harwood

In other fields of music the recording is likely to be very compressed in order to be heard above other noises without gaps. This particularly applies to rock and pop, as these styles are heard via radio by people who are not really listening but who would be disturbed by pauses in the endless flow of drivel.
Heavy compression, boosting all weaker sounds to almost the level of the peaks, also helps to explain why TV adverts sound so loud.
A CD made to be heard this way can sound really bad on a proper hi-fi, lacking dynamic range.
Thus, by means of technology employed for commercial gain rather than in the service of musical experiences, we are acclimatised to pseudo-music with almost no dynamic range. Even BBC Radio 3 FM is strongly compressed, so listening to it does not prepare us for CD-quality sound. A live performance or a well-recorded CD played on good equipment in a quiet room might take some getting used to.


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## motive2002

I'm a little torn on this. I do think the dynamic range is a bit excessive. Listening to music in the car for example.. the old problem of not hearing the quieter passes and having to fiddle with the volume.

I think it's sort of a show-off of what digital technology _can_ do.. maybe not perhaps what it _should_ do, if that makes any sense.

Using a compressor.. that's an interesting approach.

With classical music, I don't mind the dynamic range so much. Now movies on the other hand.. I hate when the music and sound effects are so LOUD and you can barely hear the dialogue.


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## World Violist

I don't think classical music is that great to listen to in a car... unless it's Ginastera's second quartet or something. Especially orchestra music by Mahler, Debussy, that lot of composers who really knew how to make the orchestra whisper like the wind and cry out with the voice of God.

However, I still hold to my opinion that it really depends on the year the recording was made. With all this newfangled SACD stuff, it seems to me it only really captures the concert-hall sound - rather weak, actually. It doesn't cut through anything.

The older recordings, on the other hand (Toscanini, those older guys) have recordings that truly resound and can slice right through any sound out there. The dynamic range isn't that high, and the analog sound just catches the pure sound, not the echoes in the hall as much. It's far stronger, if you can stand the quality (and I don't see anything wrong with it).

Either that or you could just listen to Ives or something all the time... Huge walls of sound...


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## Guest

Addressing the OP 
If the dynamics are too much or to little on a CD then the main problem lies with the recording engineers, if he/she dose not get it right then things will and do sound messy, as does very bad editing where a note is cut off prematurely instead of being allowed to die as in the original performance [bad editing is a sore point with me] with a good set up as you have the aim is to get as near to the original sound (Hi Fi) as possible. And bad recording is a pain but is not so noticeable on a more basic set up.


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## Artemis

This phenomenon is sometimes referred to in the music industry as the "loudness war" or "loudness race", as explained in the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

The following simple article discusses the problem using some further examples: http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/dynamics/dynamics.htm.

As explained in these articles, it's all a matter of whether the dynamic range has been set so high by the recording engineers (presumably in order to make the music sound louder, and hence more "appealing") that it results in "clipping", i.e. attenuation of the sound at high levels.

Apparently, according to the sources above, this loudness problem has shown some tendency to increase since the time CDs were introduced in the early 1980's. However, I've never bought a CD with this problem but I don't dispute that it may sometimes happen.

I have noticed that some streamed music (eg from the BBC i player) has an excessively high dynamic range, which if left untouched sounds really awful. What I do to get round this problem is to record the material using the "automatic recording volume limiter" facility in the Creative Labs software which I use. Normal, live digital broadcast material from the BBC doesn't suffer from this problem and is usually, if anything, slightly conservative in regard to dynamic range.


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## Mark Harwood

Artemis, the instances to which you provide links are examples of the *reduction* of dynamic range in order to boost perceived loudness. My previous post to this thread tries to cover that.
Increasing dynamic range only makes the louder bits louder still, making the listener uncomfortable. Quiet bits can drop right off the recording.
It's easy to confuse overall volume level with dynamic range, but in reality they are very different things.
I don't know of a CD that has been made with artificially large dynamic range, but if it happens it must sound really bad.


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## Artemis

Mark Harwood said:


> Artemis, the instances to which you provide links are examples of the *reduction* of dynamic range in order to boost perceived loudness. My previous post to this thread tries to cover that.
> Increasing dynamic range only makes the louder bits louder still, making the listener uncomfortable. Quiet bits can drop right off the recording.
> It's easy to confuse overall volume level with dynamic range, but in reality they are very different things.
> I don't know of a CD that has been made with artificially large dynamic range, but if it happens it must sound really bad.


I realised that. The point is that there are web articles on problems about the dynamic range of music CDs which refer to the tendency among some audio engineers to over-compress the available dynamic range (ie reduce it) in order to boost volume. I've not come across any articles arguing the opposite, that the dynamic range on CDs is too high before any compression is applied. On the contrary, where the full dynamic range for a CD of 90 db is left in tact, this is usually applauded as the goal of good sound engineering. I wonder therefore whether people who have voted in this poll know exactly what they have voted for in saying that they find they need to adjust the volume. I suspect there is some confusion and they could, in effect, be saying they think dynamic range is too low as a result of compression. I'm not clear what they think but the situation is probably more complex than many believe.


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## Mark Harwood

I'm with you there, Artemis.
There are so many variables. Plus, as you say, a full dynamic range is to be desired. So as it comes down to personal taste and listening circumstances, perhaps some amplifier manufacturers will intruduce compression settings like those on many car radios.
I don't even use tone controls, and my favourite amplifier doesn't have one. Less is more. But that's easy for me to say, listening to Baroque chamber music, guitars, lutes and pre-war jazz. A Wagner nut may well have a different view.
Back to the point though: are any CDs made with artificially enhanced dynamic range? If not, then either some people are uncomfortable with natural dynamics, or their hi-fi equipment has a non-linear response. 
Interesting stuff.


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## Artemis

Mark Harwood said:


> I'm with you there, Artemis.
> There are so many variables. Plus, as you say, a full dynamic range is to be desired. So as it comes down to personal taste and listening circumstances, perhaps some amplifier manufacturers will intruduce compression settings like those on many car radios.
> I don't even use tone controls, and my favourite amplifier doesn't have one. Less is more. But that's easy for me to say, listening to Baroque chamber music, guitars, lutes and pre-war jazz. A Wagner nut may well have a different view.
> Back to the point though: are any CDs made with artificially enhanced dynamic range? If not, then either some people are uncomfortable with natural dynamics, or their hi-fi equipment has a non-linear response.
> Interesting stuff.


It shouldn't be necessary to de-compress commercially available CDs unless possibly some really weird settings have been applied one-off at the recording/mixing stage. Certainly I can't see any need to do this on a routine basis to all CDs, as stated in the OP. More likely there could be something amiss with the amplifier or its settings, or possibly if the sound is played via a PC there could be a fault of some description with the sound card or its software settings.

It's extremely unlikely that one needs to buy a £500 (US $1000) de-compressor in order to get the best out of music CDs. If this were case it would be big news and common knowledge, and if so it would probably never happen as the necessary corrections would be applied at source in recording studios.

Regards amplifier settings, of course you are right that they serve no purpose but to distort the sound. I always set mine to "off" in all circumstances. Interestingly, I once saw a thread on another music Forum which was discussing the best sounding PC music player, like Windows Media Player, Real Player, Jet Audio, etc. The correct answer, of course, is that they all sound exactly the same provided they're set to the default "off" positions for the various sound"enhancing" features. But it was quite funny watching all the nonsense about how some media players allegedly sounded better than others, and in what respects.


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## Guest

When you mentoin _de-compressor_ do you mean the DA converter? These were sold in their thousands in the late 80s to early 90s.


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## Artemis

Andante said:


> When you mentoin _de-compressor_ do you mean the DA converter? These were sold in their thousands in the late 80s to early 90s.


In post No 20, I meant to say "compressor", not "de-compressor", so apologies for that slip.

I certainly don't mean DA converter, which is a totally different thing. A DA converter is an essential and (normally) integral component of a CD player and sound card which converts digital signals into an analogue sound wave.

What we're talking about here is an electronic box called a "dynamic compressor" which is capable of reducing the dynamic range (ie the difference between high and low decibels) of a piece of music. In the OP it is suggested that many classical music CDs have too high a dynamic range, and therefore a home version of a "dynamic processor" is a useful supplementary piece of kit to add to one's hi-fi gadgetry in order to make appropriate adjustments to the sound one actually hears.

Now, in recording studios dynamic processors are used as part of the stock in trade of manufacturing CDs. The author of the OP is saying that in his view insufficient dynamic compression is applied at the manufacturing stage, and that he finds it necessary to apply yet more compression (using a domestic version of the same kit) to give acceptable results in terms of his perception of the range of sounds emanating from certain instruments.

I was suggesting instead that the main criticism of parts of the recording industry is exactly the opposite, i.e. that CDs are sometimes over-compressed in order to (somewhat paradoxically) boost average levels of volume. This compression is done as a selling gimmick to make the music sound "better", ie louder. Whether or not excessive compression has been applied, it hardly seems appropriate to compress the music even further by home versions of dynamic compressors, since the achievement of high dynamic range (up to the 90 DB limit of a CD) is the "holy grail" of hi-fi enthusiasts and music lovers. If there's a problem with the sound, I would guess that more likely it's a fault of some description elsewhere in the system.


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## Guest

Artemis said:


> In post No 20, Whether or not excessive compression has been applied, it hardly seems appropriate to compress the music even further by home versions of dynamic compressors, since the achievement of high dynamic range (up to the 90 DB limit of a CD) is the "holy grail" of hi-fi enthusiasts and music lovers. If there's a problem with the sound, I would guess that more likely it's a fault of some description elsewhere in the system.


I agree entirely, I have never (to date) had a CD that I can't get and enjoy the full range very comfortably, I have a class A amp, which was the best improvement I ever made


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## Weston

In a medium to large city there are constantly planes flying overhead, lawnmowers next door, dogs barking, and rude people shaking the ground with trunk rattling sub-woofers half a mile away. Absolutely the dynamic range for some classical music is too wide to hear the soft parts over all that without blasting at rock volumes in the louder parts. Just because we have the technology to have a noiseless wide dynamic range doesn't mean we should - not in today's world. Wagner didn't have planes roaring and refrigerators and air conditioners whirring in his world.

Artisitcally it doesn't need to drop below pp for me to get the general idea it's softer.


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## Mark Harwood

That looks like a cogent point to me, Weston. Where you live, your music source needs to be compressed. That ought to be done at the user end, ie. by your hi-fi system. In my view, the CD itself should have a dynamic range as close to the original sound as is possible. There are enough impediments between the performance and the listener at home without adding compression that is unnecessary, even intrusive, in a quiet place.
I hope someone can recommend a good, affordable compression system for domestic usage, so that you can enjoy your CDs to the maximum.

Where we live, the noises are the waves on the sand/shingle beach, many species of birds (sea birds in front of the house, woodland birds behind), vehicles passing from time to time, the occasional pleasure boat or fishing vessel, wind in the trees, and gales in the Winter. None of these sounds spoils our enjoyment of music. Indeed, some of them sound better to me than many of Carol's CDs. I'll stop there, before I begin to upset any Romantic period listeners.


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## Guest

*Weston * I sympathise with you regarding a noisy environment it must be hell and apart from soundproofing a listening room or shooting the neighbours there is not much you can do unless you can d/l a program to rehash the recording, I am sure they are around check this out http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ it may have something, 
I must agree with mike that the adjustment should be at the listening end and not the production end. 
I have a sportscar and these are notorious for wind noise hence I have the CD player loaded with Jazz which I can play very loud but even so there are passages that are just too quite to hear and classical is just imposable.

*Weston * I have just thought of another one you could try http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/


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## Weston

Andante said:


> *Weston * I have just thought of another one you could try http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/


I have had some software that will compress the audio. That would be a rather large undertaking for all my music at home and a good hi-fi might be the more economical solution in terms of time I think.

However - this is an excellent idea for work! At work I'm not really listening and would not need it to be a perfect reproduction. It's just pleasant background. So I could start to compile CD's of compressed classical music for work, and while I'm at it make mp3's so more can fit on a disc. That way I can have my pleasant music and not have The Lark Ascending descend into oblivion. And it will be leveled so I won't disturb my coworkers if a big orchestral crash comes in.

(Anyone mortified by the idea of great classical music as mere audio wallpaper can rest assured I do sit down and listen with all my attention for an hour or so at least a couple of times a week.)

This MediaCoder looks like it does it all. I'll give it a try. Thanks.


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## Elgarian

One of the problems with wide dynamic range arises because many of us have neighbours to consider. Often it simply isn't feasible to reproduce music at realistic volume levels (even if one wants to) purely through consideration of others who may not want to hear climactic orchestral sounds coming through the walls. 

One of the most disappointing purchases I ever made was the Haitink box of Vaughan Williams symphonies, where I soon discovered that I had to choose between scaring the neighbours, not hearing frequent passages of quiet music, or sitting there twiddling the volume control. The result: I never play the Haitink set at all unless my neighbours are out!

It seems a retrograde step to compromise the sound quality at source, so surely the solution is to have some optional compression facility incorporated into amplifier systems, just as tone controls often are. I can't see it happening though.


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## Mark Harwood

Hello Elgarian.
Your problem is that you wish to be a good neighbour. Much credit to you.
Since domestic systems struggle to reproduce the grand scale of real orchestral sounds anyway, have you tried good headphones?


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## Elgarian

Mark Harwood said:


> Since domestic systems struggle to reproduce the grand scale of real orchestral sounds anyway, have you tried good headphones?


I do use headphones quite often (particularly if I'm listening in the garden), but there are two reasons for not doing so. First, quite often my wife and I listen to music together - so we want the music 'in the room' rather than 'in the head'. But also, the LS3/5A loudspeakers I use are very transparent and have a natural feel to them that would always be my preferred way of listening. I must confess, though, that I've never considered spending really serious money on headphones - I suppose because it isn't my first choice of listening method.

I agree about the inability of domestic systems to reproduce realistic levels, but I suppose I abandoned that particular chase many years ago. That's what's given rise to this thread, after all - I mean, the clash between the realistic dynamic range of the concert hall and the restrictions in the domestic environment (which will be different for all of us).


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## Elaryad

I voted yes. Didn't realise that my little problem about listening to classical music was called "too much dynamic range". This problem haunts me. I listen to music on my pc mostly and very loud. I like to listen to every detail of whats going on in the orquestra. I want to listen to andante, moderato, etc., everything. And I have the same problem on headphones. I mess a lot with my eardrums.


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## kiwipolish

Artemis said:


> Now, in recording studios dynamic processors are used as part of the stock in trade of manufacturing CDs. The author of the OP is saying that in his view insufficient dynamic compression is applied at the manufacturing stage, and that he finds it necessary to apply yet more compression (using a domestic version of the same kit) to give acceptable results in terms of his perception of the range of sounds emanating from certain instruments.


No, I was saying the opposite. Sound engineers and manufacturers seem to use *expanders* (the opposite of compressors) that artificially increase the dynamic range, so that pp in the concert hall becomes a ppp on the CD, and ff in the concert hall becomes fff on the CD.

I never listen to music in a noisy environment. When living in a city, I had a music studio in a bomb shelter 3 floors underground, covered with wool carpets, cork ceiling, wooden reflectors, 100 meters of heavy curtains - that was so quiet that I could almost hear my own heartbeat. Now, I live in remote suburbs, on 1/3 acre section, and have no exterior noise either - so a dedicated music studio is not justified.

I have owned many high-end and above average stereo systems over the past 40 years.

My attention has been attracted to this problem by several guests musicians who would listen to my stereo system. They consistently and spontaneously remarked that the dynamic range is higher than it should be - wherever it was, and whatever stereo system I was using.



Artemis said:


> I don't even use tone controls, and my favourite amplifier doesn't have one. Less is more.


You are a perfectionist living in an imperfect world. 

My perfectionism is different. I do use tone controls, and I write down the perfect combination of volume, tone controls and dynamic compression for each CD I have in my collection. I find that 80% of my CDs need the same combination (which, BTW, is not "0"), and some need specific settings.


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## Guest

I also never use tone control. 
I also find that if the engineer has done the job right and the listener is positioned correctly, relative to the speakers no other adjustments are required, but I can see if some short cuts are made then problems can arise, luckily I have not had that experience, I have some recordings on which you can hear traffic going by and what appears to be the rumble of the underground in the London recordings, but the musical dynamics are fine.


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## Guest

There are so many varients involved in this issue that I don't think there is one answer. The quality of the sound system, the room it is in, the quality of the recording, the preferences of the sound engineer making the recording- everything has an impact. 

It is interesting to compare a very early recording of an operatic aria where the recording was obviously made on one take, with a modern recording of the same aria, even the same singer, possibly with many takes, which has been manipulated in the studio.

Dynamic range is only one consideration, absolutely everything including bad intonation can be altered these days, so one just has to listen and select what appeals. Then adjust our sound system accordingly. It all adds to the listening experience.


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## Scelsi

here's a guy who knows what he's speaking of:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17777619/the_death_of_high_fidelity

And when say Kancheli specifies a long ppp on the viola followed by a choir + orchestra fff, could it be that he's asking that consciously? 
So, if that what he wants, I'd appreciate the technicians to stick to their job. Proces the sound respectfully.

Then afterwards, when you want to listen to "the best possible copy of the (life) original, you can. (Provided you have the equipement and environement). If and when you want a bland version (for during car driving or whatever reason), you can always manipulate the rich version into a bland one.

That's why, for me, respect the dynamic range of the life intrument(s)


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## Elgarian

Well, I encountered this dynamic range problem today, with a vengeance.

I'd bought the Colin Davis/LSO live 2CD set of Berlioz's _Damnation of Faust _ on the basis of unequivocal recommendations from _Penguin_ and from _Gramophone _as 'the' version to have. I noted that both refer to the fact that 'the transfer is at rather a low level', but thought little of it. It turned out to be a massive understatement.

In order to get an initially acceptable, comfortable level, I had to wind the volume control into unknown territory - not far from full on: such a high setting, in fact, that if this had been any 'normal' CD, I'd have been afraid of my loudspeakers being blasted into their constituent parts, or my neighbours phoning the police - or both. This seemed mighty strange, so I played various sections of the CD - at a more cautious volume setting - until I understood the nature of the choices that had been made in mastering this recording. The recorded level seems to have been backed off excessively in order to accommodate the climaxes of the 'Ride to the Abyss' towards the end of the piece. If I had in fact continued to play the whole of the second CD at my original volume setting, I suspect my neighbours would have wondered if World War 3 had begun when I got to the 'Abyss'.

I transferred the first half-hour's worth of the tracks from the second CD onto my computer and looked at the audio wave profile - here's a screenshot, courtesy of the excellent _Audacity_ program:










That great mass of high amplitude stuff at the far right is the 'Ride to the Abyss' section. The much lower level stuff at the far left is Marguerite's wonderful (or what _should_ be wonderful) 'D'amour l'ardente flamme' which, when played at a volume setting that could reasonably accommodate the Ride to the Abyss, is basically reduced to an unrealistically low level devoid of all power.

The huge dynamic range means that these two Berlioz CDs are almost worthless to me. I can't play this recording, sensibly, in what I would consider to be a pretty average domestic environment. And to listen to it on headphones may well be, I suspect, potentially dangerous to my hearing. If I were to set a comfortable listening level for 'D'amour l'ardente flamme', I certainly would not like to be wearing those phones when the 'Ride' begins. If ever a recording needed some compression, this is surely it.

So I have two questions:
1. Why has attention not been drawn by reviewers to the really quite serious problems that will be presented surely to the majority of listeners by this excessively large dynamic range? 
2. Can someone please recommend a good version of _Damnation of Faust_ that I can actually listen to in comfort and without fear?


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## kiwipolish

anmarwis said:


> There are so many varients involved in this issue that I don't think there is one answer.


I agree 100%. It is a good idea to investigate all possible settings, including turning loudspeakers in various directions etc.



Elgarian said:


> The huge dynamic range means that these two Berlioz CDs are almost worthless to me.


This just proves that a dynamic compressor should be part of any good hi-fi system. I never regretted buying mine. On some recordings, I can bypass it. On the majority, I run it at 1.5. The maximum compression level is 20, followed by "infinite". So, I am rather using my compressor at a very conservative level. Your cd would probably sound right at 2 or 3.


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## Ramamaiden

Ive been reading this thread and it has been very interesting.
I am an acoustical and sound engineer myself, so i studied this stuff of dynamic range.
First i totally agree when people say that there is too dynamic range on the cds. I mean i have that problem myself and me too have to lower the volumes, or raise the volume on the quiet parts, its annoying we all know . Of course we would all love to have an acoustically perfect room were there is no annoying backgorund noise, and that we dont have to worry about bothering the neighbours =P. 

One good thing to do if people can afford it is buy a vynil player. Apart for sounding great, this format has a much lower dynamic range. The biggest problem with these is finding the recordings. But hearing classical on vynil is just the best. Even if you can have a limited collection, its worth the buy imo .
I don´t have classical music on vynil, but have some late 70´s and early 80´s rock records. like pink floyd, yes, jethrotull and rush. They sound amazing....its just another experience. I will try to get some classical vynils, but its a very good option for those wanting less dynamic range, and also at the same time you have that analog sound that is amazing.

Anyone here that has a vynil player i would love to hear your opinions.

bye


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## Guest

*Ramamaiden*, I have a lot of classical Vinyl, but only an average turn table so I get below average results, a friend has a system that would be worth somewhere in the region of $70-80,000NZ with Tannoy Speakers and a bass located under the floor somewhere and they do sound super he uses a nitty gritty cleaner and has all the required bit and pieces. but my system and room acoustics when playing CDs are just as good for well under a third of the cost.


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## kiwipolish

Ramamaiden, great to read a sound engineer here.

25 years ago, I used to have ca 7,000 classical LPs in my collection, and I remember very well when the first CDs and CD players appeared. I bought the Philips oldest model, which cost me over $1,000. My stereo was of a very high standard (B&O tangential arm turntable, Quad amplifier and KEF 105 loudspeakers). The transition to CD was so breathtaking that I almost immediately sold all my LPs and never went back to vinyl.

It is hard to compare the dynamic range of LPs and CDs because of the much higher background noise present on LPs (noise both from the vinyl and from the analog recording). 

As a sound engineer, can you tell whether other engineers who record classical music nowadays use expanders, or other ways to "enhance" the dynamic range beyond its realistic scope?


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## Ramamaiden

Kiwipolish,

i really dont know how the mastering of the classical music records are done.
Its possible that they use them cos they know how important the dynamic on classical
music is, so maybe they use them to emphasize this.
im not sure, but ill check it out to see how it is done really.


Also ive heard a lot of stories regarding the vynil and cd. A lot of people when first heard cd said that they feel that it sounded great, but it was a different sound, a more cold sound in comparison of the vynil. The vynil has this warmth unique sound thats its not on the cd. It all a matter of taste, but what ive heard on vynil, its just amazing to hear, and if i could i would love to have all my music on vynil xD.

About the dynamic range of the cds and vynil, when you say that the vynil has a much higher background noise is a way to see why the vynil has lower dynamic range, because if the backgorund noise is high, then you have less dynamic range.


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## Guest

*kiwipolish* How about we do some factual research into this as far as I can see you have not given any actual examples, you did mention some early DG recordings, which ones?? can you be a bit more specific.
Does it make any difference if heard through a decent set of cans?
Can you give details of say 6 recordings that give the greatest concern:
1. The actual work and the performers
2. The CD Label
3. The Recording Studio, date of recording and if it has been remastered, and the Engineers (most reputable Labels give these details)
If any of us has one of these Cds we can give our opinion.


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## kiwipolish

Andante said:


> *kiwipolish* Can you give details of say 6 recordings that give the greatest concern


*All *recordings have too much dynamic range, in my perception. When I hear the same work played live in a concert (where I am physically present), I *always *perceive a lower dynamic range. maybe I should get a dB meter to confirm this.

The only exceptions are organ music (don't know why) and pre-1960 recordings.

*All *the combinations of hi-end and mid-range hi-fi equipment that I have tried in the past 35 years lead me to this perception.

*All *my CDs sound better with a slight application of dynamic compression on my Drawmer compressor (and no, I don't work for them  ). The only exceptions are organ music and pre-1960 recordings.

This was first pointed out to me by the leader of a symphony orchestra whom I invited to my auditorium 30 years ago. I played him Rimsky Korsakov's Sheherazade (sorry, can't remember the version), and this was the piece he was playing with his orchestra that night. He mentioned that the sound was good, but the dynamic range too high. Most musicians think the same.


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## Guest

Well I am sorry but as a musician and a Hi Fi user I do not find this to be the case. perhaps the acoustics in the venues are not up to scratch


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## pasoleati

First, I found Ramamaiden´s posts unreadable due to so many errors in spelling and grammar. Second, I don´t think CDs have too high a dynamic range at all.


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## Krummhorn

pasoleati said:


> First, I found Ramamaiden´s posts unreadable due to so many errors in spelling and grammar.


Moderator note:
We are not grammar/spelling freaks here ...  ... This forum is comprised of many members from as many different countries, including places where English, let alone English spelling and grammar, is not taught nor required learning.


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## pasoleati

Krummhorn, I am not a native speaker either, but do manage to spell "vinyl" right. After all, Ramamaiden says he is engineer by trade, so decent spelling can be expected of him. And I wouldn´t be surprised if he was a native speaker of English...


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## Ramamaiden

pasoleati said:


> Krummhorn, I am not a native speaker either, but do manage to spell "vinyl" right. After all, Ramamaiden says he is engineer by trade, so decent spelling can be expected of him. And I wouldn´t be surprised if he was a native speaker of English...


im soooo sorry for my bad spelling, it was an outrageous mistake, i feel terrible so please forgive me.

btw im not an english native speaker and as you said im an engineer, not a writer or anything like that. also i really dont care too much when im writing on forums and i always type fast, so i make a lot spelling mistakes. well, with vynil i really thought it was spelled vinyl xD, my mistake there.

now after my useless reply of an useless comment that nobody cares, please moderator can you erase the posts that have nothing to do with the topic =P, unless my writing issues are more interesting than the topic. at least mr pasoleati seems to enjoy it.


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## Simpson Microphones

kiwipolish said:


> No, I was saying the opposite. Sound engineers and manufacturers seem to use *expanders* (the opposite of compressors) that artificially increase the dynamic range, so that pp in the concert hall becomes a ppp on the CD, and ff in the concert hall becomes fff on the CD.


As somebody who works with/in the industry, I woud have to say that it is extremely unlikely that any classical releases use expanders to increase dynamic range _(although von Karajan was famous for adjusting the fader levels by hand during a performance to 'enhance' the dynamics of the orchestra)._

In fact, quite the opposite - most of the big labels use compressors/limiters (to increase loudness), and often a huge amount of microphones (further reduction in crest-factor).

Only the small 'audiophile' labels tend towards the 'purist' approach which is to use minimal microphones and no compression (other than the mechanical distortion of the system as a whole).

If you measure the crest factor (peak-RMS) of the recordings you find 'too dynamic', you will almost certainly find them to have far less dynamic range than a real concert.



> My attention has been attracted to this problem by several guests musicians who would listen to my stereo system. They consistently and spontaneously remarked that the *dynamic range is higher than it should be *- wherever it was, and whatever stereo system I was using.


If you compare your recordings directly with real musical sources you will find that it is physically (mechanically) impossible for this to be the case _(assuming you are not using my microphones - which is a fair assumption given that I know my customers by name)_.

Loudness is an RMS (average level) perception, not a perception of peaks, and where excessive dynamics/loudness are perceived, it is most likely that this perception is based on the fact that there is excessive distortion in the recording, and also that the equal-loudness relationship is not consistent with that of a real performance.

In other words 'it's too dynamic' or 'it's too loud' is usually a case of distortion rather than actual dynamic range.

Rarely is a real orchestra perceived as being 'too loud' or 'too dynamic' - because it is not distorted.

If you measure the peak loudness of an orchestral performance you probably be amazed at how much louder it is than your hifi is capable of.

How is your listening room acoustic treatment? If the room is not 'flat' you can find all kinds of strange issues related to equal loudness effects.

Andy


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## Elgarian

Simpson Microphones said:


> Loudness is an RMS (average level) perception, not a perception of peaks, and where excessive dynamics/loudness are perceived, it is most likely that this perception is based on the fact that there is excessive distortion in the recording, and also that the equal-loudness relationship is not consistent with that of a real performance.


I think you may have misunderstood the nature of the problem that some of us have been troubled by, which is this: we play CDs in a domestic environment, where it's unreasonable (for the sake of neighbours who may not wish to hear our music playing) to attempt to achieve 'realistic' sound levels. But for some CDs it's simply impossible to achieve a single volume control setting that enables us to hear the quieter passages without the louder passages - when they occur - frightening the neighbours. This is the 'excessive dynamic range' effect that we're talking about. If we don't want to scare the neighbours, we have to choose a setting that's too low to be able to hear quiet passages properly. If we want to hear the quiet passages, we have to choose a setting which will upset our neighbours in the loud passages.

The point is that in a controlled, audio-centred environment, or specialist studio, the dynamic range of such CDs will be fine. In ordinary homes, where other people have to be considered, it simply isn't. This isn't anything to do with distortion, or incorrect perceptions of loudness. It truly is a dynamic range problem which would be completely solved by an appropriate amount of compression.


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## Guest

*Elgarian* , It seems that the problem is purely a personal one for those that have either an inadequate system *or* an unfortunate home location, it means that the Cds seem to have a too high a dynamic range when in fact it is the environment that is being used as a listening room that is the real culprit, The volume that I use is loud but can not be heard out side at a distance of say 25 - 50metres whereas if you play head banging pop music with amplified bass then that will travel well over 1k at the same volume.


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## Simpson Microphones

Elgarian said:


> I think you may have misunderstood the nature of the problem that some of us have been troubled by, which is this: we play CDs in a domestic environment, where it's unreasonable (for the sake of neighbours who may not wish to hear our music playing) to attempt to achieve 'realistic' sound levels. But for some CDs it's simply impossible to achieve a single volume control setting that enables us to hear the quieter passages without the louder passages - when they occur - frightening the neighbours. This is the 'excessive dynamic range' effect that we're talking about. If we don't want to scare the neighbours, we have to choose a setting that's too low to be able to hear quiet passages properly. If we want to hear the quiet passages, we have to choose a setting which will upset our neighbours in the loud passages.


Ah, I see.

I was mostly trying to address the points made by Kiwipolish.

However, as Andante mentions above, the listening environment can be critical to the perception of dynamics.

For example, if the ambient noise-floor of the environment is loud enough to mask the quieter sections, this will be perceived as 'too quiet to hear'.

In the car, whilst driving this can be observed in the extreme - where the very high noise-floor from road/engine/wind noise can mask almost 80-90dB of the dynamic range in worst cases.

Do you still perceive the dynamic range as 'too great' on headphones?

How about headphones which isolate?

If you can imagine a concert hall with a motorway outside the door, you can perhaps imagine that the PP & below would be approaching inaudible.



> The point is that in a controlled, audio-centred environment, or specialist studio, the dynamic range of such CDs will be fine. In ordinary homes, where other people have to be considered, it simply isn't. This isn't anything to do with distortion, or incorrect perceptions of loudness. It truly is a dynamic range problem which would be completely solved by an appropriate amount of compression.


Given that almost all of the major label (DG for example) recordings are _already compressed_ - the artifacts of which are audible - we can see that the approach is not effective in many cases.

However, if we are talking about an average home-environment noise-floor of some 30-40dB above that of the concert hall, it would take a stupendous amount of compression to 'solve' the problem.

This solution comes at the price of the distortion caused by compression, which has many symptoms such as increased ear-fatigue, unnatural sound quality, etc.

This describes the radio solution almost exactly - massive compression & irritating sound (that is still problematic in the car!).

The only solution I can think of would be either to _perform_ the music during the recording with less extreme dynamics or to include dynamic processing in the playback equipment.

There are already several consumer systems which include 'loudness' & 'dynamic' controls.

Andy


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## Elgarian

Simpson Microphones said:


> Do you still perceive the dynamic range as 'too great' on headphones? How about headphones which isolate?


Headphones aren't a solution for several reasons. First, my wife and I often listen together, so we want the music 'out there in the room, not 'in here in my head'; second, having invested what for me is a great deal of money in my loudspeakers (LS3/5As), I want to hear the beautiful sounds issuing from them; third, I basically dislike headphones - I will use them, but as a last resort.



> However, if we are talking about an average home-environment noise-floor of some 30-40dB above that of the concert hall, it would take a stupendous amount of compression to 'solve' the problem.


I don't see why. My only regret for the passing of the age of vinyl is that this dynamic range problem was virtually non-existent with LPs - I presume because of the limitations on the low levels (due to noise restrictions), and the high levels (due to tracking problems, restricted groove spacing, etc.) I don't think I ever experienced this dynamic range problem with vinyl LPs (though I was glad to see the back of them for other reasons). If you can get an acceptable dynamic range on an LP without being significantly affected by compression artifacts, why not on a CD also?

I should point out that many, many CDs are fine, with a perfectly sensible dynamic range. But there are some - like the Haitink Vaughan Williams box of symphonies, or the Colin Davis live _Damnation of Faust_, that I find practically unplayable. I could, as someone suggested and as you suggest here, spend a lot of money on a compressor; or, more cheaply, I could just throw the culprits away (and moan about them!).


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## Guest

Elgarian said:


> I could, as someone suggested and as you suggest here, spend a lot of money on a compressor; or, more cheaply, I could just throw the culprits away (and moan about them!).


Personally I would prefer that you do just that rather than have the CD engineers lower the dynamics or cut back the quality in any way at all,  as I have said before I do not have this problem just as an aside I wonder if the SACD are any different?


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## Elgarian

Andante said:


> Personally I would prefer that you do just that rather than have the CD engineers lower the dynamics or cut back the quality in any way at all,  as I have said before I do not have this problem


So I come to a crucial decision. Do I devote my life to a vain but noble campaign to persuade recording engineers to make sure the dynamic range of their recordings isn't too high? Or do I throw away my Haitink RVW box and my live Colin Davis _Damnation of Faust_ and have a cup of tea instead?

I know the world is waiting for a decision, but gosh, it's hard ....

(Incidentally, Andante, I can't see why SACD should be any different, given that the noise base will be pretty much the same, I suppose. I imagine the problem is caused by the decisions of the recording engineer, rather than the actual format.)


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## Andy Loochazee

Elgarian said:


> So I come to a crucial decision. Do I devote my life to a vain but noble campaign to persuade recording engineers to make sure the dynamic range of their recordings isn't too high? Or do I throw away my Haitink RVW box and my live Colin Davis _Damnation of Faust_ and have a cup of tea instead?
> 
> I know the world is waiting for a decision, but gosh, it's hard ....
> 
> (Incidentally, Andante, I can't see why SACD should be any different, given that the noise base will be pretty much the same, I suppose. I imagine the problem is caused by the decisions of the recording engineer, rather than the actual format.)


In my opinion there's nothing wrong with the dynamic range on the vast of majority of CDs. Any perceived problems could be the result of cheap kit, poor acoustics, or more probably lack of familiarity with some classical music. Some classical music obviously involves soft low level stuff followed at some stage by much louder passages, and if this is recorded faithfully you can't blame this on faulty recording processes.

In any event, rather than buying an expensive compressor or throwing away CDs, here's a far cheaper solution for anyone who is that bothered by this alleged problem. All you do is rip any offending CDs using a lossless format; download "Audacity" (the free digital audio editor; version 1.2.6 is stable and documented) and apply the "compressor" tool in the "Effect" menu to achieve the waveform you are happy with; finally, using the edited waveform, create a revised CD. You will need to experiment with the settings in the compressor tool to get what you want but it's not difficult after a bit of practice. You can see immediately the results of the editing.

As I said, personally I wouldn't use this tool as I think it's a waste of time and totally unnecessary with commercial music CDs. It's designed mainly for those who create their own music. But you may as well give it a whirl and see what you think.


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## Elgarian

Andy Loochazee said:


> Any perceived problems could be the result of cheap kit, poor acoustics, or more probably lack of familiarity with some classical music.


I think this has already been covered pretty thoroughly in this thread, but let me explain again: the problem arises (for those of us who are troubled by it and discussing it here) from none of the things you mention, but from practical limitations in domestic environments where there may be important reasons for not letting the loudest parts of the music increase above a certain level.



> All you do is rip any offending CDs using a lossless format; download "Audacity" (the free digital audio editor; version 1.2.6 is stable and documented) and apply the "compressor" tool in the "Effect" menu to achieve the waveform you are happy with; finally, using the edited waveform, create a revised CD. You will need to experiment with the settings in the compressor tool to get what you want but it's not difficult after a bit of practice. You can see immediately the results of the editing.


In principle this is a good idea - I use Audacity myself, and it's a fine tool. But to work your way steadily through a batch of troublesome CDs, push them through the Audacity compressor routine, then burn them back to CD again.... that's a pretty time-consuming business. The rubbish bin (for the very small number of _seriously_ problematic offenders) is still my favoured solution at present, but certainly it's worth a shot for anyone who badly wants to improve the playability of a particular recording.


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## Andy Loochazee

Elgarian said:


> I think this has already been covered pretty thoroughly in this thread, but let me explain again: the problem arises (for those of us who are troubled by it and discussing it here) from none of the things you mention, but from practical limitations in domestic environments where there may be important reasons for not letting the loudest parts of the music increase above a certain level.


I fully understand the alleged problem. The simple fact is that (classical) music volumes can and do vary quite widely within a piece, but that's mainly in the nature of the music, and one would hear exactly the same thing in a concert hall provided of course the sound recording of the CD was done properly. Just because some people may not like the inherently wide dynamic range of a piece of classical music (eg because of neighbour problems) is hardly sufficient reason to mangle it for the purpose of a manufacturing a CD such that that the natural highs and low volumes are artificially compressed.



> In principle this is a good idea - I use Audacity myself, and it's a fine tool. But to work your way steadily through a batch of troublesome CDs, push them through the Audacity compressor routine, then burn them back to CD again.... that's a pretty time-consuming business. The rubbish bin (for the very small number of _seriously_ problematic offenders) is still my favoured solution at present, but certainly it's worth a shot for anyone who badly wants to improve the playability of a particular recording.


I do quite a lot of recording from the radio and think nothing of using "Audacity" to clean up and edit the material. I never bother with its compressor tool because I have never encountered the problem you refer to. Nor have I ever encountered it on any of my classical CDs, and I have about 700. It wouldn't take that long to go through the exercise, and as you say it may only be necessary for a small number of CDs. This option is certainly a lot cheaper than buying a compressor (which is quite expensive), which I'm convinced is an waste of money and totally unnecessary unless one is creating music from primary sources.


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## Elgarian

Andy Loochazee said:


> Just because some people may not like the inherently wide dynamic range of a piece of classical music (eg because of neighbour problems) is hardly sufficient reason to mangle it for the purpose of a manufacturing a CD such that that the natural highs and low volumes are artificially compressed.


But the whole recording process, of transferring original sounds from the studio, to a medium designed (mostly, one supposes) for domestic use, involves huge amounts of 'mangling' already. What we hear at home, on all our CDs, is already a looooong way from being 'natural'. All I'm asking for is some understanding from recording engineers of the environments in which most CDs are played. I have a small number of recordings where the volume control on my amp has to be turned up an _extraordinarily_ long way to hear most of the music properly. At such a setting, the climaxes resemble earthquakes. Great, in a concert hall. In an ordinary house, one simply can't attempt it. At the very least, an 'unusually large dynamic range' warning on the label would be helpful. It might even attract a lot of people!


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## Andy Loochazee

Elgarian said:


> I have a small number of recordings where the volume control on my amp has to be turned up an _extraordinarily_ long way to hear most of the music properly. At such a setting, the climaxes resemble earthquakes. Great, in a concert hall. In an ordinary house, one simply can't attempt it. At the very least, an 'unusually large dynamic range' warning on the label would be helpful. It might even attract a lot of people!


Sorry but I can't agree. I don't have any such CDs as you describe, and if I did I would rather put up with the minor inconvenience of twiddling with the volume control rather than give licence to a bunch of musically ignorant geeks in CD factories to meddle with the natural variance of the waveform on a CD to produce a more homogenous volume level to satisfy those who don't like occasional bursts of loud music.


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## Elgarian

Andy Loochazee said:


> Sorry but I can't agree. I don't have any such CDs as you describe


Well, that goes some way towards explaining why you don't agree.



> , and if I did I would rather put up with the minor inconvenience of twiddling with the volume control rather than give licence to a bunch of musically ignorant geeks in CD factories to meddle with the natural variance of the waveform on a CD


Obviously we must just agree to disagree, though I feel I have to say again that I think this 'natural variance' you speak of is a phantom. What emerges from your speakers is far from being a 'natural' sound, for a large number of reasons, and in _any_ recording, a great deal of what you call 'meddling' lies between you and the sound that was made in the studio. What I'm talking about is just the tiniest smidgeon of an adjustment, compared to everything that already goes on.

Of course the whole discussion is hardly worth losing any sleep about, is it? It's not as if anything is going to be changed as a result of the outcome!


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## kiwipolish

Simpson Microphones said:


> 'it's too dynamic' or 'it's too loud' is usually a case of distortion rather than actual dynamic range.


Dzien dobry Andy and many thanks for your professional input. You may be right here, as the problem seems to decrease as I spend more dollars on my audio equipment, cables etc.

Is there an affordable dB-meter that I could use at home, and later take discreetly with me to to the concert hall? I would love to measure the dynamic extremes in one of my versions of Mahler's 1st symphony, and then attend a concert where it is actually performed, in order to compare the dynamic range. Not the same orchestra etc., but it would give me an idea. Have you actually done that kind of test?



Elgarian said:


> we play CDs in a domestic environment, where it's unreasonable (for the sake of neighbours who may not wish to hear our music playing) to attempt to achieve 'realistic' sound levels


That was *not *my concern when I started this thread. My only concern was the faithful reproduction of music at home. When I listen to a CD, I constantly ask myself: "could I mistake this sound for that of real musicians?" - and the answer is often "no" because of too high dynamic range... or, as Simpson Microphones suggests, because of non-obvious distortion which gives the illusion of a higher dynamic range.

Regarding your need, Elgarian, you could indeed re-record some offending CDs using Audacity as suggested, but I prefer a standalone dual compressor like i.e. these offered on Ebay.


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## Elgarian

kiwipolish said:


> That was *not *my concern when I started this thread. My only concern was the faithful reproduction of music at home.


Yes, I understand that, though the difference may partly lie in the way we're expressing ourselves. In this discussion I've tended to refer to the effect of excessive dynamic range on my neighbours, but equally I could have talked about its disturbing effect on me. If I take your comment from your very first post:


> Typically when you listen to a pianissimo with, for example, a flute solo, the flute sounds faaaar - faaaar away, sometimes hardly audible. Then, when the tutti fortissimo comes, it's an unpleasant explosion


then that is precisely what I find unacceptable, also. I hadn't thought of this in terms of musical realism, though it's true, as you say, that one does not experience this in the concert hall. I merely extended the unpleasantness to include my neighbours' displeasure. Perhaps there are two effects going on here: one being a genuinely excessive dynamic range on some CDs, and the other being the distortion effects that have also been discussed.

The really interesting thing is the way the poll is developing. Whatever the real reason, over half the respondents are registering a problem in this area.


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## Simpson Microphones

kiwipolish said:


> Dzien dobry Andy and many thanks for your professional input. You may be right here, as the problem seems to decrease as I spend more dollars on my audio equipment, cables etc.


Dzien dobry indeed!

Actually, with regards to investing dollars in audio, often drastic improvements can come with relatively simple & economic acoustic treatment. Home listeners are often amazed at what they hear in a studio, not because the speakers are any better than those at home, but because the room & acoustic treatment are often more seriously considered in the design of a studio.



> Is there an affordable dB-meter that I could use at home, and later take discreetly with me to to the concert hall? I would love to measure the dynamic extremes in one of my versions of Mahler's 1st symphony, and then attend a concert where it is actually performed, in order to compare the dynamic range. Not the same orchestra etc., but it would give me an idea. Have you actually done that kind of test?


I'm not sure what is available in NZ - what is the local large-scale electronics place? There are usually affordable meters available for health & safety type purposes that would be suitable.

Most people would be amazed at the peak dB SPL reached by the average enthusiastic orchestra (I would expect the average Moscow State performance to be in total violation of health & safety laws for more than 50% of the time!).

Measurement using an SPL meter would be as useful to notice the ambient noise-floor of both environments as for spectacular peak levels and both measurements would offer significant clues.



> That was *not *my concern when I started this thread. My only concern was the faithful reproduction of music at home. When I listen to a CD, I constantly ask myself: "could I mistake this sound for that of real musicians?" - and the answer is often "no" because of too high dynamic range... or, as Simpson Microphones suggests, because of non-obvious distortion which gives the illusion of a higher dynamic range.


If we take the question from a different perspective - it can often be interesting to try to imagine what the sound would be like of real instruments in your listening room, or even better, bring some real instruments in and have the players play with all the gusto of a live performance.

I would guess that you might find the dynamics excessive in this case too.

Many years ago I recorded a string quartet in a living room in the suburbs of London. The quartet consisted of prominent players (firsts in national orchestras), so the level was very high.

The room was a small, normal english living room with carpet, pictures, furniture, etc.

When the quartet started playing it was painful, scratchy, over-dynamic and generally awful! I left the room quickly!

Andy


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## Simpson Microphones

Elgarian said:


> Headphones aren't a solution for several reasons. First, my wife and I often listen together, so we want the music 'out there in the room, not 'in here in my head'; second, having invested what for me is a great deal of money in my loudspeakers (LS3/5As), I want to hear the beautiful sounds issuing from them; third, I basically dislike headphones - I will use them, but as a last resort.


Agreed. Headphones are a poor solution, not least for psychoacoustic reasons of perception of scale.

However, I asked about headphones simply to find out whether the dynamic range appeared problematic where SPL & noise-floor are far more condusive.

Reproduction of a full scale orchestra or even string quartet can be anti-social, from which there is no real escape.

However, it is important to consider that loudness is to an extent a relative perception, where noise-floor plays a large role. For example, travelling in the car, where noise-floor is very high, even shouting (at close range) seems reasonable, where in a silent room, the shouting would seem extreme.



> I don't see why. My only regret for the passing of the age of vinyl is that this dynamic range problem was virtually non-existent with LPs - I presume because of the limitations on the low levels (due to noise restrictions), and the high levels (due to tracking problems, restricted groove spacing, etc.) I don't think I ever experienced this dynamic range problem with vinyl LPs (though I was glad to see the back of them for other reasons). If you can get an acceptable dynamic range on an LP without being significantly affected by compression artifacts, why not on a CD also?


It would be quite possible to have a recording mastered to vinyl & re-recorded back to the digital domain for CD - there are known cases of this in the pop world.

As a recording engineer, I would be happy to offer dual-format releases where one version of the recording is optimised (similar to the average vinyl pressing) for 'worst-case' and the other 'as is'.



> I should point out that many, many CDs are fine, with a perfectly sensible dynamic range. But there are some - like the Haitink Vaughan Williams box of symphonies, or the Colin Davis live _Damnation of Faust_, that I find practically unplayable. I could, as someone suggested and as you suggest here, spend a lot of money on a compressor; or, more cheaply, I could just throw the culprits away (and moan about them!).


Generally speaking, I would imagine that the CDs you find unplayable are probably simply very bad recordings and what you describe sounds symptomatic of multi/close-mic'ing, compression & other engineering 'sins'.

How do you find classical radio?

I find it 'ideal' in the car or kitchen but unlistenable anywhere else.

Andy


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## Elgarian

Simpson Microphones said:


> I asked about headphones simply to find out whether the dynamic range appeared problematic where SPL & noise-floor are far more condusive.


I don't have a pair of headphones of even remotely comparable quality to my loudspeakers, so I don't think it would be a fair comparison - though I admit to having been idle, and haven't tried listening to the problematic recordings on phones (my excuse is that I use them so rarely). I will, though; and will report back.



> Reproduction of a full scale orchestra or even string quartet can be anti-social, from which there is no real escape.


Oh yes, I'm sure if I hired a full orchestra to play in my home, I'd be flooded with complaints (not that even a quarter of an orchestra, jammed together and standing, would fit into the room, mind you).



> How do you find classical radio? I find it 'ideal' in the car or kitchen but unlistenable anywhere else.


I don't actually have a tuner at home (all my listening is CD-based), and I only listen to radio in the car where, as you say, it's fine.


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## Andy Loochazee

Elgarian said:


> The really interesting thing is the way the poll is developing. Whatever the real reason, over half the respondents are registering a problem in this area.


I haven't bothered voting in the poll. I don't believe that many of the people who have done so know what they're voting for anyway, such is the amount of confusion that's grown up around this thread.

As far as I can see, Kiwipolish is saying that, in his experience, many classical CDs are not faithful to the music as it should sound, because CDs exaggerate loud sections so that the dynamic range is thereby skewed. He reckons that loud sections need taming down, and suggests that the best way to do this by passing the sound through a compressor in order to reduce the dynamic range to match concert hall performance characteristics.

It turns out that Elgarian (who I first thought was supporting Kiwi in this claim) is not actually agreeing with Kiwipolish on the nature of the problem. On the contrary, he seems to believe that the problem is that we don't want CDs to sound like concert halls because most domestic situations are not amenable to listening to music in this way. Instead, he wants the original sound to be compressed in order to make it sound acceptable for domestic environments. (Here I wonder whether equipment may be partly to blame. I note from another thread that Elgarian has a NAD amplifier. These are fine Amps but rather bass heavy, and more suited to Rock rather than classical music. Something like a Rotel, or even better a Cyrus, would give a flatter and rather different sound, better suited to classical).

The two positions are fundamentally different from each other. I think they're both wrong. I disagree with Kiwi because I don't believe that many classical CDs are in fact significantly unfaithful to the original sound, at least not when it's played on decent equipment in a reasonably suitable environment. Of course, classical music contains high and lows but it has never bothered me, provided the quality of sound is good. I disagree with Elgarian because I disagree with the implication of his view that the soundwave on CDs should be adjusted to produce a reduced dynamic range in order to suit the normal domestic listening environment that he thinks is typical.

Basically, I believe there's nothing wrong with the vast majority of decent quality (DG, EMI, Decca etc) classical CDs. It's purely a figment of some people's imaginatiions and/or dodgy equipment to suggest otherwise.


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## Elgarian

Andy Loochazee said:


> I don't believe that many of the people who have done so know what they're voting for anyway, such is the amount of confusion that's grown up around this thread.


The reason for the confusion, Andy, is surely that there are simply too many variables for us to be able to determine precisely what it is that is giving rise to that more than 50% 'discontent' rating in the poll. The poll tells us clearly that there's a problem for more than half the users of CDs who've voted, but of course it doesn't tell us anything about the _causes_ of the problem. I think what's emerging from this discussion is that there are more possible causes than (perhaps) some of us had anticipated. Certainly I'm learning something from this, despite the confusion.



> Here I wonder whether equipment may be partly to blame. I note from another thread that Elgarian has a NAD amplifier. These are fine Amps but rather bass heavy, and more suited to Rock rather than classical music.


I can't see why you'd single out the amp for the explanation - one could equally observe that my speakers (LS3/5As) are more suited to classical than rock. (Actually those two tendencies complement each other beautifully most of the time.) I think it's far, far more likely, as the _other_ Andy pointed out, that there are simply a few really badly adjusted recordings on the market that may sound impressive in a studio environment, but not in a domestic one.



> I disagree with Elgarian because I disagree with the implication of his view that the soundwave on CDs should be adjusted to produce a reduced dynamic range in order to suit the normal domestic listening environment that he thinks is typical.


I'm happy to live with your disagreement, but I'm uneasy about your implication that I wish to be the final arbiter on what constitutes a 'typical' domestic listening environment. I have no such grandiose ambition. I'm just expressing my own view, based on my own experience, just as you are. But if it were generally true that 58% of CD buyers are unhappy with the dynamic range of what they are buying (admittedly an unreasonable extrapolation), then I'd say maybe the issue was worth looking seriously at?


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## kiwipolish

Simpson Microphones said:


> (...)often drastic improvements can come with relatively simple & economic acoustic treatment.


Agreed, and I am serious about my music, so already 30 years ago I had an auditorium located in a nuclear bomb shelter in Switzerland. The thick concrete walls and 2-ton concrete doors made any parasite vibration impossible. Silence was total (I could hear my own heartbeat!). My shelter was fitted with furnishings, carpets, curtains all around, cork ceiling, curved wooden acoustic screens as per advice received by a sound engineer from the Swiss Radio; it was a miniature of the Ernest Ansermet Studio. My stereo equipment, at that time, was Quad amps + Kef 105 loudspeakers + B&O tangential arm turntable + the first Philips CD player. So, I suppose, my conditions were more perfect than most other audiophiles'... but this is where I first heard the musicians' remarks about too high dynamics.

Nowadays, I live in New Zealand and the conditions are quite different (no need for nuclear bomb shelters here) but, believe me, I am aware of room acoustics, speaker positioning etc.

But I keep reading your interesting posts and investigating various setups. Your experiment of hiring a string quartet was an interesting one. "Chamber music" means "music in a room", so a string quartet should sound very nice in a regular to large room. We may be used to listen to it in a concert hall, but it really belongs to our living room! I would like amp / loudspeakers / CD players manufacturers (not to mention microphone makers!) to subject their equipment to blind tests in such a way: place a string quartet and two loudspeakers on either side behind a light curtain, and have them play in random order one after another - when listeners can't tell the difference between live and recorded music, you've got the perfect combination of audio equipment / recording. Actually if you manage to stage that blind test, it might be quite a publicity stunt for your microphones 

*Elgarian*, do try a Drawmer compressor; it seems perfect for your need. I'm sure you'll love it!

*Andy Loochazee*, in an ideal world I would prefer to have the genuine sound of music without resorting to a compressor. I'll try the dB meter as *Simpson Microphones* suggests and this should tell me whether the dynamic range is indeed superior on my audio equipment or in a concert hall with live musicians playing the same piece of music.


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## Guest

kiwipolish said:


> My stereo equipment, at that time, was Quad amps + Kef 105 loudspeakers + B&O tangential arm turntable + the first Philips CD player. So, I suppose, my conditions were more perfect than most other audiophiles'... but this is where I first heard the musicians' remarks about too high dynamics.


Quite frankly I am surprised that musicians would say this, when I was active in music I found that sitting in front of the brass section [even 2 rows] made it impossible to hear a lot of the other instruments, thank the lord for the conductors that know this, Or, I should add, perhaps those musicians in the bomb shelter had their hearing damaged.
A few months ago I attended a concert given by the Choir of Christ College Cambridge, I was directly in front of the Sopranos, now when those girls let rip dynamics go out of the window, my ears were ringing for days and I loved it.

So it seems to be a matter of poor room acoustics and mediocre system as quite a few have now pointed out and not the fault of the CD.


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## Elgarian

Andante said:


> So it seems to be a matter of poor room acoustics and mediocre system as quite a few have now pointed out and not the fault of the CD.


I'm persuaded that these play a part, but not at all persuaded that they're a complete explanation. Most of my CDs don't pose much, if any, of a problem; a minority are troublesome; a very few are virtually unplayable. That tells me (not unreasonably, I think) that the decisions of the recording engineer are at least a factor to be considered.

However, yet another factor strikes me that I don't think we've mentioned yet - and that is: possible hearing deficiencies in the listener. I know for certain that my own hearing is not what it was. I know that one effect of this is to make me less sensitive to quiet sounds, and of course that will tend to make me push the volume a little higher. But I wonder if another change in my hearing is to make me less tolerant to loud sounds? In other words - it may be that the effective dynamic range _of my own hearing_ is reduced in comparison to what it was, say, 10 years ago. So when I push the volume higher to hear the quiet sounds, maybe the loud sounds become louder than my hearing is comfortable with. That would certainly make me feel that CDs were pushing beyond acceptable limits, in a general way.

This makes the number of variables in this discussion even bigger. (It remains true, however, that the dynamic range of that _very_ small number CDs that I've mentioned previously is so ridiculously high that all these other explanations pale into insignificance.) Certainly Kiwipolish's suggestion about adding a compressor would sort it out, regardless of the actual mix of causes; all I need now is the cash!


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## Mark Harwood

Perhaps the original performance that has been captured on CD had a dynamic range that the CD listener would have found uncomfortable had he/she been there at the recording session. In this scenario, it's not the recording medium, it's the performance that accounts for the problem.


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## Simpson Microphones

Mark Harwood said:


> Perhaps the original performance that has been captured on CD had a dynamic range that the CD listener would have found uncomfortable had he/she been there at the recording session. In this scenario, it's not the recording medium, it's the performance that accounts for the problem.


This is a good point.

Another issue that is often forgotten when discussing the recording of a performance is that according to the 'modern recording procedure', after the microphones are setup, a trial version of a piece is usually recorded which is used to judge 'changes required of the orchestra'.

Believe it or not, most often the conductor & players are working counter-intuitively to 'improve' the recorded result, _as they hear it in the recording_.

This can often include players & conductors 'over-playing', 'under-playing', 'second-guessing' and any manner of other directions informed by what they hear in the recording.

In the case of extremely bad recordings, I would suspect that this might be one of the factors.

Multi-mic'ing is one of the greatest causes of this unhealthy type of playing and can remove much of the natural musical interaction from a group.

My own approach to recording is to monitor the recording at matched scale & SPL on large loudspeakers in the room with the orchestra, so that musical changes will only be sought where musical performance is unsuitable _from a normal perspective_, not from the distorted perspective of a bad recording.

Andy


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## kiwipolish

Now he have it. Written by a sound engineer himself, the admission that most classical recordings are made by Frankenstein.


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## Justin

I just thought I'd chime in here - I am actually pleased that the dynamic range of classical cds has improved and that most recordings do not suffer from rock and pop transfers where the music is compressed and transferred at such a high volume level (in anticipation of limited bandwith radio broadcast or MP3 playback) that the sound quality is severely crippled.

When I compare old classical cds to newly mastered releases the difference is...well, there is no comparison. I love the fact that the full power and majesty of the music can be translated properly into the home environment whilst also retaining the beauty and transcendence of the quietest moments.

I don't think the dynamic range on modern classical recordings is set too high at all.

Oh - for those who take an interest in such things - my equipment is a meridian G08 cd player for the source, Bryston amplification, Tannoy speakers and a Lexicon music processor and REL subwoofer (I like my music multi-channel too at times and am a keen fan of 5.1 as much as I am straight stereo)

J


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## Simpson Microphones

kiwipolish said:


> Now he have it. Written by a sound engineer himself, the admission that most classical recordings are made by Frankenstein.


You would most likely be _amazed_ at what goes on at the average recording session.

However, there are many factors that have contributed to this.

For example, equal loudness effects of low monitoring levels, lack of direct comparison to the actual source, years of accumulated mythology and the various EGOs of those involved (not to mention the limitations of the transducers available) - the combination of which is highly significant.

*Also, there is the problematic & increasingly popular view that sound engineering should be considered 'art' (!).*

This fundamental contradiction is responsible for many of the worst horrors published today and fueled by EGO can be disasterous.

Andy


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## geoffrey terry

*Forte piano*

I think the problems you are experiencing are not due to the dynamics of the work, which have probably been correctly interpreted by the conductor.
It is a further effect of multi-mic and close-up-mic technique.
The engineering of classical music by CD manufacturers is a modern day abomination.
There is, in fact, a discussion taking place on brightcecilia on this very subject and a petition is in the process of being instigated.
A petition which, with the support of all those who wish to hear sound as it was intended, i.e. the nearest possible to the original as heard in the optimum location in an acoustically correct concert hall.
The petition with introduction and code of practice recommended for the recording industry can be viewed on www.orchestralconcertcds.com/petition.html
The producers and manufacturers of CDs need to be told in no uncertain terms that the majority of CDs produced today do not entertain us. Give us Back our Music is the cry of the masses.
If we all pull together maybe our cry will be heard. The industry can begin again taking a more simple approach, with the advantage of lower production costs.
It can be done and it depends on the consumer.
Geoffrey


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## Elgarian

geoffrey terry said:


> I think the problems you are experiencing are not due to the dynamics of the work, which have probably been correctly interpreted by the conductor.
> It is a further effect of multi-mic and close-up-mic technique.
> The engineering of classical music by CD manufacturers is a modern day abomination.


Gosh, what large lettering!

Haven't multi-mike techniques been with us all along? I remember eternal discussions even in the days of vinyl in which the Decca multi-miked sound was compared with the more spacious acoustic obtainable with a single pair of crossed microphones. Yet the Decca technique gave us the Solti _Ring _. I suspect that it isn't really the technique _per se_ that lies at the heart of the problem, but the skill and sensitivity of the engineer, and (as you say in your article) whether the advice of the performers has been sought in assessing the final recording.



> ... the nearest possible to the original as heard in the optimum location in an acoustically correct concert hall.


I've never really been convinced that this was either an achievable or desirable goal, except perhaps in a specially designed listening studio. In a more typical domestic environment I think the most one can hope for is a convincing _illusion_ of listening in a concert hall, which of course isn't the same thing. Hifi is, after all, an illusion. There's as much psychology (and physiology) involved as there is technology.



> The producers and manufacturers of CDs need to be told in no uncertain terms that the majority of CDs produced today do not entertain us.


Although I applaud your quest for audio excellence (of course), the problem here for me is that the vast majority of the CDs in my collection _do_ entertain me, and very well. Mostly, my quibbles are about a dynamic range that's sometimes too large for comfort - which is what we've been discussing here.


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## geoffrey terry

I apologise for the large type. I was not familiar with the system and selected a type size at random.

You are very fortunate to be able to enjoy the majority of your CD collection, especially as someone who obviously enjoyed the Solti Ring cycle, on vinyl.

My impression was that I was commenting on the subject of dynamics.

If you enjoy live orchestral concerts then you would surely agree that the dynamics of the orchestra are controlled by the conductor. It is with regard to that particular point that I made my observation. I have worked in the classical music and recording industry for more than 50 years and the greatest source of irritation for me has always been to see an engineer behaving as a conductor. In the case of a recording using multi mic technique the wishes of the conductor are certainly overridden.

If yet another technical process were introduced to reduce dynamic range you would again be changing the performance as intended by the conductor and orchestra. If the recording is made within certain criteria then the dynamics would be natural and as determined by the performance.

Do you find the dynamic range to great in a live concert environment?


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## Elgarian

geoffrey terry said:


> the greatest source of irritation for me has always been to see an engineer behaving as a conductor. In the case of a recording using multi mic technique the wishes of the conductor are certainly overridden.


Oh, I entirely believe you. But I suspect (though I do not know) that there's always been a lot of that going on - hence all that grumbling, decades ago, about the unpleasantness of the Decca multi-miked sound, and their often unnatural-sounding acoustic. I suppose I'm only asking - is this supremacy of the engineer a new phenomenon? Or has it always been with us?



> If yet another technical process were introduced to reduce dynamic range you would again be changing the performance as intended by the conductor and orchestra. If the recording is made within certain criteria then the dynamics would be natural and as determined by the performance.


We've been here before in this thread, so I'm treading old ground, but what I feel uneasy about is the whole idea that _any_ recording can be 'natural and determined by the performance'. The dynamic range of the recording has to take into account, at the very least, the noise floor (at the bottom end), and non-linearities in the equipment (at the top end). So I don't see how any recording can have a dynamic range that's the same as you'd get sitting in a concert hall. Both top and bottom of the range have to be limited somehow - either by very careful microphone placing etc (which is what you advocate, I think, and which I too would prefer), or by electronic processing. As I've said already in earlier posts, given the amount of electronic processing of all kinds that's already there, I wouldn't myself object to the very small additional degree of processing needed to make a small reduction of the dynamic range on most CDs. I don't know how much adjusting of the dynamic range has already been used (up or down) in existing recordings. I suspect it's quite common - but I simply don't know.



> Do you find the dynamic range to great in a live concert environment?


No - but the whole thrust of my argument has been that what's appropriate in the concert hall is very different from what's appropriate in an average domestic environment. If I were regularly hiring an orchestra to play Wagner in my house, I'd very soon (and quite rightly) have the police knocking on my door - no less than if I were to try to achieve realistic levels with my hifi....


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## kiwipolish

Elgarian said:


> (...) what's appropriate in the concert hall is very different from what's appropriate in an average domestic environment.


Elgarian, this is *not * what this thread is about. Please read the OP.

This thread is about *originality: faithful reproduction of music*. Neighbours or comfort are not a concern.

If neighbours and comfort are a concern for you, please start a new thread to discuss that. In a properly run forum, your posts would have already been removed and a new thread created. By keeping writing what you are, you are only adding confusion.


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## Guest

We seem to be going around in circles, but sometimes you just have to repeat yourself even if it upsets some, and yes we go off topic as do a lot of posts, *so what?? * personally the last thing we need is to have posts removed for reasons other than Spam or foul language


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## kiwipolish

Sorry; I should have written "moved" and not "removed". A forum should be kept tidy by its moderators, but this one seems to wander in all directions.


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## purple99

* sniggers at thought of Elgarian being shunted about the forum like a goods waggon    *


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## Elgarian

purple99 said:


> * sniggers at thought of Elgarian being shunted about the forum like a goods waggon    *


Just wait till you see my impersonation of Thomas the Tank Engine. Then you'll be impressed.

*kiwipolish said:*


> This thread is about originality: faithful reproduction of music. Neighbours or comfort are not a concern. ... In a properly run forum, your posts would have already been removed and a new thread created. By keeping writing what you are, you are only adding confusion.


Cheer up, Kiwipolish - it's the price you pay for having raised such an interesting and multi-faceted question, and one which is far from easy to resolve. And although you don't seem to see it, I _have_ been talking about the relationship between dynamic range and the faithful reproduction of music - but from a perspective that differs from yours. I've pretty well said all I have to say, now, and we do seem to be going in circles, so I'll stop contributing at this point - but let's agree not to be grumpy about it?


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## purple99

It's telling how excited recording engineers become about this subject.


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## Elgarian

purple99 said:


> It's telling how excited recording engineers become about this subject.


I know I promised kiwipolish that I wouldn't comment further (and I won't), but I need to thank you for this link, purple. The curious thing is that (admittedly without reading it all with the necessary intensity and focus that I don't really have time for right now), I get the impression that almost everyone contributing to that diverse and very lively discussion is correct, within their own sphere of reference.


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## purple99

Elgarian said:


> I know I promised kiwipolish that I wouldn't comment further (and I won't), but I need to thank you for this link, purple. The curious thing is that (admittedly without reading it all with the necessary intensity and focus that I don't really have time for right now), I get the impression that almost everyone contributing to that diverse and very lively discussion is correct, within their own sphere of reference.


Well, I enjoy reading both you and kiwipolish so would be sorry if one of you went into purda.


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## kiwipolish

purple99 said:


> It's telling how excited recording engineers become about this subject.


Thanks for that great link. I find it unbelievable that musicians, music-lovers and sound engineers alike are so much at a loss with this subject.

After all, the definition of the challenge is extremely simple: *to mistake a recording for real musicians*. We don't want the recorded sound to be _worse _ than the sound of real musicians; and we certainly don't want it to be _better _either!

I'm not sure about the petition mentioned on _soundonsound_ (actually, the sound samples seem to have disappeared today); but I do think that better defined recording standards seem necessary.

I am not pointing the finger at sound engineers alone. They are only one link in the chain. It is possible that some of our consumer audio equipment is not up to standard (well; I must admit I have never owned a high-end audio system worth more than $30,000; so I don't know how a $200,000 audio system would sound in my living room!), that our room acoustics are inappropriate (OK; so what exactly should I do, other than approximate trial-and-error?), that the CD had been improperly duplicated, that sound engineers had sinned by creating a Frankenstein-recording that sounds "_better_" than real musicians, etc.

What would really be useful is to have one set of reference parameters, so that serious music-lovers like ourselves know where they are; something a bit like the SPARS code (DDD - ADD - AAD), but more elaborate.

For the time being, when you buy a classical CD, you usually don't know

- what audio equipment has been used to assess the authenticity of the recording (assuming that _authenticity _was of any importance at all!)

- how was it used (i.e. placement of speakers? auditorium dimensions? acoustic panels?)

- how was that authenticity assessed (personal evaluation? scientific measurements?)

- what's the level of the loudest peak? its relation to the softest ppp?

- etc., etc.

The unreliability of all these links in the chain makes that we are still listening to modern recordings of i.e. Mahler symphonies where

- you can distinctly hear the tuba player breathing in before playing

- the sound of the harp covers that of the entire orchestra

- orchestral explosions are disproportionate and painful

- no matter how good it sounds, there is no way that, with our eyes closed, we could mistake that for a live performance


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## Isabelle

I actually agree with that, to hear all the soft recorded instruments and parts you have to turn the volume to a decent level already, but then when the loud parts comes in, its very loud and feels like its attacking my ears. I do think it adds to the atmopshere of some pieces though, but it doesn´t make the listening easier.


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## Simpson Microphones

Isabelle said:


> I actually agree with that, to hear all the soft recorded instruments and parts you have to turn the volume to a decent level already, but then when the loud parts comes in, its very loud and feels like its attacking my ears. I do think it adds to the atmopshere of some pieces though, but it doesn´t make the listening easier.


This feeling of 'attacking your ears' is significant.

It is not so much loudness (Sound Pressure Level) that produces this feeling but _distortion_.

For example, it is quite possible to cringe & cower at the sound of a relatively quiet kitchen 'boombox', where a crescendo brings the very low performance system into extreme distortion at relatively low SPL.

This is not loud (SPL) but we find it very uncomfortable all the same.

At the opposite end, a very high performance studio monitoring system can deliver sound pressure levels that are actually dangerous with such low distortion that the engineer does not feel any danger with the high levels - which is far more dangerous for his ears!

A real orchestra is equally dangerous for the musicians & conductor but does not feel particularly so because of the same lack of distortion.

The distortion caused by all forms of compression (be it mechanical or electronic) tends to induce the same feeling of 'attacked ears'.

Still, as I implied above, the main problem is the lack of education in the field of sound engineering (not least in the resulting idea of engineering as art).

Andy


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## Elgarian

Simpson Microphones said:


> It is not so much loudness (Sound Pressure Level) that produces this feeling but _distortion_.


I don't understand this, Andy. If we take the original waveform and distort it by a small percentage, then we get a waveform that isn't quite the same as the original sound. Visually they may look very similar, but there will be these small differences, with additional harmonics present.

But why would the presence of these extra harmonics make us perceive the sound as 'louder'? I can see that they may make it more or less pleasant - but I don't see why the loudness would seem greater. Does the brain misread these small additions falsely, as 'louder', rather than 'different'? Or is it that, since the distortions may be perceived as less pleasant, they're less well tolerated?

And why would this be a phenomenon restricted only to the _recording_ of music? After all, no two musical instruments sound the same (because of differences in the waveforms they produce). Why isn't the distortion created by electronic reproduction perceived in the same way as the differences we perceive between musical instruments? Perhaps you'd reply that it is - and that some instruments do sound louder than others even though the actual pressure levels are the same?

[With apologies to kiwipolish, but please note that I didn't mention the neighbours. This business of the way we _perceive_ dynamic range is central to your original question, and is just too interesting to miss out on.]


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## Mr. Terrible

geoffrey terry appears to be intent on ramming his unsolicited opinions down everyone`s throats both here and on the Music tech board from which I have followed him.

For some reason he seems to think he can insult others and their working methods with impunity and yet accuses others of starting a vendetta against him whenever anyone dares to offer a contradicting opinion.

Just be grateful he hasn`t seen fit to start am opinion poll on here.
In the meantime, can you please keep him out of the grownups area he seesm to have strayed into at www.soundonsound.com?
Thank you for your support.

Regards, Ivan.

Music lover.

OMG! 
I see as poll!!!!
Run for the hills!


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## purple99

Mr. Terrible said:


> geoffrey terry appears to be intent on ramming his unsolicited opinions down everyone`s throats both here and on the Music tech board *from which I have followed him.*


What? You're stalking a talkclassical member around cyberspace?


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## purple99

kiwipolish said:


> Thanks for that great link.


You're welcome. See what excitement the subject generates? 



kiwipolish said:


> I find it unbelievable that musicians, music-lovers and sound engineers alike are so much at a loss with this subject.


The problem is that sound engineers, their producers, and the CD labels who pay the bills and call the shots, have been permitted to get away with audio murder _for years_. You buy a CD now and you're immediately knee deep in a trade descriptions problem. It says "X concerto played by Y soloist with Z orchestra" on the cover but you don't know, when you listen to the thing, how much is a real musician, and how much is Kevin playing with his computers in a sound lab. The Terry petition is a small step towards restoring sanity.



kiwipolish said:


> I'm not sure about the petition mentioned on _soundonsound_ (actually, the sound samples seem to have disappeared today)


A further link here with working sound (scroll down).



kiwipolish said:


> but I do think that better defined recording standards seem necessary.


I'm broadly behind the petition. The detail can be argued about but the principle's important: to fire a shot across the bows of an industry who, for years, has been selling the listening public a pig in a poke. Many of the arguments apply equally to non-classical music.



kiwipolish said:


> For the time being, when you buy a classical CD, you usually don't know


Exactly. And when you ask politely -- as happens on that SOS thread -- CD label paid employees scream like goosed schoolgirls. You couldn't make it up!


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## Mr. Terrible

*Dern! I might have known I`d find you ehre, too.*

We are actually laying bets that this nutter is actually Senor Terry in disguise as well.

Anyone care to dispute that, or are there just lotsa nuts here?

Once again my profuse apologies to the rank & file on this site, as I am sure you are all normal, rational and reasonable beings.
But I do wish you would control your loonies.

Oh, and it is a little difficult to take someone who starts a petition when he is already trying to flog off some dodgy old stereo pair bootlegs seriously.
Something of a loaded deck here.

Wonder what the musicians and conductors take of the proceeds is, Geoff?


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## Mr. Terrible

purple99 said:


> What? You're stalking a talkclassical member around cyberspace?


BOO! 
You`re next!


----------



## Mr. Terrible

Elgarian said:


> I don't understand this, Andy. If we take the original waveform and distort it by a small percentage, then we get a waveform that isn't quite the same as the original sound. Visually they may look very similar, but there will be these small differences, with additional harmonics present.
> 
> But why would the presence of these extra harmonics make us perceive the sound as 'louder'? I can see that they may make it more or less pleasant - but I don't see why the loudness would seem greater. Does the brain misread these small additions falsely, as 'louder', rather than 'different'? Or is it that, since the distortions may be perceived as less pleasant, they're less well tolerated?
> 
> And why would this be a phenomenon restricted only to the recording of music? After all, no two musical instruments sound the same (because of differences in the waveforms they produce). Why isn't the distortion created by electronic reproduction perceived in the same way as the differences we perceive between musical intruments? Perhaps you'd reply that it is - and that some instruments do sound louder than others even though the actual pressure levels are the same?
> 
> [With apologies to kiwipolish, but please note that I didn't mention the neighbours. This business of the way we _perceive_ dynamic range is central to your original question, and is just too interesting to miss out on.]


A clue is in the common use of loudness buttons on certain stereo systems.
The response of the average hifi system is tailored to approximate that of the response of the listener`s ears, which are anything but linear in response.

For whatever reason, an audio system that is distorting and putting out an spl of X will tend to sound louder subjectively than a really clean undistoprting system putting out, for example, X+3dB spl.
This is not imagination or wishful thinking but a well documented aspect of human response to audio signals.
Put very very simplistically, a predominance of odd harmonic components in a sound will tend to make it have a higher and more "attacking" presence than a similar sound with predominantly even harmonic components.
Hence the almost pure sinewave of a clarinette will always sound "sweeter" if played in the classical style rather than the overblown "Acker Bilk" style where the excessive travel of the reed contributes a rasp.
And of course audio distortion is seldom if ever made up of predominantly even harmonics.

Hope this helps & sorry to intrude.
I`ll get my coat.


----------



## purple99

Mr. Terrible said:


> BOO!
> You`re next!


* shakes in boots *

How are the Kevins on SOS? Still shrieking like outraged spinsters?


----------



## Elgarian

Mr. Terrible said:


> Hope this helps


Yes it does, thank you, though it also generates an additional stack of questions that leave me feeling that I need a cup of tea.

Like, for instance: 
(1) what approximate percentage of odd harmonic distortion is needed to produce a perceived 3 dB rise (say) in perceived loudness, and does a fairly reasonable hifi system generate that much? 
(2) How much of this distortion takes place in the ears of the listener, and how much does that vary from one individual to another? 
(3) Would you pass the teapot, please?


----------



## Mr. Terrible

*What noise annoys a noisy oyster*

Unfortunately the whole subject of subjective hearing is vast and labrynth.

Even the factual side is immense and there are of course dozens of not hundreds of conflicting crackpot theories floating around to make it worse.

Even (as unlikely as it may seem) the personal likes and dislikes of an individual as far a their preferred style of music will affetc their subjective perception of loudness.

As a retired bassist (contra and electric) I always seem to prefer a lot more low end component when listening to any music and I am sure I am not alone.

FWIW there is a large amount of debate going on in pop circles at present about the so-called loudness wars, where each producer seems to be trying to get the engineers to wring out the last possible dB of loudness fom a recording.

Now if THAT were happening to the same extent in orchestral music there would genuinely be room for complaint.

Oh just noticed I failed to address a couple of you rquestions.
the distortion is only going to happen IN the listeners ears if the listener has a hearing problem. The distortion will always be either on the original recording or added by the listening system or environment.
Aunt Minnie`s timplate biscuit rattling sympathetically with the tubular bells in the 1812 are just as much a distortion or undesired artefact as intermodulation distortion in a stereo system.

Another interesting aspect of all this is that of course the monitor speaerks used to monitor and mix audio recoridngs are nothing like the average HiFi speakers.
Even the top of top end Hi FI versus top of top end monitors wqilkl sound markedly different, because each is seeking to achieve a different end.
Hi Fi`s are designed to present the recorded material in as pleasing and musical manner possible consistent with faithful reproduction of what is on the recording.
Monitors are designed to protray what has been recorder asaccuratley as possible with no flattery and generally as much precision, particularly in the crucial midrange as possible.
That said, the differences become finer and finer as you s0pend more money in each genre.
PMC`s and Brystons are always going to be pretty acceptable to either camp unless money is no object.


----------



## Mr. Terrible

PS I am a crap typist and a retired bassa player because of arthritis in my hands. Sorry!

PPS: just finished the last cup!
Kettle`s on though....


----------



## Elgarian

Mr. Terrible said:


> the distortion is only going to happen IN the listeners ears if the listener has a hearing problem. The distortion will always be either on the original recording or added by the listening system or environment.


I think I don't - can't - believe that. First, because the ear/brain system is a physical transducer (no less than a microphone or a speaker) - so surely there must be some distortion in that system? (Obviously it would be very hard to measure.) And second, because clearly we do all perceive the same sound differently. Presented with the same recording played on the same system in the same environment, one person will shove up the volume control, another will pull it down, one will find the high frequencies edgy, another will find them sweet - and so on. This is really important, it seems to me. If 'distortion' is going to play a part in the explanation of the dynamic range problem, then we need a lot more information about the part played by the receiving system - ie. the listening individual's ears - than we have.

I think we also need solid quantitative answers to my first question in my previous post, namely: what percentage of odd-harmonic distortion is needed to produce (say) a 3dB increase in perceived loudness (which after all is not so much, actually)? If it's 0.1%, then yes, OK, this may well be the answer. If it's 20%, then maybe it's not very significant at all. I don't know where to even start looking for an answer!

Finally, we clearly need a bigger teapot.


----------



## Mr. Terrible

I`m afraid subjective levels are just that, subjective, so there isn`t really a way to quantify what is going to make A sound louder or quieter than B.
That said, because it IS a subjective difference we are talking about here, you have to remember that the listeners are going to range from cloth eared ted the half deaf barman at the dog & sprocket who likes a bit of karaoke of a friday night to mr. goldenears who can differentiate between A440 and A442, recognises specific concert halls by their signature reverberation, etc etc.
Both ends of the spectrum really do exist & both will be affected differently by different factors.
Since a loss or increase of 3dBA is abrely audible to 99% of the population, there is problem number one.
Without wishing to be racist, it has also been clinically proven that people of different ethnic backgrounds "hear" sound differently.
So. Distortion vs. level or rather perceived level.
If you have ever been involved in any form of recording, you will be aware that whilst two sounds may move the meters an equal amount, they can and often do sound very different level wise depending on the content.
This too is part of the long and winding road to understanding the relationship between actual level and perceived level.

The oly way distortion can occur without outside interference in the human ear is if there is some physical problem within the hearing system.
I think what you are confusing slightly here is noises that cause the human ear to react in a way that simulates distortion,whereas what is actually happening is that the hearing response is automatically tailoring itself to protect itself from what it percieves as harmful vibrations.
This is why soldiers standing close to big guns are given head phones, not ear defenders. 
When the lanyard or other firing mechanism is opeated, the first thing that happens is that the system transmits a sharp sound loud enough to bring the ears natural defence mechanism into play and attenuate the sound, so that by the time the gun actually fires the ear is already fully defended against the sound wave.
Now apply that to listening to loud music and you hopefully begin to see where the effects to your hearing originate.
The rest, I.E. perception that harsh sounds are louder than smooth ones,is pretty much all psycho-acoustics.

There are tons of excellent books on all these subjects and I would be stupid to hold myself up as an expert, as I am not.

If you are truly interested in acoustics and how our hearing and perception functions, you could have enough to keep you going for years.
Just the study of RT60 is a tough not to crack, but understanding room acoustics is a must if you really want to hear a true representation of recorded music.

And also the biggest reason why this whole thread is a little er wasteful of bandwidth.

A bit pointless obsessing over how the recording was made when most people`s listening rooms make a nonsense of it.

Frankly you are doing yourself and your ears a disservice if you confuse hifi manufacturer`s specmanship (tdh intermodulation etc) with actual performance in a real situation.
Only your own ears can truly be the judge of what sounds good to you.
And of course that will only be true for you.
My "listening room " such as it is has a naff old pair of Missions and a cheap technics amp. In my studio I have a good but not great set of monitors with a thirty year old Quad amp, plus a pair of truly horrible computer speakers. 
All three are necessary for me to be able to translate the EQ balance of my original recordings into something that will sound good in as many possible environments.
My main reason for using what i do is that I know what they sound like on a wide variety of material and I know how mixes done on them will translate.
I don`t have the luxury of having one system that flatters the heck out of what I like to listen to in a way that I like to hear it.
But that doesnt stop me enjoying having my ears cossetted by a nice stereo, provided the original material is well presented in a way that I like, so I am no different to you guys - just have a different set of criteria when I`m working.

As a matter of curiousity, does listening room acoustic treatment get discussed much on here?


----------



## kiwipolish

Elgarian said:


> I don't understand this, Andy. If we take the original waveform and distort it by a small percentage, then we get a waveform that isn't quite the same as the original sound. Visually they may look very similar, but there will be these small differences, with additional harmonics present.
> 
> But why would the presence of these extra harmonics make us perceive the sound as 'louder'?


This is what makes the violins sound like trumpets - an exaggerate way of describing the phenomenon.

If you keep attending live concerts, and then come back home to find out that violins sound much louder on your audio system than in real life (especially during the _tutti_) - you've got distortion.

It might be hardly perceptible, but it is always there.

I have recently added a power conditioner to my audio system. It's a device I was unaware of until recently. Audiophiles' opinions are not uniform about its usefulness; some actually say that it reduces the dynamic range.

And since I bought my power conditioner, I understand why: *because it reduces distortion*! So, the loud parts are not as hard on your ears, and the music seems to have less dynamic range; it seems to be closer to the original live performance.

That's why I was saying that sound engineers are only one link in the chain. There may be other links that we are unaware of. The main missing link is the lack of reliable standards.



purple99 said:


> A further link here with working sound (scroll down).


Thanks for your interesting links. I especially agree with this statement:


> The entire process has got out of hand. The industry is offering CDs that are not faithful representations of the composer's work. They are technically constructed electronic sound monsters.


... but I am not sure whether the method suggested is the correct one. However I am one unhappy consumer.



Mr. Terrible said:


> Another interesting aspect of all this is that of course the monitor speaerks used to monitor and mix audio recoridngs are nothing like the average HiFi speakers.


Sure; and the acoustics of the control room are certainly not exemplary, and have absolutely nothing in common with any home setup (high-end or mid-range).



Simpson Microphones said:


> (...)the main problem is the lack of education in the field of sound engineering (not least in the resulting idea of engineering as art).


That's the real problem. We now have all the technical gear to allow sound engineering to be a science. However, sound engineers still want to be artists - and, of course, like with all artists, some are good, and many others are bad.

The input of Simpson Microphones in this thread gives us hope, though.  Have you seen his thread "Worlds most realistic recordings? - Simpson Microphones calls for musician listeners" where he mentions his quest to devise a combination of audio equipment where most listeners can't tell the difference between live musicians and their recording?


----------



## Mr. Terrible

Oh dear. More hi fi smoke and mirrors!
How would any of you guys who bangon about inferior audio conditions in the control room know?
The average mastering engineer spends more on his environment than you chaps spend on your whole listening chain.
For a reason.
The comments about engineers wanting to be artists is laughable if you actually KNEW any real engineers.

I have wandered into your world to find out if you are all as mis-informed as the two clowns who wandered into MY world are.

With those two gents as exceptions I am trying to offer an objective view of the problems facing us all when it comes to interpreting recorded material.
Unfortunately for me, I have extensive knowledge of the lunacies put about by the nuttier end of the HiFi trade - interconnects costing hundreds of pounds for bits of wire that go nowhere near the signal chain, bits of wood to stand your cd player on to affect its tonality?
Mains filtering is only going to affect your signal if you have dirty mains to begin with.
It isnt going to stop your amp distorting if the amp IS distorting.
Equally, you are far more likely to convince yourself that something you just paid £gazillion for really DOES sound better.
Emperor+new clothes.

Hands up anyone on here that has actually invested in some professionally designed and manufactured sound treatment for their listening room?
LENRDs are the baseline here, by the way, not the pinnacle.

Oh, dear me!

I just checked out the link to the thread that" gives you hope that all the evil engineers will be held at bay" and the quote from Simpson Microphones.

£10k for a wooden microphone made in Poland with no testimonials but the designer`s?
Have you guys really taken leave of your senses?

I give up.

I`ll be posting the link to Simpson on my brothers Hi Fi lunacy site and leave you guys to it.
You`re as bad as the hi fi nerds.
There isnt even a frequency response curve on there, guys! 
Doesn`t that make you in the least bit suspicious?
And sound clips to represent perfect pure recordings disseminated as MP3????????
Even I could send you a 24 or 48 bit, 96 or 192k sample of audio.


----------



## Elgarian

Mr. Terrible said:


> I`m afraid subjective levels are just that, subjective, so there isn`t really a way to quantify what is going to make A sound louder or quieter than B.


But there is:

We sit a listener in front of a loudspeaker with the ability to control the signal amplitude and the ability to switch in differing degrees of odd-harmonic distortion. We feed in the undistorted signal (A) at an agreed appropriate loudness. The listener now switches between this and the alternative signals B, C, D etc, each with differing (known) amounts of odd-harmonic distortion, and in each case adjusts the level until the perceived loudness is the same as A. From his volume settings at the end, it's possible to determine the subjective effect on perceived loudness of all the distorted signals, and get a nice graph of perceived dB increase versus percentage distortion. Do that for a lot of listeners and we get a good reliable statistical result which at least provides a base to work from.

Without quantitative results of an experiment of this kind, I don't see how one is to make any headway, because as I said earlier, we don't even seem to have ball park figures relating amounts of distortion to perceived loudness. Without this, the whole discussion rests on mere assertions.

*Footnote*
But I see Mr Terrible, meanwhile, has said:


> You`re as bad as the hi fi nerds.


After completing my response above, I saw that this had been posted. What is it, I wonder, about this topic that makes people so bad tempered? It's very odd.


----------



## Max!

I wouldn't worry if i were you..... Knowing Mr Terrible as I do... I can promise you, he starts off grouchy any way.... Irascible has often been my favorite description of his contribution style on Sound on Sound forums....


He often makes very valid points .... but fails to wrap them up in diplomacy, or indeed, give a monkey how they are interpreted. 

We're not all raving maniacs 

(that said, I have , arguably, a reputation for often being even more "brusque" in my responses.... so very mucha case of the kettle calling the pot carbonised....  )

The basic issue, (back on thread topic for a moment) in reality, is that almost no one has a replay system actually capable of reproducing the dynamic range and acoustic power of an orchestra cleanly.... Nor a space big enough to do so without suffering from natural compression as the room saturates. 



and the majority of listening environments in domestic premises are far from spectrally balanced , nor are reflective elements controlled enough to give an accurate stereo image. at the listening position...

The vast majority, of even committed listeners, are blisfully unaware that what they're listening to is the combined input of their room, their system AND the recording... most realise the system has input... few realise the room is actually often more important.. 






also, to broaden Mr Terrible's comments on hearing... 


The Ear does generate plenty of distortion..... for various reasons.... assuming one categorises spectral response changes , and transient response changes as a distortion... 

a couple of examples... 

given the very low mass of the ear drum membrane.... the slightest bit of earwax on it can have a significant effect on it's operation...


sometimes the brain can compensate... and you become used to it... sometimes it can't....

as the mass increases , the transient response slows , and the high frequency range begins to tail off...
,
heavy earwax deposits in the canal can change the way the ear acts as a wave guide.... 

sinus problems can lead to the blocking of the eustachian tubes... which prevents the ear form pressure equalising... this has other effects... the internal resonances change, as well as the transient response.... 

there's all sorts of other things, like blood pressure, fatigue, allergies, certain drugs, and previous exposure to noise..... that incline the ear to do things that will affect what you perceive.... 

I'm supposed to be working... so i'll toddle off and let you all get back to normal..... 

hope Mr terrible isn't too demanding 

(No I'm not an alter ego..... BTW.... You can look me up at SOS. )


best regards
Max!


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## Mr. Terrible

Elgarian said:


> But there is:
> 
> We sit a listener in front of a loudspeaker with the ability to control the signal amplitude and the ability to switch in differing degrees of odd-harmonic distortion. We feed in the undistorted signal (A) at an agreed appropriate loudness. The listener now switches between this and the alternative signals B, C, D etc, each with differing (known) amounts of odd-harmonic distortion, and in each case adjusts the level until the perceived loudness is the same as A. From his volume settings at the end, it's possible to determine the subjective effect on perceived loudness of all the distorted signals, and get a nice graph of perceived dB increase versus percentage distortion. Do that for a lot of listeners and we get a good reliable statistical result which at least provides a base to work from.
> 
> Without quantitative results of an experiment of this kind, I don't see how one is to make any headway, because as I said earlier, we don't even seem to have ball park figures relating amounts of distortion to perceived loudness. Without this, the whole discussion rests on mere assertions.
> 
> *Footnote*
> But I see Mr Terrible, meanwhile, has said:
> 
> After completing my response above, I saw that this had been posted. What is it, I wonder, about this topic that makes people so bad tempered? It's very odd.


Sorry but I just don`t see the point in attempting to quantify a subjective effect, since by its very nature the results will be different for just about everyone.
I can see what you are gettin at, but WHY?
Since you are never going to come up with an average value for distortion vs amplitude that will suit everyone, why not just leave it up to the listener and his volume control?
There seems to be basic misunderstanding of what listening to music is supposed to achieve here. As far as I am concerned, listening to music is supposed to be a relaxing pleasure, not arelentless search for some sort of unattainable ear nirvana.
Given that the vast majority of music lovers are never going to spend the sort of time effort and money required to have a truly balanced acoustic environment in the first place, any equipment you have is going to be influenced so highly by the acoustic you listen to it in as to make the extra thou you spend on your super hi fi irrelevant.

My apologies if you mis-interpreted my comment about hifi nerds.
Just seeing that web site with the Simpson Mics on it made me realise how much smoke and mirrors there is still out there.

To clarify my horror at the website, there is NO mention of any real technical spec here at all. No spl capacity, no transient response no graphs of frequency esponse.
And this in a product where you are expected to part with nearly £20k for a pair.

I have been very careful not to say that the product is rubbish because I have never seen or heard the mics in question, but bearing in mind the rhetoric posted about these mics giving hope for improvements in recording I find myslef stunned by the naivete displayed here.

P.S. Max didn`t get it quite right.
I just don`t suffer fools gladly, especially when they are arrogant about things they know little of, like the Two Clowns.

FWIW I have stopped railing on the Other Side and intend to do so here.
realised it made me look as childish as the Clowns.

Sorry.

Poo! forgot a bit.

Distortion actually occurring in the transducer/amp/preamp/speaker chain in even halfway decent equipment is pretty much a thing of the past, unless you are seeking thd figures in the four zeroes.
Most distortion in the listening chain is going to happen through mis-matching and faulty gain structures.
Or bad recordings like for example the current metallica album, which is just plain badly recorded.
Given this, the only variable left in the chain is the listener and his individual likes and dislikes.
hard to see how you can program in an algorithm to take that into account.
Wish you guys would open up to the idea that the audio pros DO have the same concerns as you, but because they work with audio all day every day & for the most part are highly educated and experienced in the business of listening objectively, you cn learn a lot from them that will hopefully improve your listening experience.
Again, hands up all of you on here who have any sound treatment in your listening rooms?
It is generally regarded as step 1 for home studio builders.


----------



## Elgarian

Mr. Terrible said:


> Sorry but I just don`t see the point in attempting to quantify a subjective effect, since by its very nature the results will be different for just about everyone.
> I can see what you are gettin at, but WHY?


Perhaps we'd all benefit by reminding ourselves what we're discussing:

1. It's been stated several times earlier in this thread that sounds containing odd-harmonic distortion are perceived as louder than sounds that do not, even though the measured sound pressure levels are the same.

2. This has been proposed as an explanation for why the dynamic range of music recorded on CD is often perceived as 'too large'. It's an interesting suggestion, and it may be correct, but it needs testing. We need to have at least some rough idea of how much perceived increase in loudness is produced by given amounts of distortion. (As I said earlier, if we find we need 20% of odd-harmonic distortion to produce a mere 3dB increase in perceived loudness, say - then the distortion argument could be, at best, only a partial answer. If on the other hand, 0.1% distortion produces a 10dB increase in perceived loudness, then we may have a potentially convincing explanation.)

3. My proposed experiment was just one suggestion about how such a rough estimate could be obtained, that is, how to introduce some useful element of objectivity into a difficult subjective area. I daresay such experiments have been carried out - but if so, I don't know what their outcome was.

Finally, could I ask, please, for less heat, more light, and more respect for the opinions of other posters? Goodness knows there are many things in the world to get justifiably angry and upset about, but if we think that the perception of dynamic range on CDs is one of them, then maybe we need to get a better sense of proportion?


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## Mr. Terrible

*dynamic range on cds*

Ah I had overlooked the original premise in this thread, coming to it as I did from a similar but different thread on SOS.

Dynamic range on a CD has nothing to do with distortion.

It has everything to do with dynamic range.

I had assumed that since you apprently all sought that concert hall experience in your listening room, you would be looking to reproduce the dynamic range of a live performance.

The problem here is not about distortion and evn or odd harmonics, it is more to do with listening to concert hall sized dynamics in your room.
If you are only a metre or two from the sound soure,sure the loud buts are goigng to knock you on your ***.
Sitting a metre or two in front of a full blown concert orchestra live will have the same effect.

Fool that I am, I had assumed that something like that would be obvious to all participants.

Since live can give you everything from zero to however many f`s you want up to about 120-130dBA (and the threshold of pain and hearing damage is well within these figures)
anything that achieves these levels in your listening room is going to make you deaf real quick.

There is such a thing as too much realism.


----------



## purple99

Elgarian said:


> Finally, could I ask, please, for less heat, more light, and more respect for the opinions of other posters? Goodness knows there are many things in the world to get justifiably angry and upset about, but if we think that the perception of dynamic range on CDs is one of them, then maybe we need to get a better sense of proportion?


I've requested the same on the forum where Mr. Terrible originates:

View attachment 291


Sound on Sound

Sadly, some SOS members have got themselves caught up in a climate of cyber-abuse -- very unlike the civilized environs of talkclassical. I'll be amused to see whether Mr. Terrible tries the same tricks (again) here.


----------



## Simpson Microphones

Elgarian said:


> I think I don't - can't - believe that. First, because the ear/brain system is a physical transducer (no less than a microphone or a speaker) - so surely there must be some distortion in that system? (Obviously it would be very hard to measure.)


Whether or not we can measure (or even define) the distortion of the human hearing system, we can consider this as a constant for each person (at least outside of the psychological aspects).

What we _cannot_ do is assume that the distortion of the auditory system is greater than that of the microphone or speaker - in mechanical terms this is not the case.



> If 'distortion' is going to play a part in the explanation of the dynamic range problem, then we need a lot more information about the part played by the receiving system - ie. the listening individual's ears - than we have.


Where playback distortion plays a part is in the perception of loudness.

For example, it is well known that the human perception of loudness is sensitive to RMS (average) levels, rather than peak.

Most forms of distortion increase the RMS level (by way of increased gain without increased peak-to-average ratio) and the perception of loudness goes with it.

This is how a heavily distorted electric guitar amp, at only 100dB SPL, can sound louder than an orchestra with peaks at 120dB SPL.

However, given that the perception of loudness is relative to that of the noise-floor (eg. shouting over road noise in a car is not perceived to be as loud as the same shouting in a quiet room), we must consider the interaction between how we perceive the loudness of our listening and the perception of loudness according to the distortion of our playback system.

In other words, where the environmental noise-floor of the listening space is higher than that of the real concert hall (where the original performance took place), we will intuitively increase the gain of our playback until something like the same ratio appears (until the music is similarly audible above the noise-floor).

At this point we have increased the gain in the system and so have increased the proportion of distortion and so the perception of loudness.

So we end up with the perception of loudness that (perceptually) _exceeds_ the original performance levels, despite the much lower actual peak levels.

Of course, this is an exaggerated & extremely simplified view of the principle.

Also, the perception of loudness is not isolated. The increase in distortion does not only produce an increase in perceived loudness but has serious side-effects (listening fatigue for one).

These side-effects can be seen in the use of compression or mechanical distortion in speakers/microphones.

Andy


----------



## Elgarian

purple99 said:


> I've requested the same on the forum where Mr. Terrible originates


Thanks for the SOS link, Purple, which provides a helpful context for what's going on here.

What a terrible shame that such an interesting topic (and one which clearly concerns a substantial number of people who listen to music on CDs) should be shanghied in this way, and drowned beneath so much unpleasantness.

I'll take myself off to more nutritious pastures, with a bit of Corelli's companionship to restore my equilibrium.


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## Elgarian

I was going to walk away from this discussion, but then found this response, whose courtesy and reasonableness require acknowledgement. Thanks, Andy.



Simpson Microphones said:


> For example, it is well known that the human perception of loudness is sensitive to RMS (average) levels, rather than peak. Most forms of distortion increase the RMS level (by way of increased gain without increased peak-to-average ratio) and the perception of loudness goes with it.


Thanks - I follow this, and it makes sense. It's the clearest explanation I've read so far of why this might be an important factor.



> This is how a heavily distorted electric guitar amp, at only 100dB SPL, can sound louder than an orchestra with peaks at 120dB SPL.


These figures represent the kind of data I was seeking in the experiment I was suggesting, though I suspect that to get your 20dB of perceived increase, the distortion levels are massively higher than those produced by a reasonable hifi system.



> where the environmental noise-floor of the listening space is higher than that of the real concert hall (where the original performance took place), we will intuitively increase the gain of our playback until something like the same ratio appears (until the music is similarly audible above the noise-floor). At this point we have increased the gain in the system and so have increased the proportion of distortion and so the perception of loudness. So we end up with the perception of loudness that (perceptually) _exceeds_ the original performance levels, despite the much lower actual peak levels.


I think I follow all this in principle. My only query (and it's an important one) concerns the actual figures involved, and whether there is enough of a difference in noise floor, and enough of a difference in distortion, to produce the perceived exaggeration of loudness in the recorded playback that some people (about 50% or more according to the poll) are having trouble with.


----------



## Simpson Microphones

Mr. Terrible said:


> Sorry but I just don`t see the point in attempting to quantify a subjective effect, since by its very nature the results will be different for just about everyone.
> I can see what you are gettin at, but WHY?


I have addressed this in my previous post (see above).



> Since you are never going to come up with an average value for distortion vs amplitude that will suit everyone, why not just leave it up to the listener and his volume control?
> There seems to be basic misunderstanding of what listening to music is supposed to achieve here. As far as I am concerned, listening to music is supposed to be a relaxing pleasure, not arelentless search for some sort of unattainable ear nirvana.


If we are discussing this in principle, then we are talking about the principle.

It is this principle which guides our development. If we aim only for 'pleasure & relaxation' (aside from the conflicting ear-fatigue issues of compression related distortion), then we end up with an entirely subjective perspective on an engineering subject, which is not able to help us improve.



> Given that the vast majority of music lovers are never going to spend the sort of time effort and money required to have a truly balanced acoustic environment in the first place, any equipment you have is going to be influenced so highly by the acoustic you listen to it in as to make the extra thou you spend on your super hi fi irrelevant.


A relatively inexpensive set of DT100 headphones (or other isolating types) would offer a good playback environment in terms of dynamic range & noise-floor.

I wonder what proportion of listeners use headphones? Do they complain of dynamic range issues?



> Just seeing that web site with the Simpson Mics on it made me realise how much smoke and mirrors there is still out there.
> 
> To clarify my horror at the website, there is NO mention of any real technical spec here at all. No spl capacity, no transient response no graphs of frequency esponse.
> And this in a product where you are expected to part with nearly £20k for a pair.


I can't blame you for your perception. I do not publish such specs as they are meaningless in the context of the microphone (if you examine the concept you may be able to extrapolate the logic behind this).

I reserve the effort of going into these details for 'serious enquiries', which you are welcome to make, not least as this is a very complicated subject and cannot be adequately stated in simple terms.

I don't _expect_ you to 'part with' any money other than to ensure a serious enquirey - this is the purpose of the money-back scheme.



> Distortion actually occurring in the transducer/amp/preamp/speaker chain in even halfway decent equipment is pretty much a thing of the past, unless you are seeking thd figures in the four zeroes.


This statement represents most of the audio industry.

The value of the statement is totally qualified by the caveat, which is the most dubious part (not least in the testing & qualification itself).



> Most distortion in the listening chain is going to happen through mis-matching and faulty gain structures.


You are correct here, most particularly from a mechanical-acoustic perspective, where the greatest mis-match occurs (at both transducer ends of the signal chain).



> Given this, the only variable left in the chain is the listener and his individual likes and dislikes.


Again, you represent the audio industry well with this logical progression, with all its implications, but the statement rests on faulty logical foundations.



> Again, hands up all of you on here who have any sound treatment in your listening rooms?
> It is generally regarded as step 1 for home studio builders.


To an extent I agree with this (and if you read the whole thread you will see my response was similar).

The very best answer to this is (isolating) headphones - which are readily available to all and have none of the issues (noise-floor, SPL capability) which I would hold as largely responsible for the confusion.

Andy


----------



## Simpson Microphones

Elgarian said:


> I think I follow all this in principle. My only query (and it's an important one) concerns the actual figures involved, and whether there is enough of a difference in noise floor, and enough of a difference in distortion, to produce the perceived exaggeration of loudness in the recorded playback that some people (about 50% or more according to the poll) are having trouble with.


The average (empty) concert hall might have a noise-floor around 30dBA (or less) and the average kitchen or living room might be anywhere between 50-80dBA (depending on activities, electrical equipment - computer/air-con/fridge, traffic, city location, etc).

If you are able to raise your volume control an extra 20-50dB (!) to compensate for the increase in noise-floor you have two options - either the loud parts will actually be 20-50dB louder (if you have a 50kw industrial sound system) or they will contain so much distortion from trying to play so loud that they will be perceived as such (more or less).

Of course, again, this is a simplified response because the noise-floor will not necessarily be equal accross all frequencies, so will not be quite so simple in practice.

This issue becomes more interesting when we include the gain-stage of the recording itself.

Andy


----------



## Guest

*Jeez *are you jokers still going at it chasing the Tiger, eh, mind it doesn't turn and bite, I will restate,_ I am happy with CDs as they are, my system and room works_


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## Mr. Terrible

DT100`s are fine for the purpose for which they were designed.
Durable, moderately accurate listening cans to help artists when tracking.
There is no way I or anybody else with a decent set of ears would ever rely on them for an accurate representation of the actual sound being produced at the other end.
For you to even suggest these cans demonstrates just how little idea you have of the true nature of accuracy in sound reproduction.

Oh and just to get things in perspective, I am a 64 year old retired performer.
I have made a lot of recordings in professional environments like Treasure Isle and Woodland B in the USA (Nashville) and in Wessex and Rockfield in the UK.
I am a keen amateur home recordist and coincidentally don`t use a computer to actually track audio.

My equipment is laughably basic by comparison with that used by the real recording pros on SOS.
But I suspect it is still far more honest in terms of presentation of recordings, especially since I HAVE acoustically treated my room, than the equipment you chaps are using to listen to music and adjudge it to be bastardised in some way by the recording process.
The simple fact is that you will never succeed in reproducing the concert hall experience in a room the size of a cloakroom at Queens Hall.
So a degree of dynamic processing HAS to be applied in order for the music to still be meaningful in a domestic environment.


That a cretin like Bathsaltzar or Syco99 (or whatever your anonymous troll calls himself here) feels like he can accuse people he knows nothing about of doing THINGS he knows nothing about to recordings which he has admitted he cannot decipher well enough to know they have been edited without someone else telling him so, demonstrates to me that there is a vast gulf between the lunatic end of your world and the realities of modern sound recording.

I came here because I felt that you guys were probably being falsely represented by these two idiots and I have to say everything I have seen on here gives the impression of reasoned debate, even if it is woefully mis-informed at times.

Any of you that take the tim eto come over to SOS and actually read more than the one thread will find a vast treasure trove of useful information from some of the top acousticians recordists producers and engineers in the world.

What yoiu WILL fond on occasion is us pokin gfun at the nuttier end of the Hi FI thang, simply because you can`t convince some people that the laws of physics are absolute, but some of their attempts to break them can be hilarious.
Apart of course from the ones that fleece decenty honest people out of their hard earned money.

I am not saying that everything you read on SOS is the 100% truth - opinons are like ********, everyone has one and sometimes they ALL stink.

So come and read with an open mind.
And do us ALL a favour and get your two idiots to either put up or shut up on SOS.
SO far all we have seen is a bunch of high flying rhetoric and feeble attempts at abuse.

I`d also recommend you to re-read my earlier posts about loudness etc & then read A.S.`s repetition of most of it.
Neither he nor I can alter the laws of physics, either!


----------



## Mr. Terrible

Andante said:


> *Jeez *are you jokers still going at it chasing the Tiger, eh, mind it doesn't turn and bite, I will restate,_ I am happy with CDs as they are, my system and room works_


Well done you! 
Glad someone round here is happy just to listen to nice music.

As a side thought, have any of you guys got tinnitus or early onset deafness yet?
Just had my ears checked and I am losing a ton of mid & high in my left ear - have to mix with LR and then RL to get my balances right, which is a pain.
Just as well it is all for my own amusement these days.


----------



## purple99

Mr. Terrible said:


> ...cretin... lunatic... falsely represented...idiots


Which is why I can't take anything you say seriously. You find it impossible to debate on the internet without engaging in cyber-abuse.



Mr. Terrible said:


> Any of you that take the tim eto come over to SOS and actually read more than the one thread will find a vast treasure trove of useful information from some of the top acousticians recordists producers and engineers in the world.


That's true. The trouble is that the SOS forums are so infected by a culture of cyber-abuse it's nigh impossible to have a reasonable debate there. You politely make your point only to be met with a stream of abuse. You point this out, gently poking fun at them, telling them to behave, and even the moderators join in!

Why some people behave like this when they get behind an anonymous internet login is outside the scope of this thread and I don't want to derail the discussion. But it's worth pondering, and you shouldn't be allowed to get away with it here.


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## Mr. Terrible

www.tapeop.com 
Latest issue editorial.
Discussed at some length in the forum.

Just noticed the inane comment above.
My name IS Ivan. Last Name is hyphenated S-C.

Apparently have yourself confused enough to have read your own abusive and anonymous posts and thought they were written by someone else!

No wonder you apparently also have cloth ears.

To the rest of you guys, please drop by and see how we deal with newbs normally in the "newbies" section.
Even when they are claiming to be newbs and patently aren`t they are treated with the consideration they show themselves to be worthy of.
Or not.

(note this has nothing to do with the SOS as such with whom I have no affiliation)


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## purple99

Mr. Terrible said:


> (note this has nothing to do with the SOS as such with whom I have no affiliation)


I suspect the publishers of "The World's Best Music Recording Magazine" might be relieved to hear that.


----------



## Mr. Terrible

And your name is.......?


----------



## purple99

Mr. Terrible said:


> And your name is.......?


Shall we let these nice people get back to their thread? Just keep in mind that if I catch you cyber-abusing anyone here again I won't let you get away with it. Just because you can do it on SOS doesn't mean you can do it here.


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## Elgarian

Simpson Microphones said:


> The average (empty) concert hall might have a noise-floor around 30dBA (or less) and the average kitchen or living room might be anywhere between 50-80dBA (depending on activities, electrical equipment - computer/air-con/fridge, traffic, city location, etc).


Those are useful figures, Andy (thank you for giving them), and at first the idea of a listener sitting at home winding up his volume control 20 dB or more to get the quiet passages above his domestic noise floor seemed a compelling one. But two (quite independent) problems occur to me:

1. To compare the 'live performance' zero reference with the 'domestic hifi' zero reference, we need to consider not an _empty_ concert hall, but a concert hall full of people sitting quietly. What would be the typical noise floor in the middle of a concert hall _full of people sitting quietly_ (which is what we need for a fair comparision)? Might it not be even greater than the noise floor for many domestic environments? If so, then the argument won't hold, except for people living near busy roads, airports, etc).

2. *If* there really is a difference of 20dB or more between the two noise floors, then I don't see why we need the distortion argument at all. There's already an adequate explanation for the perceived exaggerated loudness of the CD's loud bits, in the fact that the listener, in trying to compensate for his higher domestic noise floor using his volume control, will experience loud passages that are (assuming for the moment that his hifi can reproduce them), indeed, too loud. Distortion may make a bad situation worse, but it seems redundant as a primary explanation for the effect we're discussing (_if_ there really is a 20dB difference in noise floor).

The more this discussion continues, the more confirmed I become in my original view that the quest to produce a 'realistic' dynamic range in a domestic environment results in something that is neither desirable, nor - and here's the paradox - realistic.


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## Mr. Terrible

Elgarian said:


> The more this discussion continues, the more confirmed I become in my original view that the quest to produce a 'realistic' dynamic range in a domestic environment results in something that is neither desirable, nor - and here's the paradox - realistic.


Bingo!

You are, of course, 100% right on the money.

The words "unattainable in a normal domestic environment" might be appropriate as well.

The distortion element is a whole different kettle of fish & is still relevant to a discussion of perceived loudness, but again it isn`t going to be something you can quantify sufficiently well to actually apply a generally acceptable "fix"

I`m off out of here now - hope that in among all the flying feathers there has been some small shakeup of mindsets here.

Within the "blow" end of the audio there is a fair amount of concern that within the "suck" end there are a lot of pundits and self-proclaimed experts peddling pseudo-science in order to con the gullible out of their money.

Just one tiny point: if you look at the average pro studio site & query hookup wiring, you aren`t going to find much mega expensive cryo-oxy-napalm-death wire in use.

Same goes for gold plated 13 amp plugs.
I have often wondered if the purchasers of those have all the sockets in their houses gold plated and then do the same to the fuse box and interconnects to the local distribution board and so on...


----------



## Andy Loochazee

purple99 said:


> Shall we let these nice people get back to their thread? Just keep in mind that if I catch you cyber-abusing anyone here again I won't let you get away with it. Just because you can do it on SOS doesn't mean you can do it here.


I can't see why you consider that what Mr Terrible has written is so terrible. I stress that I have never previously encountered Mr Terrible and I've never heard of the forums he has been involved in to which you refer. Nor can I see why you have taken it upon yourself to issue general warnings to other users. There is a standard procedure for reporting what might be considered as offensive posts, but I can't see anything offensive about Mt T's contributions.

In general I can't see any harm in trying to liven things up on this Forum a bit by more feisty discussion of the type Mr T has attempted. For some time this Forum has ticked over on a diet of mainly low grade comment. Many of the better quality posters, of longer-standing, who have something really interesting to offer have long since cleared off (well before your time in fact) either as a result of bans or in response to what they considered was a period of over-regulation.

On the topic of this thread itself, personally I'm bored stiff with it. I find it contains some of the most pompous and long-winded load of utter nonsense I've ever seen in a classical music forum. The nonsense has come from people who reckon there is something systematically wrong with most classical CD recordings, which requires adjustment by diy compressors. Whilst I can accept that there might be the odd recording that are defective, it's plain stupid to suggest that the recording industry has systematically not calibrated sound correctly (in whatever way they wish to describe it) on the majority of CDs.


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## Mr. Terrible

Andy Loochazee said:


> On the topic of this thread itself, personally I'm bored stiff with it. I find it contains some of the most pompous and long-winded load of utter nonsense I've ever seen in a classical music forum. The nonsense has come from people who reckon there is something systematically wrong with most classical CD recordings


Me too - that`s why I am planning on clearing off unless anyone has anything further to contribute that could be construed as meaningful.

Shame for those who have posted in the thread actually seeking to understand what goes on with recorded music psycho-acoustically.

Oh and as a PS I just re-read the rules and it appears that both I and Flake99 have broken several of the rules of this forum, so I suggest that we both be banned forthwith.

Moderatorrrrssss.....


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## purple99

Andy Loochazee said:


> I can't see why you consider that what Mr Terrible has written is so terrible.


I agree, it's not terrible. It's mild cyber-abuse:



Mr. Terrible said:


> ...cretin... lunatic... falsely represented...idiots


He's engaging in a standard internet forum technique -- online abuse. Often such abusers act as part of a gang, each taking turns to post abuse. That's the sort of forum Mr Terrible comes from.



Andy Loochazee said:


> Nor can I see why you have taken it upon yourself to issue general warnings to other users.


Because I don't think cyber-abusers should be allowed to get away with it. I find them easy to deal with -- like all abusers they're cowards at heart so if you stand up to them they tend to slink away with their tails between their legs -- but their effect on an internet community can be pernicious.



Andy Loochazee said:


> There is a standard procedure for reporting what might be considered as offensive posts


Which I've used -- if you mean the report-post mechanism -- but it's a good idea imo to confront online abusers directly. Otherwise their abuse just sits there while you wait for daddy-mod to arrive. I'm not the only one who objected:



Elgarian said:


> Finally, could I ask, please, for less heat, more light, and more respect for the opinions of other posters? Goodness knows there are many things in the world to get justifiably angry and upset about, but if we think that the perception of dynamic range on CDs is one of them, then maybe we need to get a better sense of proportion?





Andy Loochazee said:


> but I can't see anything offensive about Mt T's contributions.


Well, that's where we differ. I can deal with the likes of Mr Terrible with one hand tied behind my back. You, I suspect, can deal with cyber-abusers too. But not everyone can. They take one look at comments like:



Mr. Terrible said:


> ...cretin... lunatic... falsely represented...idiots


and think 'Whoa. I'm not engaging in an online community where that passes for rational discussion.' So good people are lost and the abuser wins.



Andy Loochazee said:


> In general I can't see any harm in trying to liven things up on this Forum a bit by more feisty discussion of the type Mr T has attempted.


Except for his abuse -- quoted above -- I agree. When he talks about DT100s he's fine.



Andy Loochazee said:


> For some time this Forum has ticked over on a diet of mainly low grade comment. Many of the better quality posters, of longer-standing, who have something really interesting to offer have long since cleared off (well before your time in fact) either as a result of bans or in response to what they considered was a period of over-regulation.


That's a shame and I share your wish to read interesting and entertaining material here. But that can be achieved without providing a haven for cyber-abusers.

I suggest this discussion continues in feedback...


----------



## Elgarian

Andy Loochazee said:


> I find it contains some of the most pompous and long-winded load of utter nonsense I've ever seen in a classical music forum.





> it's plain stupid to suggest that the recording industry has systematically not calibrated sound correctly (in whatever way they wish to describe it) on the majority of CDs.


May I please ask, once more, for contributors to focus on discussing the topic, and not engage in making offensive remarks about others?

One of the first requirements of intelligent discussion is the understanding that someone else's disagreement with our own opinion doesn't, in itself, imply that they're stupid; on the contrary, discovering _why_ they hold such a differing opinion frequently leads to the greater understanding of both parties. But calling their contributions 'pompous' or 'stupid' leads nowhere at all.


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## Mr. Terrible

purple99 said:


> I suggest this discussion continues in feedback...


So where are you?

Still awaiting the arrival of the mods to ban us both.

Unfortunately since there really doesn`t seem to be any further positive activity in the original thread I can`t see the point in hanging around.

Good bye and thanks for all the fish.


----------



## purple99

Mr. Terrible said:


> So where are you?
> 
> Still awaiting the arrival of the mods to ban us both.
> 
> Unfortunately since there really doesn`t seem to be any further positive activity in the original thread I can`t see the point in hanging around.
> 
> Good bye and thanks for all the fish.


It's not fair to use this thread -- "Do you think that most classical CDs have too much dynamic range?" -- to discuss your penchant for cyber-abuse. If you and/or Andy want to debate why more cyber-abuse would be good for talkclassical, there's a perfectly good feedback forum for that purpose. I'm happy with the current arrangements. Oh, and don't send me any more abusive PMs, there's a good chap. I know abusers, when caught doing it in public, like to continue their abuse in secret -- it's the standard modus operandi of abusers the world over - but I've got you bang to rights and you're just making things worse.


----------



## Andy Loochazee

purple99 said:


> ... If you and/or Andy want to debate why more cyber-abuse would be good for talkclassical, there's a perfectly good feedback forum for that purpose. I'm happy with the current arrangements.


I'm not advocating cyber-abuse so don't try to be clever. You generally have far too much to say about other people's behaviour. As I said before, if you have any concerns, use the recommended channels for complaint. I'm not here to criticise anyone but I have noted that your views about Mr T seem to be an overflow from a dispute you've had before. As far as his comments here are concerned on the substance of this thread, they seem reasonable to me. As I see it, like me he is commenting on the very unusual ideas and arguments put forward by some folk here that most classical CDs are seriously defective, and is not personalising it by making any direct insults against anyone in particular. Certainly I'm not making any personal attacks. And if the Mods see things differently I couldn't care less, as I'll be off at the mildest suggestion.


----------



## Mr. Terrible

purple99 said:


> It's not fair to use this thread -- "Do you think that most classical CDs have too much dynamic range?" -- to discuss your penchant for cyber-abuse. If you and/or Andy want to debate why more cyber-abuse would be good for talkclassical, there's a perfectly good feedback forum for that purpose. I'm happy with the current arrangements. Oh, and don't send me any more abusive PMs, there's a good chap. I know abusers, when caught doing it in public, like to continue their abuse in secret -- it's the standard modus operandi of abusers the world over - but I've got you bang to rights and you're just making things worse.


So much for your suggestion that we take this to an area designated by you.
I had moved to the more private medium of PM`s foolishly assuming that you would prefer not to be ridiculed in this more public forum.

You are still a pompous idiot, but I dont see the point in reiterating my opinion of you to no good purpose.
Under what category would you put your own "cyber-abuse" fired like a scattergun at all and sundry on the "other" forum,?

Which was of course what led me here in the first place.


----------



## Frederik Magle

Alright, this has gone far enough. Unless this thread returns to its original subject, and remain there, it will be closed.

I will remind all posters about the posting guidelines, not least:



> Be polite to your fellow members. If you disagree with them, please state your opinion in a »civil« and respectful manner.
> 
> Do not post comments about other members person or »posting style« on the forum (unless said comments are unmistakably positive). Argue opinions all you like but do not get personal and never resort to »ad homs«."


Regards,
Frederik Magle


----------



## Mr. Terrible

Agree 100% both purple99 & I have copntravened the ruiles on here on innumerable occasions in this very thread.
Never mind closing the thread, I think we should both be banned forthwith.
I certainly would if it were my forum.

Mind you, over on SOS where purp (I can call you purp, can`t I?) has been infinitely more abusive to far greater a number of forum members he has been allowed to have his say.
Unfortunately he doesnt seem to want to allow others the same courtesy in return.

One thing: before you do ban us, I am about to start a thread which I hope anbd expect will be of considerable interest to your more serious members.

I apologise in advance if it stirs some feathers on here, but an earlier poster was right, quite a few of you do seem to be making some rather large, complacent assumtions about music and sound in general.
Are you open to alternative ideas. guys (and guy-esses)?

FWIW I am usually pretty direct but you will generally find that my posts are based on fact rather than supposition or myth.


----------



## Frederik Magle

Neither Mr. Terrible nor purple99 will be banned - for now, but there must be no more personal attacks and/or discussion about these in this thread (or any other!). If you wish to reply to _this_ post please do so by Private Message. And that includes you, Mr. Terrible. Don't wish too hard for a ban 

With that said this thread will return to the original subject. Remember, any replies on the subject of personal attacks/bad behavior should be sent by PM directly to me, or another moderator, and we will sort it out.


----------



## Mr. Terrible

Hope the irony was not lost on you. 
I had already contacted the member in question by PM and was told by him that he refused to discuss our differences in private.

Original subject seems to have been thoroughly debated & appears to have left both sides, predictably, polarised.

As I see it the fundamental problem is more about how people choose to listen and what their expectations are rather than the processing of the medium of delivery.

And if we assume that this is a democracy in which we live, there should be place for both philosophies, not one or the other at the expense of the other.
Actually - not sure (was crap at geog) but is Czech etc a democracy now? I know POland is, nominally.


----------



## Elgarian

Mr. Terrible said:


> Original subject seems to have been thoroughly debated & appears to have left both sides, predictably, polarised.


This is inaccurate. Anyone who has the patience to look through the last two or three pages will find at least one aspect of the original discussion still quietly continuing (as far as it can, amid the wreckage), between myself and Simpson Microphones. It would be easy to lose track of that, but I hope Andy continues to contribute.


----------



## Simpson Microphones

Elgarian said:


> Those are useful figures, Andy (thank you for giving them), and at first the idea of a listener sitting at home winding up his volume control 20 dB or more to get the quiet passages above his domestic noise floor seemed a compelling one. But two (quite independent) problems occur to me:
> 
> 1. To compare the 'live performance' zero reference with the 'domestic hifi' zero reference, we need to consider not an _empty_ concert hall, but a concert hall full of people sitting quietly. What would be the typical noise floor in the middle of a concert hall _full of people sitting quietly_ (which is what we need for a fair comparision)? Might it not be even greater than the noise floor for many domestic environments? If so, then the argument won't hold, except for people living near busy roads, airports, etc).


Given that almost all classical recordings are made in an empty/quiet (usually very quiet) concert hall, the perception of the conductor & musicians will moderate their performance according to that noise-floor.

In the case of live recordings, you may have a point that the noise-floor will have influenced the performers to moderate their dynamics to fit the dynamic range available.

I'm not sure if the noise-floor of the average live concert is actually higher than that of the average domestic environment - I would guess that the average full concert hall would likely still be quieter than the average city house, but I will look up some measurements and report back.



> 2. *If* there really is a difference of 20dB or more between the two noise floors, then I don't see why we need the distortion argument at all. There's already an adequate explanation for the perceived exaggerated loudness of the CD's loud bits, in the fact that the listener, in trying to compensate for his higher domestic noise floor using his volume control, will experience loud passages that are (assuming for the moment that his hifi can reproduce them), indeed, too loud. Distortion may make a bad situation worse, but it seems redundant as a primary explanation for the effect we're discussing (_if_ there really is a 20dB difference in noise floor).


Essentially you're right.

The distortion 'argument' is there to explain how it is possible to perceive loudness in excess of the natural loudness of a concert hall performance, despite the fact that the home hifi can nowhere near reach the actual peaks let alone exceed them.

In other words, the distortion allows the increase in the perception of loudness to remain more or less linear with increase of system gain beyond the 'clean' capacity of the system (and above the natural level of the actual event).

Which capacity is further increased with gain in the recording itself via compression.



> The more this discussion continues, the more confirmed I become in my original view that the quest to produce a 'realistic' dynamic range in a domestic environment results in something that is neither desirable, nor - and here's the paradox - realistic.


There certainly seems to be a contradiction between the motivation & the result.

However, the real 'paradox' (perhaps irony would be a better term) is that compression, as a form of distortion, does not alter the overall perception of loudness. It only effectively increases gain to allow the user home system enough gain to overcome environmental noise-floor.

_So, compression cannot be the answer to this particular question._

In other words, if a symphonic recording is extremely dynamic, whether this (peak) dynamic range is reproduced perceptually by compression or playback distortion does not matter, the resulting perception of loudness will be the same (as it would have been if the recording had been cleanly reproduced at the excessive levels).

Only the form & artifacts of the different distortion types will differ (though all of them produce more or less listening fatigue).

-/-

Of the classical musicians I know personally, who listen to classical recordings regularly, most of them use headphones as they intuitively or even consciously understand the limitations of their hifi & environment.

For these listeners, compression simply reduces sound quality unnecessarily.

_To say nothing of the potential positive feedback system of a subjective approach to studio monitor design combined with a subjective approach to engineering recordings on the same monitors._

Andy


----------



## Mr. Terrible

Hm. Had to have a little think about this.
The noise floor question is of course valid but doesn`t entirely do away with the need to take into account the effect that the content of a recording or for that matter a live piece of music can have on the percieved loudness involved.

Harking back to my clarinette analogy, the effect there would be further exacerbated for people who don`t actually like Acker Bilk but do like classical clarinette.
There is a peculiar phenomenon that I have always thought of as the parent syndrome, where a teenager listening to "his/her" music is always too loud at any volume for mum and dad, yet Gerry and the Pacemakers at Mach9 is fine for them.
Okay I am overstating the case and making it absurd to stress the point here.
I have a vinyl recording of the tocata & fugue in D minor that is on clapped out vinyl & was recorded by someone nobody ever heard of in a church somewhere in Holland, but for me it is the best T&F I have ever heard even thought I could not tell you why.
Because of this, I invariably shrink away from other recordings of the piece because to me they dont sound as "nice" as"my" version.
To the point where I feel compelled to lower the volume.
Absolutely no science here to back all this up but I guarantee if everyone is honest, we all have a degree of this in our listening habits.
It has nothing to do with harmonics, noise floor or anything other than personal preference. 
Subjective.

The harmonic thing comes back into play when you are listening to two sounds of equal amplitude and one is distorted and the other is not. 
Distorted will always sound louder because it offends the ear earlier.
Fortunately most of you will not have the opportunity to hear nasty distorted noises on your systems unless you tune to radio 1, but then you won`t notice the difference because it pretty much all sounds like that.
Apologies for old fogy prejudice but I hope you see what I mean.

P.S. Noise floor in a suburban front room is going to be miles under that of a full concert room even if nobody is coughing or rustling their toffeee papers.

A point worth remembering is that the smallest change in level the average listener is capable of discerning is about 3dBA.
To get twice as loud as one watt dbm/v you need to increase amplification to 100watts, all other factors being equal.
The average symphony orchestra at FFF can muster about 135db on peaks.
Threshold of pain for an average human is 120db.
The average home hifi might be capable of a bandwidth that would accomodate zero to 135, but cd`s sure aren`t.
I use 24 & 48 bit files on occasion, because this is what your cd generally gets dithered down from, off the original recording.
Even there you would be lucky to see anything approaching 120db of dynamic range.
So you see the medium of delivery for you guys is as much at fault as anything done further down the chain. Basically, it is physically impossible to represent the full range of an orchestra within the confines of a CD.
Digital audio deals in absolutes unlike analogue
There are only a limited number of "steps " in amplitude between Odb and 135db when the recording concerned is digital in origin.
So it looks like it is back to tape.
Oh hang on - 110db is about it for even 2" 30ips tape!

*sigh*

Hope this lends some perspective to the sort of levels we are talking about here.

Oh and if anyone is curious to hear what 24/96 audio sounds like I can send you a file but you will need some form of computer based digital audio workstation software to hear it.

Reaper is free, easy to use and is a very good little package.

Find it here:http://www.reaper.fm/download.php

PM me for the file if interested.
Oh unfortunately it is pop music from 1978, the original having been recorded at 15 ips on a 24 track 3M machine in a pro studio.
What you`ll get is the raw unprocessed recording off the mother tape.


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## Elgarian

Simpson Microphones said:


> The distortion 'argument' is there to explain how it is possible to perceive loudness in excess of the natural loudness of a concert hall performance, despite the fact that the home hifi can nowhere near reach the actual peaks let alone exceed them.


OK, yes, thanks, I get that. I make progress! My only reservation - and it is admittedly a subjective one - is that on those recordings that seem to have a dynamic range that's too high, _apparent_ excessive loudness occurs before (I would have thought) the system was in danger of clipping - so wouldn't the distortion levels still be pretty low?



> However, the real 'paradox' (perhaps irony would be a better term) is that compression, as a form of distortion, does not alter the overall perception of loudness. It only effectively increases gain to allow the user home system enough gain to overcome environmental noise-floor.
> 
> _So, compression cannot be the answer to this particular question._


Now this is where I struggle to follow.

I've just been experimenting (briefly) with the compressor in Audacity, and my immediate impression is that it's possible to produce a _huge_ difference in the perceived loudness of climaxes by tweaking the compressor parameters. Indeed, it's possible to reduce the dynamic range so much that the music becomes positively boring! I think I must be completely misunderstanding what you're saying here.

However, I think I am starting to understand some important aspects of all this. And the most important is that the placement and adjustment of microphones is crucial. I can see, at least in principle, why there's a school of thought going back decades in support of the single crossed pair of microphones (or equivalent), placed at an appropriate point in relation to the orchestra - this would seem to offer the closest we can get (assuming all the other 5 million variables are reasonably controlled) to a recorded signal whose dynamic range will seem 'natural'. The moment multiple mikes are introduced, the more difficult it will be to position them and adjust their levels in order to produce a 'natural'-sounding dynamic range - and how easy it must be to get this wrong. At this point I think I'm getting closer to understanding the real nature of the problem that kiwipolish, as the OP, was trying to examine.

Or perhaps someone will say that I'm getting further away!


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## Mr. Terrible

Quote:
However, the real 'paradox' (perhaps irony would be a better term) is that compression, as a form of distortion, does not alter the overall perception of loudness. It only effectively increases gain to allow the user home system enough gain to overcome environmental noise-floor.

So, compression cannot be the answer to this particular question.


Hm. Not a very accurate explanation of what compression is or does, surely?
Compression is a means of evening out the peaks in a performace and elevating the troughs.
That includes the noise floor on "the quiet bits"
If you were talking about limiting, yes.
But there again the perceived gain increase only comes into play if, after you have compressed or limited, you are over enthusiastic with the gain make up control at the end of the chain.
Where the impression of extra loudness comes in with compression is because you are in effect bringing all the quiet buts up closer to the level of the loud bits, which you are in turn making quieter.
So indeed the average level of all sounds have gone up, even if the output meter at the end of the chain says the overall level is the same.
This is why there are mastering engineers.
A meter only tells a tiny part of the story.


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## planetnine

-is this thread still rolling on? there does seem to be a lot of confusion.

going back to the original subject of perceived too much dynamic range (those first few pages) and comparing this sentiment with the later complaints of engineering meddling does show an interesting paradox that has been raised and seemingly ignored several pages ago. The excess of dynamic range is a result of a lack of audio engineering interference rather than because of it. beyond a possible few exceptions classical music will not be expanded, but rather will be compressed (reducing its dynamic range). An overuse of compression will ruin recordings for many people, and since the CD recording medium allows a greater dynamic range that previous media such as cassette tape of vinyl, more of it is preserved than in previous years (I accept this is a generalisation).

If some members perceptions of the dynamic range of a live concert seem to be remembered as less than that of recordings of the same pieces, please bear in mind that the high sound levels of a concert will compress your ears by quite a factor during the loudest passages; this is something that the recording microphones and any digital recording process will not be affected by unless deliberately introduced, and your ears will not duplicate this compression during the recording's playback unless it is played at similar sound levels (something that most hi-fi systems will not be up to).

Add to this Mr Andy Simpson's comments about harmonic distortion (apologies if it wasn't Andy who originally brought this up) giving a perceived loudness increase to certain already loud passages (and there will be an increase on most home systems if hit hard) I'm not surprised many classical music listeners feel battered by the range of some recordings.

It would be interesting to see any consumer-intended compression devices being marketed to classical listeners; it would be more interesting to see how this would sit with the more "purist" end of the hi-fi listening community.

Incidentally, high dynamic range in domestic listening environments is a problem to another area of audio-visual. many DVDs of modern films have a very large audio dynamic range, especially the blockbusters with lots of special effects and gunshots and explosions. People find that some parts are unacceptably loud when the volume is set so they can hear the film dialogue. Turn it down to acceptable levels and the dialogue gets lost (familiar?) DVD player manufacturers have tried to counter this with a facility called DRC -"dynamic range compression" which will control the loud bits allowing the dialogue to be increased again.

This is in effect, just like Mr Kiwipolish's Drawmer compressor. I wonder if anyone has plugged their DVD player into their hi-fi and switched the DRC on with these classical recordings? -I think all DVD players will play standard audio CDs.

Just to finish up, here's an interesting fact: did you know that Classic FM change the amount of compression on their FM broadcasts according to the time of day? Their output is more compressed during peak drivetime hours to make listening to classical music more compatible with the car and road noise environment...

Nathan.


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## Mark Harwood

Nice one, Nathan. Alongside the technical stuff in this thread, which is interesting and revealing enough, that made a lot of sense.


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## Mr. Terrible

To be honest, I shudder at the thought of a compressor being stapped across a hi fi system.
Even a fairly decent one like a Drawmer is a deadly weapon in the hands of anyone who doesn`t know what they are doing with it.

Mind you that never stopped people using graphic equalisers and additional reverb units on their stereo in the past.

I feel like one of the Hi Fi Nazis myself, because thoughts of how you could police the use of compression after the fact were running through my head!
Perhaps a three page quiz on the use of various parts of a compressor?
(grin)
As a matter of interest, those of you using compressors, what brand are you using and what sort of settings work best for you?
I am particularly interested in what sort of attack and release times are being used and if the settings stay the same regardless of material being auditioned.


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## hugerr

*A little clarity (hopefully)*

There seems to be several confused and conflicting arguments and concepts floating around here, and I wondered if I might be able to help add a little clarification from a technical standpoint.

I think the original question was whether CD's had too much dynamic range. Certainly the CD format can reproduce a considerably greater dynamic range than any (non-digital) consumer format such as FM radio broadcasts, vinyl discs, cassette tapes or VHS tapes.

In general, I think custom and practice over the last 15 years or so has been to capture and reproduce a slightly greater dynamic range in classical recordings than was previously the case, simply because the CD medium allows it, and there is a perception that serious classical listeners tend to have more capable listening equipment and would appreciate recordings that are more natural in their dynamic range.

The recorded dynamnic range is very unlikely to be greater than that of the source performance (although technically, it is possible to achieve should it be required), but can often be perceived as excessive because of the listening conditions and replay equipment.

But it is certainly a very valid point to make that the vast majority of domestic listening conditions aren't compatible with the natural dynamic range of an orchestral recording. The ambient background noise in a quiet domestic living room late at night might be similar to that of a good concert hall (even with an attentive audience), but domestic hifi equipment can rarely reproduce the peak sound levels of an orchestra at dull blast. And when considering listening to classical music in a working kitchen or in the car, the situation is considerably worse, with a vastly raised noise flor, and often far less capable reproduction equipment.

Moreover, the human ear (by which I mean the mechanical aspects of the ear itself and the psychological process of interpreting nerve impulses into perceived sound) is a very complex and grossly non-linear system, and many things will have an affect on perceived loudness.

Sound reproduction in a (small) domestic room results in strong early reflections (that would not have been present in a concert hall), and these 'clutter' the sound in a way which increases density and is perceived as a greater volume or loudness. An inherent side effect of listening in small, (acoustically) untreated rooms.

Simpson has already discussed at some length the fact that harmonic distortion is perceived as increased loudness. Most sound reproduction systems will produce increasing amounts of distortion as the sound level approaches the limits of the system. The better the system, the higher these limits will be, and in well designed hi-end systems and professional sounnd monitoring equipment those limits are usually sufficiently high that normal use won't incur audible distortion at all.

However, small replay systems have considerably lower limits and are often easily reached. In these cases, a listening volume that comfortably reproduces the gentler parts of a performance could easily result in the system being pushed and the limits being reached for the louder parts, with the result that harmonic distortion increases greatly, along with loudness -- the overall sound then being perceived as excessively and unnaturally loud. The problem here is the inadequacy of the reproduction equipment, not the source recording.

Someone I read earlier was discussing the use of compressors to control dynamic range. Broadcasters use various forms of compressors routinely to achieve exactly that to varying degrees and for varying reasons. But again, there are complexities to be taken into account. Compessors are rarely used on classical music recordings -- most dynamic control is usually done by hand because it is more subtle and has less side effects. And on the occasions where compressors are used, they are generally used in a different configuration (parallel compression) that again is far more subtle and has far fewer side effects.

The amount of (dynamic range) compression is defined, technically, by the compression ratio. A ratio of 2:1 means that once the input signal exceeds a set threshold level by 2dB, the output will only rise by 1dB. If the input exceeded the threshold by 8dB, the output would only rise by 4dB, and so on. Signals below the threshold are not affected at all, and their dynamics remain uncompressed.

The influence of a fixed threshold is often quite unnatural, especially when not adjusted sympathetically against the material. Quiet and moderate signals have natural dynamics, while louder signals are 'squashed' -- not the kind of things our ears expect to hear at a concert!

Reducing the dynamic range in this way increaes perceived loudness because the peak sound level is reduced closer to the average sound level. With a little gain correction to restore peak levels to their former position, a clearer picture emerges in which the average sound levels are raised closer to peak levels -- and hence greater percieved loudness.

But again, it's not even that simple. For a given ratio, threshold and gain setting, a huge variation in perceived loudness can be obtained by adjusting the release (and to a lesser degree the attack) time constant(s) of the compressor -- how quickly the compressor reacts to sounds that exceed the threshold, and how quickly it allows the altered level to be restored to normal once the signal has fallen below the threshold again.

The ear, like most body sense, reacts most strongly to change. A rapidly changing sound level (influenced by fast attack and release settings) will be perceived as considerably louder than a more slowly changing situation -- even though the absolute sound levels haven't changed at all! The previous poster experimenting with the compressor in Audacity will be able to confirm this for himself very easily -- it is quite surprising how profound this effect can be and it can be revealed most easily using some well recorded speech (for example from Radio 4).

So... apologies for the long post. What I'm trying to highlight is that perceived loudness is a complicated issue, affected by many different and often unrelated parameters.

The issues of the way classical recordings are engineered, and the kinds of microphones techniques that are used is best left to a separate post, perhaps. And if there is interest I will return to post more later.

Hugh Robjohns
Technical Editor, Sound On Sound.


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## hugerr

planetnine said:


> DVD player manufacturers have tried to counter this with a facility called DRC -"dynamic range compression" which will control the loud bits allowing the dialogue to be increased again.


Not quite.... It's not the DVD player manufacturers that have tried to address this issue, but Dolby (and to a lesser extent DTS) through a range of sophisticated facilities built into the sound carrier used in the cinema and on the DVD: Dolby Digital

Films are created deliberately with a wide dynamic range for maximum 'impact' in the cinema. Cinema audio systems are carefully specified and aligned, as are the film dubbing theatres, so that the films creators can be confident that the experience they try to create is the same as the one the audiences enjoy.

But clearly, domestic reproduction can not hope to match (in most cases) the same dynamic range, and this has been addressed by some clever aspects of the sound carrier used in most films: Dolby Digital (and Dolby Digital Plus).

Metadata instructions are encoded along with the (full dynamic range) audio which can be applied by the home listener through the DVD player or 'home theatre system' to reduce the dynamic range. This is normally controlled by a physical switch, or a software menu option to set 'Midnight Mode' or 'DRC' or something along those lines.

With this mode activated (and it's switched on by default in many systems), the louder parts of the material are reduced in level and the quieter parts increased in level -- the exact nature and amount being controlled by the metadata instructions. These are established by the dubbng theatre engineers to best optimise the balance for domestic listening. The average dialogue level is taken as the reference point, since dialogue is usually the most critical element of any film sound mix, as you have pointed out.



> This is in effect, just like Mr Kiwipolish's Drawmer compressor.


Similar, but more sophisticated in that the low level material can be rasied as well as reducing high level material. Mr Kiwipolish's solution only addresses high level material



> I wonder if anyone has plugged their DVD player into their hi-fi and switched the DRC on with these classical recordings? -I think all DVD players will play standard audio CDs.


The Dolby Dynamic Range Control (DRC) functions require suitable metadata instructions to be present. This is not the case for conventional CDs, and so the system will not be able to function. If a DVD player has it's own bespoke dynamic range reduction system, ot will be nothing more than a crude and non-adjustable version of Mr Kiwipolish's compressor, and the results are likely to be very disappointing!



> did you know that Classic FM change the amount of compression on their FM broadcasts according to the time of day? Their output is more compressed during peak drivetime hours to make listening to classical music more compatible with the car and road noise environment...


BBC Radio 3 is the same -- although generally it is less compressed overall than Classic FM.

Hugh Robjohns
Technical Editor, Sound On Sound


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## planetnine

hugerr said:


> ...often quite unnatural, especially when not adjusted sympathetically against the material. Quiet and moderate signals have natural dynamics, while louder signals are 'squashed' -- not the kind of things our ears expect to hear at a concert!


another generalisation here, but that is probably what they _do_ hear Mr Robjohns. Even with young ears, I remember the impact of this from my very first practice in an orchestra. It really struck me how loud it was and I wondered what it was doing to my ears, I could feel them recoiling aginst the brass and woodwind.

Nathan.


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## planetnine

hugerr said:


> Not quite.... It's not the DVD player manufacturers that have tried to address this issue, but Dolby (and to a lesser extent DTS) through a range of sophisticated facilities built into the sound carrier used in the cinema and on the DVD: Dolby Digital...
> 
> ...With this mode activated (and it's switched on by default in many systems), the louder parts of the material are reduced in level and the quieter parts increased in level -- the exact nature and amount being controlled by the metadata instructions. These are established by the dubbng theatre engineers to best optimise the balance for domestic listening. The average dialogue level is taken as the reference point, since dialogue is usually the most critical element of any film sound mix, as you have pointed out...
> 
> ...The Dolby Dynamic Range Control (DRC) functions require suitable metadata instructions to be present. This is not the case for conventional CDs, and so the system will not be able to function. If a DVD player has it's own bespoke dynamic range reduction system, ot will be nothing more than a crude and non-adjustable version of Mr Kiwipolish's compressor, and the results are likely to be very disappointing!...
> 
> Hugh Robjohns
> Technical Editor, Sound On Sound


Ah, that is a pity, I didn't realise it was that involved. It is clever that an experienced set of ears will control the dynamics for a home listening environment if you choose to switch DRC on, I wonder if that can be applied to classical audio recordings released on DVD?

I'm thinking of being able to listen to a piece "as is", uncompressed, in a quiet room when you solely want to listen to the music, and with DRC enabled when just generally listening in an environment where the quieter parts will get lost and the louder parts be distracting.

Just an idea...

Nathan.


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## Simpson Microphones

Elgarian said:


> OK, yes, thanks, I get that. I make progress! My only reservation - and it is admittedly a subjective one - is that on those recordings that seem to have a dynamic range that's too high, _apparent_ excessive loudness occurs before (I would have thought) the system was in danger of clipping - so wouldn't the distortion levels still be pretty low?


What I am saying is that in those recordings which appear to have excessive dynamic range, they _do_.

Whether this perception is facilitated by:

1) a clean recording & very high performance playback (system gain)
2) a high degree of compression distortion (system gain)
3) a high degree of playback distortion (system gain)

does not matter - the perception of loudness will be more or less the same.



> Now this is where I struggle to follow.
> 
> I've just been experimenting (briefly) with the compressor in Audacity, and my immediate impression is that it's possible to produce a _huge_ difference in the perceived loudness of climaxes by tweaking the compressor parameters. Indeed, it's possible to reduce the dynamic range so much that the music becomes positively boring! I think I must be completely misunderstanding what you're saying here.
> 
> However, I think I am starting to understand some important aspects of all this. And the most important is that the placement and adjustment of microphones is crucial. I can see, at least in principle, why there's a school of thought going back decades in support of the single crossed pair of microphones (or equivalent), placed at an appropriate point in relation to the orchestra - this would seem to offer the closest we can get (assuming all the other 5 million variables are reasonably controlled) to a recorded signal whose dynamic range will seem 'natural'. The moment multiple mikes are introduced, the more difficult it will be to position them and adjust their levels in order to produce a 'natural'-sounding dynamic range - and how easy it must be to get this wrong. At this point I think I'm getting closer to understanding the real nature of the problem that kiwipolish, as the OP, was trying to examine.
> 
> Or perhaps someone will say that I'm getting further away!


By putting yourself in the shoes of the engineer you make the same mistakes (as you can see from the engineer responses posted here).

Try to forget the mechanism of compression itself - think only of the GAIN.

Open audacity and take a normal dynamic recording.

Copy the recording and apply +10dB of gain (volume).

This will probably clip/distort (which is what we want to illustrate - you will see the peaks visually cut-off 'square').

Now reduce the volume by 10dB, so that the net gain is back at 0dB.

If we compare the two files, we will see that the perception of _loudness_ remains the same - though there will be a perception of distortion to differentiate the two versions.

If we repeat the same test, this time with gain of 20dB (bigger clipping/distortion), we will again see that the perception of loudness is still little different from the original clean version.

We can think of 150 different ways of distributing the distortion for the same system gain (compression, tubes, tape, limiting, playback distortion, etc), but only the system gain will alter the perception of loudness in any significant way.

Andy


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## hugerr

planetnine said:


> It really struck me how loud it was and I wondered what it was doing to my ears, I could feel them recoiling aginst the brass and woodwind.


Yes, the conductive bones of the middle ear are damped by muscles that constrict automatically to reduce the efficiency of sound transmission in the presence of very loud sound levels. When seated within an orchestra (especially near the brass, ww or perc) a player can easily be exposed to sufficiently high sound pressure levels to trigger this response. Indeed, excessive noise exposure is a potentially serious problem for orchestral musicians, and various steps are being taken to address this in all professional orchestras.

But from the perspective of an audience member, it would be very rare that the sound pressure level within the main body of the auditorium reached the kind of levels that would start to trigger the kind of physical compression effects we're talking about here. Not impossible, especially if large orchestral and choral forces were involved, but rare.

Further, the sensation and artefacts produced by the kind of physical compression affects you mention are different and sound different to those produced by an electronic compressor, and I maintain that unsympathetic electronic compression sounds unnatural because it is.

Hugh


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## hugerr

planetnine said:


> I wonder if that can be applied to classical audio recordings released on DVD?


If the sound track is a Dolby Digital sound track (and most DVD-videos are), then the option is certainly there... although not all producers bother to configure the appropriate metadata parameters yet. Those working in the film world are very familiar with the requirements and have learned how to use the metadata facilities very effectively.

At the moment, it's all still a bit new to the TV world, and the experience and understanding is still building. So I suspect you will find some DVD-video programmes of classical performances that are suitably encoded to provide appropriate options for full and restricted dynamic range listening, and others that aren't. Hopefully, the situation will improve as time goes on.



> I'm thinking of being able to listen to a piece "as is", uncompressed, in a quiet room when you solely want to listen to the music, and with DRC enabled when just generally listening in an environment where the quieter parts will get lost and the louder parts be distracting.


You're far from the first to be hit by this idea, Nathan -- it has been bandied about for a long time and various attempts have been made to find ways of implementing it. The Dolby approach is one of the best engineered, most flexible and widely used at the moment.

DAB radio was designed with a similar (albeit simpler) system in mind, and most DAB radios incorporate provision for dynamic range reduction. The Pure range of DAB radios have a software-selectable option to impose a fixed dynamic range reduction process, for example -- and it is switched on by default in most Pure DAB sets. IT's nothing like as sophisticated as the Dolby scheme, but it is useful for kitchen and car listeners.

This whole issue is a difficult one to satisfy since those listening in good conditions typically want uncompressed, full dynamic range (or something close to it), while those is less favourable conditions want more heavily reduced dynamics in order to enjoy the material more easily.

Dolby's approach is the closest yet to being able to satisfy everyone with near optimal results. Classic FM and BBC R3's approach of switching in heavier compression during 'drive time' is clearly a compromised solution that only works because they know their audience demongraphics reasonably well.

Systems offering built-in DRC facilities provide the required flexibility in that the user can decide when to implement the DRC function, but are often technically crude solutions that tend to introduce unwanted artefacts.

With the increasing use of digital media (discs, radio, internet streaming etc), medatdata becomes a more practical way of providing the required flexibility with compromising the source material, and systems like Dolby's will start to become the norm, rather than the exception in future.

Hugh


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## hugerr

Simpson Microphones said:


> We can think of 150 different ways of distributing the distortion for the same system gain (compression, tubes, tape, limiting, playback distortion, etc), but only the system gain will alter the perception of loudness in any significant way.


Sorry Andy, but this is patently not the case. In your suggested examples, the increasingly clipped versions definitely sound louder, even though the peak signal levels remain the same. The (in this case grossly anharmonic) distortion increases the subjective loudness.

Systems gain is definitely NOT the only mechanism to increase the perception of loudness.
Distortion (harmonic or anharmonic) affects the perception of loudness. Spectral balance affects perceived loudness. Peak-rms level ratios affect perceived loudness. Compression time-constants affect perceived loudness. And absolute listening level (what you refer to as system gain) affects perceived loudness.

Considerable academic reasearch has been published on this. Indeed, the whole issue of subjective loudness is one which is very much in vogue at the moment in the context of television and radio broadcasting standards, and the difficulties in assessing and controlling perceived loudness are being widely debated.

Hugh


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## Bluebottle

As much as I am enjoying Hugh go over old territory and debunk some pseudo-science with engineering common sense, may I go back to the original question here?

Is the dynamic range on some CDs too great and what (if anything!) can we do about it?

I am a recording engineer and have been for far too long and therefore I have seen the changes in recording methods over the decades. Is the dynamic range too great of some CDs?

Yes.

But there is a business reason for all this.

LPs used to be recorded by a team of experts, each fully aware that the dynamic range of an LP is just 30dB, maybe slightly more, but that was about it. The dynamic range of the average listening environment is about the same. Any quieter and the traffic noise from the street will drown it out, any louder and the neighbours start banging on the walls.

Today's classical CDs are largely recorded by one-man operations and using very limited means. Yes, there are some recordings being made in the US and Germany with proper equipment and the BBC has produced a handful of good recordings in the UK. 

But for the most part, classical recording has 'fallen' into the hands of the enthusiastic amateur and these recordings are done in home studios, smaller venues, halls and churches. I can think of several well-known labels with hundreds of titles on their books that fall directly into this category. 

Budgets are just so low, that the artist or the label owner has to perform the recording themselves and the know-how and experience is just not there to reduce dynamic range to within the limits required by the domestic listening environment.

All-in-all, I suppose it is better that way, than having someone try (and fail) to reduce the dynamic range of a piece without spoiling the listening experience.


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## hugerr

Bluebottle said:


> Is the dynamic range on some CDs too great and what (if anything!) can we do about it?


The answer is very simple, surely?

Technically, no, provided your listening conditions and equipment are up to the job.

Aesthetically, perhaps, but it becomes an entirely personal judgement based on the listening equipment, listening room acoustics, ambient noise, and personal hearing preferences.

I've never yet found a classical CD that I've thought had excessive dynamic range when listening on my main stsreo in my main listening room. But I have thought that occasionally when listening in the car, and sometimes in the kitchen.

But personally, I'd rather have the full range to enjoy when I'm listening critically, rather than compromise the recording so that it becomes acceptable for the occasions when I choose to listen in the car, but disappointing and unnatural on better systems.



> LPs used to be recorded by a team of experts, each fully aware that the dynamic range of an LP is just 30dB, maybe slightly more, but that was about it. The dynamic range of the average listening environment is about the same.


Sorry, but no it isn't. The average background level of a quiet sitting room might be around 30dB SPL. A half decent hifi should be able to reach peak levels of around 90dB SPL quite easily at the listening position when working hard, and good hifis will achieve far more than that on peaks. So the listening environment dynamic range could easily exceed 60dB, and in many cases, 80dB.

...and it would be a very poor record playing chain that failed to exceed 30dB dynamic range. A direct cut master lacquer would be capable of nearly 70dB dynamic range, and a decent pressing about 45-55dB.



> Any quieter and the traffic noise from the street will drown it out, any louder and the neighbours start banging on the walls.


Again, entirely subjective. If you live in a detached house in a quiet village (as I do...) then such issues are far less of a consideration, and I'd not be happy if the industry as a whole compromised my enjoyment of more or less natural dynamics in order to avoid upsetting your neighbours!



> Today's classical CDs are largely recorded by one-man operations and using very limited means.


Er... not in the bits I've been working in...



> But for the most part, classical recording has 'fallen' into the hands of the enthusiastic amateur and these recordings are done in home studios, smaller venues, halls and churches.


Sorry, this is just not the case -- speaking as someone professionally involved in the industry. Home studios can not accommodate full orchestras! Halls and churches are often ideal venues for recording some repetoire, and everyone I work with is professional and proud of it!



> I can think of several well-known labels with hundreds of titles on their books that fall directly into this category.


Oh dear... I think some specifics are required because I fear there are some serious misunderstandings going on.



> Budgets are just so low, that the artist or the label owner has to perform the recording themselves


Budgets are certainly low, and I know of several label ownsers who are active in hands-on recording work, but in these cases know-how and experience is not in question.



> ...to reduce dynamic range to within the limits required by the domestic listening environment.


YOUR listening environment, as judged by you. I think it important to emphasise the personal subjectivity of this. I'm not dismissing your dissatisfaction with the dynamic range of commercial CDs -- I completely understand the issues you are raising. I'm just trying yo highlight the fact that it is an entirely subjective and personal thing, and question whether everyone should suffer a (in my opinion) inferior product in order to satisfy the specific limitations of your listening environment and (possibly) replay equipment.



> All-in-all, I suppose it is better that way, than having someone try (and fail) to reduce the dynamic range of a piece without spoiling the listening experience.


Absolutely. I quite agree! Manual control of dynamic range is certainly possible, and can work well. But it is a skilled job and circumstances and experience don't always allow perfect results, sadly. In some cases (such as live broadcasts -- which is part of my background) there is little option and errors are mercilessly exposed. When post-producing or mastering a recording, it is somewhat easier, but is never simple, and rarely pleases everyone all the time.

Hugh


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## Mr. Terrible

Absolutely. I quite agree! Manual control of dynamic range is certainly posible, and can work well. But it is a skilled job and circumstances and experience don't always allow perfect results, sadly. In some cases (such as live broadcasts -- which is part of my background) there is little option and errors are mercilessly exposed. When post-producing or mastering a recording, it is somewhat easier, but is never simple, and rarely pleases everyone all the time.

(Hugh)
Absolutely. 
As I said earlier.
A dangerous thing in unskilled hands!

Hugh won`t blow his own trumpet so I`ll do it for him. 
One of his previous employers WAS the BBC.
And he wasn`t hired to make the tea.
Well, not all the time.


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## 0VU

hugerr said:


> Yes, the conductive bones of the middle ear are damped by muscles that constrict automatically to reduce the efficiency of sound transmission in the presence of very loud sound levels.


If one regularly is subjected to high sound levels, particularly when they are sustained, it's worth bearing in mind that the muscles mentioned by Hugh are not particularly large (actually tiny), and are not strong or capable of long periods of contraction.

There's no definitive 'time limit' as to how long they can maintain contraction, it varies quite widely from person to person but, for an average (if such a thing exists) healthy adult, somewhere around 5-15 minutes would be doing quite well. When the muscles tire, they relax, regardless of the state of the reflex controlling them. When this happens their damping action is removed and the inner ear is subject to the full, unrestricted force of the high level sound, allowing damage to occur more readily than when the auditory reflex contraction is functioning. This is another reason why sustained exposure to high sound levels is a bad thing.


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## Bluebottle

Hugh, dynamic range, as I meant it in this case, is NOT the S/N ratio, but the difference between the quietest note played and the loudest.

I have just completed a piano piece and the artist had a dynamic range of 60dB, in other words, the quietest note he played was 60dB below the loudest chord. 

Yes, a good pressing can have a S/N ratio of 50dB. But then it gets played a few times and that range drops to whatever damage has been done by little specks of dust and possibly even damage by the stylus. Let us be generous and make the S/N ratio on an LP that has been played a few times 40dB.

Yes, a quality hi-fi in a nice, quiet neighbourhood can be every bit as good as a control room, but I always imagine a person sitting in bed-sit with an angry landlady with a husband that is on nights!


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## hugerr

Bluebottle said:


> Hugh, dynamic range, as I meant it in this case, is NOT the S/N ratio, but the difference between the quietest note played and the loudest.


I am, of course, fully conversant with the concepts and practical meanings of dynamic range and signal to noise ratio. I do not believe I have misunderstood your intentions.



> I have just completed a piano piece and the artist had a dynamic range of 60dB, in other words, the quietest note he played was 60dB below the loudest chord.


Is that a measurement derived from the peak level of the attack of the 'quietest' note he played, or of the least audible point in the decay of a sustained note, as it merges into the background noise floor? There is plenty of scope for confusion and misinterpretation here. But for the point of discussion I'm happy to go with a dynamic range figure of 60dB in this example -- a range that can be easily and accurately accomodated on CD (or digital radio/DTT), but not on Vinyl or cassette, and with some difficulty on FM broadcasts.



> Let us be generous and make the S/N ratio on an LP that has been played a few times 40dB.


I don't think it's a generous figure, but okay... for the sake of discussion.



> Yes, a quality hi-fi in a nice, quiet neighbourhood can be every bit as good as a control room, but I always imagine a person sitting in bed-sit with an angry landlady with a husband that is on nights!


It may be what you imagine, and similar practical restrictions may even apply to a majority of the CD buying public. But is it really desirable deliberately to compromise the CD recording in order to satisfy this market?

Personally, I'd say no. It seems you would say yes. For me, the advantage and attraction of the CD was that it provided freedom from the dynamic range constraints of broadcasts, cassettes and vinyl.

Sadly, in the case of pop music, the never-ending search for more volume has destroyed any sense of dynamic range (as the recent debacle over Metallica's latest album highlights). Thankfully, in the more rational world of 'serious music' dynamic range has been preserved and I would prefer it to stay that way.

But clearly, different people have different opinions and that's all fine and dandy. The important point is to understand the technicalities and the reasons for the way things are, so that opinions can be based on a solid foundation, and are therefore meaningful.

Hopefully our discussion has helped to do that amongst some of the others reading this.

Hugh


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## tredlie

Google directed me to this forum when I was looking for info on dynamic range of CD/SACD/etc. Then this thread made me register, so here I am.

What I really found exciting about most of the posts was that the complaints went into the opposite direction of mine. Generally speaking, I deplore the lack of dynamic range in CDs. What always strikes me when I visit a concert is just that: the vast difference between a ppp and fff. 

So when it comes to High Fidelity music reproduction, i find it odd that I should ask for dynamic compression. So there we are: spend 1000s on HiFi hardware only to have those pieces present us with a leveled out dynamic experience somewhere between p and f? For me this is simply not what I want because this is not what the composer had in mind. If the score says it is fff then the music should be blasting at you.
By the same token: should I restrict the recording to - say - 70Hz? Only because some neighbors somewhere could be complaining? (just picture the opening of Also sprach Zarathustra stopping at 70Hz)


Now, if we move to other venues of life: mp3 on ear plugs, cars, thin walls etc. Then we are not talking about HiFi any more. Then we may have good reasons for dynamic compression. But that is then an issue to be dealt with in the car but not at the recording/mastering stage.

I would even go a step further: as long as the media allows it, no dynamic compression should be made. I have the notion that on LPs in the olden days at least the 30db were fully used (they were not listened to in cars, so there may not have been a pressure to compress), SACD and DVD-A have a much higher dynamic range, but not even that of CDs is utilised then this advantage of the hi res media is useless.

There seem to be a few folks on the forum with long standing experience in recording/mastering. perhaps they can answer the question: what is the actual practice in classical music in terms of amount of compression? 

And further: perhaps new electronic distribution of music would make it possible to have different version on the Labels web sites for down load: hires not compressed, and a few versions of higher compression?

Greetings

redil


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## hugerr

tredlie said:


> what is the actual practice in classical music in terms of amount of compression?


I don't think you'll find a standard practice as such. It very much depends on the material, the label's policies, and the opinions of the producer, engineer and musicians.

In the main, I would say that most classical work intended for CD is not compressed, either by hand or automatically, or if it is, it would be very mild and gentle with the aim of it being imperceptible.

Material indended for broadcast is compressed -- usually by hand, and often during the recording and mixing -- and in many cases a further level of compression may be added during transmission.

Hugh


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## Elgarian

Simpson Microphones said:


> Try to forget the mechanism of compression itself - think only of the GAIN.
> Open audacity and take a normal dynamic recording.
> Copy the recording and apply +10dB of gain (volume).
> This will probably clip/distort (which is what we want to illustrate - you will see the peaks visually cut-off 'square').
> Now reduce the volume by 10dB, so that the net gain is back at 0dB.
> If we compare the two files, we will see that the perception of _loudness_ remains the same - though there will be a perception of distortion to differentiate the two versions.


I really do follow what you say here, and I can see, without any doubt, that the clipped signal will be perceived roughly as loud as the unclipped signal (and horribly distorted, to boot) even though the peaks are lower.

On the other hand, I think I may have reached the end of my particular road in this discussion, because I'm losing the thread of the argument. I don't understand how this clipping exercise (which is surely extreme) relates to the problem of compression. If I use Audacity to _compress_ an audio signal, I don't get anything like the degree of distortion that the clipping produces (I've just been trying all this out a few minutes ago). The two operations don't seem to be at all comparable. Although clipping has the effect you describe, a small amount of compression really does diminish the perceived loudness of the _ff_s in relation to the _pp_s. I can _hear_ the difference. So I don't understand where this is taking us. As far as I can see, based on these experiments, a light touch of compression on recordings that are perceived as problematic would noticeably tame any climaxes that are perceived as excessive. I'm not saying there isn't a price to pay in terms of distortion, but the reduction in perceived loudness (relative to the _pp_s) is really quite marked.

Someone in one of the more recent posts was talking about the effect of listening to loud sounds in a confined space, and that this exaggerates the perception of loudness. Intuitively, I feel that's a more convincing explanation of the phenomenon. If I took these problematic recordings outside and listened to them in a field, it wouldn't surprise me if I didn't think the dynamic range was excessive at all.


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## Bluebottle

Elgarian said:


> I don't understand how this clipping exercise (which is surely extreme) relates to the problem of compression. If I use Audacity to compress an audio signal, I don't get anything like the degree of distortion that the clipping produces (I've just been trying all this out a few minutes ago). The two operations don't seem to be at all comparable. Although clipping has the effect you describe, a small amount of compression really does diminish the perceived loudness of the ffs in relation to the pps. I can hear the difference. So I don't understand where this is taking us. As far as I can see, based on these experiments, a light touch of compression on recordings that are perceived as problematic would noticeably tame any climaxes that are perceived as excessive.


There is no relationship. They are two completely different things (as Hugh has pointed out).

On the one hand, we have the need for the discerning listener to be able to hear music as it was played, using the full dynamic range.

On the other hand, we have the various psycho-acoustic effects of sitting in a living room (or wherever) and not being able to see the player and therefore not being able to mentally single out that solo, despite other noises and the acoustics of the venue.

To counteract the psychoacoustic effects of not being able to see the player, or watching the player on television and seeing them up close, but still having them sound rather distant, we use a variety of tricks, so that when you sit down, either in front of the TV or just the Hi-Fi, you get as close to the original experience as possible, albeit perhaps, in a somewhat idealised manner.

In the good-old, bad-old days of vinyl, I tried to get the dynamic range (which, for the record, I take to be the difference between the loudest part of the quietest note and the loudest part of the loudest note) to about 30dB. In part, this would be done with a limiter-compressor, and in part it would be achieved by reading the score and gain-riding (i.e. bringing the volume up and down by a few dB.

Today, we have a far wider range and can allow most pieces through as they were played. In a complicated piece with very quiet solos and crashing cadences, most engineers will knock the very tops off with a limiter and bring up the very quiet bits up by a small amount, using spot mics to 'zoom-in' on the solo slightly, hopefully, without destroying the overall feel of the piece.

It has been my observation (as mentioned earlier) that the growing number of small 'boutique' labels run by one man who has to do everything, for that one man to just use one stereo pair and no post production processing. Admittedly, not all, but some - enough for some people to find some passages too quiet for a less than optimal listening environment.

Even when I know that a single pair will probably tick all or most of the boxes in a piece, I use three or more pairs and choose which one after the event and, of course there will be spot mics for the soloists. Imagine recording Tchaikovsky's Piano in B flat minor and getting the balance of the piano to the orchestra wrong, just because the acoustics of the hall changed once the audience was let in!


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## Simpson Microphones

Elgarian said:


> I really do follow what you say here, and I can see, without any doubt, that the clipped signal will be perceived roughly as loud as the unclipped signal (and horribly distorted, to boot) even though the peaks are lower.
> 
> On the other hand, I think I may have reached the end of my particular road in this discussion, because I'm losing the thread of the argument. I don't understand how this clipping exercise (which is surely extreme) relates to the problem of compression.


The clipping relates directly to compression because it is only the GAIN of either operation that dicates the perception of loudness.



> If I use Audacity to _compress_ an audio signal, I don't get anything like the degree of distortion that the clipping produces (I've just been trying all this out a few minutes ago). The two operations don't seem to be at all comparable. Although clipping has the effect you describe, a small amount of compression really does diminish the perceived loudness of the _ff_s in relation to the _pp_s. I can _hear_ the difference.


Are you taking account of the gain (usually post gain with compressors)?

If you compress without increasing the system gain (this never happens in the real world) you will simply see a reduction in the peak levels.

In audacity this means clicking on the 'normalise to 0dB' box to turn _off_ this function.

This is equivalent, in perception of loudness terms, to the same level of clipping, and if you repeat the test with this normalisation function turned off I would expect you to find the results the same as with the clipping.

Andy


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## hugerr

Simpson Microphones said:


> The clipping relates directly to compression because it is only the GAIN of either operation that dicates the perception of loudness.


Try as I might, I can't make any sense of this statement. Gain is not the only parameter that affects perceived loudness, as I tried to explain earlier, and isn't the issue that determines perceived loudness in the experiment you proposed.



> If you compress without increasing the system gain (this never happens in the real world) you will simply see a reduction in the peak levels.


Along with an increased 'sound density' as the ratio of peak to rms levels changes. If you subsequently match peak levels (with 'post-gain' or 'make-up gain' ) the increased density of the compressed signal will definitely sound louder, although peak levels remain the same.

Yes, some gain has been introduced into the system through the make up gain, but only as much as was removed by the action of the compressor controlling those peaks!

I'm sure I'm misunderstanding the point you're trying to make, but I can't see it... sorry.

Hugh


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## Mr. Terrible

Makes two of us Hugh.
Compression by its very nature evens out the sounds in the whole audio spectrum of the recording, which is of course why it is perceived as being louder.
I find Andy`s comments about noise floor a little confusing too.


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## Elgarian

Simpson Microphones said:


> The clipping relates directly to compression because it is only the GAIN of either operation that dicates the perception of loudness. .... etc


Reluctantly, and despite your best efforts Andy, I think I have to abandon my part in the discussion, as I'm completely lost!


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## Mr. Terrible

(grin) Don`t feel bad about it - you arent the first and you wont be the last.
Compression is a very knotty subject to say the least.

If you fancy picking up a little more, may I recommend one of Paul White`s primers on basic recording techniques, which you can pick up very reasonably on Amazon or Play?

His stuff is pretty easy to digest but is also well-informed.


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## Alnitak

Mark Harwood said:


> Where we live, the noises are the waves on the sand/shingle beach, many species of birds (sea birds in front of the house, woodland birds behind), vehicles passing from time to time, the occasional pleasure boat or fishing vessel, wind in the trees, and gales in the Winter. None of these sounds spoils our enjoyment of music. Indeed, some of them sound better to me than many of Carol's CDs. I'll stop there, before I begin to upset any Romantic period listeners.


Like you, Mr Harwood, where I live, the noise of the rain falling on the roofs of the factories, trucks passing from time to time, the occasional plane landing never spoil my enjoyment of music.

In fact I don't really realise that there is a problem with the dynamic range on most CDs.


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## Mark Harwood

Thank you, Alnitak. I suspect that we agree on this: the CD is not to "blame", it's the listening environment.
Just kidding.
There is a serious issue here, and despite the fact that I'm not at all affected by it I've found it very interesting. Solutions seem to have been put forward. let's hope that they get to be applied.
Happy listening!


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## Mr. Terrible

As far as I am concerned, all that is required is that everyone is allowed to choose what type of recording they want to hear.

Not to have one style of recording forced on them or the recording methodology imposed on the creators of such recordings.
If people truly want to know how many microphones and how many edits and how many takews and how much compression.EQ/gating were used, they`ll ask.
If enough ask they`ll get it.
Can we be allowed to know how many people have signed the original petition so far?

Like I said earlier, or it might have been on the other place, "that is why there is chocolate and vanilla."


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## Vaneyes

i think most are about right. Two recs that come to mind where the dynamics is too broad are, Respighi Roman Trilogy w. Gatti (RCA), and Sibelius Symphony 3, w. Vanska (BIS).


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## geoffrey terry

The first consideration is our age. There will come a time when loud sounds become loud noises and fain sounds cannot be heard. Even attending a live orchestral concert will highlight such difficulties. You may see a percussionist sound the triangle and hear nothing. 
There is a way of compensating for the early stages of hearing loss. Give up on loudspeakers and use high quality headphones. PortaPro for example. You will be amazed at the sound quality.
Here is a sample of dynamic range that could present problems for those of a certain age, however, listening to the same passage on high quality headphones will bring back the joy of hearing just about everything; try it.
The finale of the Bruckner 7th Symphony:
http://www.occds.org/cd/cd006.html
If you believe the dynamics are exaggerated then they are probably correct, once again the headphone test will confirm the fact.
Don't shoot the pianist before you are sure!
Geoffrey


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## Vaneyes

geoffrey terry said:


> The first consideration is our age. There will come a time when loud sounds become loud noises and fain sounds cannot be heard. Even attending a live orchestral concert will highlight such difficulties. You may see a percussionist sound the triangle and hear nothing.
> There is a way of compensating for the early stages of hearing loss. Give up on loudspeakers and use high quality headphones. PortaPro for example. You will be amazed at the sound quality.
> Here is a sample of dynamic range that could present problems for those of a certain age, however, listening to the same passage on high quality headphones will bring back the joy of hearing just about everything; try it.
> The finale of the Bruckner 7th Symphony:
> http://www.occds.org/cd/cd006.html
> If you believe the dynamics are exaggerated then they are probably correct, once again the headphone test will confirm the fact.
> Don't shoot the pianist before you are sure!
> Geoffrey


geoffrey, I think the intent by the OP (six years ago) was to get the opinions of people who still had good hearing, and listened by (may we use the term) traditional means.

IOW the purpose was to discuss detection of CD engineering shortcomings, not to engage in a discourse on corrective hearing solutions. 
Regarding headphones, with my good hearing, I find extravagant dynamics even more irritating. :tiphat:


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## bigshot

Sometimes it can be due to a frequency response imbalance. Our ears are more sensitive to upper midrange. If that is boosted, horn blasts can sound really piercing and make us turn the volume down, making everything else too quiet.


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## Itullian

Yup, I think they do.


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## AndorFoldes

Yes! It is perhaps the single most annoying deficiency in recordings.


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## julianoq

Vaneyes said:


> i think most are about right. Two recs that come to mind where the dynamics is too broad are, Respighi Roman Trilogy w. Gatti (RCA), and Sibelius Symphony 3, w. Vanska (BIS).


I think the whole Vanska Sibelius cycle on BIS unfortunately has this problem. That's sad because is a great cycle but it bothers me a lot so I don't listen it that often.


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## bigshot

If you run into that a lot, and like to play music at relatively low volume levels, it might be worth it to invest a few hundred bucks into a compressor/peak limiter.


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## Svelte Silhouette

My dad writes a +/- value in pencil on the back of his CD booklets so he knows the right level "for him". I think that this is referenced2 a test CD he has but am not sure. Since he's a professor in otology I'd reckon his "valuation" reasonable though.

The variances don't trouble me at all though as I vary the volume 2suit and can use a remote control without 2much difficulty 

My dad hates remote controls for everything and says he "likes the exercise" so all remotes for anything other than weirdly for the main TV sit by whatever kit they operate. Even his bedroom TV's remote lives by it rather than more sensibly on his bedside cabinet. Only the main lounge's TV one sits on a coffee table all lonesome as it views the 5 or 6 others sitting on top of corresponding kit on the AV rack.


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## Svelte Silhouette

bigshot said:


> If you run into that a lot, and like to play music at relatively low volume levels, it might be worth it to invest a few hundred bucks into a compressor/peak limiter.


That'd surely just introduce distortion so doesn't seem a sensible idea 2me. Better 2just use that remote control 2reduce the volume or do as my dad does so u know which discs go 2loud 4comfort.


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## Svelte Silhouette

Yep, a compressor/peak limiter sounds like the best way of wasting money and getting a worse sound to me.

I make a point of rarely agreeing with young folks and am generally in dispute with my childers on a daily basis so I'll try not to again :lol:

I kind of agree with your dad regarding there being "too many remotes" and got one to replace the lot but still prefer manually adjusting the volume control etc


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## Svelte Silhouette

Haut Parleur said:


> Yep, a compressor/peak limiter sounds like the best way of wasting money and getting a worse sound to me.


CDs are already 'somewhat' equalised as part of the recording process. The idea of using a 'compressor/peak limiter' would be a waste of money, as you say, and could only ever worsen the sound.


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## JohnD

Svelte Silhouette said:


> CDs are already 'somewhat' equalised as part of the recording process. The idea of using a 'compressor/peak limiter' would be a waste of money, as you say, and could only ever worsen the sound.


"Equalizing" refers to the tonal quality of music. "Compressing/limiting" refers to dynamic range. Yes, CDs are somewhat equalised. But they have more dynamic range than either vinyl lps, which are somewhat limited, and FM radio broadcasts, which are highly limited. So for anyone who wants less dynamic range in the music they listen to, a compressor/limiter would not be a waste of money.


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## Svelte Silhouette

JohnD said:


> "Equalizing" refers to the tonal quality of music. "Compressing/limiting" refers to dynamic range. Yes, CDs are somewhat equalised. But they have more dynamic range than either vinyl lps, which are somewhat limited, and FM radio broadcasts, which are highly limited. So for anyone who wants less dynamic range in the music they listen to, a compressor/limiter would not be a waste of money.


I want loads of dynamic range - who wouldn't?

Something that squishes the recorded sound just worsens the end result.

I'd guess if you don't care about a messed up end result then a compressor/limiter would not be a waste of money.

There's a lot more dynamic range in the concert hall so anyone with a compressor/limiter could recoup the cost by not attending any though


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## Svelte Silhouette

JohnD said:


> "Equalizing" refers to the tonal quality of music. "Compressing/limiting" refers to dynamic range. Yes, CDs are somewhat equalised. But they have more dynamic range than vinyl lps ...


This is true BUT the point I was making is that Equalisation affects what we hear compared to what was heard in the studio ie. we never hear exactly what was heard there. The idea of using something else to distort what we can hear at home is not a good idea imho. I am not a fan of tone controls BUT accept that personal preference leads some to want to 'tailor the sound' in 'a more pleasing fashion to themselves' ... this is 'a distortion of the original' BUT a long way removed from that created by using a compressor/limiter.

Like Haut Parleur "I want loads of dynamic range - who wouldn't?".


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## bigshot

Haut Parleur said:


> Yep, a compressor/peak limiter sounds like the best way of wasting money and getting a worse sound to me.


That's what they use in recording studios to deal with excessive dynamics. Professional grade limiters don't cost a whole heck of a lot. The differences in quality between them involve the sophistication of how the envelopes of the compression are applied. They don't add distortion. They just change dynamics.

Dynamics are adjusted and fine tuned using compression/limiting. That is the tool for the job. If you don't know how to use the tool, you could certainly spin the dials into something that sounds bad though.


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## bigshot

Haut Parleur said:


> I want loads of dynamic range - who wouldn't?


People who check off in this poll that there is too much dynamic range in CDs and they frequently have to adjust the volume.

A compressor/limiter is the tool you use to correct excessive dynamics. If you have that problem, it's the tool you use.

Equalization is completely different. An equalizer is a tool for correcting frequency response imbalances.

Neither of these tools are "good" or "bad". If you need them, you need them. Modern pro grade equalizers and compressors/limiters are inexpensive and easy to find for sale online. Professional sound engineers use them all the time. They don't add distortion or "mess up the sound". On the contrary, when they are used properly, they improve sound quality.


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## JohnD

Well said, bigshot!


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## bigshot

I really don't see why there is such a huge logical gulf between professional sound engineering and audiophilia. I would think that instead of arguing with people who make the recordings, audiophiles would be trying to learn from them. It only makes sense that you'd want to make sure that your playback system matched the sound of the systems used to monitor in studios so you'd be hearing what the engineers and performers heard. But a lot of audiophiles worry about glowing tubes and magic wires and reject calibrating their response or optimizing their room acoustics. It's kind of like someone buying a sports car, and instead of looking to professional race car drivers for practical ideas how to get great performance out of a car, instead you go out and buy a shiney chrome distributer cap and gold engraved hubcaps and convince yourself that the bling makes the car go faster.

We are very lucky nowadays. Achieving great sound is pretty straightforward and it doesn't cost a whole lot. I don't understand why people make it harder on themselves than they need to. It comes down to equipment and technique. Audiophiles seem to think particular equipment makes the difference between good and bad sound. Engineers know that technique is the trick. Even expensive equipment can sound bad if there's no effort to match the response to the calibration standard used in studios. And relatively humble equipment can sound fantastic if it is carefully calibrated to industry specs using a good equalizer.


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## bigshot

double post. sorry.


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## Svelte Silhouette

bigshot said:


> I really don't see why there is such a huge logical gulf between professional sound engineering and audiophilia. I would think that instead of arguing with people who make the recordings, audiophiles would be trying to learn from them. It only makes sense that you'd want to make sure that your playback system matched the sound of the systems used to monitor in studios so you'd be hearing what the engineers and performers heard. But a lot of audiophiles worry about glowing tubes and magic wires and reject calibrating their response or optimizing their room acoustics. It's kind of like someone buying a sports car, and instead of looking to professional race car drivers for practical ideas how to get great performance out of a car, instead you go out and buy a shiney chrome distributer cap and gold engraved hubcaps and convince yourself that the bling makes the car go faster.
> 
> We are very lucky nowadays. Achieving great sound is pretty straightforward and it doesn't cost a whole lot. I don't understand why people make it harder on themselves than they need to. It comes down to equipment and technique. Audiophiles seem to think particular equipment makes the difference between good and bad sound. Engineers know that technique is the trick. Even expensive equipment can sound bad if there's no effort to match the response to the calibration standard used in studios. And relatively humble equipment can sound fantastic if it is carefully calibrated to industry specs using a good equalizer.


Having been involved in professional recording whilst also being, I suppose, 'an audiophile' I'm not sure who I'd argue with or learn from. The fact remains that I only know what I've engineered should sound like as all else I've only, at best, a fair idea of what it should sound like. Equipment makes a difference and an equaliser is only of use to the original engineer replaying the finally recorded work in his/her own home as any other usage is purely 'personal preference' rather than 'in pursuance of accuracy'. Humble equipment can't ever sound fantastic ... such an idea is fantasy albeit though almost any kit can sound 'real good' to someone without any reference points and who am I to deny such being labelled, albeit actually 'mis-labelled', 'fantastic' ...


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## bigshot

Equalizers are extremely useful tools. Like any tool, they have to be used properly to be effective. Not many people have experience properly equalizing their system to a calibrated standard. But if you have a reasonably good system, it's well worth researching and experimenting with the best way to apply the tool. It can get one a lot closer to optimal sound quality than throwing money at the problem.

It's always good to approach every problem systematically. Learn how sound reproduction works. Study the variables. Analyze your system to determine its strengths and weaknesses. And apply the tools that turn weaknesses into strengths.

Frequency response is the most important aspect of sound reproduction, and it's the aspect that most audiophiles never even address.


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## bigshot

Equalizers are extremely useful tools. Like any tool, they have to be used properly to be effective. Not many people have experience properly equalizing their system to a calibrated standard. But if you have a reasonably good system, it's well worth researching and experimenting with the best way to apply the tool. It can get one a lot closer to optimal sound quality than throwing money at the problem.

It's always good to approach every problem systematically. Learn how sound reproduction works. Study the variables. Analyze your system to determine its strengths and weaknesses. And apply the tools that turn weaknesses into strengths.

Frequency response is the most important aspect of sound reproduction, and it's the aspect that most audiophiles never even address.


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## Svelte Silhouette

bigshot said:


> Equalizers are extremely useful tools. Like any tool, they have to be used properly to be effective. Frequency response is the most important aspect of sound reproduction, and it's the aspect that most audiophiles never even address.


Few audiophiles are uninterested in frequency response BUT only an expensive equaliser will make an acceptable change to this and, even then, one largely related to personal preference. The money spent on expensive tools, one is untrained to use, is far better spent on the amplifier etc. As regards cheaper tools, even with training to use such, the money is far far better spent elsewhere BUT each to their own and I'm not going to get embroiled in the sensibilities behind this.


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## bigshot

AV receivers have good digital parametric equalizers built into them.

Balanced response makes music sound clearer and fuller. It eliminates listening fatigue and makes it possible to turn the volume up without hurting your ears. Balanced response also takes some of the stress off your speakers and makes them perform better and more efficiently. Flat response is accomplished objectively using test tone sweeps.

The best way to get good sound is to learn how sound works and to learn how to properly use the tools that can help you get there. There's no shortcut. Applied knowledge is better than a million dollars. It's worth the effort.


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## Declined

Yes. I turn my volume up down quite often on nearly every work I listen to.


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## Guest

I think BIS overdoes it, particularly in their more recent recordings. The Shostakovich 11th Symphony is a good case in point. A playback level to adequately hear the first movement knocks me out of my chair for the second movement!


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## Andreas

I've run a number of my CDs through the TT Dynamic Range Meter Software (download). Interesting results and a remarkably wide spread. DR values from 5 to 8 are the norm for pop music releases nowadays. 10 to 15 seems to be the usual range for classical music.

26,6 Nono: Fragmente - Stille, An Diotima; LaSalle Quartett; 1986; DG
21,8 Nono: La lontananza nostalgica ... etc; Kremer/Kridenko; 1992; DG
18,1 Nono: Choral Works; SWR Vocal Ensemble; 2001; Hänssler
16,9 Pärt: Passio; Tonus Peregrinus; 2003; Naxos
16,4 Beethoven: Sinfonie 9; Nagano; 2011; Sony
15,9 Beethoven: Sinfonie 9; Herreweghe; 1999; Harmonia Mundi
15,6 Brahms/Strawinski: Violinkonzerte; Hahn; 2001; Sony
15,5 Schubert: Große C-Dur-Sinfonie/Unvollendete; Mackerras; 1998; Telarc
15,4 Barber: Sinfonien 1 & 2; Alsop, Marin; 2000; Naxos
15,1 Mendelssohn/Schostakowitsch: Violinkonzerte; Hahn; 2002; Sony
15,0 Beethoven: Sinfonien 3 & 8; Järvi; 2006; Sony
14,8 Schönberg/Monn: Kammersinfonie/Konzerte; Brogli-Sacher; 2013; Cybelle
14,7 Strauss: Ein Heldenleben/Macbeth; Markson; 1999; Naxos
14,6 Bruckner: Sinfonie 8; Furtwängler; 2005; Membran
14,6 Sibelius/Schönberg: Streichquartette; Tetzlaff Quartett; 2010; Avi
14,4 Barber: Cellokonzert etc; Alsop; 2001; Naxos
14,4 Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Vol. VIII; Schiff; 2008; ECM
14,2 Brahms: Sinfonie Nr. 1; Berglund; 2001; Ondine
14,2 Brahms: Streichquartette op. 51; Quartuor Ludwig; 1999; Naxos
14,1 Beethoven: Sinfonie 9; Karajan; 1977 [Remastered 2007]; DG
14,1 Beethoven: Sinfonien 5 & 6; Zinman; 1997; Arte Nova
14,0 Bruckner: Sinfonie 9; Davies; 2005; Arte Nova
14,0 Beethoven: Opp. 109-111; Leonskaja; 2010; MDG; 
14,0 Strauss: Don Quichote etc; Markson; 2000; Naxos
14,0 Baird/Knapik et al.: Streichquartette; Quartetto Dafô; 2002; DUX
13,8 Beethoven: Sinfonie 9; Karajan; 1984; DG
13,8 Beethoven: Sinfonien 1 & 2; Karajan; 1985; DG
13,7 Poulenc: Stabat Mater etc; Järvi; 2013; DG
13,6 Beethoven: Op. 2; Kodama; 2008; PentaTone
13,5 Ligeti: Works for Piano; Aimard; 1996; Sony
13,5 Pärt: Spiegel im Spiegel; Hudson/Klinger/Kruse; 2006; Brilliant Classics
13,4 Beethoven: Sinfonie 8/Große Fuge; Nagano; 2011; Sony
13,3 Bruckner: Sinfonie 8; Boulez, Pierre; 2000; DG
13,3 Mahler: Sinfonie 1; Solti; 1964; Decca
13,2 Fauré: Requiem; Summerly; 1994; Naxos
13,1 Bruckner: Sinfonie 9; Furtwängler; 2005; Membran
13,1 Bruckner: Sinfonie 9; Jochum; 1982 [Remastered 2000]; EMI
13,1 Serocki/Baird/Krenz: Klavierkonzerte; Wodnicki; 2008; DUX
12,9 Górecki: Miserere; Gershon; 2012; Decca
12,9 Beethoven: Sinfonien 5 & 6; Mehta; 2009; Helicon Classics
12,8 Scattered Rhymes; Orlando Consort; 2008; Harmonia Mundi
12,8 Bruckner: Sinfonie 9; Furtwängler; 2001; Cantus Classics
12,7 Purcell: Instrumentalmusik; Hengelbrock; 1991; DHM
12,1 Beethoven: Sinfonie 9; Karajan; 1963; DG
12,1 Chopin: Etüden; Perahia; 2002; Sony
11,8 Bach: Kunst der Fuge; Aimard; 2008; DG
11,8 Schubert: Unvollendete/Große C-Dur-Sinfonie; Furtwängler; 2010; Naxos
11,6 Bach: Goldberg-Variationen; Gould; 1982; Columbia
11,5 Bach; Grimaud; 2008; DG
11,3 The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace; Jenkins; 2001; Virgin
11,2 Bruckner: Sinfonie 9; Giulini; 1989; DG
11,1 Bach: Französische Suiten 1-4; Gould; 1973; Columbia
10,8 Vivaldi - The Four Seasons; Richter; 2012; DG
10,7 Bruckner: Sinfonie 8; Furtwängler; 1964 [Remastered 1998]; EMI/Testament
10,5 Bach: Goldberg-Variationen; Gould; 1956 [Remastered 2002]; Columbia
10,5 Beethoven: Sinfonien 5 & 6; Karajan; 1963; DG
10,5 Strauss: Alpensinfonie; Karajan; 1981; DG
10,2 Bruckner: Sinfonie 3; Young; 2007; Oehms
10,1 Bruckner: Sinfonie 9; Rattle; 2012; Warner

I'll add some pop music releases, just for comparison:

14,8 Fleetwood Mac: Rumours; 1977 [1984]
13,1 Eric Clapton: Unplugged; 1992
12,3 Björk: Debut; 1993
11,6 Nirvana: Nevermind; 1991
10,6 R.E.M.: Automatic for the People; 1992
9,9 The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper; 1967 [2009 Remaster]
7,8 Daft Punk: Random Access Memories; 2013
7,2 Radiohead: OK Computer; 1997
5,0 Oasis: Be Here Now; 1997
4,3 Red Hot Chili Peppers: Californication; 1999


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## SixFootScowl

Andreas said:


> I've run a number of my CDs through the TT Dynamic Range Meter Software (download). Interesting results and a remarkably wide spread. DR values from 5 to 8 are the norm for pop music releases nowadays. 10 to 15 seems to be the usual range for classical music.


That might explain my feeling that non-classical music is easier to listen to on an earbud and as background music.


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## KenOC

Florestan said:


> That might explain my feeling that non-classical music is easier to listen to on an earbud and as background music.


'S true! Even in classical music, radio stations compress the dynamic range probably because so many people listen to it in cars. I wish my car CD player had a compressor -- some do.


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## MatsP

Elgarian said:


> Well, I encountered this dynamic range problem today, with a vengeance.
> 
> I'd bought the Colin Davis/LSO live 2CD set of Berlioz's _Damnation of Faust _ on the basis of unequivocal recommendations from _Penguin_ and from _Gramophone _as 'the' version to have. I noted that both refer to the fact that 'the transfer is at rather a low level', but thought little of it. It turned out to be a massive understatement.
> 
> In order to get an initially acceptable, comfortable level, I had to wind the volume control into unknown territory - not far from full on: such a high setting, in fact, that if this had been any 'normal' CD, I'd have been afraid of my loudspeakers being blasted into their constituent parts, or my neighbours phoning the police - or both. This seemed mighty strange, so I played various sections of the CD - at a more cautious volume setting - until I understood the nature of the choices that had been made in mastering this recording. The recorded level seems to have been backed off excessively in order to accommodate the climaxes of the 'Ride to the Abyss' towards the end of the piece. If I had in fact continued to play the whole of the second CD at my original volume setting, I suspect my neighbours would have wondered if World War 3 had begun when I got to the 'Abyss'.
> 
> I transferred the first half-hour's worth of the tracks from the second CD onto my computer and looked at the audio wave profile - here's a screenshot, courtesy of the excellent _Audacity_ program:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> That great mass of high amplitude stuff at the far right is the 'Ride to the Abyss' section. The much lower level stuff at the far left is Marguerite's wonderful (or what _should_ be wonderful) 'D'amour l'ardente flamme' which, when played at a volume setting that could reasonably accommodate the Ride to the Abyss, is basically reduced to an unrealistically low level devoid of all power.
> 
> The huge dynamic range means that these two Berlioz CDs are almost worthless to me. I can't play this recording, sensibly, in what I would consider to be a pretty average domestic environment. And to listen to it on headphones may well be, I suspect, potentially dangerous to my hearing. If I were to set a comfortable listening level for 'D'amour l'ardente flamme', I certainly would not like to be wearing those phones when the 'Ride' begins. If ever a recording needed some compression, this is surely it.
> 
> So I have two questions:
> 1. Why has attention not been drawn by reviewers to the really quite serious problems that will be presented surely to the majority of listeners by this excessively large dynamic range?
> 2. Can someone please recommend a good version of _Damnation of Faust_ that I can actually listen to in comfort and without fear?


I love your descriptions of neighbours phoning the police, world war three beginning, etc. I am greatly annoyed by this issue myself. I have several classical recordings which to my ears have far too much dynamic range (at least for home listening), which leads to the exact same problems as you are having. Thanks for the moral support


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## bigshot

I have no neighbors adjoining my listening room, and my system is capable of very high volume with no distortion or noise. I love these sorts of recordings.

But if you want it more compressed, just use Audacity to compress the tracks and burn them back to CD-R. My Yamaha receiver has a setting that dynamically adjusts the EQ and dynamics to compensate at lower volume levels. That can help too.


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## Chordalrock

I use a software compressor for most classical music. I can recommend Bombardier:

http://www.stillwellaudio.com/plugins/bombardier-buss-compressor/

I use it with foobar2000. You can install the compressor in foobar by going to file/preferences, then components and then vst plugins. It's usable and configurable via view/DSP. (edit: I forgot that foobar may also require a vst adapter - not sure what the case is with the newest versions of the program, but you can install one simply by dropping it into the components folder.)

You can make the compressor sound sufficiently natural yet quite compressed if you use a ratio of around 1.6 and threshold of around -50 db (a higher threshold may be somewhat better for most recordings but then there are those absurd recordings that really require the super low threshold). Then use Flat mode and bomb for attack and release. I find that +10 db is a good compensation with these settings. You don't want too high software volume because your speaker amp might start to overheat.

Just to make this little guide complete, obviously the RMS shouldn't be too high, but I do keep it around 30. Haven't bothered to experiment with it. I keep the knee rather low but again haven't experimented.

I would probably buy a hardware compressor like this if I spent more time listening via a sound system other than my computer.


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## Figleaf

Why all the complaining about modern technology? I wish it had been around 110 years ago. Would you want to go back to the world of Stroh violins, accompanists hammering away on upright pianos with the felt taken out, and handkerchiefs stuffed in the recording horn so fortissimo high Cs wouldn't blast? I'm sure the great artists of long ago would have killed for the dynamic range of the digital era!

To answer the question properly: it's only a problem in a noisy environment like a car where the quiet bits are inaudible- but that's not really the fault of the recording.


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## bigshot

I used to take a suitcase Victrola out to the patio of a coffee shop and spin records on lazy Saturday afternoons. Occasionally I would play Caruso's M'Appiri, which has an incredible held high note that cuts through like gangbusters. A sourpuss lady came up to me once and said, "Can ya turn down the volume?" I pointed out that acoustic Vicrolas don't have a volume adjustment "...but I happen to have one right here in my pocket." I reached in and pulled up a gym sock and held it up proudly. She looked shocked and I jammed it in the horn and kept on playing. She gave up.


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## Chordalrock

Figleaf said:


> Why all the complaining about modern technology? I wish it had been around 110 years ago. Would you want to go back to the world of Stroh violins, accompanists hammering away on upright pianos with the felt taken out, and handkerchiefs stuffed in the recording horn so fortissimo high Cs wouldn't blast? I'm sure the great artists of long ago would have killed for the dynamic range of the digital era!
> 
> To answer the question properly: it's only a problem in a noisy environment like a car where the quiet bits are inaudible- but that's not really the fault of the recording.


I'm a fan of modern technology - I'm a fan of compressors.


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## Figleaf

bigshot said:


> I used to take a suitcase Victrola out to the patio of a coffee shop and spin records on lazy Saturday afternoons. Occasionally I would play Caruso's M'Appiri, which has an incredible held high note that cuts through like gangbusters. A sourpuss lady came up to me once and said, "Can ya turn down the volume?" I pointed out that acoustic Vicrolas don't have a volume adjustment "...but I happen to have one right here in my pocket." I reached in and pulled up a gym sock and held it up proudly. She looked shocked and I jammed it in the horn and kept on playing. She gave up.


Funny how that M'appari is always among everyone's first! It does sound very good- and loud- played acoustically, which must have helped its sales.


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