Most of the studies I've seen are no longer up, I spent a while digging around some forum threads I read a while ago.

Even so, there's nothing preventing you from running a winABX test and posting the log here. You could prove me wrong in a few minutes. Most people reach transparency around 192kbps for VBR AAC with the itunes encoder.

My computer doesn't run through my stereo, which is the best audio equipment I have and the one where I can most easily distinguish lossy and lossless audio.

You're telling me you have no way to hook up a computer to your high-end audio system?

That's a bit surprising, bud.

No, I don't have any cables capable of doing so. For my 320kbps audio, I burned the mp3s to a CD-R and played them using my CD player.

Hahaha! That made me laugh so hard...I hope nobody believes this guy, he is clearly mistaken by internet myths. LOL.

Ok, Oblarg, just because YOU can't hear the difference doesn't mean other people can't. Again, it depends on your gear. I'd say you only need about 80$ in equipment to notice the difference between low bitrates and high bitrates and FLAC. About blindtests, if you read threads on HydrogenAudio, there are so many people ABX'ing, and they do notice a difference. Not everyone, but a good majority.

A "majority" of people reach transparency at ~192. People who are really good at hearing artifacts can occasionally ABX a clip at high bitrate from FLAC, and it's by listening for artifacts, not because the "drums are muted."

It's an obvious troll attempt.

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/FLAC#FLAC_Copypasta
http://2ksports.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2723541
www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=270681237200
http://www.head-fi.org/forum/thread/451 ... st_6097400
http://www.muselive.com/forums.php?m=po ... 47#1909347
http://holyfuckingshit40000.blogspot.co ... s-mp3.html

It's on Encyclopedia Dramatica... What more do ya need?

If you fags stop arguing about this bullshit, maybe we can get back to the topic at hand considering I haven't had an opportunity to participate in what the original topic was.

Indeed. The "rotational velocidensity" copypasta stopped being funny a few months ago.

Well, then let's see if I can get something going.

FasterDisaster (or anyone), what are your feelings on records being produced at louder and louder volumes? Is it killing dynamics, or is it making it more convenient for you to hear your music as loudly as possible?

If nobody thought to cite the Wikipedia page...

Loudness War

Bottom line: clipping is bad. It's bad sounding. And it's bad for your speakers. (You ever hear you shouldn't put DC through your stereo?)
/thread

Ehh, here's my attempt to get this thread back on track.

I do think that louder records in metal are negatively impacting the way we listened. Honestly though, it's a sign of the times: Most engineers and producers know that there are few audiophiles or discerning listeners who are going to be cranking Hypocrisy through stereo systems which cost thousands; more than likely, the final product will either be bought on iTunes or Amazon in lossy format and going to straight to digital audio players, or else the uncompressed version will be played from low-end or budget-conscious rigs which are hardly capable of producing the full range of the sound.

It's also a partially psychological thing. As it has been said here, the untrained ear automatically associates a louder song as sounding "better" or having more impact than a quieter song. So there's the "wow factor" that producers want every single thing to grab the listener's attention, but they do it at the expense of fatiguing the listener.

For instance: I'm listening to Borknagar's "Ruins of the Future" from Quintessence right now. It's a fantastic track from the band full of all sorts of nooks and crannies, but the production of the album is so unbearably loud that it leaves little to be desired in detail because everything is presented front and center; in other words, the loudness of everything just "clogs" the sound that could be presented with a more dynamic mastering job. The guitar tone certainly contributes to this since it dominates the mix, but everything else is cranked to high heaven, which just makes the whole song sound "congested," if you will. (I've noticed the same problem with Borknagar's other albums, especially The Archaic Course).

A. As if Wikipedia had all the facts.

B. Wikipedia isn't going to give us the opinions of MA forum users.

I think it makes a good introduction for people who aren't familiar with what the loudness war is.

It does, but he said "/thread" which is an irritating and conceited thing to do when linking to a wikipedia page.

Yes, it is killing dynamics. Have you heard World Painted Blood recently? Holy Christ on a stick does that album sound like shit. It sounds relatively okay on small speakers, but on big stereo speakers or car speakers you can tell that album has been trebled to hell and back, and the guitars sound like grindy, indecipherable noise.

Pushing all of the nobs to 10 and compressing and expanding/loudening/whatever all of the instruments doesn't do anything for the music except make it sound like total shit. I'm not a total audiophile, I just do not want my albums to start sounding like total ass. Another great example of an overproduced album is When Death Comes from Artillery. It's nowhere near as bad as World Painted Blood, but you can tell they pushed all the nobs as loud as they would go. Problem? The guitars and drums are clipped to fucking shit. Just listen to the first few seconds of the title track, When Death Comes. When the drum hits five times, you can hear the fucking artifacting that occurs. It's like this on the entire fucking thing! It's only noticeable when the guitars are going and there only one or two hits from the drum kit. It's fucking annoying and it needs to stop.

Yeah, new Slayer albums are terribly produced, including for reasons that don't relate to this thread like lack of bass. New Metallica is a joke for production, in part due to clicking. I'd say Megadeth are beating both in production.

Contrarily, I thought the latest Testament was one of the best production jobs I've heard. Relatively speaking, it's a loud album too. I also think Venom have really been cranking out well-produced albums, although I've heard others say it's the most horrible production they've heard; I think it's rough, but excellent. I thought the new Whiplash was also nicely produced.

New W.A.S.P. album Babylon is a good example, for me, of a decently produced modern album.

Frankly, FUCK the loudness war, and FUCK sound engineers these days. They just have to ruin our music...specially Metal, it suffers more than any genres in my opinion. High On Fire's newest is so bad mastering wise...I wish more Metal bands realized this problem, but unfortunately most Metal musicians either don't know about the issue, or just don't give a fuck.

Apparently, using Google is just too fucking difficult of a task for you.

Oh hey, the first result
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec_listening_test

I didn't /thread, due to the wiki link, but my other comment which immediately preceded it. There's no real debate going on here, anyway.

Not always, but typically, I've found Wikipedia has most of it right, at least, on the major non-controversial articles. There are also plenty of citations, if you care to delve further into the issue.



Opinions on what, actually? Do producers push loudness? Yes. Do people seem to like it? Yes.

Making the other guy find evidence for your argument is not how arguing works.

EDIT: Oh wow, all the comparisons have no lossless codecs in them at all (lossy codecs vs. other lossy codecs), never mind information about the people who paid for the tests, and the people who were tested. You call this bullshit evidence?

Lazy, condescending bullshit. I bet the guy didn't even click the page but just looked at the snapshot showed from the google cache.

Anyway, this is clearly the stupidest argument ever. Some people can tell the difference, others can't. Why would anyone even bother debating this? There's absolutely no ground to stand on.

Guys, c'mon. Stop feeding the bullshit in this thread, a few of us have tried to get the topic back to what it's original intent was.

If he can tell the difference, he could run a winABX test and prove it.

The fact is, at 256kbps a variable bitrate AAC is indistinguishable from the source material unless there are artifacts present, and a small minority of tracks have artifacts. About 10 minutes of searching on the hydrogenaudio forums could teach you as much.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossy_data ... ation_loss

I really hope you're trolling, because that's completely irrelevant.

Not relevant in regard to just listening to MP3s, no. They're not going to fall apart on your hard drive. I was just responding to that particular bit, because it's interesting. Anyone who's tried to edit lossy formats without a lossless editor knows what I'm talking about.

It is interesting, and it does reveal the main use of FLAC: archiving. You can't recompress a lossy file without compounding the inaccuracies, however you can always recompress from a FLAC.

RE: Compressed sound bitrates:

When you're talking about a bitrate such as 128 kbps, FIRST you have to clarify whether you're talking about constant or variable bitrate (some players like ITunes display the *average* bitrate of a VBR file). 128 kbps constant sounds like CRAP. But if you have a sound file with a lot of quiet sections or something, 128 is the average - some sections might need less, while others need more. Compressed music that sounds good enough to me is 320 kbps constant, or high quality VBR which usually has an average bitrate of 180-240 or so.



That file describes information loss by RECOMPRESSION. Listening to music only decompresses it, the source file isn't modified. Recompression is when you decompress it then compress it again (i.e. convert it to WAV then save it to MP3 again).

OKAY! Enough about sound file compression. It has NOTHING to do with the loudness war. MP3s are digitally compressed, CDs and vinyls are not.

The compression we talk about when discussing the loudness war is DIFFERENT. It is simply expanding the waveforms (vertically when looked at in an audio editor), that is, amplifying the volume.



Clipping is only bad for your speakers if it's done by amplifying the samples then slicing the tops off with a (metaphorical) razor to make it fit. That creates sharp, sudden changes in the amplitude of consecutive samples. Nobody does that. Music producers don't do basic clipping, what they do is a special kind of amplification, where the samples will approach the volume threshold at a curve or something like that, so they are "pushed outward" away from zero volume to a non-linear degree...

edit: sorry for all the capitalization. Maybe I should use italics?

Right, I know. I wasn't intending that link to be a refutation, just a point of interest.

Okay. Also, maybe I should hesitate before saying "nobody does that" when talking about clipping. Because apparently some people do (I have heard clipping in a lot of music). Probably only people who don't know what they're doing or don't have good equipment though. But that also has nothing to do with the "loudness war".

Some people like it and others don't. This is made crystal clear in this thread, where people are debating.

Well, it's not as tough for an audio file to have good sound, as long as it is not LOSSY, this means, as long as it is NOT a compressed file, such as an mp3.

Crappy stereo systems have nothing to do with the Loudness Wars. First of all, if you have good musicians, good gear and an Engineer and Mastering Engineer that knows what he is doing, the tunes will sound great on the shitiest of stereos.

The thing is, as someone stated before, people with untrained ears mistake "better" with volume or "Loudness". Turning the stereo up does not have anything to do with the dynamics of the album, those dynamics were determined when it was tracked and mixed. The Loudness Wars started because, think about this: You're in your car with your buddies listening to an album which you think is pretty awesome, and then you take that album out and put the next one in, without touching the volume knob, and then HOLY SHIT.... all of a sudden this album is 3, 6, 10dB louder than the other one and its IN YOUR FACE, so a lot of people got easily excited... and sooo the Record Labels kept trying to take advantage of the thought that so many people mistake loudness for quality.

As for obtaining that "Raw" sound, some people are just awful musicians and some people are just lazy. You can tell if musicians were trying to get a "raw" honest and gritty album, or if the band and the engineer were just not talented or extremely lazy.

Not to be rude, that's just my take.

There's lossy and lossless compression. MP3 is lossy, FLAC is lossless.

Yea... FLAC is lossless (Hence why it's called Free Lossless Audio Codec) cause you can essentially uncompress it once you have received it. But once you convert something to an mp3, you can never undo that compression, even though you can still convert it back to, say a .WAV, but it's already too late, that compression is still there.

Completely different. He was talking about the rotation of the hard drive/passage of time slowly degrading the quality of the file; the article is talking about quality loss from re-compressing the file multiple times, like if you were to go from WMA to AAC to OGG to MP3. Every time you run a lossy compression algorithm, information is lost and the quality is degraded. If you leave the file as it is after compressing it, though, it will not degrade further, information loss only occurs during the compression process. Lossy compression is a one time deal, you have to compress it again to make it worse.

EDIT: Beaten to the point.

However, the difference is usually inaudible if the bitrate is sufficiently high.

The point of FLAC is archiving, not playback.

Exactly. The "loudness war" simply exploits this well-known psychoacoustic phenomenon. And with it comes some side-effects that those producers apparently are quite happy to live with, even if it irks some audiophile nerds on internet forums (like myself).

Here's my question though: If you take a CD that was victim of the loudness war, and a CD that was produced with more dynamics, and play them both on the same stereo cranked to 10, the CD that was victim of the loudness war will be louder. So in a way, there is still an advantage to loudly producing CD's?