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Re: Bob Ludwig talks a little bit about mastering Chinese Democracy
What is the actual reason it's good to have really soft bits and really loud bits in a song?
Hedonic adaptation. That is to say, the Human Experience has all the peaks plateaued. In terms of entertainment, you need to wind back and release again to support a rhytmic impact on the spectator.
It's relative, of course. Megadeth does it different from Bach, and dynamic range is not the only way in music to accomplish that; it just visualizes the peaks and the valleys, which makes it easy to work with them.
- monkeychow
- Rep: 661
Re: Bob Ludwig talks a little bit about mastering Chinese Democracy
^ Reasonable point 
I'm just curious as to the relative merits is all.
I think it suits some genres. If you listen to a megadeth remaster compared to an original mix - I don't think the loss of range has really done any harm - and the modern sound of metal very much suits that style of music's natural sounds...of course I'd grant that doesn't apply to jazz or something else maybe.
I can see where there's situations where dynamic range is important for sure, but I also feel it's become over exposed as an issue. And I wonder how many people really notice the losses and how many just read about it on a blog and retweet the concept so to speak.
Not saying you guys are that - but I can't bring up cds at all without someone educating me on dynamic range these days! To me it's a bit like how in every film poll the same films are chosen as the best of all time. If you're knowledgable about audio - you have to hate current mastering.
Nevermind that most people ignore the real crimes against audio purity - lossy compression formats, and that most playback devices are inadequate these days. So I find it odd...people seeking out an original master, ripping it to mp3, and listening to it on their $1 junk shop ear buds....then telling everyone it sounds better than the re-issued mix 
Re: Bob Ludwig talks a little bit about mastering Chinese Democracy
Well the big glaring stupid issue with the dynamics debate is the Digital to Vinyl problem. Most modern albums are cut to a hard drive and that cut more often than not will feature compressed dynamics. Compression usually happens in the mixing stage. So the tracks are recorded, and then mixed (that included compression for the most part when working with digital) and that makes the basic album ready product. After that most albums are sent for mastering where the dynamics are manipulated further.
There's a lot of people out there buying Vinyl that has been cut from a compressed digital recording. The dynamic range is practically the exact same as it would be on CD.
On top of this is the problem of sampling rate. When you play an instrument the sound wave hits your ears and your brain works like a camera taking in that sound at a certain rate, with a certain "shutter speed" your brain takes snapshots of that sound.
Mp3 and CD's are designed to make use of this fact. When you listen to an mp3 or a CD you aren't hearing a perfectly continuous sonic signal. You are hearing tiny little splices of what that original piece of music sounded like one after the other at a really fast rate. 44100 per second is the standard for CD. They give you just enough to allow your brain to fill in the blanks and your brain does even if you are hearing something for the first time, it just fills in the blanks between splices. This keeps files sizes down. Otherwise music (which has theoreticaly infinite dimensions) could not fit on a CD or in an Mp3.
With analogue systems like vinyl there is a continuous sound being produced so instead of the sound being spat out at one rate and your ears picking it up at another, it's just a question of your ears picking up this continuous sound wave. Because of that you get better audio resolution and a better sense of the dynamic range.
Back to Vinyl again. There are PLENTY of old Vinyl records from back in the day that had compression added during the mixing phase. PLENTY.
Dynamics and Compression aren't the problem. Mastering is the Problem.
If an album is mixed well it shouldn't need to be mastered. Simple as that.
Digital isn't the problem either. There is a thing called the "quantisation" problem in digital systems. It's when you are trying to represent a sound wave that is made up of an infinite amount of points using a finite amount of numbers you are never going to be able to perfectly recreate the original soundwave so digital systems estimate soundwaves and don't give a perfect recreation. That could be a problem BUT digital systems have such high resolution now that the human ear cannot pick up the difference between analog and digital.
The real problem here is people who don't know what they are talking about acting as tough they do.
So...... a quick recap.
1. Mastering is bad.
2. No living human could tell the difference between a well mixed unmastered Vinyl and a well mixed unmastered CD.
Nevermind that most people ignore the real crimes against audio purity - lossy compression formats, and that most playback devices are inadequate these days. So I find it odd...people seeking out an original master, ripping it to mp3, and listening to it on their $1 junk shop ear buds....then telling everyone it sounds better than the re-issued mix
Hell yeah Monkey. Well said.
I personally don't care much for hi quality audio, which I can tell you the people I work with find quite weird as Sound Design and audio is my job.
You can't beat the sound of a cheap guitar overdriven through ripped amp cones under a whiskey stained gravel voice.
Re: Bob Ludwig talks a little bit about mastering Chinese Democracy
How do I know if a vinyl is "proper" or not?
Nowadays when a band cuts to tape and so has proper Vinyls, it tells you. Like the last foo fighter record was cut to tape, so they were able to crete good Vinyls off the back of that. They made a big deal about recording to tape in the press, if you really want to know and the band hasn't been outwardly proclaiming they didn't record to a HD, you need to read the liner notes and see.
