[ SECRET POST #2978 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2978 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 05 pages, 107 secrets from Secret Submission Post #426.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

What dynamic range compression is, and the loudness wars

[solarbird]

It's how much "loud" vs. "soft" there can be in a song. Literally, it's about volume level at any given point. Reducing this without changing what's being performed is called compression - basically riding the volume control and turning it up just as a song gets quiet, and turning it back down when the song gets loud, only really fast and cleverly so people don't hear it as that - they just hear the song as having a constant level.

For the last couple of decades in popular music, producers have worked very hard at making that range of volume as small as possible, and relatedly, as far turned up as possible as allowed within digital spec, in order to be the "loudest" song.

There's always been a fair bit of compression in popular music, and in anything played on the radio, because if the quiet/loudness range is big, then people listening in noisy (i.e. typical - in the car, in a restaurant, etc) environments either won't hear the quiet stuff, or will get blasted by the loud. And they'll change the station.

But it's really got much more extreme in the last couple of decades, for two reasons: 1. it became technically possible, and 2. producers know that if you play identical songs two at two different volume levels to two equivalent groups of people, the higher-volume playback will _always_ be reported as better by the listeners. So in popular music, it is always best to be 1. flat and 2. loud.

Always.

So that's what, and why, and why it's so pushed out to the limits right now.

As a musician (not in the popular music category, see here) I'm really hoping that the rise in noise-blocking/enclosing-style headphones (as opposed to the more traditional earbuds) will provide a market window for music with more dynamic range again.