Matt Mayfield Music
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2009–2025
1:54 · 2.7M views · Oct 7, 2006
A two-minute demonstration of the loudness war, showing how heavy dynamic range compression in CD mastering makes music louder while degrading sound quality. It uses audio examples so you can hear the distortion.
HN keeps linking it as the shortest clear explanation of over-compression and brickwalled mastering.
8 comments from Hacker News
I think one of the reasons that those people who prefer vinyl over digital do so, is that the recordings on vinyl are mastered with different qualities in mind than their digital counterparts. There's a YouTube video floating around called The Loudness War ( this video ) that describes what I'm talking about. I distinctly remember albums on audio CDs sounding better to me (great clarity, vibrancy, etc.) back in the early 1990s. Then, somewhere toward the end of the 1990s, CDs just started to sound worse. I blame the trend described in that video. I suspect that vinyl recordings do not suffer from this same tendency toward loudness in the audio mastering process, and that is why you have audiophiles insisting that vinyl sounds better than digital.
Your post led me down the rabbit hole of over-compression, not for the first time, and I ended up at this video which gave a very succinct answer to my question of: "Okay, I realize that music is getting compressed, but what are we losing?" this video Via a nice article with analysis: [LINK]
The same reason why music on the radio is so dang loud– excessive compression. See: The Loudness War (just 1:54 mins long): this video
>In recent decades, mastering engineers have been tasked with making studio albums louder via the application of something called dynamic range compression; essentially, the volume gets turned up on the quiet bits, and turned down on the loud bits. The cumulative effect is a song that sounds bigger and punchier The writer doesn't seem to understand loudness here. This is exactly the opposite effect of DRC (dynamic range compression). Music gets less punchier and sounds smaller, as transients are pushed down in the mix. Listening to music with less DRC is more damaging to your ears (although it sounds better), if you are comparing two tracks with equal loudness. Keeping loudness constant in this comparison is valid because we will adjust the volume knob based on the track's psychoacoustic loudness. Example: this video and this video have roughly the same loudness. The first has less DRC and is more damaging to your hearing. This misunderstanding breaks down half of the article's argument. The other half---that loud music is cooler than it was decades ago---is probably valid I guess.
I'm a bit of an audio geek. What sets me off though is not digital compression (although I'm sure you lose some fidelity, I rarely/never notice any loss with 256kbps mp4s). What is really awful is excessive dynamic compression in modern CDs themselves - and it's far worse than digital compression. Music simply loses its punch. It can be hard to do an apples to apples comparison here, but if you compare an older album (Beatles albums come to mind) and a "remastered" version, one of the differences will typically be greater dynamic compression in the remaster. Some resources on the topic: [LINK] Some examples: this video [LINK]