[kj] Yahoo! Tech: "Why New Music Doesn't Sound As Good as it Did"

[T.B.]

"B. Oliver Sheppard" wrote:


From: http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/33549

Why New Music Doesn't Sound As Good As It Did

Wed Jun 27, 2007 10:17PM EDT

Never mind that today's factory-produced starlets and mini-clones just
don't have the practiced chops of the supergroups of yesteryear, pop in
a new CD and you might notice that the quality of the music itself—maybe
something as simple as a snare drum hit—just doesn't sound as crisp and
as clear as you're used to. Why is that?

It's part of the music industry's quest to make music louder and louder,
and it's been going on for decades, at least since the birth of the
compact disc. Click the link for a nice little video, a mere 2 minutes
long, which explains it in detail, with audio cues that you'll be able
to hear in crisp detail.

The key to the problem is that, in making the soft parts of a track
louder (in the process making the entire track loud), you lose detail in
the song: The difference between what's supposed to be loud and what's
supposed to be soft becomes less and less. The result is that, sure, the
soft parts of a song are nice and loud, but big noises like drum beats
become muffled and fuzzy. But consumers often subconsciously equate
loudness with quality, and thus, record producers pump up the volume.
Anything to make a buck.

The bigger problem is that this is all unnecessary. Stereo equipment is
more powerful today than ever, and last time I checked, every piece of
music hardware had a volume knob.

Don't take my word for it: Pop in the first CD you bought and play it at
the same volume level as the most recent one you bought. You might be
shocked by what you hear.

+++++++++++++++

There's a lot more to it than simply mastering music louder.

Part of it is just the general quality of producers and recording engineers 
with a good ear for decent sound mixing has dropped way the hell down in the 
past 10 - 15 years.

The other part is the fact that especially in the last 5 years or so, most 
music is being mixed to sound "better" on portable digital players with 
tinny, shitty sounding speakers that you stick in your ear like a q-tip. And 
also, audio is being geared towards sounding best under the compromise of 
being digitally compressed to shit as MP3s, etc which drastically effects 
certain frequencies. And even large home theater systems where some people 
still listen to music on an actual cd, the speakers are now seperates. You 
have a bass subwoofer that sits by itself, the main speakers themselves have 
no real bass built in so an engineer has to take that into account when he 
mixes music that isn't going to simply go through 2 stereo full range 
speakers, but a 5.1 surround sound setup or on the other end of the 
spectrum, often cheap, shitty plastic speakers for a pc.

All this means most rock music mastered for listening these days is pushed 
and pulled by this wide variety of limitations and so-called advances in 
what people primarily listen to music on these days which adds to more and 
more technically terrible sounding music.

T.B.