Stronger Than Pride

Mr Clean said:
Applying 9dB, as you did, to the same files and Pie Jesu has notable artifacts when hitting the peaks as does the Sade song, they're not quite as noticeable as the first but there are some. Anarchy just sounds plain awful.
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Did you use a limiter or just boost the gain? I used a limiter to avoid clipping. There shouldn't be any artefacts in my boosted version
 
You missed my point, which is what you hear and what you see in meters/waveforms are 2 different things and that the original file sounds more in line with other music than your 9dB boosted file. So it answers your question that the master isn't unusually low. It's around average.

Boosting it 9dB, Limiter or not, will make the waveform look more on par with the kind of master you will likely see from today's music but as it is, in it's original form, it is on par with other music of it's time, before it and after.
 
I think so. I find it interesting though. I've added the album add to my list and the next time I'm out at a Record Fair I'll see if I can pick up a vinyl copy and see what that sounds like. Will probably cost me all of £1.

:thumbs up:
 
Mr Clean said:
I think so. I find it interesting though. I've added the album add to my list and the next time I'm out at a Record Fair I'll see if I can pick up a vinyl copy and see what that sounds like. Will probably cost me all of £1.

:thumbs up:
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That will be interesting to see
 
grimtraveller said:
What if that is an opinion ?
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GuitarLegend said:
I didn't expect opinions that suggest that I am asking something offensive
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You're not asking something offensive. But I didn't get the impression that the general consensus was that you were. You asked for opinions. You got them. Many questions will elicit shades of grey and nuances that aren't readily apparent when the question is asked.
 
When I first started recording records onto cassette back in '76, I'd have the level just occasionally touching the red on my Dad's music centre so I'd be getting each album or song as loud as it could possibly be without distorting {or distorting too much, which is another convoluted story from my convoluted existence !}. Fast forwarding to the early 80s and using a walkman and travelling on the trains, having my music recorded loud was a necessity. Even the soft soul albums I'd record loudly so when hurtling from Kings Cross to Hounslow West on the Piccadilly line, I could hear Gladys Knight as easily as Judas Priest without ever having to touch the volume control. It really came into it's own when I rode a bike. It used to take me 45 minutes to cycle to work and no way was I going to be touching volume knobs ! So I recorded with plenty of level {it also saved me battery power as I didn't have to turn the walkman up so loud}.
I pretty much do that now. When I play tapes in the car or van, I rarely have to touch the volume and if I'm doing stuff around the house, if what I'm playing is a variety of different artists from different albums or a singular artist's album, I set the volume sufficiently high so I can hear whichever song is playing. I must admit, I've never found the discrepancy of volume between one album and another to be a speaker shattering problem, such that I couldn't have everything on one volume setting. Obviously some songs will be louder or quieter than others, but never problematically so.
 
Mr Clean said:
When this was released in 1988 people still listened to music on stereos, walkmans, CD players, etc. Usually a whole LP/Cassette/CD album at a time and would adjust the volume to the mood that they required. Sadly they didn't have the foresight that in nearly 30 yrs time some numpty would be listening on a player with a mixture of songs at different volumes.
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30 years later and listening to MP3s at the computer I still like to go over a whole album.

:)
 
Mr Clean said:
Sadly they didn't have the foresight that in nearly 30 yrs time some numpty would be listening on a player with a mixture of songs at different volumes.
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No, but they did have dance collections, party collections, "best of" collections.... no foresight at all...
 
GuitarLegend said:
No, but they did have dance collections, party collections, "best of" collections.... no foresight at all...
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Do you think these compilations were assembled with no overall leveling of audio or would you say/think they went through some process to bring all the volumes of the tracks to an even level to make them more coherent?

I'm pretty sure it would be the latter.
 
Mr Clean said:
Do you think these compilations were assembled with no overall leveling of audio or would you say/think they went through some process to bring all the volumes of the tracks to an even level to make them more coherent?

I'm pretty sure it would be the latter.
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You mean they brought them up to some .... standard?
My point in the original question was that a particular album was mastered to some level without reference to any particular standard. But if they make compilations, then the rules change? If I believe most of the posts here, then nobody cares about the levels to which albums are mastered until they are compared to other albums, such as when a compilation is produced and then suddenly it matters. Is there a standard or isn't there?
 
I never said standard, I said levelled, which could mean to number on a meter, moving the volume of each track up or down. That would be the ME's choice at the time. It doesn't necessarily mean they were set to, for example, -0.1dB because other albums/tracks are.
 
Mr Clean said:
I never said standard, I said levelled, which could mean to number on a meter, moving the volume of each track up or down. That would be the ME's choice at the time. It doesn't necessarily mean they were set to, for example, -0.1dB because other albums/tracks are.
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Yes I know that, its what I do when I create an album of my own recordings. After a while, I get into the habit of mastering all of them around the same level so I don't HAVE to do it later. There is also the advice on having reference tracks to compare your work to so you don't get caught up in your own little bubble. In this case, Stronger Than Pride was beautifully mixed and mastered but it sounds exactly like they didn't care about the level too much. And yet, it appears as though level DOES matter.
 
YanKleber said:
Do you still listen to tapes? Cassette ones? I never thought that one day I would listen myself saying that but... this is amazing!
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I only listen to cassettes. All my singles and albums get put onto CD whether they're downloaded, bought as CDs or transferred from vinyl. Then I put them onto cassette and that's what I play. That way, the CD is preserved. I'm up with most of the music formats but everything ends up on tape.

GuitarLegend said:
You mean they brought them up to some .... standard?


then suddenly it matters. Is there a standard or isn't there?
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As far back as the 50s, there was a competition amongst producers and labels as to who could release the hottest {ie loudest} masters. In England, the producers and engineers were frequently and constantly in awe of the records that were coming from the US of A and they could never get them loud like their American counterparts could.
But that was only some of those engineers/producers. By around 1966 loud masters were coming from England too but not all MEs, producers or engineers wanted loud masters, hence the different levels across different genres.
The compilation question is a good one because it demonstrates that even back in the 60s and 70s, there were ways of matching varying volumes. And even singles that appeared on albums were often louder on the 45 than the album cut.
I think it's true to say that aesthetics of sound meant a lot more to engineers then than now. What many of them did, they considered as art, even though the artists primarily thought of engineers as technicians.
 
GuitarLegend said:
There is also the advice on having reference tracks to compare your work to.
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I always thought the point of reference tracks was to compare how the bass sits with the drums, guitars with the vocals and all that together as one. Not volume?

Maybe you'll just have to wait for the REMASTERED version of the Stronger Than Pride CD.
 
Since A/D & D/A converters sound best when not 'banged' too hard with incoming/outgoing audio, the artist/producer/engineers may have been striving for pristine sound vs. volume. These subtleties, of course, will not be heard when squashed to MP3. It could also be that the artists wanted to capture their original dynamics for artistic reasons. You can test this by importing the track into a DAW and see if the waveform looks like a solid bar across the timeline. If you see the peaks & valleys in the waveform, then dynamics were considered important & were maintained. If you simply want it to be louder, try normalizing it. If after that, the volume still seems the same, then you know that dynamics were considered important.
 
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