bleyrad said:
no, it wasn't directed towards you, but rather this whole attitude i'm starting to see a lot of home recordists take. i'm just encouraging people to not necessarily jump on the "limiting is bad" bandwagon... use your EARS to make the decision for yourself and don't be influenced by what people say.
the problem is that i see so many people claiming "too loud! look at this BLOCK!" like they know something that the professional engineers who got paid $150/hour to record it don't.
in some cases, the home-recordists are right; they DO know more, and the recording sounds like crap. often they are not, and the recording will sound awesome. but either way, it has far less to do with how much of a "block" the audio file visualizes out to be, and far more to do with the AURAL choices made in mixing and mastering.
i don't know, i guess i see this as a sort of last arrogant standoff of amateurs vs professionals... maybe we're spiteful that they're successful, so we look for the ways in which we think we're better than them, so we can cling together as a gang and point our fingers at those naughty pros, feeling better about our failure to succeed as well as them.
this isn't directed at you, you've done nothing wrong, just pointed out what you saw. how it is interpreted though, should be left up to ears. i will listen to the song shortly and tell you what i think of it.
I think you're way off base here. First of all, it has always been the PROFESSIONALS who have been bitching about the "louder is better" thing for years and years....and they have been annoyed with amatures like us who, instead of using our EARS, decide that our recordings must be "as loud as" instead of "as good as".
The people who are making the decision to make professional recordings so loud are NOT the engineers nor the mastering engineers. Decisions like squashing the hell out of a number to make it as loud as possible come straight from the money people...in which case louder can indeed be "better".
While the average person may not hear the effects of over compression, they still know that feeling of irritation after listening to an overcompressed album for too long. On the radio and MTV, yeah, it sounds great. Sounds great when you're cranking it at a party too. But if the music is intended to be listened to, then overcompression is nothing but a gimick that detracts from the sonic quality of the recording. It's a marketing scam.
Now the advice to homerec'ers is not that limiting is bad. I've never actually heard that. I've put a limiter on every single track I've ever recorded, and I think most people do the same. The advice that's most commonly given is that real power comes from mixing. A good mix won't require heavy limiting. You won't see sections of plateus. You might lose a few stray peaks, but that won't be very audible....hence you're improving the mix by increasing its mean power without losing clarity or dynamics.
What we're seeing in that example above is excessive compression of an already powerful mix. This makes for one heck of a loud track, but it's also very hard on the ears.
Lots of what could have been good albums are being ruined by techniques like this. Tool's lateralus is a great example...way louder than Aenima was, but soooo hard on the ears.
The average joe probably thinks in terms of "songs" moreso than "recordings", but I don't think he's given enough credit. He might think it's the songs fault for getting so irritating after the third or fourth listen, when maybe it's all that nasty high frequency distortion ramming his brain.
There have been some interesting studies done in this regard...not for the same exact reasons though. Studies have been done on the impacts of chopping off frequencies at 44khz on human listeners. Very interesting and very much related to what we're talking about. There was a Rupert Neve discussion video floating around here for some time where he talked about it...I think it was posted to the Cave.
Slackmaster 2000
