Tír Na HiFi

Aleg wrote:

tony wrote:What's Brickwalled Dave?

I am in the same situation Maciej. want to get rid of them before they become potentially worthless. Hopefully I could raise enough money to buy 30 sheets of emi paper!

Top tracks are brickwalled, bottom ones are the original. It is increasing loudness and limiting peaks thereby having it playback louder but losing dynamics. Aka "the loudness wars".

terrible practice,

doesn't this also spread to new recordings where the end result is tested on the ipod with the ear buds and then adjusted for them, effectively loosing half the music

Aleg wrote:

tony wrote:What's Brickwalled Dave?

I am in the same situation Maciej. want to get rid of them before they become potentially worthless. Hopefully I could raise enough money to buy 30 sheets of emi paper!

Top tracks are brickwalled, bottom ones are the original. It is increasing loudness and limiting peaks thereby having it playback louder but losing dynamics. Aka "the loudness wars".

I think I’ve heard this term from Fran, never bothered to check it out. Nicely explained in Wikipedia.
I can hardly see some niche, self-respecting musician to allow to his producer to turn his music in to big lump of noise, I think it’s mainly some Rammstein stuff.

In most cases the artist either probably doesn't know or has no control over what the publishers do.

"Brickwalling" is probably the single most annoying aspect about so many modern masterings (and quite a few reissues of earlier titles.) I have spent a lot of time and effort tracking down the best digital versions of my favourite albums and it's well worth it (many of them are easily available.) Some bad examples of brickwalling include REM's And I Feel Fine... compilation, most of Stevie Wonder's remasterings Smiths remasters, Steely Dan etc. One recent bad example I came across was the CD included with the DVD Audio of Jackson Browne's Running On Empty. (The DVD Audio is fine) Luckily I have an earlier version that sounds great...there are hundreds of others I could list.

Here's is a handy Dynamic Range database of various versions of your favourite albums (look at Springsteen's latest - brickwalled to death!)

http://www.dr.loudness-war.info/

tony wrote:In most cases the artist either probably doesn't know or has no control over what the publishers do.

Sure if they are capable of composing the music ( not some artist who wholly relay on somebody else) they should be able to tell what’s the difference in-between how they sound in the studio while recording the album and then afterwards when the cd is being realised. Do not they have impact at all on what is the engineer tweaking in the studio?
If this is general rule for today’s recordings (Brickwalling) then there is no future in fidelity of sound reproduction, so there is no point of any of us investing in high quality systems as we will run out of music. I can already feel this! I always return to some favourite albums but always seek something new.......
I think I recall when I asked Fran about this now, why there is so much music in these days that sound awful. I played one of PJ Harvey new albums which is absolutely terrible to listen besides the grunge style. Does not matter how good your system is you will not be able to pick up or separate the instruments. 20 years earlier the same singer on DRY sounds totally different.

nige2000 wrote:

Aleg wrote:

tony wrote:What's Brickwalled Dave?

I am in the same situation Maciej. want to get rid of them before they become potentially worthless. Hopefully I could raise enough money to buy 30 sheets of emi paper!

Top tracks are brickwalled, bottom ones are the original. It is increasing loudness and limiting peaks thereby having it playback louder but losing dynamics. Aka "the loudness wars".

terrible practice,

doesn't this also spread to new recordings where the end result is tested on the ipod with the ear buds and then adjusted for them, effectively loosing half the music

Young people mainly listen to music reproduced in mp3 format so they will not hear the difference, in fact, it is 'easier' to hear music when it is loud and there is no dynamic range it doesn't bother them, they never miss what they've never had.

My twenty something kids would never dream of sitting alone in a room listening to music; they always seem to have headphones or ear buds and listen to it in the background when using their laptops, etc.