Thomas Lund on Loudness Wars: (If anyone one can find part2 let me know)īob Katz on the Loudness War I: Bob Katz on the Loudness War II: Bob Katz on the Loudness War III: Friedemann Tischmeyer w/ collected statements: Downmixing to mono in Audacity: Links provided throughout the discussion will be posted here as a centralized resource. Images have been updated with downconverted sample rates. "It is the reason why a perfect sine wave does not appear as a perfectly thin line, it is blurred, especially in the lower frequencies when it is displayed on a log scale like that." This is an important aspect of using spectrograms, so sample rates must be downconverted before comparing masters with this technique. * Edit : MindsMirror clarified an important point about the use of spectrograms: higher sample rates will place more white area in the diagram due to the FFT size used to generate the graph, and does not have anything to do with the actual sound. Perhaps by exchanging information with each other about different albums, we can find out what the best mastered version is, and use objective information to arrive at a conclusion of what’s the best release version is to purchase. Or conversely, how well balanced and dynamic it is.
#Audify spectrogram software#
I created this thread because I was hoping to compare experiences, methods, or software tools people have run across which would allow music listeners to see with their own eyes the quality of a master, and the amount of dynamic range compression or loudness that went into the mix. And I also believe it's sorely obvious to our ears, unlike larger formats/file sizes. So while one struggles to hear any difference in quality between the $15 CD he bought or the $30 HD track he DLed, the quality in difference between mastering jobs can be clearly demonstrated and measured. While the audio industry wants to sell us more bits and bytes, they seem to be avoiding the essential problem of quality mastering. The CD gets loud and screechy at times, the vinyl in a comparison balanced and polite, with better dynamics when Dylan really does pick up energy. There is also less emphasis on the midrange on the CD, making it sound thinner. The CD remaster doesn’t ever get so bad that it peaks over 0db, but the quietness of the vinyl release is demonstrable just by looking at the spectrogram. Both sources were ripped into digital file formats and compared in Foobar. What you are looking at below is a comparison of Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A Changin’ on 1964 mono vinyl release* vs the modern CD Remaster for a Greatest Hits downmixed to mono. The vertical axis is the freq range, horizontal axis time. So white in the following images is quiet, black is loud. A spectrogram analyzes the frequency distribution, and displays density of sound information at any given frequency with black. I recently tried looking at the spectrogram in Foobar, and found this pretty interesting. The peak meter is just showing us the tip of the iceberg, and there’s a lot we don’t see with a peak meter alone. Usually this is done with a peak meter, but the music doesn’t always have to peak over 0db to be loud or have its dynamics squashed. We’ve read about the loudness war, we can hear it in our music, but I started wondering if there was an easy way to analyze the dynamic range compression in a mix (the loudness) by looking at measurements of the music itself.
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