Imagine this scenario: you really love a song on the CD you have just purchased. Surprisingly, you can’t stand listening to it for very long and you’re not entirely sure why. Something urges you to skip to another track. Again, you like the music but the feeling of a discomfort is still there. Maybe you have just a bad day. More probably you are another victim of the recording industry...
In the late 90's something went terribly wrong...
As long ago as in 1982 red book CDs were released to the public. In the beginning it was a niche market, therefore recording companies put a very little effort in the mastering process and program material mostly remained untouched when being transferred onto a silver disc - such CD’s were often tracked at very soft levels due to engineers cutting straight from original analog mixes. Only in the late 80’s, with commercial CD players exploding onto the market, a mastering became a legitimate profession. With more advanced digital equipment available in early 90’s mastering engineers could take a full advantage of CDs’ dynamic range without a need to compress or clip. This was a golden age for CD recordings. But in the late 90’s something went terribly wrong…
THERE IS A THIN LINE BETWEEN LOVE AND HATE
Imagine this scenario: you really love a song on the CD you have just purchased. Surprisingly, you can’t stand listening to it for very long and you’re not entirely sure why. Something urges you to skip to another track. Again, you like the music but the feeling of a discomfort is still there. Maybe you have just a bad day. More probably you are another victim of the recording industry.
How is it possible that you cannot enjoy your favorite music anymore? It is not your fault - it is the music with no or very limited dynamic range that is physically difficult to listen to for any length of time and urges you to skip the tracks. Quiet sounds and loud sounds are squashed together, there is no contrast anymore. It is not natural when four singers screaming their lungs out in a chorus are as loud as whisperred verses of a song, when an unplugged guitar beats a kick drum in its loudness. It’s also the reason why some people are still fanatical about vinyl recordings of the good old days. It’s not necessarily that the vinyl sounds better - it does not. It’s that it is impossible for a vinyl record to be fatiguing.
David Bendeth, producer
“Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered - almost always for the worse”
THE RISE AND FALL OF DIGITAL
The major shortcoming of analog recording systems was always the noise floor of the medium, such as tape hiss or surface noise (crackles and pops) on vinyl records. ALL analog recording and playback media have some sort of inherent noise. To get as far away as possible from this noise floor the loudness of the track was increased. Thus program material was more clearly audible and farther above the noise and the dynamic range of a recording increased.
But all analog media also have their, technically speaking, ´saturation´ point: a limit over which the sound would become distorted. This type of distortion gives a hot, fuzzy, warmish sound. Can you remember how we were making tape recordings intentionally hotter by overmodulation to get a better signal to noise ratio? Sometimes it was used with care even by professionals to enhance immediacy of the material - e.g. Rolling Stones were famous for this and nobody have ever objected.
Binary digits have no inherited hiss or crackle (in fact, the CD playback requires the introduction of a small amount of randomized noise - dither). Zero in dBFS (full scale) is the the absolute highest level allowed for no clipping and distortion, unlike analog VU scale, where zero is the average level and sound swings above and below. The dBFS scale uses negative numbers to represent audio program level below the maximum zero. Typically, -20dbFS = 0dB on VU (i.e. 0dB on VU leaves approximately 20dB reserve for signal peaks on the dBFS scale).
There are different ways of dB level referencing. To illustrate one of the approaches, look at the following waveform - it is Dire Strait’s So Far Away from their legendary Brothers in Arms (1985, Vertigo, 824499-2). The album was mastered by Bob Ludwig and contributed tremendously, especially through its convincing sonic qualities, to the rise of CD format when it was still young. The paler waveform confined inside the spikes and peaks represents average volume levels of the track and jagged peaks that move up and down on the scale outline macrodynamics of the track. The bigger the distance between the peak level and the average level, the more competent is a track (micro)dynamics-wise.
From today’s point of view, the hereabove Dire Straits material was recorded in 1985 very quiet - there is a lot of headroom (i.e. it could have been louder). There is an occassional transient that comes closer to 0dBFS, but overall the peaks are hitting -5 to -8dBFS or even lower, and there is a sufficient reserve for the dynamic range. The original pressing of this CD features one of the biggest dynamic sweeps ever seen in rock music: Brothers in Arms measure as much as -18dB in microdynamics (the CD layer of the recent SACD remaster is, contrary to a popular misconception, not that courageous as it stops around -8dB). The level of -0.3dBFS formerly was considered as the loudest signal that was safe to put on a CD, since some early CD processors would treat a 0dBFS sample as an error. Thus the average level of audio is pretty low, but if you turn it up, these CDs may sound excellent.
The trick is that listeners judge how loud a sound is based on its average loudness, not its peak loudness. So even though there might be two tracks whose loudest parts (peaks) reach the same loudness level in dBFS, the one with a higher average level will be subjectivelly perceived as louder.
Dynamics is one of key elements in any music, perhaps the most important - it is virtually light and shade of the music. It creates a sense of spaciousness and makes it easier to pick out individual sonic elements - room reverberation, resonance of the wooden body of a guitar, the sound of strings being plucked, vocalist raising or lowering her/his voice, a sudden rush of drums, a quiet section bursting into a fortissimo passage - these elements bring an excitement to a music and when those things are neutered, the excitement is lost.
