This is a perfectly valid trope, but it still smells faintly of Complaining About Shows You Dont Like. Unless you have a healthy audiophilic streak, you're unlikely even to perceive the problem, or understand how one could find it annoying.
It's kind of like font geekery—yes, font design is an art of sorts; yes, there are good fonts and bad fonts; no, there's nothing wrong with being an enthusiast on the subject ... but even so, 95% of even sensitive. educated readers aren't going to care what font the book's in as long as it's halfway serviceable, and won't feel their reading experience has been compromised.
I'm also reminded of those amateur film critics who can't let go of the new Star Trek movies' now-memetic screen glares, which most viewers didn't notice or care about. In fact, I'm wondering if "Boutique Trope" shouldn't be a thing now.
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Ditto this (two years later)! There's a legitimate trope to be discussed here, comparable to Orange/Blue Contrast or Digital Destruction— and, like those, it may be partly the domain of specialists but once noticed it can't be un-noticed. However, more than half the examples are Complaining About Shows You Dont Like or overwrought hyperbole (loud mixers "need to be brought before a war crimes tribunal," really?). The trope itself isn't necessarily YMMV, but many of the examples seem to skew that way. Someone or someones with more time than me needs to do a thorough cleanup of the examples to get the complaining out.
Hi, neighbor!
It isn't Complaining About Shows You Dont Like; it's complaining about shows you do like that introduce annoying and superfluous elements that detract from the viewing experience even as the core elements of the show remain just as good or even get better. It's more analogous to Executive Meddling. In fact, more often that not it is Executive Meddling.
Edited by reebty
IF, starting about 15 years ago, an industry-standard had been agreed for digital music files, and more imporantly, the hardware to play them, which had included using 'replay-gain' meta-data, the Loudness War would have been nipped in the bud.
The simple fact is that most music, starting about that time, has been "consumed" in cars, through personal players etc., and what people want is for each "song" on their playlist to be at more-or-less the same volume.
Like-it-or-not (Lars Ulrich), file-sharing is the new radio, it's how people get to hear new music they wouldn't even THINK of paying for before hearing it, and if people who downloaded Metallica "songs" were to find that they played back at lower volume than Taylor Swift ones do .......
Replay-gain metadata would have precluded the need to make CD's (or the original PCM source files) as "loud" as possible.
And I wouldn't have stopped buying new-release rock and pop albums (or "re-masters" of classics) a decade ago.
Sen
Whoever renamed the trope: thank you!
Probably should get working on that essay now... Hide / Show Replies
Boo indeed! Yes, it was a reference to a work that's fairly obscure, but guess what - we have a page for it, so you can read all about the Record of Lodoss War series and thereby get the reference!
All this "we have to make trope names more generic and boring so that everyone can understand them" garbage just destroys the uniqueness of the editing community in the long run. Some of them needed to be changed, but others (like this one) were fairly inoffensive.
Oh, and I've just read through the Trope Repair Shop discussion on the rename. Both of them. See, one discussion thread was made asking for a rename. There was a crowner, and no consensus was reached, so the name stayed the same. Then six months later, someone remade the discussion thread, presumably because they were unhappy that they couldn't get their own way in the previous one. This really isn't how democratic discussions are meant to go - if the consensus is not to act, you don't just keep badgering everyone until you get a result you like!
End result: a pointless rename which served only to further destroy any evidence that this site ever had a sense of humour.
Edited by CNash
Senses of humour usually shouldn't involve titles that sound like they're trying too hard, no?
Probably should get working on that essay now...
I took the liberty of changing the Laconic because it's the opposite of what the trope is about. I simply put it in Sarcasm Mode.
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The laconic was simply louder = better. I've read the description, and I think it really does fit, non-sarcasticly; the companies think louder = better and use the trope that way, even if listeners don't agree. The pothole makes it seem as though the trope is either complaining or louder = worse, neither of which are true. Therefore, I've undone the change.
That was the amazing part. Things just keep going.
Californication: We finally have a nice official mastering of Californication. WB have issued it, cut by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering from 24/192 wave files. If you're shopping for it, the ASIN at Amazon is B 00000 JQ 0 E and it was released October 2012. It has CB in the deadwax. The new vinyl on the back includes the websites "www.redhotchilipeppers.com" and "www.warnerbrosrecords.com" while the horridly compressed original lists "www.redhotchilipeppers.com" and "www.redhotchilipeppers.net" on the back. The openness of the new vinyl is substantial, although not quite on the same plane as the all analogue vinyl reissues of Stadium Arcadium and Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Still, nice to finally have a dynamically alive version of Californication on vinyl.
...Could...could someone change the article image? LOOKING at that hurts my ears, badly. x_o
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Put it into Image Picking.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
That Pixie Lott album wasn't a lampshading. She released her debut album, Turn It Up (named for a song that's about praising those who can realise when a relationship is over) and the clever marketing people decided that a special re-release with a whole 'nother CD should be called Turn It Up Louder.
People need to stop using heavily zoomed-out sound editor images to rely on the quality of the recording, or at least stop relying on said images. Unless zoomed in to the actual waveform itself (those squiggly lines), editors show the peak value of the sound per pixel. This means that if an editor zooms out enough that a pixel represents 1 minute, any time the volume peaks at a certain level it will use that peak to represent the the entire minute regardless of what the rest of it sounds like. Which means ANY song will look like a brick if A) you zoom out enough B) the song is long enough and C) you make the window small enough or use a low enough screen resolution.
One of my favorite albums is Bloody Kisses by Type O Negative. The sound peaks consistently, yet is actually rather quiet (even by the standards of its release) and has a LOT of dynamics. However, many of the songs are quite long, which means if you zoom out fully they'll look like your modern-day meter peg fest, which they are anything but.
People need to know and understand this because otherwise they'll end up with misleading information, or lack thereof. Many less-loud pieces of music get confused with much louder pieces because of this, which is very counterproductive to a wiki such as this.
Solo, I'm a soloist on a solo list. All live, never on a floppy disk.
Does Record of Loudness War affect different players differently? What I mean is, if I listen to, say, Bleed Like Me on my Zune I end up with major listener fatigue and my ears hurting, but if I listen to it in my car or on my computer I don't get that. (In all fairness, my car's stereo system is fifteen years old and kind of sucks; until I replaced the radio, it didn't pick up bass lines, which made for a rather unique experience of listening to "Another One Bites the Dust".)
Edited by tenderlumpling Hide / Show Replies
... good question. I never thought of that.
(mostly because I only listen to stuff on headphones on my PC...)
Probably should get working on that essay now...
When I listened to Death Magnetic (the most infamous Metallica example, if you didn't know) in my car, I thought it basically sounded fine. But in headphones or on my fairly expensive computer speakers, not so much. Part of that is just because of background noise making it harder to pick up on this stuff; part of it is probably also because better speakers can allow you to hear the little "cracks" that result from clipping, and the volume fluctuations or lack thereof. Brickwalling doesn't seem so bad in car-listening situations, but conforming the final master of an album to that standard is like painting exclusively in neon colors so your art is easier to see in a darkened room.
Conforming the final master of an album to that standard is like painting exclusively in neon colors so your art is easier to see in a darkened room.
That so needs to be quoted. Can we add it to like the main page or something?
Probably should get working on that essay now...
Some people just don't mix with headphones. For those people, there are things like crossfeed effects on some players and amps to ease listener fatigue.
It's better to mix on speakers, you say?
Maybe I should try that when I don't have flatmates.
Probably should get working on that essay now...
Sen
Also, I just noticed this entry:
- Strapping Young Lad invokes this for the sole purpose of of creating a gigantic and unrelenting wall of sound. It's unpleasant, but that's the point.
This is the production equivalent of purposefully trying to crap your pants on the bus. Even if you succeed, it still smells bad, and what's the point?
Edited by Sen Probably should get working on that essay now... Hide / Show Replies
Yeah, but distorted electric guitars are cool, and...
Right. Shutting up now.
Probably should get working on that essay now...
I really enjoy this article, and it's spot on except for one point:
Compression really isn't something we, as humans, can emulate with just a volume knob. You'd have to be listening really really carefully for everytime the music gets louder and constantly changing the volume for that to be accurate. We can't do, as humans, the things that compression does with algorithms. Everything else in the article is fine, but that particular comparison is invalid. I thought I would bring it up here in case someone thinks it's worth changing.
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I think the point being made was that the "justification" for overcompressing songs is something along the lines of "listeners won't tolerate it if this song's average volume is lower than this other song's average volume", or alternatively "listeners will be confused if this part of the song is quieter than this other part of the song". Now, there ARE people who will prefer compressed stuff for this reason, but most music lovers are quite content to turn up the volume if they feel like they can't hear something well enough. So the idea that this "problem" needs to be solved by permanently ruining the dynamic range of the recording is a major fallacy.
I think it needs to be noted that a fair amount of the reason compression is used so much on many forms of popular music is that popular music is very often listened to over car stereos. This compression isn't just being applied because of some condescending expectation that people won't like it if the dynamics in their music change. The noise floor of a car listening environment is very high, and making music that can be properly heard the entire way through literally requires a high level of compression. If you are mixing music for car stereos you generally have around 40 dBs to work with, as opposed to music intended for audiophiles, who, one can expect, will listen in a much quieter environment. If one tries to listen to classical music in a car, one will have to turn up the volume very high just to hear the quiet passages, and when the dynamics change it can really hurt one's ears.
I guess I just don't think we should be so condescending about it. It's not just that people can't be expected to change the volume knob.
Despite the disclaimer that "All modern music is a victim of this practice to some extent," I don't think this would be an Omnipresent Trope even today. So I removed that disclaimer and the "aversions" section:
- For the most part, this phenomenon is not present in the more "sophisticated" genres, such as classical, opera, jazz, and most musicals, due to the loudness of the sound (and lack thereof) being, in itself, a crucial element of the music. Ditto for the more "rootsy" genres such as folk and bluegrass, which put an emphasis on having a natural organic sound versus a slickly-produced one.
- The Paper Chase, who I admit to shamelessly Entry Pimping, subvert this hard: their lead singer/guitarist is an engineer for bands such as Modest Mouse and Explosions in the Sky, and even their detractors usually respect their production style.
- No Pink Floyd releases have used brickwall compression. This is largely due to the production of their albums (particularly Dark Side of the Moon) being so highly revered to start.
- Maybe that's because they didn't want to become just another brick in the wall.
- The 40th anniverary remixes of The Doors' original albums (produced by Bruce Botnick from the original multitracks) have good dynamic range and no clipping.
- Hurt's albums so far don't sound like they lack dynamics. In particular, the intro to "Summers Lost" is very quiet compared to most of the song.
- The new stereo Beatles remasters received a minimal amount of peak limiting: not to make the songs louder, but to keep a consistent overall volume across the albums while maintaining the original dynamics. The mono remasters did not have any peak limiting used on them.
- Then again, people would be crucified if they tried to do that to the Fab Four...
- Rivers Cuomo of Weezer has often made the observation that his records are mixed low (so as to sound better when turned up through a stereo), saying that Weezer's albums "sound like crap" when listened to at a low volume.
- The Cure's Disintegration mentions in its liner notes how it was mixed to be played loud and that one should start turning up the volume.
- The 2010 CD remaster does have overall volume gain but the dynamic range is still retained and very little clipping (waveform has natural peaks). Yet the CD remaster doesn't have the original liner notes either.
- Averted in many (though not all) soundtracks. Without some sort of automated volume adjustment, it's very hard to listen to The Lord Of The Rings soundtracks after Metallica.
- Porcupine Tree. Singer-Songwriter-Guitarist Steven Wilson is a producer too and is adamantly opposed to this, to the extent of having considering putting "Please note that this record may not be mastered as loudly as some of the other records in your collection. This is in order to retain the dynamic range and subtlety of the music. Please, use your volume knob" on the sleeves of the Deadwing album.
- The 2008 remaster of Overthrow's "Within Suffering." The sound was much improved from the original release, and the volume was left unchanged.
- My Bloody Valentine have a reputation for playing at ear-splittingly loud volumes live, but their iconic Magnum Opus Loveless was mastered at 1991 loudness and doesn't clip. It even has dynamics - well, as much dynamics as you can get on a monolithic album like that...
- Hot Hot Heat have songs such as "Jingle Jangle" with impressive dynamic range, going from a quiet acoustic feel to a loud, jangly, catchy-as-hell song and back again. They've said in the past that they try to take control of making their albums to avoid having any label induced sourness.
- 65daysofstatic were inspired by this article on dynamic range compression
to produce their album The Destruction Of Small Ideas much more quietly than their previous two, as mentioned in this interview with the band by the author of the aforementioned article. As a result, while the production on The Destruction Of Small Ideas is harder to get a grip of, the overall sound quality is much better.
- All but the last 2 remastered Depeche Mode albums avoid this...partially. Like the Beatles remasters, they're louder, but still have their dynamic range. The clipping is minimal...for the most part. This is presumably thanks to Alan Wilder supervising the remastering of the albums from when he was in the band.
- Spinal Tap. Their speakers may go to eleven, but their albums? Less so.
- With Devin Townsend's new(er) album Ki, he announced "I officially pull my hat out of the loudness wars."
Not sure about that, but eh. No big loss. We can always point the people to the discussion page for aversions...
Probably should get working on that essay now...
I think I'm going to edit the aversions back in. Most of them, anyway. I really see no reason to leave them out. Every trope has notability issues in the Aversions section, but I think we can be trusted to evaluate them on a case-by-case basis. This really IS an extremely prominent trope, and aversions in modern mainstream music are very rare. And I also think it's useful to point out that most classical/jazz music averts it.
More specifically, I think any instance where some producer or band member has actually gone out of their way to point out that they're averting this practice is definitely notable and should be left in. Whereas "you'd think this album would've been brickwalled, but it wasn't" is more of a take-it-or-leave-it matter.
Edited by SirLemming
Question, am I the only one who thinks that there's a lot of clipping to the chorus of Ironic?
I opened up "Ironic" in Audition, it doesn't clip at all, it's well below the threshhold. If they put it on a greatest hits recently, it probably got fucked like what happened to Garbage.
Probably should get working on that essay now...
The thread linked above is closed, so I figured that I'd post this here.
Why, why, why does the title have to be a shitty anime reference? It's not witty at all; it's an extremely clunky fusion of the phenomenon's actual name with a painfully Engrish anime title that has nothing to do with the subject (except for the tenuous-to-the-breaking-point connection afforded by the word "record", which means completely different things in each context, not to mention that the albums in question were almost universally recorded after vinyl records had died out as a mainstream medium and that "Record of Loudness" sounds like a bizarre parody of Dungeons and Dragons-style item names). Would it have made any sense to name the Serial Killer page "Serial Killer Experiments Lain"? There isn't a page for Axis and Allies (yet?), but would "Axis Powers Hetalia and Allies" work at all as a title? "Record of Loudness War" is actually worse than those examples, given that it's not just a lame reference, but a pun that has that awkward, "square peg-in-a-nearly-square hole" feeling shared by all truly bad wordplay - and I'm not talking about the entertaining, bad-on-purpose kind of bad here; I'm talking about what Mark Twain referred to when he said that incompetent writers use the "almost right" words. It's a hobbling cripple of a pun that adds nothing to the title, is distracting to people who know about the anime and baffling to those who don't (for the record, I was previously familiar with Record of Lodoss War and I still thought that it was an awful name), and just provides another example of the stereotype that the people here have to get anime and video games all over everything - which, I guess, has been proven, given that they've decided to keep a title that exists entirely for the purpose of shoehorning anime into an unrelated topic. The thread linked above had a bunch of people saying that we shouldn't "fix what isn't broken", on the grounds that people still managed to figure out what the page was about, but I always thought that it was good to fix things that are stupid, "broken" or not. Really, the article should have been called "Loudness War" from the start, without any of the conflicting ideas, aesthetic butchery, or half-assed "wit" that it ended up being saddled with.
Edited by DURRRRR Hide / Show Replies
The title popped into my head on a whim when I saw this in the YKTTW list. It seemed so intuitively right and properly clever, so I suggested it and it was taken up.
I think it works. It has record (vinyl, recording) plus "loudness war"
Didn't actually read the post, did you? My point was that there shouldn't be anything plus "Loudness War", let alone a contrived anime reference. PROTIP: A loud album isn't a "Record of Loudness".
Edited by DURRRRR
Aye, you can blame me too, I mean I suck at making up titles and I just went Sure, Why Not?.
Probably should get working on that essay now...
TheUglyBarnacle
This article has several flaws:
A. It ignores the fact that portable digital music players do not have the power to play uncompressed music at a high volume. Doing so will either cause clipping or destroy the battery life, and most people can't be bothered to spend $20 on an amp. Like the article says, "all recording medium have an absolute limit when it comes to amplitude".
B. It assumes that having lots of compression is an inherently bad thing. It can't be common because people like the fuller, more "forward" sound, or that consumers favour noise cancelling over sound quality when listening to music in public, or that they have shitty MP 3 players. No, they're uncultured simpletons who have this horrible music forced on them by "stupid executives". In fact, the "Amusing Casualties" section refers to uncompressed sound as "correct".
C. There's only a single sentence explaining why overcompression in music exists, and it's pretty much one giant Take That!.
Edited by BLOODPOUCH Hide / Show Replies
There's already an attempt at explaining why this practice exists, and how it evolved from something not inherently bad. Even if "brickwalling" itself is technically not inherently bad, virtually everybody who knows what it is condemns it, so you're probably not going to find a whole lot of sympathy here. Tropers are only going to bend over so far to accommodate a viewpoint that virtually none of us espouse. That's what Wikipedia is for.
But yeah, You Could Always Edit It Yourself.
Edited by SirLemming
I haven't seen ANYBODY in favour of the loudness war. Most people, when confronted with the evidence, tend to side with the anti-brickwallers.
Make of that what you will.
Also, we're not talking about just "lots of compression" here, we're talking about destructive compression.
So, I guess this trope would be a great example of Easy Evangelism in reality?
Probably should get working on that essay now...
I know it's old but just a though on OP's point B. Specifically the "maybe consumers wants this and that's why it's happening". Sure, if both overly compressed and less compressed versions and one clearly was preferred by the market there could be an argument like that, but as it is there's only one (yes, I know that sometimes there is not only one, but in the general case) version and if you want the music, you have no choice on the compression.
Just awesome like that
Out of curiosity, what is the song in the page image? I'd like to check it out.
Insert witty and clever quip here. My page, as the database hates my handle. Hide / Show Replies
"Search and Destroy" by The Stooges, from the 1997 Raw Power remaster.
... wait, I forgot to say that was the song on the page? Editing time.
[[VisualPun "µ."]]
Link to the most recent Trope Repair Shop thread discussing renaming this trope: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=1298748081076571000
I just want to mention that the trope name made me laugh hard. Thumbs up to the submitter.
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That's nice to know, considering one of the first comments on the old system said it was "physically painful" and claimed that whoever thought it up "should be shot and fed to angry ferrets". XD
Probably should get working on that essay now...
C'est moi. Sorry, everyone. Please withhold angry ferrets (cute friendly ones are okay, though)
So, the explanation here is very good, but for the non-audiophiles out there, let me see if I can explain it right to make sure I've got it. On a properly mixed cd, the singing, guitar, bass, and drums will be on different volume levels. So for example the singing and guitar can be easily heard while the drums and the bass are more in the background, but then whehn the singing stops they might tone up the drums and bass so you can hear all three instruments equally. When a cd falls to this problem, everything is at the same volume level, so it doesn't really sound distinct. Is that about right?
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Kind of. When the individual tracks (drum, bass, guitar, vocals, etc.) are layered on top of each other to create the mix for a song, a very conservative mixing job will simply throw them on top of each other, reduce the master volume enough so that the combined sound wave doesn't exceed the maximum volume threshold (a hard limit of any digitally recorded/mastered music), and call it a day. Due to volume fluctuations within separate instrument parts as well as the irregular volume fluctuations that can be created when you combine them, the highest peak volume of the waveform usually ends up being some random drum hit that's way louder than the rest of the song, which means the song has to be mastered at a low average volume to make sure that drum hit doesn't go past the threshold.
A legitimate use of compression would be to reduce the volume of that one stray drum hit so that the rest of the song can be mastered louder. Most people would agree that that's a perfectly acceptable trade-off. But if you take this philosophy to its fullest extent, you reduce EVERY peak in the entire song to one particular volume so that the whole thing is practically a bunch of 1's and 0's. Sure, this lets you have a very consistent loudness across the whole song, but you're practically turning it into one big long bleep.
The concept of "clipping" — "chopping off" the top/bottom of a wave's peak by pushing it past the threshold — is separate from compression, but often related. Because if you compress a peak enough, you're basically doing the same thing.
So, the way I interpret it is that during the worst case scenario they :
A. take every track of of a song (drum, vocals,etc)and make them the same volume even though that they all aren't, leading to some awkward, and sometimes painful, balance issues. For example, they might make the lead and rhythm guitar the same volume, even if common sense says not to.
B. They then do the same thing with each individual song, making the peaks and lows of all the songs about the same. You don't even need to be an audiophile to know why this is NOT A GOOD IDEA. A good example I can think of is RHCP's Californication. The peaks of the songs Around the World and the title track are both the same. Problem? Around the World is a fairly hard Funk Rock song. Californication? A BALLAD. And Californication was the track that was boosted. This leads to some fairly noticeable clipping issues, with the song getting very fuzzy at times.
C. To add insult to injury, they then artificially boost the volume. You know that feedback sound you get when you increase a speakers settings above the recommended settings? Yeah, that's pretty much the mixing equivalent. Only you can't just turn the speakers down to fix it, because it's burned into the CD. Joy.
Someone told me that the trope description here is far more confusing than the one at Wikipedia.
Well, I've spent so much time staring at that page and editing it I've lost perspective. It might be, but I sure dunno.
Probably should get working on that essay now...
I've tried editing it a bit, but I have no idea if it's clearer now.
Probably should get working on that essay now...
After having to hear every idiot with a car stereo used exclusively to thump bass at max volume, the length of this entry gives me hope.
If only anyone I knew felt the same way.
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Sen
Okay, I've added "everything Shiina Ringo ever released" to the list. I realise I'm probably jumping the gun, but my first reaction to the start of Shoutso Strip was "OW MY FUCKING EARS JESUS CHRIST TURN THIS SHIT DOWN" (I'm listening to it right now at 10% in Winamp and the clipping is still egregious), and a cursory scan through Audition reveals her other albums aren't much better.
And Tokyo Jihen's albums are brickwalled like hell too. FUCK.
EDIT: Adult isn't brickwalled!
EDIT EDIT: No, Adult definitely looks suspect in Audition. I think it is brickwalled, but I have a copy where it seems someone had the generosity to turn it down by something like -20 dB first.
Edited by 70.33.253.45 Probably should get working on that essay now... Hide / Show Replies
Actually, I've noticed a trend in my few Japanese albums starting late in The '90s where they're really brickwalled...
Probably should get working on that essay now...
Sen
Related to the "commercial" quote, I vaguely remember a sort of quote, possibly in a TV show, about a character who found a way to make his Tivo automatically avoid commercials by making it look for sudden jumps in volume. Was that a TV show or something like that?
Probably should get working on that essay now...
I just wonder if the "earrape" in Youtube Poop videos was a nod to the Loudness War?
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