Re: (TV) this one's for keith (and maybe howard)

[Maurice Rickard <maurice@mac.com>]

At 7:19 PM -0700 8/22/06, Jay wrote:
> http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyid=2006-08-22T173033Z_01_N22395766_RTRUKOC_0_US-LEISURE-DYLAN.xml&src=rss&rpc=22

It'd be nice to find out exactly what he's responding to.  My 
suspicion is that it's the craptacular mastering used on a lot of 
recent CDs in the effort to make things "louder" across the board, 
but which squish all the life (dynamic range, or the difference 
between quiet and loud extremes) out of the tracks, and lead to ear 
fatigue.

CDs have really good dynamic range available (no surface noise), so 
theoretically one could have close-to-natural-sounding recordings, 
but there's been a movement to make things as loud as possible, or at 
least as loud as competing pop CDs.  In the vinyl world, if you want 
to get really loud, you can go the 12" 45 route and cut wide grooves, 
though even there you have to deal with the possibility of the groove 
being so wide that the needle jumps out.  On CDs, 0 is...0, the 
maximum loudness you can get, and there's nowhere to go from that 
other than distortion.

Opening CD tracks in a two-track .wav editor can be quite 
instructive.  There's an interesting historical discussion of this 
here:
http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/dynamics/dynamics.htm

--

Maurice Rickard
http://mauricerickard.com/   |   http://onezeromusic.com/
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