Sly One

Blog #3: Loudness

The following is a repost of my comment on the Anjunabeats forum at http://www.anjunabeats.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=31854&st=0.

The discussion was started by Above & Beyond Tony making a plea to the trance community to stop sending in tracks which had been mastered so hard that they competed with re-compressed radio mixes.  As usual, any mention of mastering and compression sent everyone off into a solid rant.  It occurred to me at the time that people get too hung up on compression, limiting and saturation, and that there are a number of other issues at stake.

Here are my thoughts on the matter:

I think people get too hung up on loudness as being a direct consequence of RMS power, when in fact the ear is a lot more complex than that.

It used to be that tracks were mastered to sound good on big fat club soundsystems, end of story. It made obvious sense: over time, mastering engineers (who were absolutely required, since someone had to cut the vinyl) learned what frequencies had to thunder, which ones had to punch, which ones the hi-hats had to really shred and which ones no bugger is going to hear anyway, because it’s pumping out of 3-inch hi-end drivers. And which ones, not to fine a point on it, were going to be completely destroyed by a cutting process which drove the cutting head so hard that it was constantly distorted (this, by the way, is that lovely warm vinyl sound that people talk about).

Here’s the rub: if you’re mastering for a track to sound good loud, you don’t want to much in the high frequencies. High frequencies hurt; the ear is far more sensitive to them than any other range. So you make sure they are in short bursts, not sustained assaults. The ear is good at taking these in its stride (short cracks of high frequencies are common in nature, so we’ve evolved to deal with them. White noise most certainly isn’t).

The really loud sounding tracks, I tend to find, are tracks that over-represent the high frequencies, thus pushing your ear that much harder in its most sensitive areas. The thing is, when your track is played really loud, you really don’t need to over-represent high-frequencies. Your ears will do that for you by distorting to buggery anything that they hear.

I present for the defence: Agnelli & Nelson – Embrace. One of my favourite old tunes. Listen to thad pad lead that kicks in around the peak of the track, and you’ll notice it’s mostly midrange, with just a bit of high. Play that tune at 140dB on a wall of Turbosound tooth-rattlers, and suddenly it sounds like you’ve been hit by a tsunami. Listen to it on a home stereo and it just doesn’t. Unless you happen to have a Function 1 widowmaker in your front room, terrorising the cat. And if you do, can I come around?

Trance has increasingly become a style of music which is heard on headphones and home stereos far more than it is heard in clubs, and the discerning buyer has started to demand that they have their ears battered by a wall of trance energy that sounds like what they expect when they are in a club. DJs want to buy the tunes that sound huge when they are buying stuff from Beatport on a pair of iPhone earbuds. The end result? In order to get your tunes sold, you need to target that requirement.

Which brings us back round to the classic loudness wars catch-22 situation. Who’s going to be the one that starts producing tracks that sound quieter, knowing that it’ll mean their remix will be the one in the pack that no-one notices?

DJs look at the peak meters on their DJM-800 and go “they’re the same volume”, because they’re peaking at 0dB. Very few actually now A/B the two tracks on the cue, use their ears instead and realise that one has been clipped to buggery and the other one has nice flowing dynamics, or one needs the hi-end turned down. Which producer will take the plunge and wave the flag for dynamics, by releasing a track that sends the crowd to the bar because it sounds 6dB quieter than the previous track?

And who’s going to spend £hundreds to get their track mastered by an old-school pro engineer, get it sounding awesome loud, but get it ignored by buyers because it sounds soft and lacking in definition compared to modern stuff?

I’ve focused on high frequencies as an example, but there are other factors too. For example: stereo spread is used heavily in radio mixes and on tracks to make them sound big, but this has the opposite effect when played loud. Or good, grunty sub-bass is removed, taking away the chunky rumble and replacing it with frequencies that can punch harder on a 3-inch home speaker. I could go on.

My personal view is that we should return to the fine days of a proper club mix and non-club mix, where the two are pretty similar except that the club mix is more focused into the middle of the stereo field, avoids super-high (10khz+) frequencies, softens the highs and is mastered for punch, not sustained energy.