Dynamic Range Comparison at Metal - Loudness War

Shaded Pest said:
Hey guys, i've made this little comparison with my demo song

DR5 vs DR10 https://soundcloud.com/shadedpest/sets/dynamic-range-at-metal

According to Dynamic Range Day ? Dynamic is the new Loud ? NO MORE Loudness War !, DR10 is the "Loudness sweet spot"

Not squashed and not too low
But sometimes loud music seems to be better... Give your opinion!
Click to expand...

Loud music can mean higher total perceived dynamic range, because if the audio content effectively aligns to the frequency sensitivity curve of the ears, it means you do not have to add as much power in order to reach a certain loudness level, hence the total perceived dynamic range is kept higher than if you would push it to the same loudness levels using limiters instead. This is one aspect to it. The other aspect is the fact that limiting the music keeps more of the soft parts above the perception threshold at lower volumes, so in this sense it means you can perceive more of each sound source throughout the song at more volume levels, instead of having various sound sources temporarily drop out of the listener's awareness during the playing of the song. For this reason the mastering engineer must view the loudness increase as a process required to make more of the playing perceived at more volume levels, by more playback systems.

In reality, what we have today is a lot of various productions coming out of gear with varying signal capacities, end-to-end. The listener's playback systems have a limited dynamic range as well and after downgrading the audio to 128 kbit mp3, you have lots of noise left and "no bouncing beauty". The result is basically that some music sounds good at loud levels, while a lot of music sounds really bad at those same loudness levels. And not only that, but the music is also produced with more and more software, so all in all it means there are a combination of music dimensions seriously suffering from the way the music is being handled between the source and the ears of the listeners. At some point this has become so damaging to the perception of music, that the industry is now starting to realize some industry standard around this would be a good thing after all.

The best thing you can do is to maximize the potential dynamic range of your setup end-to-end and remember that samples can suffer from limited dynamic range as well, so it's about removing as much as possible of the dynamic range limitations and record at the highest possible sample rate and bit depth. So that the day when the industry standard gets higher, you are able to print your work to those standards with the content you've already produced. That and to understand how to work with the production in order to end up with good dynamics.
 
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Personally, I find the sweet spot to be at -13 to -14 dBfs RMS ...I analyzed a lot of my favorite tunes from the 90s and some modern tunes, and that was the level that seems to work best for my tunes.
 
Nystagmus said:
Personally, I find the sweet spot to be at -13 to -14 dBfs RMS ...I analyzed a lot of my favorite tunes from the 90s and some modern tunes, and that was the level that seems to work best for my tunes.
Click to expand...

Interesting, I never analyzed my favorite tunes like that, maybe I should do so too :)
 
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