What's Your Opinion on Dynamic Range?
- Thread starter ALXIII
- Start date
Loudness is to some degree the result of confusion around what is optimal audio and music quality. Loudness essentially means high RMS levels centered around to the ears sensitive frequency areas at the edge of the stereo field. Normally this means that the presence of the audio and music qualities become shadowed in the perception, but because of great monitoring and great limiting engineers have been able to gradually push mixes louder while limiting the presence of the audio and music qualities becoming shadowed by this in the perception. This in turn has resulted in the opposite - more of the audio and music qualities can be perceived from the loudness increase. As a result loud mixes have over time formed a standard. Loudness when combined with power, means you can listen more softly without losing the clearity of some of the sound sources in the mix. For that reason the loudness and power is important to stage the product to as many playback and playback volume configurations as possible, which is a critical success factor in mastering. Therefore loudness and power has always been important in mastering. What has then caused the loudness to become a hot topic, is that in the hands of many engineers it contributes to making music less great, because the richness of audio and music qualities is lowered by it. There is a great difference in final result when you combine different monitors, limiters and engineers. The difference is in the perceived presence of the audio and music qualities. A loud mix with its great qualities not present enough, works like this: When you turn up the volume the mix turns noisy. When you turn down the volume the mix turns unclear sounding. So the musical elements do not provide the level of impact required compared to other mixes that have that impact. That is mainly the issue. Musically speaking, the music is not present enough. For the music to be present enough, the right musical qualities need to be present enough.
There are many reasons why loudness has become an issue. One of them is that the dynamics of the mixes out there are suffering from the loudness, which is to a great degree caused by getting worse peak-to-rms ratios across the frequency spectrum of the mix. Why this in turn has become an issue, is because the ears in a typical home recording situation cannot notice that, in other words the more loudness engineers are going for, the more demanding the monitoring and limiting becomes. This is what has then made the difference between pro and non-pro mixes more obvious.
To achieve enough presence, there are things you can do. For instance do not place most of the maximizing burden at the end of the signal chain. What is hitting the master bus should already be close to the final level in loudness during mixing, so that it will survive all of the volume automation present inside of the mix when additional compression is applied. Secondly, control the intensity range with multi-stage compression on the mix scope. I like to use 4 stage compression and combining that with 4 playback volume levels: very low, low, high, very high. These 4 stages implement multi-band compression/expanding (isolated on M and S). The final brickwall limiting should in my view be done using specific hardware that has certain headroom and dynamic characteristics on the content.
Last edited:
Nystagmus
Composer
I like to scan all of my favorite tunes from accross the decades and see what their actual dB RMS rating is.
From that, I get a clear mathematical idea of the dynamic range and how the tune actually sounds.
Usually, the best tunes from the 1990s onward have a dB RMS of about -15 dB RMS to -13 dB RMS and no higher than that.
I am usually referring to the CD or FLAC versions, not the MP3's which sound less clear and less bassy and less wide anyhow.
I use the RMS Buddy VST freeware and load up tunes in Reaper. You can also use a VST plugin wrapper component with Foobar2000 media player to load RMS Buddy too.
After a while, you start to get a feeling of what the numbers actually sound like, and you can tailor your own mixes to be at such and such an RMS level.
I also like to look at the waveforms to see how smushed they are or not. Sometimes you can just glance at a waveform and see that it's been way too compressed/limited/crushed/clipped. You have to play it of course to be sure, but some people are so good at making music sound bad you can even see it.
From that, I get a clear mathematical idea of the dynamic range and how the tune actually sounds.
Usually, the best tunes from the 1990s onward have a dB RMS of about -15 dB RMS to -13 dB RMS and no higher than that.
I am usually referring to the CD or FLAC versions, not the MP3's which sound less clear and less bassy and less wide anyhow.
I use the RMS Buddy VST freeware and load up tunes in Reaper. You can also use a VST plugin wrapper component with Foobar2000 media player to load RMS Buddy too.
After a while, you start to get a feeling of what the numbers actually sound like, and you can tailor your own mixes to be at such and such an RMS level.
I also like to look at the waveforms to see how smushed they are or not. Sometimes you can just glance at a waveform and see that it's been way too compressed/limited/crushed/clipped. You have to play it of course to be sure, but some people are so good at making music sound bad you can even see it.
TweedSoldier
New member
You said Dynamic RANGE. So if a song's already loud, making it louder won't be as dramatic and cool. However, if you started off softer, you give the track more headroom to get dramatically loud!!!
quiet quiet quiet then BOOM LOUD LOUD LOUD!
It works really well in classical music, and I'm sure it works in other genres as well.
quiet quiet quiet then BOOM LOUD LOUD LOUD!
It works really well in classical music, and I'm sure it works in other genres as well.
chris carter
New member
Nobody has EVER been able to show a correlation between how loud a record is and how successful it is. Because there is none. It just has to be in the general ballpark of everything else out there. The louder you make it, the worse it will sound, and it will not help sales one bit.