Recent thoughts about music: The Loudness War

(DISCLAIMER, added May 4, 2012, and this applies to all my Loudness War related entries: I don't have access to the actual masters of any recordings I refer to, so some statements might be inaccurate.)

I've been wanting to do an entry about The Loudness War since I started this "thoughts about music" series, but haven't exactly known what to do with it, or what aspects to discuss. There are plenty of articles and videos that do a good job of explaining the history and technical aspects of it, so what do I have to add to the discussion? Some anecdotal evidence and waveform pictures, that's what!

I used to think that louder CDs were better. Then I read the Rolling Stone article The Death Of High Fidelity, and I realized that really loud CDs actually sounded like crap. Almost a year after I had read the article, I came across a perfect example of how crappy modern mastered music was compared to decently mastered music. I went to a friend's DJ gig at a bar, and the first two songs he played were some old songs from Parliament and Morris Day & The Time. The music was LOUD, but it sounded pretty good. Later on, he played Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl", and it sounded really harsh and headache inducing. It was obvious to me that the dynamic range of it was squashed all to Hell. Never minding the lossy compression (which is different from Dynamic Range Compression) of YouTube videos, you can probably recreate this experiment at home. Put on a Parliament video, crank it up to a loud (but comfortable) level, then put on Katy Perry, and try not to turn it down. :)

I wonder sometimes if I use the Loudness War as a convenient excuse to ignore new music, remembering that there were plenty of CDs on my "Favorites of the 2000s" list that were terribly compressed. Then I remember some of those CDs that might have been more fun to listen to had they not been so squashed. Take for example Weezer's "Maladroit". Here is a picture of the first single, "Dope Nose":

SMASH! Let's compare that to a prime slice of Power Pop of similar length from Urge Overkill's awesome 1993 album "Saturation", a track called "Woman 2 Woman":

Do you see all those spikes above and below the solid blue parts? That's a good thing! Now let's take a look at something else that's well mastered and fun to listen to, "Trash", from The New York Dolls' classic 1973 self titled debut. This seems to have no compression at all in the mastering stage:

In 2006, surviving NY Dolls members David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain reunited and released a new record, "One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This." I bought it in October of that year, mostly on the strength of "Dance Like A Monkey", and was slightly disappointed with the album as a whole. I listened to it a few times, then basically put it away, giving it another try the following Spring or Summer. I enjoyed it quite a bit more then, it's a much better Spring/Summer record than a Fall/Winter record. Some other things that would have made it better would have been if they had called the band something other than The New York Dolls, and if they had taken a couple of tracks off, namely the slower ones. Years later, I realized that it also would've been a hell of a lot more fun to listen to had they not compressed it so bad. Take a look at one of the songs that is closer in spirit to the old Dolls, "Gimmie Luv & Turn On The Light."

If you think that looks bad, then you ought to hear it! Again, you can probably look these up on YouTube and get an idea of how they sound.

One thing that I've discovered in all my research is that there is more to the problem than just compression/limiting in the mastering stage. On more recent recordings, some problems are caused by recording too loud, most others are caused by jacking up all the levels in the mix and/or compressing in the mixing stage. I wish I could say I was an expert at differentiating just plain loud mixes from those masters that are heavily compressed, but I'm not. I have a lot of CDs from the early 1990s that are really compressed, the main differences between these older CDs and the Loudness War victims are that the older CDs used analog compressors, and they usually left about a decibel of space above the main peaks of the music to give the music some "breathing room" as well as avoid clipping. What really got the Loudness War rolling was the mass production of digital brickwall limiters. The modern day Loudness War is generally considered to have started full bore with Oasis's 1995 album, "(What's The Story) Morning Glory?". I don't currently own it, so I can't make my own examples from it, and using the tracks from it that are on my "Stop The Clocks" compilation wouldn't be fair because they're supposedly even more compressed than on the original album. The only decent waveform from that album that I could find online was on this guy's Loudness War blog entry. (Check him out, he's basically from my generation, and seems to have the same angst about modern music as I do.) His waveform was for a ballad called "Cast No Shadow". I listened to it on YouTube, the song is entirely too quiet to have such a squashed waveform. But it's definitely not the first example of brickwalling. While the Wikipedia Loudness War entry says that digital brickwall limiters went into mass production in 1994, the earliest example of true brickwalling in my collection is from Guns n' Roses' "The Spaghetti Incident?", which came out on November 23, 1993. Check out their cover of The Stooges' "Raw Power".

A lot of brickwalled CDs were released in 1994, but most of them were fairly tasteful compared to what came later. That year, Oasis released "Definitely Maybe", and according to a lot of people it's almost as bad, if not as bad, as "Morning Glory." A few months before "Morning Glory", Fear Factory released "Demanufacture", which is probably my second most brickwalled looking (but not loudest!) pre-"Morning Glory" CD. Check out the track "Zero Signal" below.

Here is what "Zero Signal" looks like from the Mortal Kombat soundtrack. I don't know if any compression was applied, or if it's just a really loud mix. Whatever it is, it's more reminiscent of some of those loud Metal CDs I have from the early half of the 1990s. If this is an accurate snapshot of the mix that George Marino had to work with when mastering "Demanufacture", then I'd say that he didn't have much to compress, and he actually did a decent job. (Sorry, I realized that I was definitely talking out my ass, but decided to leave it and strike through it rather than deleting it.) It's very compressed, but uses a very different kind of compression than the "Demanufacture" version. I'm not sure how these were done, but the Mortal Kombat version looks something like plain old (yet heavy) Compression, while the Demanufacture version looks like it was Hard Limited. I'm not really sure which I like better.

I almost wish I still had my "Demanufacture" remaster just to compare these with. "Demanufacture" is loud enough that it really didn't need a remaster, which is why I eventually sold it. And honestly, the original is not that bad sounding.

To be continued...

LOVE STINKS! Yeah Yeah...

One of the consequences of having been laid off has been the lack of a social life. Not like I ever really had much of one except during the prime years of Louisville Mojo, but when I was gainfully employed I could at least afford to go out when I wanted to, work schedule or weather permitting. I hardly even worried about gas when I had a steady income and a "home away from home" in Louisville, but these days the simple act of driving makes me feel like I'm spending money. I do try to get out of the house once or twice a week, but that's not nearly enough. Being broke also means I can forget about dating.

I can think of too many reasons why I've been single my entire life, so I'm just going to go into the main reason I'm single now. Being unemployed hurts men on the dating front in two ways: one, you're too broke to take somebody out. And two, women don't like unemployed guys, especially ones who live with their parents, no matter the circumstances. I haven't tried contacting anybody on OKCupid since last Summer. The last girl that I talked to on there ultimately rejected me for that very reason, despite the fact that she was also unemployed and in the process of moving in with her parents. See, it's a fucking double standard! So, while I am available, I've essentially taken myself off the market. It really sucks feeling like I can do nothing but stand by while I watch too many of my female friends get paired off, some of them even getting married.

I actually would like to start dating again, but until I find a job that's guaranteed to last more than one or two months, or go to school (whichever comes first), I don't see it happening. There are far worse things than being single, but it would be nice to have a female to go out and do fun stuff with.

I guess I could go over another reason why I've been single. I've never been able to make good use of the window whenever it's been open. (Stuff like that is why I love "How I Met Your Mother.") When someone of interest who had been unavailable becomes available, you don't want to pounce right away, but at the same time you don't wait too long and take a chance on someone else moving in on her. Man, this hurts my brain...ANEURYSM! The last time the window opened for someone that I was crazy for, an ex-coworker, I really did try to get myself in there, but she was always too busy hanging out with other people. The window wasn't open very long. She ended up hooking up with one of her ex-coworkers, a big ogre of a dude who I never would have imagined her being with. They've been together ever since.

There's a part in the Slayer song Divine Intervention that for some odd reason makes me think of two people having sex, it comes in at about the 1:23 mark. I got to thinking recently that one of my ideas of Hell would be being forced to watch "the ones that got away" having sex with their significant others. Actually, if the s.o. happens to be a woman, then that could possibly be Heaven. :)

Movies I've watched recently, content ratings, and a barely related story.

Most of the time, I watch movies to try to forget about my life for a while. Other times, I like to see something I can relate to. Then there are movies that I don't want to see or would rather not have seen because they remind me too much of life. I just saw "The Company Men" today, and it was an example of something I could relate to AND enjoy. Granted, the characters in the movie who lost their jobs were way higher on the totem pole than I was, but the hassles were still the same. This past Sunday, I watched "Blue Valentine," which I'll admit I really only watched because I wanted to see what had originally given it an NC-17 (MPAA ratings are a favorite subject of mine), and the fact that Michelle Williams was involved helped (I've kinda had a thing for her since the Dawson's Creek era). It's basically about a marriage falling apart, while also showing how it started. In some respects "Blue Valentine" might be a decent movie, but I've seen too much of that kind of thing in real life, and therefore it's too painful to enjoy. Someone who posted a thread on the imdb.com message board said it best IMO: "So if you've ever watched white trash fighting in the middle of Walmart and wanted to know the backstory, watch this movie. Otherwise, avoid it." As for the rating...eh, I'm not sure. It's definitely not for kids, but I'd rather a teen see a sex scene from this movie than images of somebody getting blown up or burnt to a crisp. There's not really much nudity, but the sex is still pretty explicit. (More on that later on.)

Another movie that I recently watched partially to see why it got its rating was "The King's Speech". Before I saw the movie, I thought, "This doesn't look like an R-rated movie." And when you get right down to it, it's not. It's only rated R because it surpasses the PG-13 F-Bomb quota. All the f-bombs appear in one or two scenes, and in the context of speech therapy, so it's not like they're gratuitous and spread throughout the movie. Interestingly, the British Board Of Film Classification (or BBFC) originally rated it with a "15", then re-rated it "12A" on appeal. I think that was a smart decision. For shits and giggles, I decided to see what the BBFC gave "The Company Men" and "Blue Valentine". "The Company Men" was a pretty mild "R", so I guessed correctly that it was a "15". Surprisingly, "Blue Valentine" also managed a "15". The Extended Classification Information had this to say: "The BBFC's Guidelines at '15' state 'Sexual activity may be portrayed without strong detail'. The film includes three sex scenes of note - two portrayals of sexual intercourse and one of cunnilingus. In terms of sexual mechanics, each scene is strong and approaches the upper limits of what is permitted at '15'. However, nudity is limited and the scenes are otherwise sufficiently lacking in detail to be allowed at that category." I was also surprised that "Black Swan" passed for a "15", but since kids under 15 aren't allowed in to see "15"-certified movies, I guess that's alright.

While I'm on the subject of ratings, I highly recommend the documentary "This Film Is Not Yet Rated". Also, this article does a good job of comparing the MPAA and the BBFC, using Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" as an example.

On my way home from the theater, I stopped by a restaurant that has a big "Taking Applications" sign out front, yet hasn't had any applications in the past three days, to see if they had any applications today. They didn't. But anyway, I saw an ex-coworker there, someone who works in what I'm now calling the "Crackhead Sector". Between my recent angst about getting rejected for a job I used to do and having watched "The Company Men", I thought to myself that if she said "Hi" to me, I would've responded with, "Hey there Jobby McJobberson!" But I don't think she saw me, so I didn't get to say it.

Crud Update

After a few days of using some generic Dayquil/Nyquil Sinus type stuff, I switched over to Mucinex D. I also got a neti pot. Now I'm taking regular Mucinex and using the neti pot occasionally. It's weird, my nose isn't stopped up, but there still seems to be some stuffiness in the very back of my sinuses. The crud in my chest seems to be loosening up pretty good now.

In other cruddy news: I can't remember if I mentioned it before, but I applied for a couple of jobs last month at Main ex-Employer for the department I was in when they laid me off. I finally got a rejection e-mail from them yesterday for one of the jobs, saying that I wasn't a strong enough fit. I'm now waiting to get rejected for the other position. I know that Corporate/HR people follow some odd kind of logic that makes no sense to most regular people, and I'm sure that the Recruiting department of this company are smoking the same proverbial crack that Corporate/HR people do. If it had been up to the people that I actually worked directly with, I would've gotten my old job back about two years ago. Hell, had it been up to them, I wouldn't have gotten laid off, period.

What have I gotten myself into?

I can't believe I did it. I paid for a Lifetime Membership for Louisville Mojo, my former favorite social networking/now dating site. I don't feel like going into the whole story of the rise and fall of Louisville Mojo*, but I will say that the site has been dying a slow, painful death for the past six years. Last April, they decided to become a dating site where you had to pay to be able to see profiles and read or send messages to members. The only thing that non-members could do was post in the Forums, which for a lot of people in my circle was the main attraction of Mojo. Women who were members as of that date got an entire year free, while the men only got two weeks free. I never had a girlfriend during the six years that I had been on Mojo at that point, and I knew my broke ass wasn't getting hooked up anytime soon either, so why bother paying? A friend gave me a month's membership as a gift just a few days after my two weeks expired. As long as I was able to use the forums, I was okay with not paying.

Last September, they decided that non-paying members could read the forums, but not post. In October, they decided that non-paying members couldn't even read the forum threads after the mods and admins spent too much time deleting the fake profiles of some douchebag ex-forum poster and his girlfriend who were stinking up the forums. I was highly pissed off.

In November, some of my friends and forum posters had a get-together. There were a couple of threads that spawned from that event that piqued my interest, and on my birthday I decided to treat myself to a month-long membership. The Lifetime membership is only $25 more than what you'd pay for a month, but I had better things to spend that extra $25 on. For a while, I had been on the fence about whether to bother keeping a profile, but I figured that as long as there were people on there willing to meet up occasionally, I'd stick around. Soon after that month was up, I paid for another month. And another month. My previous membership was set to expire on February 17th, so I had to decide whether I was going to pay up again or not. I was still hesitant to get a lifetime membership since a lifetime membership to a dating site just seems silly, not to mention the Forums have gotten even slower**. But since I just paid $60 to participate for the past three months, I figured that a $45 investment would pay off if Mojo survives another three months. So I took the plunge. And now I'm feeling a bit goofy for it.


*I'll probably just copy and paste one of my "Rise And Fall Of Louisville Mojo" style entries from my old blog to tell the story.

**Honestly, I don't have a lot to say these days, and therefore have nothing to contribute to the forums. And as the old saying goes, "If you're not part of the solution..."

The Crud

I haven't gotten majorly sick with anything like the flu or strep throat since 2005, but it seems like I do get a case of "The Crud" at least once a year. I don't know if definitions for The Crud are the same for everybody, but for me it means nasal and chest congestion. I had some major sinus pressure the past couple of days, and didn't feel like doing much of anything, especially not writing. I felt so crappy yesterday that I didn't care one way or the other that it was Valentine's Day, a day that I usually try to ignore anyway. Getting some sinus medicine has definitely made life more bearable.

Recent thoughts about music, Part 2: Formats

For this installment, I've decided to talk about formats, which does factor in the Loudness War somewhat, instead of talking more directly about the Loudness War. A lot of people like to pit CDs against vinyl, or CDs against MP3s/downloads. I'm not really wild about lossy downloads, and prefer just about any physical product over them, whether it's CD, vinyl, or even (*GASP*) cassette tapes. For some reason, downloading just doesn't appeal to me, I'm not sure why. I especially can't condone illegal downloading because I'm all for artists getting paid. The only time I'd really do it anymore is when I want something that is extremely rare and unlikely to get reissued, like Pantera's first four pre-major label albums.

Of the most popular physical formats, I like CD the most due to it's convenience, and since a well mastered CD can sound just as good, possibly even better, than vinyl. To get the best out of your vinyl, you need to give them a deep cleaning. With CDs, you just pop them in the player and enjoy! Unfortunately, it seems that the pooch has been screwed in the mastering department, with an assist sometimes coming from the mix. When I first learned about the Loudness War, a lot of people touted vinyl as being an alternative to ultra-compressed CDs. I soon learned though that vinyl has it's mastering issues as well. Vinyl is only as good as the source it is mastered from, and the plant that it's pressed at. Good vinyl editions are usually sourced either from analog master tapes or high resolution (or at least higher than 16/44.1) digital masters. Some vinyl are sourced from CDs, and in that case you're better off just buying the CD! One example: a record from The Who from Universal's "Back To Black" series? Bad*. The same Who record from Classic Records? Good! (*There are very few "Back To Black" series records I know of that aren't sourced from CDs, so I'm assuming that the ones from The Who are CD-sourced as well. But I could be wrong.) Before you get into vinyl, you really want to do some research. A lot of albums are licensed out to other companies, and you'll want to find out which companies are good, and which ones you'll want to avoid. You'll also want to find out about pressing plants.

Another reason that I currently prefer CDs over vinyl is that with my current living arrangement, I have nowhere to put my turntable. It's been boxed up ever since I moved out of my brother-in-law's place two years ago. That makes me a sad panda. Vinyl can be really neat sometimes. In 2008, I bought My Morning Jacket's "Evil Urges" on vinyl since it conveniently came with the CD. The CD was definitely good for car listening. One of the tracks that was getting played on the radio was "I'm Amazed", which never really impressed me. But there was something about listening to that song on vinyl that made it downright magical. Maybe it was the fact that I was sitting down and listening to it, letting it soak in, rather than hearing it on the go. The art of just listening to music is one I hope to rediscover someday, but that's another story for another day.

Cassette tapes aren't really a good format. They're probably better used to make copies of your vinyl or CDs than they are in prerecorded form, but I think I'd still rather listen to a prerecorded tape than to lossy downloads. Cassette copies of other cassettes? UGH! I seriously can't stand those.

My next installment will probably be about mastering and remasters.

Recent thoughts about music, Part 1: "New" Music

I've been having a bad case of Writer's Block lately. I'll start on an entry, realize it's too ambitious for me to try to finish in one sitting, and save it in hopes of finishing it another day. I've had lots of thoughts about music, and have decided that the best way to go about it is to do it in separate parts. In this installment, I'll be focusing on what I think of new music. In my case, "new" could mean in the past ten years.

Back when I was really starting to get into music in the early 1990s, my main source of discovering music outside of radio and whatever my brother brought back with him from college was magazines. I've bought tapes and CDs just on the strength of what was said about them in magazines like Rolling Stone, Spin, or various Metal mags, Rip being my favorite one. The Telecoms Act of 1996 virtually killed radio, making formats and playlists narrower and narrower. But with the rise of satellite radio and music on the internet in the early 2000s, you didn't really need radio, and you could actually sample the bands you were reading about before you bought their music. Only one problem though: there is way too much music out there! I realized in the early 1990s that for every good/great band in a particular sub-genre, there were about a thousand mediocre/bad ones. The internet seems to have expanded that ratio to at least 10,000:1. I do hear a lot of music that is pleasant enough, yet doesn't really move me. It's stuff that I would probably enjoy more if I didn't have 55 years of Pop/Rock music history filling my head as it is. I feel like I've heard it all, and heard it done better. And on that note, why bother with new music when there's still so much good old music to catch up on, especially since the older CDs or vinyl are probably mastered better than the newer stuff. But that's a topic that I'll save for another time. Extreme forms of Metal are probably the best example. I can only take so many blast beats and Cookie Monster vocals before it just gets boring, and not many bands are really doing anything that hasn't really been done before.

Here were my favorite albums released between the years 2000-2010, in mostly alphabetical order and excluding local stuff.

Anthrax - We've Come For You All
At The Drive In - Relationship Of Command
Beastie Boys - To The 5 Boroughs
Black Kids - Party Traumatic
Bleeding Through - The Truth
Cannibal Corpse - The Wretched Spawn, Worm Infested (EP)
Danzig - 777: I Luciferi
Eagles Of Death Metal - Death By Sexy
Exodus - Shovel Headed Kill Machine
Fear Factory - Digimortal
Flight Of The Conchords - self-titled, I Told You I Was Freaky, The Distant Future (EP)
Franz Ferdinand - self titled
Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
Metallica - Death Magnetic
Metalocalypse:Dethklok - The Dethalbum, The Dethalbum II
Ministry - The Last Sucker
Outkast - Stankonia, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
Pantera - Reinventing The Steel
Queens Of The Stone Age - Rated R, Songs For The Deaf
Rage Against The Machine - Renegades
R.E.M. - Accelerate
Slayer - Christ Illusion
Static-X - Cannibal Killers Live
Superjoint Ritual - A Lethal Dose Of American Hatred
System Of A Down - Toxicity, Mezmerize, Hypnotize
Tenacious D - self titled
U2 - All That You Can't Leave Behind, No Line On The Horizon
Kanye West - Late Registration, Graduation, 808s And Heartbreak, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

To some, that might seem like a relatively lengthy list, but it's probably a fraction of most music freaks' "favorites of the decade" lists. And did you notice that there aren't a whole lot of new artists? Kanye West was one of the few to come out in the past decade that really grabbed me. Seeing as that I consider myself a "rocker" and am not really all that into recent Pop or Hip Hop, that probably says something about the sad state of Rock music. To paraphrase what I said earlier, I find a lot of newer Indie Rock fairly pleasant, but as for Hard Rock, if I had kids, I'd almost rather they listen to Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga than Shinedown or Nickelback.

My next installment will most likely be about The Loudness War. If you don't know much about it, there's a good entry on it on Wikipedia, which includes lots of entertaining links for further reading.
The Loudness War Wikipedia entry

January is already over.

January came and went pretty quickly. Maybe not as quickly as I'd like, but still pretty quick. With the exception of the weather, the year hasn't been totally horrible yet. But I'm starting to run low on the money that I saved up in December. I am honestly glad that I haven't had to worry about driving to work in the weather we've had, but I could use the income. Hell, the weather really hasn't been as bad around here as it has been up north, especially in the northeast, but I'd still rather be living someplace warmer. On the upside, the days are starting to get longer, and Daylight Saving Time will be here before we know it.

I'm still housesitting. The dog hasn't peed or pooped since I closed off the guest room from the animals, but the cat is still not pooping in the litter box enough. While it's a pain to clean up, I've been lucky in that the cat has mostly kept the pooping confined to the storage room where the litter box is, and has only pooped outside of there a couple of times. I was hoping to be more productive with my blogging while I'm here, but usually by the time I get here after checking status updates on Facebook and whatnot, the dog is already at the door whining.