Which Theocracy album sounds the best? My thoughts on the loudness war, etc..

[dudu]

I decided to test the dynamic range of all three Theocracy albums and the results were somewhat surprising. Generally, the higher the dynamic range the better the sound. Mirror Of Souls and As The World Bleeds scored lower/same than the original self-titled. This came as a surprise because I have always considered the newer ones to sound less "muddy".

Just for fun I have thrown in a measurement for "Deacon Blues" from Steely Dan's Aja album.

These measurements are likely the result of the newer albums being "louder". Since the mid 1990s albums have becoming increasingly loud, and as a result have lost a large amount of audio clarity. I highly recommend checking out this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

To understand how much audio has changed take a look at these audio graphs.

The first is a high quality vinyl recording of Steely Dan's Aja which was originally released in 1977. This album was considered very good sounding when it was released, and is still today by modern standards.

If you take a look at the graph of "The Serpent's Kiss" you can see how much louder the audio actually is.

Anyway, this was all just for fun, I am not trying to lower opinions of the band's records because they are terrific, I just find it a shame that nearly all metal has become a victim of the "loudness war". Hopefully you guys find it as interesting as I did.

 

[BM]

Just going with common sense and not having any background in this stuff, so please let me know where I go wrong (or not).

Suppose a recording has a very large dynamic range and you would 'mute' that to only fill one third of what the digital format could hold, then you would be compressing the sound, as fewer bits are used to hold the music, right?

Suppose you 'amplify' the music to just fill what the digital format can hold, then you use the full digital range. If you amplify it too much, such that the peaks go beyond what the digital format can hold, then you loose something (clipping).

The example graphs one the wiki site show a first recording that goes to the maximum, but not beyond it. The more recent releases of that song go beyond the range of the medium.

So, a recording should go to the max, but not beyond it? Can you show the graphs of songs of the new album? Also, since the tempo of metal can be quite fast, peaks that can be associated with the tempo will fill a graph if not zoomed in enough. In the Deacon Blues song, you can see the tempo...

What happens if low frequencies are loud and high frequencies are not? How does it show in measurements and how does human hearing deal with it? Can you still perceive the high frequencies? I would say yes.

Finally, metal is supposed to be loud.

 

[JayArby]

On the first album the audio is clipped a whole lot on every song. That's why it's louder. (Don't ask me why I know this, but I did look at it a while back for some reason.)

 

[dudu]

Just going with common sense and not having any background in this stuff, so please let me know where I go wrong (or not).

Suppose a recording has a very large dynamic range and you would 'mute' that to only fill one third of what the digital format could hold, then you would be compressing the sound, as fewer bits are used to hold the music, right?

Suppose you 'amplify' the music to just fill what the digital format can hold, then you use the full digital range. If you amplify it too much, such that the peaks go beyond what the digital format can hold, then you loose something (clipping).

The example graphs one the wiki site show a first recording that goes to the maximum, but not beyond it. The more recent releases of that song go beyond the range of the medium.

So, a recording should go to the max, but not beyond it? Can you show the graphs of songs of the new album? Also, since the tempo of metal can be quite fast, peaks that can be associated with the tempo will fill a graph if not zoomed in enough. In the Deacon Blues song, you can see the tempo...

What happens if low frequencies are loud and high frequencies are not? How does it show in measurements and how does human hearing deal with it? Can you still perceive the high frequencies? I would say yes.

Finally, metal is supposed to be loud.

I am not an audio engineer by any means, so I may not be able to answer your questions in full, but music does not need to be mastered "loud" in order to sound so, that is what a volume knob and EQ is for (if necessary). I will post some extra graphs in a few hours.

 

[dudu]

On the first album the audio is clipped a whole lot on every song. That's why it's louder. (Don't ask me why I know this, but I did look at it a while back for some reason.)

The first album is actually slightly less loud than the rest

 

[JayArby]

Correct, but that's because it's poorly mixed in comparison. There is a lot of clipped audio that is outside the playable range, but you can't really hear the clipping. So I'm thinking that's why it scored higher with that program thingy or whatever it was.

 

[PlasmaShock]

Finally, metal is supposed to be loud.

Loud to a point. There needs to be enough compression to make it sound good, but hard limiting just to squish the audio in order to make it as loud as possible causes a very boring flat sound. In metal, you want the drums to punch you in the gut, and guitars to send shivers down your spine. That all goes away when loudness war tactics are abused.

Metal is best when played loud using a VOLUME KNOB

 

[JayArby]

I agree with the volume knob sentiment! Compression doesn't change the volume; it changes the dynamics.

But I usually like a lot of compression unless I'm listening to acoustic songs or a capella singing or something with really subtle dynamic changes. With metal, especially power metal, it's hard to hear all the parts come through clearly without quite a bit of compression. AtWB is definitely the best mixing job I have ever heard--and it is extremely compressed.

(Why am I acting like I know what I'm talking about? )